The Mind as Lord and Master: Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens

Abstract

Critics of Wallace Stevens have frequently drawn parallels with Wordsworth, and recent books on Wordsworth--my own included--have tended to genuflect, little nervously, in direction of Stevens; but no one, as far as I know, has looked in any detail at affinities that are felt to exist between these two great Romantic poets. As starting-point one might take Stevens' derogatory comments on this word in his lecture Immigration as Value of 1948: We must somehow cleanse imagination of he begins, imagination one of great human powers. The romantic belittles it. The imagination liberty of mind. The romantic failure to make use of that liberty. he continues impressively, is only genius. It intrepid and eager, and extreme of its achievements lies in abstraction. The achievement of romantic, on contrary, lies in minor wish-fulfillments, and incapable of (NA, 138-9). Wordsworth didn't of course know that at end of century he would come to be thought of as Romantic with capital 'R,' and he didn't have to fight word. He would have agreed with Stevens in distinguishing between imagination, the only genius and lesser power in mind--fancy, he would have called it--that craves for minor wish-fulfillment. And he would have agreed that highest achievements of imagination lie in realm of abstraction. The differences begin to emerge when one asks what sort of achievements abstraction has to offer. Stevens in 1948 was seventy years old. He was looking back over poetic career that had six years earlier been brought very consciously to climax in poem beautifully and tentatively called Fiction. As anyone who has glanced through his Table of Contents will know, Stevens was master of exotic title--The Owl in Sarcophagus, Dove in Belly, Man Carrying Thing--but for his life's great work, he chose to be extremely plain: Fiction. Every word makes its point: because imagination never pins anything down, toward because it therefore cannot arrive, Supreme and Fiction playing each other off to show poet who elegantly knowing, wholly in control. Only indefinite article a out of place--used to stress uncertainty, and in process telling kind of lie. For Stevens (and presumably for rest of us too) there can only be one supreme fiction. As he put it in letter of October, 1940, to Henry Church: major poetic idea in world and always has been idea of God. Two months earlier he had written (this time to Simons): If one no longer believes in God (as truth), it not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else. To put it more simply, man had created God because there was need for Him; question then became to what extent could imagination that had made Him be itself His replacement. In seven years between Ideas of Order in 1935, and Notes Fiction, Stevens thought this one through and through; it was his great central preoccupation. In seven years between Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and completion of The Prelude in 1805, Wordsworth approached it again and again, like Stevens creating from energy of his questioning much of his finest poetry. Both equally were forced to be tentative, because each in his way was making biggest claim for imagination, and for human mind, that he knew how to make. But they lay of course on different sides of borderline of belief--Wordsworth, if not practising Christian, certainly believer of kind, and seeing man as godlike in his potential; Stevens writing 130 years later as an atheist who felt death of God had left gap that only man could fill. To which one might add that on their different sides of borderline both equally were open to charge of wish-fulfillment, not just in their more romantic or fanciful moods, but in grandeur of their claims for imagination itself. …