Ordinary Evening In New Haven Research Articles

The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb

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...

As If in a Book: Everyday Reading in Stevens

As If in a Book: Everyday Reading in Stevens Nora Pehrson When I complain of the “bareness”—I have in mind, very often, the effect of order and regularity, the effect of moving in a groove. . . . But books make up. They shatter the groove, as far as the mind is concerned. They are like so many fantastic lights filling plain darkness with strange colors. —Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie Moll, January 17, 1909 “OFTEN WHEN I am writing poetry,” Wallace Stevens explained in a 1949 letter to Barbara Church, “I have in mind an image of reading a page of a large book” (L 642). Unsurprisingly, therefore, meta-readerly scenes occur from first to last in Stevens’s verse, and they illustrate his changing ideas not just about the lyric but about creativity itself. “[W]hat one ought to find” in poetry, Stevens insisted in the same letter, “is normal life, insight into the commonplace, reconciliation with every-day reality” (L 643). His own solitary reading practice afforded him the simultaneous grounding and revelatory moments of insight necessary to sustain a generative relationship to “every-day reality,” or to the outward, communal world inhabited by his readers. Like a flash of brilliance, or a sudden illumination of strange and fantastic colored lights, his immersion in a text, as he saw it, could constitute “a momentary existence on an exquisite plane” (CPP 786). It could bring about a state of heightened receptivity and attentiveness—one that would ultimately wane but that left his sense of himself and of the environment beyond the text invigorated and transformed. For Stevens, the ordinary habit of reading was a means of opening up to the extraordinary value and artistic potential latent in the everyday—an accessible and reliable way of prompting creative discovery, but also, secondarily, of connecting with his actual readership. In the pages that follow, I first consider, briefly, Stevens’s private reading habits by way of his journal entries and personal correspondence. Then, I turn my attention to a group of six poems that focus specifically on the activity of reading: “The Reader,” “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light,” “The Lack of Repose,” “The House Was Quiet and the World [End Page 48] Was Calm,” “Large Red Man Reading,” and “The Novel.” Arising out of Stevens’s own reading practice, these poems, which depict and enact the experience of reading an absorbing and challenging text, elicit a parallel response in us, Stevens’s real-life readers, drawing us in as active collaborators in the textual process. This may seem contradictory, given that the poems, with one exception, evoke solitary figures reading in private spaces. Unobserved, unaccompanied, apparently indifferent to company, if these readers speak, it’s to themselves. Yet the solitary reading experiences in question are figured through various grammatical and rhetorical strategies—shifting pronouns, direct address, wordplay, and open-ended syntax—that are more suggestive of an interpersonal exchange. Stevens took his readers increasingly into account with each published volume—not by lessening the difficulty of his work, but by invoking the reading experience itself as a subject, thereby projecting his poetry outward to share his own habits and include his readers in the process. Using theories of the everyday, I will explore how Stevens’s collaborative stance—a result of his self-referential, open-ended, experimental lyricism—corresponds to his efforts to achieve an ongoing creative relationship to what he called the “normal”—that is, the shared, social, collective—experience of daily life. As a group, the reading poems remain an underappreciated part of Stevens’s work, one that has perhaps been overshadowed by the seemingly more ambitious aims of long poems such as “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Yet to focus on these particular poems about reading is to deepen our sense of Stevens as an artist, to see him afresh as a poet chiefly and principally devoted to connecting with his readership.1 Furthermore, isolating the reading poems as a unit helps us see Stevens—as Susan Howe and other contemporary poets do—as a forerunner of postmodern experimentalism and a precursor to the avant-garde interest in capturing and...

Introduction “The Life of the World”

Introduction “The Life of the World” Bart Eeckhout, Lisa Goldfarb, and Gül Bilge Han In the end, in the whole psychology, the self,The town, the weather, in a casual litter,Together, said words of the world are the life of the world. —Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” THIS IS THE SECOND HALF of the twelve contributions that—with one exception—came out of the symposium on “Wallace Stevens as World Literature” organized at the University of Stockholm in the spring of 2018. We prefaced the previous issue with a brief theoretical reflection on the concept of “world literature”—a term we will continue to spell without capitals in the essays that follow. Although, like last time, we’ve tried to put the essays in a sequence that has a certain editorial logic, what we appreciated most about the dozen essays we received is their diversity of perspectives—what we called the polyphony of critical voices in our previous introduction—and their felicitous complementarity. As at the symposium, no real thematic or methodological clusters imposed themselves and so we decided against subdividing the essays in a manner that would have seemed merely artificial. This second installment of our special issue, in other words, doesn’t open a single door onto another dimension of the topic; it basically continues where we left off by further multiplying possibilities of critical engagement. Two essays nevertheless gravitated naturally to first and last place. Gül Bilge Han’s opening contribution, “‘The World in a Verse’: Stevens, World History, and Global Modernisms,” has the sweep of a synthetic introduction that sets the theoretical stakes for the topic to which we’re returning. Han looks more closely into the emergence of a global collective consciousness in Stevens’s prose and poetry during the wartime years. While Stevens dreaded how “the consciousness of the world” might replace the “imagination,” as he put it in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (CPP 655), he was also given to envisaging the imagination as a source for a global vision of collectivity, or what he called a “civil fiction” in his poetry (CPP 586). As Han argues, “the idea of poetry as an aesthetic [End Page 127] source for exploring both connectivity and distance between different geographical, cultural, and political environments builds a recurrent trope at various stages of Stevens’s career.” After all, his attempts at proposing a common fiction that could embody the collective function of poetry and art is a well-established feature of his writings during especially the 1930s and 1940s. Before applying such ideas analytically to several poems, Han takes the time to situate Stevens’s preoccupation with a globally oriented poetics against the background of recent developments in the study of global modernisms and world literature. She pays special attention to the methodological and theoretical challenges that are posed by the stretching of “historical context” to unusual proportions. To illustrate the difference in scale that a global recontextualization may entail, Han turns to the 1945 poem “Two Tales of Liadoff,” where the reader is left to negotiate between local Fourth of July fireworks as associative backdrop to the poem’s imagery and the cataclysmic dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For a more explicit poetic manifestation of a historically informed globalized consciousness, Han then studies “The Greenest Continent,” the third section of the 1935 poem “Owl’s Clover.” There, in Stevens’s own words, the question becomes whether the “imagination, extended beyond local consciousness, may be an idea to be held in common by South, West, North and East” (L 370). Like many others, from Langston Hughes to Nazim Hikmet, Stevens constructed his version of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia—a classic instance of Western imperialism and colonialism—from a distance through the news media. In his poem, Han notes, Stevens appeared to be “interested less in celebrating interconnectedness than in staging the exigencies of art’s mobility and collectivizing power in the face of fascism, economic deprivation, and colonial rule.” She finishes by analyzing how Stevens also envisioned a global community of the poor in his more elegiac 1938 poem “Dry Loaf.” The latter...

