Our next-to-last poet

Like Franz Kafka, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) worked for an insurance company; by day, Stevens was an executive with the Hartford Accident and Insurance Company, and at night and on weekends he wrote poetry.

I’m not going to say that Stevens’s poetry makes us long for the clarity of the Romantic poets, but it can be a little difficult to understand at times. It’s helpful to know a little bit about Stevens’s ideas about poetry and the imagination. He was influenced by his studies at Harvard with the philosopher George Santayana, who planted the seeds for Stevens’s ideas that in an age of skepticism, poetry can fulfill the function of religion. Critics say that Stevens’s poetry explores “the role of the imagination in relation to reality, or the reality of poetry in relation to the reality outside it.” Frank Lentricchia states Stevens sees imagination as giving order to a meaningless, disordered reality: “Reality, as alien being, is a ‘violence’ which ever pressures us . . . and the imagination is the response of our subjective violence which pushes back against inhuman chaos. Imagination makes space between us and chaos and thereby grants momentary release from sure engulfment, madness, and death.”

One example of this idea can be found in “Anecdote of the Jar” (Norton 1904). The speaker in the poem says he placed a jar on a hill in Tennessee. The jar isn’t special—it’s “gray and bare,” but it’s a product of human imagination, and it transforms the landscape. The lines “It made the slovenly wilderness/Surround the hill” conveys the idea that the jar becomes a center of interest in a wilderness that previously had no center at all—it gives the wilderness focus. And Stevens goes even farther than that in the next few lines, saying, “The wilderness rose up to it/And sprawled around, no longer wild.” The mere presence of a work of art, even a simple one like a bare jar, tames the wilderness, makes it something that human beings can live with and in. Reality is alien, wild, until art changes it into something human.

The same sort of idea can be found in the poem “The Idea of Order at Key West.” In this poem, the speaker is watching a woman on a beach. The woman is singing a song, and, according to one critic, through her song, the singer transforms meaningless and menacing reality (the sea) into a meaningful construction. Stevens calls the sound of the ocean “inhuman” and says the ocean is “like a body wholly body”: it has no mind, no meaning. It’s completely physical. We can also see him reject Romantic pantheism (the belief that God’s spirit inhabits everything) when he says “The sea was not a mask”—he’s implying that God is not concealed behind the appearance of the sea, as some Romantic thinkers might have claimed.

He goes on to say that the woman’s song is distinctive from the sound of the sea, “even if what she sang was what she heard.” The singer may be trying to imitate the sound of the sea, but what she sings is a human song, art instead of reality. A couple of stanzas later, Stevens makes the claim that the song creates the sea, or at least transforms the way we see the sea, giving it a human reality:

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Art, in a sense, creates the world. The material, chaotic, inhuman world is basically unknowable, but art creates the world on knowable, human terms. The sea becomes what the singer says it is—there’s no other way for human beings to understand it.

The two final stanzas of the poem present the speaker, having heard the singer’s song, seeing the sea in a fresh way, observing the lights on the fishing boats “Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,/Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.”

This whole notion may remind you of Shelley’s statement that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world; Stevens’s version would be something like “Poets are the unacknowledged creators of the world!”

“Sunday Morning” sets a scene in the poems first lines: a woman is lounging with coffee and oranges on a lazy, sunny Sunday morning when she begins to think about the traditional associations of Sunday, such as Palestine and Jesus’ death. The poem works as a kind of argument between the speaker of the poem and the woman: the speaker feels that transcendent, traditional religion should be abandoned for an appreciation of the beauty of the physical world, while the woman feels drawn to thoughts of heaven and eternal life.

Section II provides examples of the beauties of the physical world: “Shall she not find in comforts of the sun . . . /Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?” In Section III, the speaker traces the conception of divinity from Jove (the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Zeus), who was transcendent and remote from human beings, to Jesus, who was a mixture, in Stevens’s presentation, of humanity and the heavenly. The speaker suggests that the next step should be an understanding of divinity as entirely human, saying the result will be that earth shall “seem all of paradise that we shall know.”

In Sections IV through VI, the speaker and the woman discuss her need for permanence: she says she understands that the earth is beautiful, but earthly beauties don’t last. Paradise needs to be imperishable. The speaker gives two basic arguments: 1) because there isn’t a real heavenly paradise, any earthly paradise will be more permanent than something that doesn’t exist; and 2) there wouldn’t be any beauty without impermanence: we get tired of anything that’s permanent, and we’re only really aware of the beauties of experiences and items that are rare, fleeting, and impermanent. A permanent state of anything wouldn’t be paradise at all: we’d find it dull and oppressive.

Sections VII and VIII are a call for an abandonment of traditional religions that focus on non-earthly paradises and the establishment of a kind of material religion built upon an appreciation of the beauties of the earth. The poem’s final lines are beautifully written, an attempt to create in the reader a sense of religious wonder and awe at the loveliness of the natural world:

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink.
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

It’s beautiful, even lush poetry, but it never strikes me as an adequate religion. Apparently, at the end of his life Wallace Stevens felt the same way: according to the nuns at the hospital where he died, Stevens had a deathbed conversion, becoming a Christian before he passed away. You never can tell what people are going to do.

For discussion:

- I’ve suggested that Stevens’s ideas reflect some of Shelley’s thoughts. Does his poetry remind you of anything else we’ve read in this class?

- One of the characteristics of the Modernist movement is that works are meant to be difficult to understand. According to a literary dictionary, “Many modern productions in prose or verse are presented without overt solicitation of the reader’s interest, emotions, or understanding and are difficult to apprehend because they are designed to have the vividness of a well-made artifact, the reality of an object.” Do you feel that Stevens is working this way, trying to make his poems vivid and beautiful rather than understandable?