A Sense of Doubt blog post #3553 - "Downward to darkness, on extended wings" - "Sunday Morning' by Wallace Stevens
I don't know if you know this, but I am always bumping blog entries.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13261/sunday-morning
Sunday Morning
This is the later and more definitive version of “Sunday Morning.” Read the first published version of this poem, which appeared in Poetry magazine, here. In 1915, editor Harriet Monroe asked Stevens to cut several stanzas for Poetry, and Stevens would later restore these cut stanzas when he published the poem in book form in 1923.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70288/wallace-stevens-sunday-morning
Wallace Stevens: “Sunday Morning”
The first great flight of a Modernist legend.
BY Austin Allen
Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” (1915) is a lofty poetic meditation—almost a philosophical discourse—rooted in a few basic questions: what happens to us when we die? Can we believe seriously in an afterlife? If we can’t, what comfort can we take in the only life we get? As World War I intensified and Stevens neared middle age, he broached these subjects with quiet urgency in a poem as beautiful as it is difficult.
Although “Sunday Morning” is considered Stevens’s breakthrough poem, it wasn’t published until he was 36. It debuted in Poetry magazine during a year that brought several other Modernist milestones, including T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Marianne Moore’s first professionally published poems, and a major Imagist anthology coedited by the poets Richard Aldington and H.D. Compared with these experiments by younger writers—and with many of the poems later collected in Stevens’s first book, Harmonium (1923)—“Sunday Morning” innovates in a mellower and statelier mode.
The first stanza ushers us into a pleasant domestic setting, where a nameless woman lingers over breakfast:
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe …
This sensuous scene—with its vibrant colors, casual coffee, and oddball cockatoo—retains a bold modern flavor; some critics have compared it to paintings by Matisse. The title situates the poem on Sunday morning, suggesting that this woman is flouting the norms of her era by skipping church. Her nonconformity, however, is solidly in the mold of Emily Dickinson, who wrote in the 1860s of “keep[ing] the Sabbath” by “staying at Home” and listening to birds. An even closer model is Edna Pontellier, heroine of Kate Chopin’s revolutionary novel The Awakening (1899), who attempts to retreat from her suffocating society into a liberating solitude. (Pontellier, too, owns a chatty parrot and often wears a peignoir, or dressing gown.) More subtly, as a solitary figure contemplating beauty, death, and nature, Stevens’s character recalls some of the brooding loners in William Wordsworth’s poems from a century before.
In fact, once we’ve processed its opening jolt, “Sunday Morning” starts to look texturally and thematically grounded in the 1800s. It employs a sonorous pentameter and a lush Romantic diction: maidens, Alas, silken weavings, odors of the plum. Its atmosphere of imaginative reverie evokes the fantasy and “vision” poems of John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake. Even its rejection of religion recalls the worldly naturalism of the Romantics.
In many ways, that naturalism—a secular spirituality that the critic T.E. Hulme dubbed “spilt religion”—provides the crucial backdrop for “Sunday Morning.” Stevens’s second stanza poses three heavy questions:
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
The woman’s “bounty” is the gift of herself: body, heart, and mind. Why, she wonders, should she pledge these to “dead” gods and beliefs—to the kind of “divinity” that manifests itself briefly and ambiguously, if at all? Why not dedicate them to the “comforts of the sun” and the “beauty of the earth” around her? She (or the poem’s speaker, whose voice melds with hers) concludes that “Divinity must live within herself,” assimilating all the “pleasures” and “pains” of earthly experience. The next stanza repeats this idea in a mythic register, tracing the development of Jove—the supreme Roman deity—from “inhuman” spirit to humanlike presence “commingling” his blood with ours, as in ancient tales of gods seducing humans. Stevens asks whether this process will end in humans deposing and discarding their gods: “Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be / The blood of paradise?” If so, the result will be a profound reunion with nature: “The sky will be much friendlier then than now … Not this dividing and indifferent blue.”