A Forum on Stevens and Lyric Theory Introduction

A Forum on Stevens and Lyric Theory Introduction Henry Weinfield “A MORE SEVERE, // More harassing master would extemporize / Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life,” wrote Wallace Stevens in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (CPP 415). Stevens is himself, of course, that more severe, more harassing master. There are other great twentieth-century poets who are also theorists of poetry, but what makes Stevens so distinctive is that his theory of poetry is not only contained and embodied in his poetry but articulated in it as well. T. S. Eliot (whom Stevens viewed as his main antagonist) was a great poet and a great theorist, but the two activities were separate for him, the one occurring in verse and the other in prose. William Carlos Williams (for whom Stevens had cordial feelings, but who is really his poetic antitype) made “No ideas but in things” his rallying cry (6–17), and one could even say that for him, by contrast, the theory of life is (or should be) the theory of poetry. Stevens, however, insisted that “It Must Be Abstract” (CPP 329). His imperative in both his poetry and his theory of poetry was to push the art of poetry as far as it could go, as far as he could make it go. Language—in its relation to both the heard and the seen—was his material; in this regard he was utterly concrete. He strove to arrive at “the still finer, more implacable chords” and to “make the visible a little hard // To see” (CPP 90, 275). For better or for worse, the theory of poetry was the theory of life for Stevens because what he says of his solitary singer in “The Idea of Order at Key West” was true for him as well: “there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made” (CPP 106). In recent years, after a hiatus in which the New Historicism held sway, there has been a good deal of renewed discussion of lyric theory, as manifested, for example, by the publication (only a year apart) of two anthologies and a work of theory: The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations, edited by Marion Thain (2013); The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (2014), which takes a critical stance against viewing the lyric as a stable genre; and Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015), which is at once a work of theory in its own right and an attempt to delineate both the genre of lyric poetry and the various [End Page 195] controversies pertaining to and surrounding it.1 However we understand the category of lyric poetry, even if we take the view that it is meaningless as a category and stands in the way of understanding, it is clear that Stevens, unlike other major twentieth-century poets—unlike Pound and Eliot, for instance—is a poet for whom the theory of poetry is essentially the theory of lyric poetry. For that reason, viewing Stevens in relation to the lyric can serve both to anchor the theoretical discussion and to shed light on Stevens’s work itself. That, in any event, was the idea out of which this forum emerged. It began life as a roundtable at the 2018 MLA Convention in Chicago. The idea for the roundtable came not from me but from one of the Associate Editors of this journal, Natalie Gerber, who, because I had recently published a review essay on Culler’s book (see Weinfield, “A/The”), suggested that I organize the session and in fact helped me to do so. Let me take this opportunity to express my gratitude to her as well as to the participants. The essays gathered here, as well as deepening our understanding of Stevens’s poetry, interact with lyric theory in a variety of ways. Two of the contributors, David Ben-Merre and Zachary Tavlin, focus on what Stevens called, in the poem of that title, “The Creations of Sound.” Ben-Merre’s essay, “Xs and Os: Chiasmus, Apostrophe, and the Lyric Subject in Stevens,” is interested in the...

