Stevens, Emerson, and Abandonment

Abstract

Stevens, Emerson, and Abandonment Jesse Zuba UNLIKE PATRICK REDDING, who, in the previous contribution to this special issue, takes a skeptical approach toward the question of Ralph Waldo Emerson's influence on Wallace Stevens, I agree with Harold Bloom and other critics that Stevens's immersion in Emerson is evident throughout his poetry. Stevens's extensive Emersonian heritage consists in both specific references, such as "poverty," the "central man," and the "scholar," and broader interests and affinities, such as the importance of the ordinary, contact with elemental reality, and the attitude of impersonality.1 James Longenbach identifies an intriguing element of that heritage in Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, where he describes Stevens's "innate Emersonian diffidence" regarding politics. He writes that Stevens "always felt somewhat insecure commenting on political situations he knew less well than he knew poetry" (161), though, as Longenbach demonstrates, that never prevented Stevens from engaging politics in his poetry. Similarly, for Redding, Stevens's insecurity regarding political commentary leads him to adopt a "stance of reluctant concession" in his poetry of the 1930s, when the suffering and upheaval caused by the Great Depression added urgency to the question of the poet's social role. While the publication of the revised and expanded edition of Harmonium in 1931 and of Ideas of Order in 1936 suggests that self-doubt did not necessarily slow Stevens's productivity—as various critics have usefully shown, it may even have inspired it—he tends nevertheless to "represent[] politics as an unwelcome disturbance to the peace, an interruption to the normal flow of creative private life," as Redding puts it (272). If in "Farewell to Florida," for example, Stevens abandons his isolated location in the "ever-freshened Keys," where he often spent holidays, to "return to the violent mind" of "men in crowds" that populate his "leafless" north, he does so only grudgingly. Confronting social unrest requires a departure announced in hyperbolic terms—Florida is "forever gone"—as well as the tellingly regular rededication to the task embodied in the repeated commands "carry me, misty deck, carry me / To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on" (CPP 97–98). As Harold Bloom rightly suggests, the poem's farewells are "wild with all regret" (111). [End Page 28] To describe Stevens this way brings the Emersonian roots of his "diffidence" into focus. According to David Bromwich, Emerson's responses to political crises were predictable enough to qualify as a "pattern": His pattern generally was to withhold himself from the fray until the last possible moment, when the force of a calamity became unendurable. Then, at the beckoning of others, he would make his statement. Once he had played the part, he would confess to a sense of having been besmirched, or somehow cheated of himself, in the course of making his eloquence serviceable to a cause. (136–37) Bromwich goes on to recount how Emerson was persuaded by his friends to write to President Van Buren to protest the implementation of the Indian Removal Act. "In speaking thus the sentiments of my neighbors and my own," Emerson was denouncing what was clearly a great wrong—both in his own eyes and those of others—yet he confides, nevertheless, in his journal that the "tragic Cherokee business which we stirred at a meeting in the church yesterday will look to me degrading & injurious do what I can. It is like dead cats around one's neck" (Political Writings 51; Journals 1820–1842 591). The journal entry anticipates the still more forceful objection to political commentary that Emerson registers in a famous passage from the opening of his address on the Fugitive Slave Law, where he states that he does "not often speak to public questions. They are odious and hurtful and it seems like meddling or leaving your work," a point he reinforces when he further claims that the "one thing not to be forgiven intellectual persons is not to know their own task, or to take their ideas from others and believe in the ideas of others" (Essays 993). This connection raises the question of the provenance of both writers' shared antipathy to political commentary. Emerson's...