In the poem’s account, this prospect, though uncertain, is borne out by the death of numerous myths. Stanza IV presents a catalog of imaginary afterlives—fictions of immortality—that have lost out to earthly reality:
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures …
As the critic M.H. Abrams has shown, this passage resembles Wordsworth’s bid (in The Recluse) to salvage Paradise—otherwise doomed to be a “fiction of what never was”—by locating it in “the common day.” Stevens affirms this idea and fleshes it out with rich Keatsian imagery. The depiction of earthly sensuality in stanza V, in which “boys … pile new plums and pears” at girls’ feet, mirrors the cornucopia in Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes.” By contrast, the sterile, “unchanging” heaven in stanza VI evokes the frozen scene on Keats’s famous urn. Even one of the signature lines of “Sunday Morning”—“Death is the mother of beauty,” from stanzas V and VI—recalls Keats’s rapture in “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die …” (It may also be in dialogue with the opening of Endymion: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”) Like the terminally ill Keats, Stevens recognizes that the foreknowledge of mortality and loss fosters our most intense sensations—the mingled pleasure and pain we experience as “beauty.”
“Sunday Morning” is so marked by the accents and attitudes of Romanticism that it can seem 200 years old, not 100. Still, it wouldn’t have remained a Modernist icon if it were only an imitation of long-dead poets. Something in its effect sets it apart from Thomas Hardy’s ballads, Yeats’s mystic visions, and other classics of the same era. One way to pinpoint what made it new is to ask what made it unsettling.
•
The first audience for “Sunday Morning” was Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine. Though she had the foresight to publish it, she also made major changes to it. According to Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young’s introduction to The Poetry Anthology 1912–2002,
In 1915, [Monroe] eagerly accepted “Sunday Morning”—provided [that Stevens] drop three of the original eight sections and allow her to rearrange the order of the sequence. Unlike several prima donnas the Editor dealt with, Stevens was exceedingly modest of his work, and he complied. (When he reprinted the poem in Harmonium, in 1923, he quietly restored his original text.)
Monroe’s edits sacrifice many of the poem’s best effects in the name of concision and an orderly “flow.” In her version, for example, the reference to Palestine that closes the first stanza segues into the one that, in Stevens’s version, opens the final stanza; the two stanzas that end with the word wings occur in succession; and so on. This heavy-handed arrangement reduces Stevens’s delicate echoes and dialectical structure (silent questions answered by an unidentified, perhaps interior, voice) to a distorted muddle.
To her credit, Monroe does not soften the poem’s religious skepticism. However, by cutting stanzas II, III, and VI, in which Stevens explores the contrast between earth and paradise—between our beautiful, “perishing” reality and the static fantasy land we struggle to imagine—she undermines much of the basis for that stance. As a result, the poem’s skeptical claims (that there was no Resurrection, for example, and that we can never believe in heaven as we do in earth) feel unearned and preachy. Meanwhile, it loses much of its optimism: gone are the notions of an inner divinity and of a “much friendlier” sky purged of gods.
Finally, Monroe’s edited version ends with the stanza that Stevens had placed next to last. This is the vision of a ring of dancing men celebrating their “devotion to the sun,” which shines “Naked among them, like a savage source.” To paraphrase Walt Whitman’s romanticized image of the “savage” in “Song of Myself” (section 39), these men are not waiting for civilization but already past it. They represent humanity stripped of pretensions and illusions, worshipping the sun “not as a god, but as a god might be.” The final lines of their stanza—“And whence they came and whither they shall go / The dew upon their feet shall manifest”—suggest a kind of redemption by way of reabsorption into nature. They will pass away like dew, their chants “returning to the sky” but “echoing … among [the hills] long afterward.”
By ending on this stanza, Monroe’s version gives us, if not transcendence, then at least a confident prophecy. It makes an assertion—not of belief but of a future direction for humanity. It bears out Stevens’s 1928 claim that “the poem is simply an expression of paganism.”
But Stevens’s greatest poems are never “simply” anything. They are questionings, testings, worryings of the poet’s major themes. And “Sunday Morning” in particular is the beginning of an inquiry, rather than the end. It launches Stevens’s career-long project of finding a poetry that (as he later put it) “will suffice” in the absence of consoling myths. His World War II–era poem “The Well-Dressed Man With a Beard” begins: “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.” By rejecting Jove and Jesus alike, “Sunday Morning” gives us the first great no in Stevens’s poetry, but its affirming yes is more tentative than Monroe may have wanted to believe.