From The Commonplace Book

from The Commonplace Book Maitreyabandhu (bio) i.m. Urgyen Sangharakshita These fitful sayings are, also, of tragedy: The serious reflection is composed Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace. —Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” 1.1 A pheasant kickstarts its rancorous alarmin windless hills gripped by winter’s paw:the sound of rain is like the tentativebeginnings of tumultuous applause. I rang my mother again from the weedycorner of a field near where a crop-sprayer, with rhythmic stutter, threw a wing,an angel wing, across a crop of kale.She was in France, an overnight stopoverbefore the river cruise: meals and foyers,miniature bottles of shampoo, hand soapwrapped in tissue. After her second fallmy brother bought an automatic car:a lifetime of shifting through the gears and shewas nervous again behind the wheel, drivingto Morrisons to get used to it, buyingtoilet paper and Special K. “I can’t talkfor long, love, they’re just about to call us in.”Bad reception. The stuttering angel wing.A pigeon climbed an angle of the light.Cold wind scattered the first few autumn leaves.One can accumulate as much of nothingas one likes, it will all add up to nothing.“I’d better go . . .” A car was changing downat the oak-rigged horizon and the wind [End Page 62] that had been saying serious amongthe hedges, in the treetops, then further offacross the fields, was saying (I seemed to hear it)serious . . . then serious again. 1.3 Friends reported Rainbows! Rainbows! in WhatsAppphotos on my phone, driving alwaystowards and through them with hedges running offto where the local crows creaked the skyabove our unaccommodating heads.We carried folding chairs, arranged ourselvesin rows for the possibility of warmthand then another friend, driving pastthe portaloos, stopped to open hiscar window, wave his phone and shout out Rainbows! 1.7 We should have painted rainbows as well as rain,double and triple rainbows like the onesthat greeted you after the war when you walkedbarefoot from that hill station, burning your passport,having shaven and taken robe and bowl,walking all the way from India to Hampsteadwith Christmas Humphreys muttering dirty habitsand blue films, exchanging Pali studiesfor Soho and the Diamond Sutra’s beat. 1.14 On the way up, the lift plays Handel’sOmbra mai fu (without the solo) beforethe TV dayroom and the corridor’sposter of the Beatles striding likeyoung gods towards Love, love me do.The disabled loo has laminated picturesof tulips blutacked to the tiles. My friend, [End Page 63] marooned between one thought and another,sways like sea-grass in a current he can’twithstand in front of Doris Day and JamesStewart in The Man Who Knew Too Much.A shot rings out. The man, who’s been blacked-up,whispers something, then touches Stewart’s face.Stewart’s eyes aren’t sharp enough to tiethe lost connections as Arabs shout and fightin the crowded market chase to London Heathrowwith low sun over Hounslow and seagulls parkedacross a field all facing the same way,their bonnets glaring in the fading light. [End Page 64] Maitreyabandhu Maitreyabandhu won the Keats-Shelley Prize, the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, and the Basil Bunting Award. His first pamphlet, The Bond, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award. His second pamphlet, Vita Brevis, was a Poetry Book Society Choice. He has published three collections with Bloodaxe Books: The Crumb Road (2013), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Yarn (2015); and After Cézanne (2019). Maitreyabandhu lives and works at the London Buddhist Centre, UK, and has been ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order for twenty-nine years. He has written three books on Buddhism published by Windhorse Publications. Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications

“The Fury and the Mire of Human Veins”: On Bloom's “Endlessly Elaborating Poem”

"The Fury and the Mire of Human Veins":On Bloom's "Endlessly Elaborating Poem" Chris Winkler (bio) In the closing pages of his latest, and surely most personal, work, Harold Bloom poses a question that may serve as the book's theme. He asks: Is there a relation between a writer's immortality and a reader's search for consolation in regard to the death of friends or family and intimations of the reader's own impending mortality? (2019, 505) This question comes at the end of a prolonged discussion of Proust, whose very appearance as the subject of the book's coda is hardly this work's least curious aspect. Bloom takes up the novelist's famous epiphanies, a corollary of the romantic sublime. For Bloom, these Wordsworthian "spots of time" are, however brief, intimations of immortality, and, as such, death-defying; they also contain "Proust's truth," which is "compounded of perception, involuntary memory, impressionism, a search for spiritual meaning, and a kind of atheistic mysticism" (497). These are more than just aspects of Proust's work; the near five hundred pages that precede this observation portray a critic who, too, is in search of lost time and achieves a similar effect. But Bloom's reverie on Proust finally gives way to the explicit statement of the book's theme cited above—which, in its remaining few pages, solely becomes, with reference to Samuel Johnson, "intimations of the reader's [Bloom's] own impending mortality." In his use of poetry as consolation in the face of death, late Bloom is all too human. This preoccupation, though, has simultaneously and strikingly led the criticism to literalize the poetic imagination. Bloom's critical memoir, perhaps inevitably, literalizes tropes such as time and death, which are so central to the earlier work. Whereas Bloom's well-known theory of poetic relations emerges from his consideration of a poet's sense of "lateness" and the necessity of "lying against time," Possessed by Memory is haunted by the physical actuality of these concepts. If the exigencies of a critic's life can so easily transform the function of his central tropes, such a phenomenon [End Page 345] raises the question: how do these tropes understood in the context of Bloom's theory of poetry formulate a theory of life?1 This question has alternate origins in the ending to Wallace Stevens' 1950 poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven": This endlessly elaborating poemDisplays the theory of poetry,As the life of poetry. A more severe, More harassing master would extemporizeSubtler, more urgent proof that the theoryOf poetry is the theory of life, As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands. (2015, xx) Stevens' romantic understanding of a poem as ars poetica and as "the life of poetry" is no longer especially romantic, for we as readers and writers have unconsciously internalized such assumptions, owing in no small part to Bloom's work over the last half century. Our poems are both statements about, and demonstrations of, our conceptions of poetry. "A more severe, more harassing master," Stevens goes further, allying the theory of poetry with the theory of life. The poem's final tercet ends with rich ambiguity: is poetry or lived experience the referent? Put differently, are the poem's final figurations tropes of writing or of living? Are "the intricate evasions of as" metaphor itself or artful human action? I find it nearly impossible to read Stevens' magnificent ending without thinking of the theory of creative misprision Bloom develops over the course of two decades, beginning in 1970 with his book on Yeats. For instance, what are intricate evasions if not a poet's swerves, his defense mechanism vis a vis the past? And what are such worlds (importantly, encompassing both heavens and hells) that a poet creates if not demiurgic? Recall Bloom's exchanges with de Man in the late seventies, which more than anything forces him to clarify his theory of poetic influence against those of his fellow intertextualists.2 The telling difference between Bloom's work...

