The Problem of Of , the Evasions of As , and Other Grammatical Curiosities in Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”

Abstract

The Problem of Of, the Evasions of As, and Other Grammatical Curiosities in Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” David Letzler HOW SHOULD ONE read an “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”? For the past four decades, there has persisted a basic dispute over what Wallace Stevens’ late masterpiece attempts and achieves. We might trace this difficulty to the oft-cited debate between Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom over whether the poem is, as the former claimed in her 1969 On Extended Wings, “the saddest of all Stevens’ poems” (269) or, as the latter asserted eight years later in The Poems of Our Climate, a celebration of “its own copiousness, its abundance of invention” (306). Yet the discussion has threaded past and beyond that starting point, spanning across methodological and theoretical clashes as well as generational turnover in Stevens criticism. We continue to be puzzled as to whether “An Ordinary Evening” is a “quintessentially realized philosophical poem,” as Wolhee Choe argued (291), or is instead, in Keith Manecke’s terms, “unable to reach any satisfying conclusion” (95); we ponder if the poem deconstructively reveals, as Thomas A. Fink put it, “the practical limitations of the symbol” (93), or if it is rather a “validation . . . that communication is indeed possible,” as Karen Helgeson insists (277). The problem is not simply that evaluations of the poem’s import differ. The more vexing problem—often unacknowledged and perhaps even unrecognized—is the frequently conflicting literal interpretations of the poem’s passages. For instance, within two relatively recent issues of this journal, we see both Helgeson gloss Canto X’s tale of the “man / Of bronze whose mind was made up and who, therefore, died” (CPP 402–03) as clearly describing an overly subjective mind that “see[s] what [it] want[s] to see and [is] in this sense indifferent to what might actually be ‘out there’” (289) and Julianne Buchsbaum paraphrase the same passage as self-evidently depicting those overly objective characters in the poem “devoid of any human consciousness to create and/or respond to meaning . . . who privilege a cognitive modality of absolute certainty” (104). This is not simply a matter of opposed aesthetic judgments or ideological concerns (though these are often present in criticism on the poem, as [End Page 206] Theodore Sampson notes [169]): this is a more primal clash over what is signified by the notion of one’s “mind” being “made up.” Many of these clashes derive, I think, from a few subtle, nearly imperceptible grammatical choices. In the example above, for instance, consider the ambiguity within the passive voice’s erasure of any active subject: by whom or what is the bronze man’s mind “made up”—by itself, solipsistically, or shaped passively by the outside world? Further, how does one take the phrase “made up”: is it simply an idiom indicating a completed decision, or does it indicate the materials comprising the mind (i.e., that of which it is made up)? The text is not clear, but since the phrase “made up” reads so innocuously, it is all too easy to select one meaning and proceed. Stevens’ grammar constantly presents similar challenges over this poem’s 558 gnomic lines and throughout his corpus generally: as Vendler noted long ago, Stevens can be quite the “sleight-of-hand man” when constructing his “devious syntactic form[s]” (“Qualified Assertions” 169–70). Though it has been over two decades since Eleanor Cook suggested that “An entire study could be made of Stevens’ poetics of grammar” (Poetry 7), no one, as far as I can determine, seems to have undertaken such a project. I suspect this is not for a lack of critics assenting to Vendler’s or Cook’s sentiments, but because their claim is all too correct: Stevens’ grammar is often so tortuous that even to ponder plumbing its depths can be so dizzying as to discourage further efforts. His work’s grammatical difficulties are at their most pronounced in Stevens’ longer poems, especially the late ones. No matter how convoluted the shorter lyrics might become, their words may all be held in the mind at once, allowing whatever connections and correspondences they suggest to be...