•
Critic Janet McCann has argued that the last two stanzas of “Sunday Morning,” in Stevens’s version, “do not cohere.” She believes that Stevens permitted Monroe’s tampering because “he did not know exactly where he wanted the poem to go or how seriously he wanted the paganism to be taken.” This interpretation risks underestimating him all over again, but McCann is surely right to identify the ending as the heart of the poem’s conflict. The blissful sun-worship of stanza VII yields to something darker and stranger in stanza VIII:
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
This is our nameless woman’s epiphany after her final rejection of Christian belief. The sun here is no longer a godlike presence but part of an “old chaos,” reminiscent of John Milton’s “Chaos and old Night” in Book 1 of Paradise Lost. This troubling phrase introduces a litany of forlorn, even fatalistic words: dependency, solitude, inescapable, isolation, downward, darkness. Yet an intertwining series of adjectives emphasizes liberation: unsponsored, free, wide, spontaneous, sweet, casual, extended.
The celebration of freedom, space, and spontaneity is quintessentially American. So is the landscape, though Stevens doesn’t name a particular location. Earlier in the poem, we learned that the woman sits “over the seas” from Palestine, hinting at an Old World–New World divide. Now we hear a touch of pride in the references to “our mountains” and the bountiful “wilderness.” Here, then, is Stevens’s earthly paradise: both the wide-open country of Whitman and the chaos of a godless universe. The word ambiguous, emphasized through enjambment, holds the two visions in permanent tension.
Whether or not we find this tension satisfying, it is vital to Stevens’s design. The last two stanzas debate each other just as the language of the last stanza debates itself. Humankind might someday achieve an ecstatic union with nature, but for now, the randomness and beauty of the world elude us.
More than disbelief, it is this irresolution that marks the poem as modern. “Sunday Morning” is the first of many Stevensian sequences that circle around philosophical questions without ever landing on a definitive perch. At this early date Stevens was still half-wedded to the outlook of the Romantics, but in the disillusionment of his era, as well as the sprawl of the American landscape, he found a new ambiguity and freedom.
Austin Allen is the author of Pleasures of the Game (Waywiser Press, 2016), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. He has taught creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Cincinnati.
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens is one of America’s most respected 20th century poets. He was a master stylist, employing an extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous precision in crafting his poems. But he was also a philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously exploring the notion of poetry as the supreme fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality. Because of the extreme technical and thematic complexity of his work, Stevens was sometimes considered a difficult poet. But he was also acknowledged as an eminent abstractionist and a provocative thinker, and that reputation has continued since his death. In 1975, for instance, noted literary critic Harold Bloom, whose writings on Stevens include the imposing Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, called him “the best and most representative American poet of our time.”
Stevens was born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania. His family belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church and when Stevens became eligible he enrolled in parochial schools. Stevens’s father contributed substantially to the son’s early education by providing their home with an extensive library and by encouraging reading. At age 12 Stevens entered public school for boys and began studying classics in Greek and Latin. In high school he became a prominent student, scoring high marks and distinguishing himself as a skillful orator. He also showed early promise as a writer by reporting for the school’s newspaper, and after completing his studies in Reading he decided to continue his literary pursuits at Harvard University.
Encouraged by his father, Stevens devoted himself to the literary aspects of Harvard life. By his sophomore year he wrote regularly for the Harvard Advocate, and by the end of his third year, as biographer Samuel French Morse noted in Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life, he had received all of the school’s honors for writing. In 1899 Stevens joined the editorial board of the Advocate’s rival publication, the Harvard Monthly, and the following year he assumed the board’s presidency and became editor. By that time Stevens had already published poems in both the Advocate and the Monthly, and as editor he also produced stories and literary sketches. Because there was a frequent shortage of material during his tenure as editor, Stevens often published several of his own works in each issue of the Monthly. He was recognized on campus as a prolific and multitalented writer. Unfortunately, his campus literary endeavors ended in 1900 when a shortage of family funds necessitated his withdrawal from the university.
Leaving Harvard was hardly a setback, though, for Stevens was not working towards a college degree and was not particularly invigorated by the school’s literary environment. Once out of Harvard, Stevens decided to work as a journalist, and shortly thereafter he began reporting for the New York Evening Post. He published regularly in the newspaper, but found the work dull and inconsequential. The job proved most worthwhile as a means for Stevens to acquaint himself with New York City. Each day he explored various areas and then recorded his observations in a journal. In the evenings he either attended theatrical and musical productions or remained in his room writing poems or drafting a play.