Reflections on a Musical Performance: Staging a Dialogue between Beethoven and Stevens

Reflections on a Musical Performance: Staging a Dialogue between Beethoven and Stevens Mark Steinberg HISTORY SOMETIMES MAKES brothers of artists far separated by years. A flame can burn and then catch fire again generations later, a shared interest finding its energy taken up and vibrating anew. Many are those who have investigated our emotional landscape, whose revelations make us feel less alone and more noble. Rarer is the artist who grapples as well with our process of coming to know the world. Our own thinking is often mysterious to us, and we frequently recognize beauty in the fait accompli without knowing what led us there. The late works of Ludwig van Beethoven and much of the poetry of Wallace Stevens, however, seem to engage vitally with the way in which our thinking helps us form the world as we know it. This is the idea behind an experimental and investigative performance my group, the Brentano String Quartet, put on at the 92nd St. Y in New York City in March of 2019. During a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, lines of poetry by Stevens were projected on a screen behind the quartet, fading in and out to correspond with events in the music. The text was projected just a bit at a time, full ideas brought to completion only over prolonged moments, as if being mulled over in the mind of the listener, summoned by the music. We made an attempt to have the music and poetry cohabit, neither usurping the attention completely, the two arts held in a fertile suspension. The music doesn’t need the words and the words don’t need the music, but we thought they shared enough between them to illuminate each other in some fashion, creating a new amalgam adding dimension to both. ________ During the intermission, before the start of the music, the audience sees these lines from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,”1 priming them for the idea of art as an investigative tool: [End Page 168] the theoryOf poetry is the theory of life, As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands. (CPP 415) Beethoven in what is generally referred to as his late period often writes a sort of meta-music—music in which we can sense the process of creating music, and in which that process tells us about our ability to conjure sense from the world. Stevens, likewise, seems to write often about poetry itself, to meander in real time through the process of a poem’s taking shape, inviting us into the mind of the poet and sharing in his contemplations. This is precisely the sense I have always had in hearing the first movement of Op. 132. As when Stevens says that “the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life, // As it is,” so does Beethoven write music, which, if it has an “aboutness,” is about composing itself, about ordering abstract musical ideas, both following and manipulating them to make a form that is built before our eyes. The quartet begins with a motif that is a bit of an obsession for Beethoven in his late period, a four-note idea that is, perhaps, his version of Bach’s having spelled his own name in musical notes. And so he speaks of both the complexity and perfection of his predecessor and of the idea of self-reference. The four-note idea is set forth as a sort of postulate upon which to build. Already in the introduction of the piece, the idea comes both right side up and upside down and intertwines with itself. It will rarely be completely absent from the proceedings, as if the laws of logic and perception are controlling what might otherwise seem an almost random succession of thoughts. It suggests a clarity of eye that is Stevens’s “things as they are” (CPP 135). As this motif is first introduced, the projections show: This is how the wind shifts:Like the thoughts of an old human,Who still thinks eagerlyAnd...

Crazy Jane and Professor Eucalyptus: Self-Dissolution in the Later Poetry of Yeats and Stevens

Crazy Jane and Professor Eucalyptus:Self-Dissolution in the Later Poetry of Yeats and Stevens Margaret Mills Harper … all talk about God, whether pro or anti, is twaddle. —Wallace Stevens, quoting Professor Joad Fol de rol, fol de rol. —W. B. Yeats, "Crazy Jane Reproved" PARTICULARLY IN THE TWO magisterial volumes The Tower and The Winding Stair, the later W. B. Yeats is a poet who might be typified by the weighty line, the bardic voice, forms like the poised ottava rima and meditative style that Helen Vendler calls "spacious" (Our Sacred Discipline 291). Late Wallace Stevens moves into sparer variants of his ongoing poetic preoccupations, offering himself as "a diffident minimalist," in Charles Altieri's phrase (321), substituting purgation for harmonium. These are overgeneralizations, of course. A parallel that interests me appears if I juxtapose two late sequences, focusing especially on each poet's late reworking, or redramatizing, of the poetic subject. The two texts I will consider are Yeats's Words for Music Perhaps and Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." They are not stylistically or thematically similar, though both represent somewhat analogous moments in each poet's career. Considered together, Yeats's Crazy Jane poems in particular (which form a large part of the sequence Words for Music Perhaps) and Stevens's multi-canto "An Ordinary Evening" represent ambitious experiments in creating dissolution by two wielders of powerful language. Both works explore the paradox implicit in highly skilled poets confronting the absence of the imagination, the seeming opposite of everything their abilities can and do make possible.1 For Yeats, the effort involved following the magisterial poems of The Tower with the abjection and exultation of a different kind of mask, a different style, and arguably a different approach toward composition, than he had tried before. Words for Music Perhaps was published by Cuala Press in 1932 and then included in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), two years before Yeats's seventieth birthday. The title of the sequence is ironically misleading: the twenty-five short poems of the sequence are not [End Page 31] meant to be set to music—hence Yeats's playful "Perhaps." In March 1929, the poet wrote his old friend Olivia Shakespear, "I am writing Twelve poems for music—have done three of them (and two other poems)—no[t] so much that they may be sung as that I may define their kind of emotion to myself. I want them to be all emotion and all impersonal" (Letters 758). Indeed, the idea of Yeats writing for music seems to have amused both himself and his wife. R. F. Foster quotes George Yeats writing to Thomas McGreevy, a good friend, that "William … yesterday came dashing along from his cot to announce that he was going to write twelve songs and I had got to purchase 'a musical instrument' at once and set them to music. … All said songs being of a most frivolous nature!" (letter from February 11, 1929, qtd. in Foster 385). Given that she did not play a musical instrument, not to mention that it seems not to have mattered which musical instrument she was meant to buy, "frivolous" might be an understatement. The twenty-five short poems of Words for Music Perhaps are technically very unlike some of Yeats's weighty and serious late poems, including the poems in magisterial ottava rima like "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" or "Coole Park, 1929" and "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931." The poems that comprise Words for Music Perhaps are light and somewhat tune-like, with short stanzas, frequent uses of refrain, and tetrameter or trimeter rhyming lines suggestive of ballads or Shakespearean songs. The little lyrics are anything but frivolous, though. Instead, their light touch is part of a spiritual/intellectual purpose that includes the question of words' inherent musicality. The sequence foregrounds the idea of simple joy as wisdom, which is common to Yeats's late work. As an oft-cited (and often misquoted) passage in one of his last letters puts it, I am happy, and I think full of an energy, of an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I...

