Concordia Discors in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Abstract

I 0 COUNTERACT THE GENERAL TENDENCY to view the poetry of i Wallace Stevens as esoteric and obscure, I shall scrutinize the poetic structure of three of his major poems, Man with the Blue Guitar, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. These poems have similar underlying actions and structures, and an analysis of them as the central poems of Stevens's middle, late, and final periods reveals increasingly subtle and precise imaginative resolutions of one of the commonest and most painful of contemporary problems. Stevens's concern in these poems is with the need of the exceptional man and of the ordinary man to live in harmony with each other. Although his exceptional man is always imaginative, Stevens's theme is much like a persistent one of Hawthorne's: once something special has broken the chain of feeling which links a man to ordinary mortals, how can it be repaired without his losing the exceptional quality which may have been the very cause of its original break? It is true that a number of Stevens's early poems turn upon a self-conscious aloofness from ordinary experience. In Comedian as the Letter C, for example, Stevens forces Crispin, the central character, to go through a complicated discipline of the imagination -an experience which isolates him-but then rather brutally dumps him, in the end, into a commonplace life, with a garden to cultivate, a wife, and four daughters. Crispin accepts his end, but Stevens is bitterly contemptuous of his hero's adjustment, even though he sees no alternative to it. The violence of mood and of irony manifests this bitterness painfully. In another extended poem, written years later, Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery, Stevens does not force his exceptional poet to be ordinary, but rather accepts his inability to achieve just such ordinariness. Although Stevens is bitter, his bitterness here is di-