Stevens soon tired of this life, however, and questioned his father on the possibility of abandoning the newspaper position to entirely devote himself to literature. But his father, while a lover of literature, was also prudent, and he counseled his son to cease writing and study the law. Stevens heeded the advice, and he attended the New York School of Law from 1901 to 1904. He then worked briefly in a law partnership with former Harvard classmate Lyman Ward. After parting from Ward, Stevens worked for various law firms in New York City. In 1908 he accepted a post with the American Bonding Company, an insurance firm, and he stayed with the company when it was purchased by the Fidelity and Deposit Company.
Stevens’s early years with the insurance firm brought great personal change. Financially secure, he proposed marriage to Elsie Viola Kachel, who accepted and became his wife in September 1909. Two years later Stevens’s father died, and in 1912 his mother also died. During this period Stevens apparently wrote no poetry, but he involved himself in New York City’s artistic community through his association with several writers, including poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. Stevens was keenly interested in the art exhibitions at the city’s many museums and galleries. He developed a fondness for modern painting, eventually becoming a connoisseur and collector of Asian art, including painting, pottery, and jewelry. He particularly admired Asian works for their vivid colors and their precision and clarity, qualities that he later imparted to his own art.
By 1913 Stevens was enjoying great success in the field of insurance law. Unlike many aspiring artists he was hardly stifled by steady employment. He soon resumed writing poetry, though in a letter to his wife he confided that writing was “absurd” as well as fulfilling. In 1914 he nonetheless published two poems in the modest periodical Trend, and four more verses for Harriet Monroe’s publication, Poetry. None of these poems were included in Stevens’s later volumes, but they are often considered his first mature writings.
After he began publishing his poems Stevens changed jobs again, becoming resident vice president, in New York City, of the Equitable Surety Company (which became the New England Equitable Company). He left that position in 1916 to work for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he remained employed for the rest of his life, becoming vice president in 1934.
This period of job changes was also one of impressive literary achievements for Stevens. In 1915 he produced his first important poems, “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Sunday Morning,” and in 1916 he published his prizewinning play, Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise. Another play, Carlos among the Candles, followed in 1917, and the comic poem “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” appeared in 1918. During the next few years Stevens began organizing his poems for publication in a single volume. For inclusion in that prospective volume he also produced several longer poems, including the masterful “The Comedian as the Letter C.” This poem, together with the early “Sunday Morning” and “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” proved key to Stevens’s volume Harmonium when it was published in 1923.
Harmonium bears ample evidence of Stevens’s wide-ranging talents: an extraordinary vocabulary, a flair for memorable phrasing, an accomplished sense of imagery, and the ability to both lampoon and philosophize. “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” among the earliest poems in Harmonium, contains aspects of all these skills. In this poem, a beautiful woman’s humiliating encounter with lustful elders becomes a meditation on the nature of beauty (and the beauty of nature). Stevens vividly captures the woman’s plight by dramatically contrasting the tranquility of her bath with a jarring interruption by several old folk. Consistent with the narrator’s contention that “music is feeling,” the woman’s plight is emphasized by descriptions of sounds from nature and musical instruments. The poem culminates in a reflection on the permanence of the woman’s physical beauty, which, it is declared, exists forever in memory and through death in the union of body and nature: “The body dies; the body’s beauty lives. / So evenings die, in their green going, / A wave, interminably flowing.”
“Peter Quince at the Clavier,” with its notion of immortality as a natural cycle, serves as a prelude to the more ambitious “Sunday Morning,” in which cyclical nature is proposed as the sole alternative to Christianity in the theologically bankrupt 20th century. Here Stevens echoes the theme of “Peter Quince at the Clavier” by writing that “death is the mother of beauty,” thus confirming that physical beauty is immortal through death and the consequent consummation with nature. “Sunday Morning” ends by stripping the New Testament’s Jesus Christ of transcendence and consigning him, too, to immortality void of an afterlife but part of “the heavenly fellowship / of men that perish.” In this manner “Sunday Morning” shatters the tenets, or illusion, of Christianity essentially, the spiritual afterlife—and substantiates nature—the joining of corpse to earth as the only channel to immortality. In her volume Wallace Stevens: An Introduction to the Poetry, Susan B. Weston described the replacement of Christianity with nature as the essence of the poem, and she called “Sunday Morning” the “revelation of a secular religion.”
Less profound, perhaps, but no less impressive are Harmonium’s comedic highlights, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” and “The Comedian as the Letter C.” In “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” the narrator, a middle-aged poet, delivers an extended, rather flamboyantly embellished, monologue to love in all its embodiments and evocations. He reflects on his own loves and ambitions in such carefree detail that the work seems an amusing alternative to T.S. Eliot’s pessimistic poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Like “Sunday Morning,” “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” celebrates change, and it suggests that even in fluctuation there is definition—“that fluttering things have so distinct a shade.”