“In the Metaphysical Streets of the Physical Town”: Place and the Ordinary in Stevens’s “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”

Previous articleNext article No Access“In the Metaphysical Streets of the Physical Town”: Place and the Ordinary in Stevens’s “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”Benjamin MaddenBenjamin MaddenUniversity of Adelaide Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 3February 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/688624 Views: 94Total views on this site © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Feeling Strange and Turning Back: Stevens, Frost, and the Foreign

Feeling Strange and Turning Back: Stevens, Frost, and the Foreign Zachary Tavlin DENNIS LEE DESCRIBES writing in “colonial space” as an attunement to cadence, a speaking to one’s “own dwelling” (154), that requires in turn a listening to the “deeper cadence in which the poem is locally sustained” (152). “But if we live in space which is radically in question for us,” Lee writes, “that makes our barest speaking a problem to itself. For voice does issue in part from civil space. And alienation in that space will enter and undercut our writing, make it recoil upon itself, become a problem to itself” (154). In The Hybrid Muse, Jahan Ramazani considers the invisibility of what he calls “postcolonial poetry” relative to parallel readings of fiction and drama, and like Lee he recognizes that academic and readerly assumptions about voice, place, and affective expression often prevent entry into the work of poets (including Louise Bennett, Okot p’Bitek, and A. K. Ramanujan, but also aspects of W. B. Yeats’s poetic archive) who speak neither from within an unquestioned, un-alien space nor out of a postmodern non-place where locality itself is an obstacle to good—because non-territorial—thought and speech (3). It would be all too easy to take the poetry of Wallace Stevens as an example of the latter, as a collection of “Description[s] Without Place” (CPP 296), and Robert Frost’s as the former, as a record of northern New England vernacular speech wrestling with meters, devoted to the cadence of a solid and well-established place. Such a schema would indeed allow one to dismiss these modernist white American poets as unconcerned in any way with the politics of borders and colonial dialectics—what Frantz Fanon refers to as the process of cultures “once living and open to the future” becoming “closed, fixed in the colonial status, caught in the yoke of oppression . . . mummified” (44).1 But both Stevens and Frost were concerned throughout their careers with the sort of meta-problem that grounds much postcolonial writing and scholarship, the at once practical, metaphysical, and deconstructive problem of Self and Other, which Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a binary that is “the last of the shibboleths of the modernizers that we must learn to live without” (354). That Stevens’ poetry, for instance, contains and/or attempts to overcome an epistemological deadlock aligned with this meta-problem—which grounds colonial [End Page 50] politics and poetics performed far from the hard, spare landscapes of his Connecticut—is recognized by none other than Edward Said, whose 1984 essay “The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile” borrows Stevens’ famous phrase from “The Snow Man” to describe the diasporic experience in wholly psychological terms, where “the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable. . . . [A] life of exile moves according to a different calendar, and is less seasonal and settled than life at home” (55). In this essay, I will consider a few of the different ways in which the poetry of Stevens and Frost encounters the encroachment of the “foreign” into spaces of refuge, and will situate my readings of a few representative poems within an epistemological problematic of self and other that underlies concrete concerns about immigration, settlement, xenophobia, and colonialism. Though Stevens’ career in poetry and correspondence evince several different approaches to the pressures of the “exotic” real, in his late poems his acquaintance with things is often only with their surfaces, not their depths: birds sing strange and dissonant songs (“Of Mere Being”), landscapes present a hard outer shell (“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”), and particles of the world appear transcendent only in their muteness (“The Course of a Particular”). But insofar as Stevens resolves the initially disturbing foreignness of the world in his old age, it is in his recognition of the construction of metaphor as an engendering relation that remains open to the revision and reconstruction of one’s desire for the unusual. In “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain,” for instance, “the outlook that would be right” is achieved by the observer-poet’s reordering his position...

