Stevens' Mixed-Breed Versifying and His Adaptations of Blank-Verse Practice

Abstract

THE PROSODY of Wallace Stevens has long intrigued scholars. Unlike many of his contemporaries who famously composed their poetry entirely in meter (Robert Frost and E. A. Robinson), or vehemently eschewed rhyme and meter in favor of free verse (William Carlos Williams), or elected some alternate form of measure (Marianne Moore), or alternated periods of both practices (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound), Stevens conveys his receptivity to what he terms both measure and free verse, provided each has any “aesthetic impulse back of it” (Letter to Ferdinand Reyher, 13 May 1921). He also frequently wrote both metrical and free-verse poems throughout his career. At times, the form of the one comments upon the other. Yet, as frequently, the two forms function more simply as different modes suited to different purposes. In his late verse, whose metricality has been questioned, we see a quasi-blank verse that is described as a nearly “free-verse line” and one that has elicited interest but not, to my knowledge, a theoretical description. In this article, I will propose one way in which Stevens’ experiments with the two verse practices merge together and one way in which his late blank-verse line might serve as an unlikely bridge to what we think of as conventional free-verse lines. Before coming to the late blank verse, though, I want to look back to Stevens’ earliest expressive positioning of iambic pentameter verse as a vehicle for poetry.