In the mock epic “Comedian as the Letter C” Stevens presents a similarly introspective protagonist, Crispin, who is, or has been, a poet, handyman, musician, and rogue. The poem recounts Crispin’s adventures from France to the jungle to a lush, Eden-like land where he establishes his own colony and devotes himself to contemplating his purpose in life. During the course of his adventures Crispin evolves from romantic to realist and from poet to parent, the latter two roles being, according to the poem, mutually antagonistic. The poem ends with Crispin dourly viewing his six daughters as poems and questioning the validity of creating anything that must, eventually, become separate from him.
“The Comedian as the Letter C” is a fairly complex work, evincing Stevens’s impressive, and occasionally intimidating, vocabulary and his penchant for obscure humor. Stevens later declared that his own motivations in writing the poem derived from his enthusiasm for “words and sounds.” He stated: “I suppose that I ought to confess that by the letter C I meant the sound of the letter C; what was in my mind was to play on that sound throughout the poem. While the sound of that letter has more or less variety ... all its shades maybe said to have a comic aspect. Consequently, the letter C is a comedian.”
Although these poems are perhaps the most substantial in Harmonium, they are hardly the volume’s only noteworthy ones. Also among the more than 50 poems that comprise Stevens’s first book are “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” an imagistic poem highly reminiscent of haiku, and “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” an eloquent exhortation that death is an inevitable aspect of living. These and the other entries in Harmonium reveal Stevens as a poet of delicate, but determined, sensibility, one whose perspective is precise without being precious, and whose wit is subtle but not subdued. Harriet Monroe, founder and first editor of Poetry, reviewed Harmonium for her own periodical: “The delight which one breathes like a perfume from the poetry of Wallace Stevens is the natural effluence of his own clear and untroubled and humorously philosophical delight in the beauty of things as they are.”
Few critics of the time, however, shared Monroe’s enthusiasm, or even her familiarity with Harmonium. The book was ignored in most critical quarters, and dismissed as a product of mere dilettantism by some of the few reviewers that acknowledged Stevens’s art. Although apparently undaunted by the poor reception accorded Harmonium, Stevens produced only a few poems during the next several years. Part of this unproductiveness was attributed by Stevens to the birth of his daughter, Holly, in 1924. Like his autobiographical character Crispin, Stevens found that parenting thwarted writing. In a letter to Harriet Monroe he noted that the responsibilities of parenthood were a “terrible blow to poor literature.”
In 1933, nine years after his daughter’s birth, Stevens finally resumed writing steadily. The following year he published his second poetry collection, Ideas of Order, and in 1935 he produced an expanded edition of that same work. The poems of Ideas of Order are, generally, sparer and gloomier than those of Harmonium. Prominent among these bleak works is “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery,” comprised of 50 verses on subjects such as aging and dying. Perhaps in reference to these 50 short verses, the racist title refers to the litter that, in Stevens’s opinion, accumulated in blacks’ cemeteries. He ends this poem by noting the futility of attempts to thwart nature and by commending those individuals who adapt to change: “Union of the weakest develops strength / Not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge / One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? / But the wise avenges by building his city in snow.”
Stevens more clearly explicated his notion of creative imagination in “The Idea of Order in Key West,” among the few invigorating poems in Ideas of Order and one of the most important works in his entire canon. In this poem Stevens wrote of strolling along the beach with a friend and discovering a girl singing to the ocean. Stevens declares that the girl has created order out of chaos by fashioning a sensible song from her observations of the swirling sea. The concluding stanza extolls the virtues of the singer’s endeavor (“The maker’s rage to order words of the sea”) and declares that the resulting song is an actual aspect of the singer. In his book Wallace Stevens: The Making of the Poem, Frank Doggett called the concluding stanza Stevens’s “hymn to the ardor of the poet to give order to the world by his command of language.”
Following the publication of Ideas of Order Stevens began receiving increasing recognition as an important and unique poet. Not all of that recognition, however, was entirely positive. Some critics charged that the obscurity, abstraction, and self-contained, art-for-art’s-sake tenor of his work were inappropriate and ineffective during a time of international strife that included widespread economic depression and increasing fascism in Europe. Stevens, comfortably ensconced in his half-acre home in Hartford, responded that the world was improving, not degenerating further. He held himself relatively detached from politics and world affairs, although he briefly championed leading Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, and contended that his art actually constituted the most substantial reality. “Life is not people and scene,” he argued, “but thought and feeling. The world is myself. Life is myself.”
