Stevens into Music: An Interdisciplinary Conversation Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb WALLACE STEVENS’S POETRY has long been associated with music: scholars and critics have noted the musical themes, allusions, and structures in his verse, from Harmonium to The Rock and in late poems. Stevens also famously writes of the musical analogy in his prose: in his essays, aphorisms, and letters, he often discusses the music of poetry and music proper, including some of the composers he admired (Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Mahler, Stravinsky), pieces of music he was fond of (symphonies by Schubert and Tchaikovsky early on, later also Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier), performers he liked (Leopold Stokowski), and concerts he attended. He had an extensive record collection, and his musical tastes were broad and lifelong: repertoire for piano solo, symphonic music, and opera, as well as more popular music (Bing Crosby, Jack Benny), were among the genres he enjoyed. Many of his poems have been set to music (most frequently, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but scores of others as well), both in his lifetime and to the present day. While he did not attend performances of music composed for his poems, Stevens delighted in composers’ musical efforts, corresponded with and occasionally met with them. In a 1955 letter to Barbara Church, less than two months before his death, he reported how the Julius Hartt School of Music in Hartford had awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree (L 887). We cannot help but think of that degree as a tacit acknowledgment of the fundamental importance of music in Stevens’s verse, and the actual music it continues to inspire. Given the ubiquitous presence of music in Stevens’s poems and prose, a few years ago the officers of the Wallace Stevens Society decided it was high time to mount an MLA roundtable on the subject, which we did in early January, 2018, with an eye to an eventual special issue. To foster as interdisciplinary a conversation as possible, we invited not only literary scholars but also a noted musicologist and a working composer to share ideas about Stevens’s musicality (thematically, structurally, and in relation to the genre of lyric), his record collection, and the relation of his work to that of the composers he admired and whose names occasionally surface [End Page 147] in his verse. The early morning roundtable (at 8:30 a.m.!) on that snowy, ice-cold Saturday in January drew an unusually numerous crowd, and we reveled in the conversation among panelists and with audience members. Aspects of these conversations appear in the pages that follow, along with new voices that we have encountered since. In titling the issue Stevens into Music, we want to highlight a distinction between our current focus and the inspiring work that has already been done on the poet’s ideas and relationship to music—notably, Barbara Holmes in her 1990 book The Decomposer’s Art: Ideas of Music in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and the long string of essays on the topic, as well as excellent broader studies of sound and the auditory imagination in his work. Anca Rosu’s The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens (1995) and two special issues of this journal—Stevens and Structures of Sound, edited by Jacqueline Brogan in 1991, and Wallace Stevens and “The Less Legible Meanings of Sounds,” edited by Natalie Gerber in 2009—merit special recognition. Here we aim to chart new ground in providing a musical lens alongside our usual literary one to examine Stevens’s musicality. We propose to look not only at different ways in which Stevens as a poet was himself “into” music, but also at how his poetry has been turned “into music” by composers and performers. That two-way street between the literary and the musical is what sets this special issue apart and constitutes its interdisciplinary nature, for we bring musical and literary insights together in the hope that they will illuminate each other. To highlight this interaction, we start off by discussing a musical composition—the same work that also inspires the cover image we commissioned. We are excited to present an elaborate interview with...