Wallace Stevens at Harvard: Some Origins of His Theme and Style

Abstract

That Wallace Stevens wrote verse as an undergraduate has been known at least since the appearance of the Wallace Stevens number of the Harvard Advocate in December, 1940, but perhaps because of the obvious immaturities in the Advocate selections, his early poetry has not been seriously considered. The Harvard work is worth examining, however, since it shows the genesis of Stevens' preoccupation with the conflicting yet interdependent worlds of imagination and reality and the early stylistic development which resulted from this preoccupation. Stevens wrote his undergraduate verse at a time (1898-1900) when as he said on a later visit to Harvard, it was a commonplace to say that all the poetry had been written and all the paintings painted (The Irrational Element in ca 1937, from Opus Posthumous, ed. S. F. Morse, New York, 1957, p. 218). This commonplace does not seem to have taken into account Yeats' mastery of his early style or the poetry of Hardy or Housman, but perhaps their voices were obscured by such Decadents as Dowson, Symonds, and Wilde, whose celebration of art for art's sakethe ivory tower Tennyson had warned against in The Palace of Art to mark the end of an era, even though they contributed to the poetry of the era to come when they did much to introduce French symbolism into English poetry. In America, the sweeping innovations of Whitman and the incisive wit and suggestiveness of Emily Dickinson were largely ignored. Edmund Clarence Stedman, the well-known poet, critic, and editor of his day, spoke of the hour in which his An American Anthology appeared (December, 1900) as a twilight interval (see Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska, A History of American Poetry, 1900-1940, New York, 1952, p. 10). Poetry seemed less and less significant in a world of science,