Stevens contended that the poet’s purpose was to interpret the external world of thought and feeling through the imagination. Like his alter ego Crispin, Stevens became preoccupied with articulating his perception of the poet’s purpose, and he sought to explore that theme in his 1936 book, Owl’s Clover. But that book comprised of five explications of various individuals’ relations to art proved verbose and thus uncharacteristically excessive. Immensely displeased, Stevens immediately dismantled the volume and reshaped portions of the work for inclusion in a forthcoming collection.
That volume, The Man with the Blue Guitar, succeeded where Owl’s Clover failed, presenting a varied, eloquently articulated contention of the same theme the poet, and therefore the imagination, as the explicator of thought and feeling that had undone him earlier. In the title poem Stevens defends the poet’s responsibility to shape and define perceived reality: “They said, ‘You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.’ / The man replied, ‘Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.’” For Stevens, the blue guitar was the power of imagination, and the power of imagination, in turn, was “the power of the mind over the possibility of things” and “the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal.”
The Man with the Blue Guitar, particularly the 33-part title poem, constituted a breakthrough for Stevens by indicating a new direction: an inexhaustive articulation of the imagination as the supreme perception and of poetry as the supreme fiction. Harold Bloom, in acknowledging Stevens’s debacle Owl’s Clover, described The Man with the Blue Guitar as the poet’s “triumph over ... literary anxieties” and added that with its completion Stevens renewed his poetic aspirations and vision. “The poet who had written The Man with the Blue Guitar had weathered his long crisis,” Bloom wrote, “and at fifty-eight was ready to begin again.”
In subsequent volumes Stevens single-mindedly concentrated on his idea of poetry as the perfect synthesis of reality and the imagination. Consequently, much of his poetry is about poetry. In his next collection, Parts of a World, his writing frequently adopts a solipsistic perspective in exemplifying and explicating his definition of poetry. Such poems as “Prelude to Objects,” “Add This to Rhetoric,” and “Of Modern Poetry” all address, to some extent, the self-referential nature of poetry. In “Of Modern Poetry” Stevens defined the genre as “the finding of a satisfaction, and may / Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.” In Wallace Stevens: An Introduction to the Poetry, Susan B. Weston wrote that in “Of Modern Poetry,” as with many poems in Parts of a World, “Stevens cannot say what the mind wants to hear; he must be content to write about a poetry that would express what the mind wants to hear, and to render the satisfaction that might ensue.”
Stevens followed Parts of a World with Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, which is usually considered his greatest poem on the nature of poetry. This long poem, more an exploration of a definition than it is an actual definition, exemplifies the tenets of supreme fiction even as it articulates them. The poem is comprised of a prologue, three substantial sections, and a coda. The first main section, entitled “It Must Be Abstract,” recalls Harmonium’s themes by hailing art as the new deity in a theologically deficient age. Abstraction is necessary, Stevens declares, because it fosters the sense of mystery necessary to provoke interest and worship from humanity. The second long portion, “It Must Change,” recalls “Sunday Morning” in citing change as that which ever renews and sustains life: “Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace / And for the particulars of rapture come.” And in “It Must Give Pleasure,” Stevens expresses his conviction that poetry must always be “a thing final in itself and, therefore, good: / One of the vast repetitions final in themselves and, therefore, good, the going round / And round and round, the merely going round, / Until merely going round is a final good, / The way wine comes at a table in a wood.” Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction concludes with verses describing the poet’s pursuit of supreme fiction as “a war that never ends.” Stevens, directing these verses to an imaginary warrior, wrote: “Soldier, there is a war between the mind / And sky, between thought and day and night. It is / For that the poet is always in the sun, / Patches the moon together in his room / to his Virgilian cadences, up down, / Up down. It is a war that never ends.” This is perhaps Stevens’s most impressive description of his own sense of self, and in it he provides his most succinct appraisal of the poet’s duty.
