Music and the Vocal Poetics of Stevens and Valéry

Abstract

In his 1951 acceptance speech ‘On Receiving the Gold Medal from the Poetry Society of America’ Wallace Stevens said of poetry: ‘In one direction it moves toward the ultimate things of pure poetry; in the other it speaks to great numbers of people of themselves, making extraordinary texts and memorable music out of what they feel and know. In both cases it makes itself manifest in a kind of speech that comes from secrecy. Its position is always an inner position, never certain, never fixed’ (CPP 834). In these few words, Stevens synthesizes some of his ideas about poetry and at the same time echoes Paul Valéry. Both assert that a poem occurs in the act of speech and, as we speak the words, we at once give voice to the poet’s own sense and express what Stevens calls elsewhere more broadly ‘the rhythms and tones of human feeling’ (CPP 877). Most importantly, for Stevens and Valéry, the ‘position’ of poetry is ‘never fixed’. Poetry moves, Valéry writes, as a pendulum, steadily and surely from one pole of language to the other — from sound to sense and from expression to impression,1 the ideas in poetry are always to be found in motion, in ‘les coulisses du poème’ (‘the wings of the poem’ [Cahiers I 292]).