MODERNIST Poetry's ENCOUNTER WITH EPISTEMIC MODELS OF VALUE

This article elaborates on the dilemma faced by modernist poets in seeking to define values in an intellectual context that was post-Romantic and post-epistemic. Pound and Stevens, for example, reacted strongly against the ways that Romantic writers had tried to tie the rhetorical elaboration of values to precise descriptions, as if description could still support values. Victorian writing tended to experience the effort to ground value in fact as a source of constant irony, given that the desired values refused to become manifest. Positivist philosophy and its literary allies asserted that values simply occupy a different and much more unstable realm than do facts. Having established these historical premises, the essay then concentrates on how Stevens and Pound, in challenging positivist assumptions, sought two different sources of value, each of which, however, placed value within the domain of experience. Pound's approach was Nietzschean, in that it was Nietzsche who had demonstrated how valuing precedes determinations about fact. Pound's capacity to make his early lyric poems seem to come out of nowhere and depend on linguistic invention alone for their power is shown to be a realization of Nietzschean strategies. Meanwhile, Stevens in his early work tried out a range of attitudes that seemed to him capable of defying fact, especially by approximating aphoristic self-assertion. Finally, Pound in his Cantos and Stevens from the late thirties onward developed self-reflexive versions of an analogical model of valuing that, as Dora Zhang has shown, shaped the response of novelists (James, Proust, and Woolf) to the same dilemma that modernist poets were facing. The essay closes with a reading of section XII of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” as a demonstration of Stevens's analogical mode.

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

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...

Aspect-Seeing and Stevens' Ideal of Ordinary Experience

Aspect-Seeing and Stevens' Ideal of Ordinary Experience Charles Altieri I did not at all anticipate the emerging interest in the poetry of ordinary life or everyday life. I am enough of a modernist myself to believe we have plenty of ordinary life without asking our poetry to submit to it. But one would have to be a fool not to appreciate the appeal of the notion, especially when developed by as fine a literary critic as Siobhan Phillips, who has written by far the best account of Stevens' relation to this topic in her recent book, The Poetics of the Everyday. In general, the topic appeals because we want poetry to be about something, because we are suspicious about claims for the sublime with its temporality of singular events, and because we want poets not to be snobs but respectful of a common social order. The poetics of the everyday allows us to satisfy all three wishes. Of course, such naked satisfaction is forbidden to academic literary criticism. Yet when one reads Phillips one appreciates how such satisfactions can be embodied in intricate intellectual performances. There are, in fact, very good reasons why poets would engage the everyday, and why critics would value their thinking. Phillips' basic argument seems compelling: Stevens begins with something close to contempt for ordinary life, and for the temporality of repetition that is a necessary part of it. On the need for ecstatic time he was one with the modernists. But eventually he realized that there is no escape from alienation and its pseudo-heroics without reconciliation with the everyday. Phillips' formulation has the intense and pointed logic of a major critical mind: "Stevens can overcome dualistic malady [of 'The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad'] with the commonplace patterns that once seemed the malady's ground" (80). Even when he changed styles to embrace the process of thinking in time, it was only in The Rock that the Penelope of "The World as Meditation" could turn "the terrified farewells of 'The Auroras of Autumn' into the peaceful routine of 'An Ordinary Evening'" (108). Penelope's way of absorbing the sun through repetition "overcomes the elegiac" (108) that seems of a piece with wanting to live a life of exalted moments. I have no quarrels with Phillips' sharp account of Stevens' ultimate project, realized differently in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" and in [End Page 78] The Rock. (Phillips does not acknowledge those differences because she is more interested in the logic these poems share than in the styles by which they explore different levels of the everyday.) Her argument achieves two significant public values. First, she brilliantly articulates what can follow from accepting repetition: along the lines of Kierkegaard, agents can find that "the resignation of individual retrospection can paradoxically provide a new sense of identity and conception of history" (Phillips 100). One gains a "forward-looking acceptance" (100) by which to replace the traditional lyric's commitment to elegy for what has made the self different from the ordinary. Second, she makes a powerful argument that "diminishment brings one closer to the novelty in an ordinary round, to a fresh perception of one's consistent world. The poem's insistence [Phillips is talking here about 'Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself'] registers that perception as it demonstrates the effort it demands, making Stevens's final work the fresh inscription of an endless duty" (110-11). Hence "Kierkegaard describes patience rather than desire as the opposite of despair" (109). And because that attitude lessens the centrality of individual retrospection, it affords a new everyday sociality (88). Repetitive time is potentially everyone's time, and the care for what repeats and so is central in life is potentially everyone's care. I do have three quarrels with this account of the poems in The Rock. The first two are relatively minor. I see no sense of duty on Stevens' part in registering these perceptions. It is not the case that necessity drives the perceptions; rather, Stevens is concerned that one see the perceptions "as a necessity requires" (CPP 428). What necessity requires is an attitude toward the world perceived rather than...