Although Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction elucidates Stevens’s notions of poetry and poet, it was not intended by him to serve as a definitive testament. Rather, he considered the poem as a collection of ideas about the idea of supreme fiction. Writing to Henry Church, to whom the poem is dedicated, Stevens warned that it was not a systematized philosophy but mere notes— “the nucleus of the matter is contained in the title.” He also reaffirmed his contention that poetry was the supreme fiction, explaining that poetry was supreme because “the essence of poetry is change and the essence of change is that it gives pleasure.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction was published as a small volume in 1942 and was subsequently included in the 1947 collection, Transport to Summer. Also featured in the collection is Esthetique du Mal, another long poem first published separately. In this poem Stevens explored the poetic imagination’s response to specific provocations: pain and evil. Seconding philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Stevens asserted that evil was a necessary aspect of life, and he further declared that it was both inspirational and profitable to the imagination. This notion is most clearly articulated in the poem’s eighth section, which begins: “The death of Satan was a tragedy / For the imagination. A capital / Negation destroyed him in his tenement / And, with him, many blue phenomena.” In a later stanza, one in which Bloom found the poem’s “central polemic,” Stevens emphasizes the positive aspect of evil: “The tragedy, however, may have begun, / Again, in the imagination’s new beginning, / In the yes of the realist spoken because he must / Say yes, spoken because under every no / Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken.” In Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Bloom called Esthetique du Mal Stevens’s “major humanistic polemic” of the mid-1940s.
In 1950 Stevens published his last new poetry collection, The Auroras of Autumn. The poems in this volume show Stevens further refining and ordering his ideas about the imagination and poetry. Among the most prominent works in this volume is “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” which constitutes still another set of notes toward a supreme fiction. Here Stevens finds the sublime in the seemingly mundane by recording his contemplations of a given evening. The style here is spare and abstract, resulting in a poem that revels in ambiguity and the elusiveness of definitions: “It is not the premise that reality / Is solid. It may be a shade that traverses / A dust, a force that traverses a shade.” In this poem Stevens once again explicates as the supreme synthesis of perception and the imagination and produces a poem about poetry: “This endlessly elaborating poem / Displays the theory of poetry, / As the life of poetry.” Other poems in The Auroras of Autumn are equally self-reflexive, but they are ultimately less ambitious and less provocative, concerned more with rendering the mundane through abstraction and thus prompting a sense of mystery and, simultaneously, order. As fellow poet Louise Bogan noted in a New Yorker review of the collection, only Stevens “can describe the simplicities of the natural world with more direct skill,” though she added that his “is a natural world strangely empty of human beings.”
Stevens followed The Auroras of Autumn with a prose volume about his poetics, The Necessary Angel. In the essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” he addressed the imagination’s response to adversity, and in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” he once again championed the imagination as the medium toward a reality transcending mere action and rationalization. Consistent in the volume is Stevens’s willingness to render his ideas in a precise, accessible manner. Thus The Necessary Angel considerably illuminates his poetry.
By the early 1950s Stevens was regarded as one of America’s greatest contemporary poets, an artist whose precise abstractions exerted substantial influence on other writers. Despite this widespread recognition, Stevens kept his position at the Hartford company, perhaps fearing that he would become isolated if he left his lucrative post. In his later years with the firm, Stevens amassed many writing awards, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the 1951 National Book Award for The Auroras of Autumn, and several honorary doctorates. His greatest accolades, however, came with the 1955 publication of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and another National Book Award. In this volume Stevens gathered nearly all of his previously published verse, save Owl’s Clover, and added another 25 poems under the title “The Rock.” Included in this section are some of Stevens’s finest and most characteristically abstract poems. Appropriately, the final poem in “The Rock” is entitled “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” in which reality and the imagination are depicted as fusing at the instant of perception: “That scrawny cry—it was / A chorister whose c preceded the choir. / It was part of the colossal sun, / Surrounded by its choral rings, / Still far away. It was like / A new knowledge of reality.”
After publishing his collected verse Stevens suffered increasingly from cancer and was repeatedly hospitalized. He died in August 1955. In the years since his death Stevens’s reputation has remained formidable. The obscurity and abstraction of his poetry has proven particularly appealing among students and academicians and has consequently generated extensive criticism. Among the most respected interpreters of Stevens’s work are Helen Vendler, who has demonstrated particular expertise on the longer poems, and Harold Bloom, whose Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate is probably the most provocative and substantial, if also dense and verbose, of the many volumes attending to Stevens’s entire canon. For Bloom, Stevens is “a vital part of the American mythology.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2411.09 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3417 days ago & DAD = 073 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment