Wallace Stevens's 'Forces, the Will & the Weather'

Abstract

Wallace Stephens's 'Forces, the Will & the Weather', a meditative lyric of twenty-four lines, was published in I942 and later included in the Collected Poems of I954. It seems to have been written between 1938 and I940, the productive centre of his career.1 The reader who nods with recognition knows Stevens well, for the poem does not appear in any of the three collections of selected poems that give clues to the reputations of single poems at different times.2 Further, in all the literature that has built up around the poet, I have only ever found one brief (and misguided) attempt to explain its difficulties. Either the critics are right and 'Forces, the Will & the Weather' is simply not worth considering, or else something is wrong with the critics' evaluations. I believe that the latter is true, both with regard to this demonstrably fine and complex poem and to quite a number of others that have been almost equally ignored, and that this neglect tells us something important about the present limitations of criticism of a great modern poet. Some of these have been accurately observed by Frank Kermode in a review of Stevens's letters that opened out into a wider discussion of the failures of the poet's critics. Not only, he says, are many critics guilty of a method that turns the poetry into something closer to second-rate philosophy than major poetry, but, preferring generalizations to particulars, they constantly fail to attend to the workings of particular poems.3 I would add the further stricture that critics of the poems usually proceed as if the whole output were now a totally assimilated phenomenon, completely catalogued and valued, its internal hierarchies stable and assured. Again and again in Stevens criticism the same fairly small number of poems is referred to, by implication the acknowledged centre of the poet's work. Because I find that this consensus omits so many of the poems I most admire, I suspect it. Thinking