by John N. Serio

from Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems, edited by John N. Serio

1

What can one say about a poet who writes, quite tenderly, "And for what, except for you, do I feel love?" and who does not mean his wife, or his daughter, or any other person, but rather an imaginary figure: the muse? But that is how Wallace Stevens begins the prologue to what many consider his greatest poem, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"—with a passionate, intimate address not to a beloved but to an intangible concept: inspiration. With something approaching erotic fervor, Stevens personifies an abstraction and speaks directly to poetry, as if it were his lover:

In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

No other poet I know of has written so elegantly and so persuasively about the beauty and significance of poetry in everyday life. We find these declarations not only in Stevens's poems but also in his essays, most of which originated as invited lectures on the subject of poetry. In these essays, Stevens seduces us with his enchanting prose to believe in the spiritual importance of poetry. The imagination—frequently synonymous with the act of the mind, or poetry, for Stevens—is what gives life its savor, its sanction, its sacred quality. In a passage from "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," he stresses the importance of poetic language by evoking our human craving for the sound of words:

The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them. (1)

Noting that the imagination (poetry) must be based on reality, and furthermore that the interdependence of the imagination and reality is crucial, Stevens goes on to isolate poetry's inherent distinctiveness: It bestows nobility, a quality he defines as "our spiritual height and depth" (664). Nobility emerges from the press of the imagination against a world that seems chaotic, crass, violent, and banal. The task of the poet is to transmit his imaginative power to others. Stevens sees the poet fulfilling himself "only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others." Simply put, the poet's role "is to help people to live their lives" (660-1).

One could cite other essays that make Stevens's case for poetry, but the real question is: How well does his own poetry measure up to his ideal? After all, the telling phrase in the opening line of the invocation to "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" is "except for you." Since the "you" refers to the creative faculty of the mind, it excludes everything else, including, of course, people. At the very least, such devotion to art rather than another person might strike a reader as odd. It has certainly struck many readers as cold and impersonal. With such observations as the following, Stevens has done little to alter that impression: "Life is not people and scene but thought and feeling" (909); "Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble" (901); "I have no life except in poetry" (913)

There is an abstract feature to much of Stevens's poetry that distinguishes it from that of most other poets. Modern lyric poets, for example, usually write about more tangible topics, often using the first-person singular. One thinks of the speaker contrasting his neighbor's view of walls with his own in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," or the persona's sudden reversal of perspective toward a rather ugly, lice-infested fish in Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," or even the paralyzing insecurity of T. S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, dreading a social encounter ("In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo").(2) Each of these poems has a well-defined speaker and a clear setting. Each invites the reader to identify with or relate to the principal human figure in the poem.

By contrast, Stevens's poems frequently seem bizarre, theoretical, and detached. What is one to make of lines such as "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream"; or "A. A violent order is disorder; and / B. A great disorder is an order"; or "There it was, word for word, / The poem that took the place of a mountain"? In addition, Stevens often employs strange characters, such as the mountain-minded Hoon, Professor Eucalyptus, and Canon Aspirin. He seldom uses the first-person form in his poetry, and when he does, it is likely to be in the plural form of "we." Although he occasionally chooses the second-person "you," he usually resorts to an anonymous third-person "he" or "she," or to the even more remote "one."

How then do we explain Stevens's subject and elucidate his greatness as a poet? The answer is simple: His major achievement is the expression of the self in all its amplitude and, in fact, teasingly beyond it. In this respect, he writes in the grand tradition of romantic poetry. Ironically his strategies of distancing—his use of odd characters, his opening philosophical gambits, his impersonal voice—serve to objectify and make authentic deeply personal sources of feeling and thought. To borrow Eliot's phrase, Stevens's poems become objective correlatives of various states within the reader, not only of heart and mind but also of being.

By analogy, consider what happens when one reads a poem such as Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." Given the title, one naturally assumes that this is Whitman's personal declaration, his own song. After all, he begins rather explicitly: "1 celebrate myself, and sing myself." But as one continues to read—as one absorbs the language, the sounds, the images, the rhythms—a revelation emerges: This is not Whitman's song of self at all, but rather "mine." Whitman's song of self has subtly transformed itself into the reader's. One realizes, sometimes with a jolt, that the title, "Song of Myself," is a play on words: it has a double and much more personal meaning.