Public Desires, Private Desires: The Satisfactions of Stevens and Stanley Cavell

Public Desires, Private Desires:The Satisfactions of Stevens and Stanley Cavell Rachel Malkin We fling ourselves, constantly longing, on this form. —Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" VIII Wallace Stevens first read "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet" at Mount Holyoke College in 1943 as a participant in "Pontigny en Amérique," a series of seminars held under the auspices of the French philosopher Jean Wahl. Stanley Cavell's only sustained engagement with Stevens to date commemorates these colloquia, which housed Jewish intellectuals in flight from Nazi-occupied Europe seeking refuge in America. Motifs of desire and satisfaction echo through the text of Cavell's "Reflections on Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke." Meditating on what philosophy and literature might want from one another, Cavell defines the condition of being human as that of inhabiting "the maze of infinite desires in finite circumstances" (78), a phrase that also identifies the play of contingency and necessity at work in writing. The American pragmatist Richard Rorty famously argued that literature takes the part of contingency, providing exemplary private perfections, whereas philosophy, in privileging necessity, strives to establish the grounds of community. Rorty considered the attempt to reconcile the private with the public erroneous. But an examination of the relationship between Stevens and Cavell, the most innovative American inheritor of ordinary language philosophy, allows for a more nuanced disciplinary comparison than Rorty's division of labor suggests. Cavell proposes a philosophy that incorporates desire, and finds in this possibility the basis of a non-instrumental vision of community. While Stevens, too, finds something common in contingency, their communities may not be entirely the same. Critics of poetry have begun to notice affinities between Stevens and Cavell. In what follows, I hope to show the two authors have much in common: a remarkable convergence of intellectual and cultural influences, the sense of an epistemological crisis that involves, or equals, an aesthetic one, and powerful reverberations of the American liberal public discourse of Stevens' time. I will suggest, however, that their profound similarities are, in some ways, misleading. The differences between Cavell [End Page 105] and Stevens may seem at first like mere differences of stress—the pressure each puts on two halves of the same equation. But these stresses might very well turn out to be definitive. They bear on the question of where poetry and philosophy stand in relation to desire and community. The terminology of the ordinary and experiential plays an important role in contemporary critical discourse. In this discourse, an interest in the ordinary conditioned by an American rhetoric from the 1930s and 1940s and by liberal ideals, on the one hand, seems to meet with a resurgence of interest in the affective dimension of art and philosophy, on the other. I would suggest that this happens through an investment in a liberal ideal of community that sometimes converges, at other times conflicts with a vision of community derived from the aesthetic. Two questions I would like to raise here, though perhaps not fully answer, are how much of a resource for the idea of liberal community Stevens can be, and relatedly, whether what Cavell wants from the aesthetic is always compatible with the implicit political aims of his project. In recent years, Stevens critics have begun to combine a philosophically oriented, phenomenological understanding of the ordinary with the historically inflected "democratic" uses to which it has been put, often routing their arguments through a discussion of American pragmatism. Thus, the emergent criticism seems to find common ground between phenomenological and American liberal indices of value. To this end, it mobilizes ideas of the diurnal or everyday, and an emphasis on experience, alongside a focus on the common, humble, and shared. While valuable, I believe that this approach sometimes entails an invisible investment, one that might extend to existing discussions of Stevens and Cavell. In general, Stevens has been viewed mostly either as an American poet of his time or as legitimately philosophical. Where recent commentators have addressed both, the two elements seem to be brought together unproblematically. But the phenomenological and American sides of Stevens might have a more convoluted relationship than this suggests.1 American and...

Wallace Stevens: Poems Selected by John Burnside (review)

Reviewed by: Wallace Stevens: Poems Selected by John Burnside Edward Ragg Wallace Stevens: Poems Selected by John Burnside. Edited by John Burnside. London: Faber, 2008. When it comes to selected editions of Stevens' work, readers and scholars—especially outside the United States—have traditionally referred to the 1953 Selected Poems, published by Faber & Faber. This edition features poems chosen by Stevens himself and has been, historically, the first port of call for new readers of Stevens beyond North America. As documented by George Lensing, Carolyn Masel, and more recently Mark Ford, Stevens was, however, embroiled in discussions concerning a potential selected edition to be published in England as early as 1944. In 1952, R. A. Caton's Fortune Press finally published a selected edition, much to the chagrin of Knopf in New York (the book was subsequently withdrawn). Stevens' interest in the Fortune Press was aroused by his correspondence with the English poet Nicholas Moore as well as his acquaintance with Moore's father, the philosopher G. E. Moore. The elusive literary publisher Tambimuttu was also negotiating with Stevens during 1944-45 to produce one or more editions of his work, one of which was to have been a selection, as part of Tambimuttu's Editions Poetry London series (an offshoot of Poetry London magazine). What is perhaps most surprising is that Stevens ever consented to publish a selected edition of his work or even to capitulate to making the selections himself. The remaining correspondence amply shows Stevens' fear of being defined by such prosaically-titled publications as a Selected Poems or Collected Poems, for him chisel-marks on the epitaph of a poetic career. He characteristically refused to make the selections for the first proposed Fortune Press edition. When Faber approached Knopf about a selected edition in 1951, [End Page 284] Marianne Moore was touted to assemble the list. As an unpublished letter of November 1, 1951 from Knopf's Herbert Weinstock to Stevens shows, T. S. Eliot himself had suggested that either Marianne Moore make the selection or Stevens do so, with the Knopf camp urging Stevens to proceed. The Wallace Stevens Archive at the Huntington Library houses the volley of letters that ensued. On November 12, 1951, Stevens sent Weinstock his hand-written selection of titles, warning Weinstock that "It is not a list of things that are what 'the author wishes to preserve.' It should not be advertised that way; it is representative" (WAS 3333). Lovers of Stevens' work occasionally wonder why Harmonium is still the poet's best-known book, given the overall achievements of his poetic career. But in the fifty-eight poems Stevens selected himself, thirty-four of them are from Harmonium (if one includes the 1931 edition). Certainly, many of the Harmonium "lyrics" suit anthologizing, yet if the text is to be understood as "representative," then, for Stevens, these poems were significant manifestations of his work (the Harmonium-esque "Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain," from Transport to Summer, also made the cut). Of course, Stevens' selection also included "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," as well as a range of poems from all his published books to date. The only exception was "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," which had appeared in The Hudson Review but is now more widely recognized as part of the 1954 The Rock (first published in Stevens' Collected Poems). There have been other selected editions over the years, notably for the North American market and usually masterminded by Knopf. These range from Holly Stevens' important 1971 selection, The Palm at the End of the Mind, over Helen Vendler's smaller gathering in 1993 for Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, to, most extensively and now most attractively, the Selected Poems edited by John Serio in 2009. But whereas the latter will be familiar to all Stevens lovers, rather obscurer is a slim paperback entitled Wallace Stevens: Poems Selected by John Burnside published by Faber in 2008. It is, sadly, already out of print again and has been replaced by another reprint of the 1953 selection I have been revisiting in my opening paragraphs. The Scottish...

