Reviewed by: The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb Langdon Hammer The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens. By Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. If a poem is like a picture, it is like an object, with the manifest presence of a thing. To say a poem is like music is to say it is like a process or performance, an event happening in time, and therefore fugitive. While pictures may or may not be mimetic, music rarely is, and that lack of external reference adds to the impression of fugitivity. When we look at a picture, we stand in a frontal, focalized orientation to an object at a certain distance from us. When we listen to music, even when we are seated in a hall, we are surrounded by an ambient phenomenon with no fixed location. Music sweeps over and through us. Arguably, because sound waves physically enter the body via the ear canal, music is present as much inside as outside of the listener. To judge from the number of books and articles on the two subjects, criticism finds it easier to discuss poetry’s relationship to visual art than its relationship to music, although, in the primacy it gives to sound and the way it unfolds in time, poetry has demonstrably more in common with music than with visual art. Stevens scholarship is not an exception, having been more focused over the years on the poet’s relationship to modern painting and visual art than on his relationship to music. Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb’s The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens adjusts that balance with the first monograph overview of the subject. Rather than a sustained argument, the book is structured as a series of semi-independent chapters exploring diverse topics, including music and memory, melody, birdsong and the sounds of nature, and Stevens’s relationship to modern European composers. Despite this variety of approach, a unified view of Stevens emerges. Stevens’s poetry, the co-authors write, is “an art of textual performance that invites open-ended interpretive processes and embodied experiences” in the service of a “musical aesthetic of transience, ephemerality, and affective intensification” (2). This view is not entirely new: it is consistent with the American pragmatist poet represented in philosophically oriented accounts of Stevens. But the focus on music, by putting Stevens into the company of modern European composers, makes for a rich recontextualization of his aesthetic thinking and fresh reference points for the reading of individual poems. Eeckhout and Goldfarb invite us to read “Of Mere Being,” for instance, with Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs in mind. “Im Abendrot,” the last of the songs, concludes with a pair of flutes imitating birdcalls at dusk (an unusual moment of unmistakably mimetic music). The co-authors suggest that Stevens, a longtime admirer of Strauss, “might have been haunt[ed] . . . —in whatever manner: consciously, unconsciously, semiconsciously—” by those “warbling” flutes (117) when, in his last poem, he imagined a “gold-feathered” [End Page 114] bird singing “Without human feeling, a foreign song” (CPP 476). The link between Stevens’s poem and Strauss’s song is nicely worked out, but the conditional “might have been” raises questions about the status of the connection. When Eeckhout and Goldfarb go on to propose that Stevens might have been in the audience when Gustav Mahler conducted his First Symphony in New York, and that music might have informed his poem “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate,” some readers will balk at so much speculation. But the coauthors’ aim is less to insist on direct influence than to put Stevens’s poetry into conversation with modern orchestral music. There is no doubt Stevens tried to create poetic equivalents of certain musical effects. Referring to the presentation of the silver rose in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, he wrote, “The glancing chords haunt me and sometimes I try to reproduce the effect of them in words” (L 744). Did he perhaps imagine orchestral composers as part of the audience for his poems? He did on at least one important occasion. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” was commissioned for the sesquicentennial...
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Jul 30, 2024
Jörn Peter Hiekel 
Open Access