Similarly, when Stevens writes, “And for what, except for you, do I feel love?" we, as readers, respond to the language, to our "need for words to express our thoughts and feelings." We search their sound "for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration" that expresses not Stevens's self but ours. It is we who "press the extremest book of the wisest man / Close to [us], hidden in [us] day and night"; it is we who "sit at rest, / For a moment in the central of our being"; and it is we who discover that the "vivid transparence that [poetry brings] is peace." We are like the invisible audience in Stevens's "Of Modern Poetry" that listens "Not to the play, but to itself, expressed / In an emotion as of two people, as of two / Emotions becoming one." The poet, the "metaphysician in the dark," has created the music that gives "Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses." Stevens touches and moves our deepest and most private sense of self. In doing so, he fulfills his goal of making his imagination ours.

2

Such an observation about how Stevens's poetry works may seem to state the obvious, but too often this aspect of his work has been neglected. Criticism on Stevens is filled with erudite scholarship. It explores his philosophical perspectives, his sophisticated aesthetic theory, his relationship to other poets and to the other arts. There is even a book that criticizes Stevens for his lack of interpersonal relationships. But the true force of Stevens's poetry, what keeps drawing us back to his poems—to his words and images and metaphors and rhythms—is that he speaks to our vast and inarticulate interior world. Although his poems might have their sources in his personal reaction to the world—he once observed, "Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right" (913)—they give voice to our own unique, personal, and otherwise tangled inner life.

Only a handful of readers, Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom most prominently, have emphasized this quality. Vendler elucidates the deeply private sources of Stevens's poetry, noting their roots in personal disappointment, in thwarted desire, and in a profound and brutal misery. She suggests that to read Stevens's poems "without a personal calibration ... is to read them emptily."(3) Her useful tip, one that can assist a novice reader's approach to Stevens, is straightforward—"substitute 'I' whenever Stevens says 'he' or 'she': for 'Divinity must live within herself,' read 'Divinity must live within myself,' and so on" (44). Bloom places Stevens squarely "in the curiously esoteric but centrally American tradition of Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau and Dickinson."(4) He sees Stevens as the twentieth-century poet who best expresses "that solitary and inward glory we can none of us share with others":

His value is that he describes and even celebrates (occasionally) our selfhood-communings as no one else can or does. He knows that "the sublime comes down / To the spirit and space," and though he keeps acknowledging the spirit's emptiness and space's vacancy, he keeps demonstrating a violent abundance of spirit and a florabundance of the consolations of space. He is the poet we always needed, who would speak for the solitude at our center, who would do for us what his own "Large Red Man Reading" did for those ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases, "and spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked."

Stevens's poems do more than that, too. By shaping these feelings, by giving them expressible form, they expand our sensibility, teaching us how to feel. Stevens's poetry becomes, as all art does, a two-way street. As the corresponding symbol of the inner life, his poems not only give shape and expression to our interior world, but in doing so, they also lend emotional import and expressiveness to the outer world. Stevens notes this effect in one of his essays, when he observes how a different description of a familiar place—such as Wordsworth's "This City now doth, like a garment, wear / The beauty of the morning, silent, bare"—invests reality with depth and human value, "This illustration must serve for all the rest," he says. "There is, in fact, a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world in which we live" (662), "The result," says the philosopher Susanne Langer, in speaking about the cultural value of the arts, "is an impregnation of ordinary reality with the significance of created form." Stevens's poetry, to modify Langer's terms slightly, objectifies subjective reality and subjectifies the outer experience of the world. (5)

 

About the Author
John N. Serio has been the editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal for over twenty-five years. His publications include Wallace Stevens: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography, Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays, The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens, and Poetry for Young People: Wallace Stevens. He has co-edited the Online Concordance to Wallace Stevens’ Poetry, available at www.wallacestevens.com. The recipient of two Fulbright fellowships, he has twice taught for the Semester at Sea program and is currently a professor at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York.

Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems
Alfred A. Knopf