Wallace Stevens: Hypotheses and Contradictions

WALLACE STEVEN'S HYPOTHESES—his ifs and ors— and his contradictions—his buts—play a visibly large role in his poetry. They represent speculation, on the one hand, and the obstruction of speculation, on the other. Speculation is a way to resist the inertial forward movement of the mind; hypothesis is a way to swerve away from present thinking, as is contradiction (see "Earthy Anecdote," Stevens's first manifesto of the need for change and the means to change). Although speculative and contradictory forms of thought are indispensable to Stevens through his middle period, in the later part of his career he begins to resist them. From youth to age, he seeks out truth in different ways. First, by dialectical means, he seeks philosophical "truth." Conceiving of it as an absolute, he relies on a contrastive either/or characterized by tentative hypotheses and frequent selfcontradictions. Next, adopting a Nietzschean multiplicity or a cubist variety of perspectives, he argues not for "the" truth but for "truths," and relies on endless elaboration (as in "The Man with the Blue Guitar") to present many "truths" at once. But in the later work he seeks "a" truth, always a provisional one, and approaches it asymptotically, suggesting various metaphors, each of which comes in some way close to the essence of his goal. ''It is not in the premise that reality / Is a solid'' (An Ordinary Evening in New Haven). From a wish to systematize the access of poetry to ''truth,'' or to register and name all available ''truths,'' Stevens arrives at the emotional and personal reality of many ''shades'' or ''forces'' that present themselves to us, one by one, over time, as ''a'' truth valid for one mood or one hour, but which always must anticipate their own ''decreation.''

Stevens in Corsica, Lear in New Haven

N 4 November 1949 in New Wallace Stevens honored sesquicentennial of Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences by reading Ordinary Evening in New Haven, poem he had written for occasion.' An unusual commemoration it proved to be. Stevens evoked city's uncongenial climate in late fall turning to winter, a barren time when the last leaf that is going to fall has fallen (XXX/350).2 The poem describes a day in New Haven memorable only for its dismal weather, when rain

Writing the Limits of Representation: Balzac, Zola, and Tournier on Art and Photography

In Wallace Stevens' An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, a certain Professor Eucalyptus philosophizes that search for reality is as momentous as the search for god.' If this search drives the scientist, the philosopher, or the poet, it is no less the quest of artists for whom the search is bound up with the need to confront the real with forms of their own making, forms that embody hypotheses about the nature of reality and of art. Crucial to the artist's search are both the limits of realistic representation-for as one of Balzac's artists notes: pour notre malheur, il est des effets vrais dans la nature qui ne sont plus probables sur la toile2-and the status of the representation: its referential relationship to an object considered outside the page or frame, what Stevens' poem terms eye's plain version... a thing apart, / The vulgate of experience (I.1-2). This paper will explore the limits of representation as they emerge in three short stories, in order of consideration: Zola's L'Inondation3, Michel Tournier's Les Suaires de Veronique in Le Coq de Bruy~re4, and Balzac's Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu5. All three stories adopt, at least superficially, the realistic aesthetics for which Balzac and Zola are the traditional models. Zola's story is based on an actual flood of the Garonne River; Balzac describes the events that befall the young Nicolas Poussin in a studio on the Quai des Grands Augustins three centuries before Picasso would take up residence there. Tournier's story takes place in Arles during the yearly Rencontres internationales de la Photographie, which the author most certainly attended, and its first person narrator could, by essentialist reduction, be taken as Tournier himself. This evocation of an actual historical setting serves to authenticate the events of the narrative, and in turn they are a foil for the realism of the painterly or photographic representations that figure in each story. The imbrication of first degree realism (the referential qualities of the narrative) and second degree realism (the discourse in the narrative concerning photographic and pictorial realism) complicate the reader's notions of representation and of referentiality. Each story dramatizes the limits of realist representation, that is,

The Reader Is the Medium: Ashbery and Ammons Ensphered

Canonized in mid-career by Harold Bloom,' Ashbery and A. R. Ammons elaborate in contrasting manners Stevens' correlative attempts to project a festival sphere (An Ordinary Evening in New Haven) and to rival plentifullest John of Revelation (Description without Place). Both first published in 1974, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Sphere project communities as inclusive and articulate as the Psalmist's heavenly Temple and the apocalyptist's

Stevens' Fusky Alphabet

Wallace Stevens uses the alphabet as a code to validate the philosophical concerns of his poetry. The alphabet is “murderous” if it represents a sacred and sterile process that assumes a final dispensation as “heavenly script”; the alphabet is “fusky” if it represents an artistic act that continually mediates between the emptiness of things and the imagination to create poetic heavens on earth. Stevens often works with an abbreviated alphabet (ABC, XYZ, etc.) where the letters are “characters” who represent certain relations between the imagination and reality. An understanding of this code informs certain poems where letters play an explicit and major role, such as “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch,” “Connoisseur of Chaos,” and “The Comedian as the Letter C.” The alphabetical code also informs much of Stevens’ other work and accounts for many of the apparent difficulties of his poetry—the curious vocabulary, the fantastic characters, and the exotic topography of his poetic universe.