“Fact Meeting Fact—with a Background of the Ideal”: Hellenism in Stevens’s Journals

Abstract

“Fact Meeting Fact—with a Background of the Ideal”: Hellenism in Stevens’s Journals Charles Altieri I also bought a volume of lectures on Greek subjects.. . . The impression of Greece is one of the purest things in the world. It is not a thing, however, that you get from any one book, but from fragments of poetry that have been preserved, and from statues and ruins, and a thousand things, all building up in the mind a noble conception of a pagan world of passion and love of beauty and life. It is a white world under a blue sky, still standing erect in remote sunshine . . . —Wallace Stevens, journal entry for April 9, 1907 (ellipses in orig.) AFTER THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY graciously awarded me a one-month fellowship in the fall of 2019 to begin re-editing the journals of the young Wallace Stevens, I once again became fascinated by them. But my fascination led me in other directions than the work of editing. Even though I was irritated by Holly Stevens’s narrow focus on her father in Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens (1977), there is a charm and interest to her editing that I obviously could not provide. And what publisher would sponsor the re-editing of a journal engaged primarily by scholars with one of those scholars replacing the poet’s daughter? Luckily, my re-engagement with the journals turned out to fit well into two larger concerns of mine, so I could honor The Huntington’s superb hosting by trying to show how the journals provide a distinctive focus for these larger concerns. One concern is negative. The older I grow, the angrier I get at psychological accounts of poets that make them representatives of the trials and tribulations and inner conflicts of their age. In the case of Stevens, at least, the journals suggest a very different character from the one described, often quite powerfully, by others who have engaged with them, such as Joan Richardson and Frank Lentricchia. These critics want a tormented character desiring a literary career in conflict with his father’s wishes even as he took his father’s concern for financial stability to heart. But I think a good part of Stevens’s interest in money stems less from a desire for financial [End Page 146] success than from a concern to facilitate a refined comfort in accord with the Hellenic ideals he imbibed at Harvard. I will argue that Stevens accepted the person he came to think he was, and that this acceptance fostered the self-confidence necessary for a poetry that could avoid sentimentality and build intricate impersonal and transpersonal tonal structures.1 My second concern is more general and much more positive. Put simply, Stevens’s education in the Humanities at Harvard allied him with the ideals shaped by Victorian thinkers eager to provide alternatives to the Benthamite perspective on value. These alternatives made it possible to reframe and reject now-standard conjunctions of Puritanism and capitalism that are seen as shaping American ideas of public virtue. Stevens’s reading of figures like Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, and his acquaintance with George Santayana, as well as with his associates at the literary journal he edited for three semesters, The Harvard Advocate, established a different opposition that was more encompassing and civilizing than the Puritan opposition between evidence of salvation and signs of damnation stressed by Richardson and Lentricchia. This was the opposition between Hellene and Philistine, which led Stevens to speak in the journals of his being “specially keen after Greek matters all winter” (SP 163) and to read carefully at least Plato and Epictetus, on whom much of this idealizing of the Hellenic was founded.2 These readings helped Stevens appreciate pagan models of experience that did not idealize symbolic interpretive structures. And Epictetus helped him accept his own cold distance from most humans by internalizing Stoic versions of rational self-care that call for isolating the subject from all that he or she cannot control. If I am right about this influence, Stevens was not tormented by his principles, although he was occasionally disturbed by the narrowness of life lived according...