Wallace Stevens and the Realities of Poetic Language

Stefan Holander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780415955966
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135914004
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study examines Wallace Stevens' ideas and practice of poetic language with a focus on the 1930s, an era in which Stevens persistently thematized a keenly felt pressure for the possible social involvement and political utility of poetic language. The argument suggests how mutually implicated elements of his poetry such as diction, prosody and metaphor are relied on to signify or enact aesthetic closure; both in the negative terms of expressive impotence and unethical isolation and the positive ones of imaginative and linguistic change. In this respect, the study deals closely with the epistemologically and ethically fraught issue of the ambiguous and volatile role of non-semantic elements and linguistic difficulty in Stevens' language. Assuming that these facets are not exclusive to this period but receive a very clear, and therefore instructive, formulation in it, the discussion outlines some of Stevens' most central tropes for poetic creativity at this stage of his career, suggesting ways in which they came to form part of his later discourse on poetic functionality, when polemical concepts for the imagination, such as "evasion" and "escapism," became central. Stevens' prosody is discussed from within an eclectic analytical framework in which cumulative rhythmics is complemented by traditional metrics as a way of doing justice to his rich, varied and cognitively volatile use of verse language. The expressive potency of prosodic patterning is understood both as an effect of its resistance to semantic interpretation and by assuming a formal drive to interpret them in relation to the semantic and metaphoric staging of individual poems. A poem, in turn, is understood both as a strategic, stylistically deviant response to the challenges of a particular historical moment, and as an attempt to communicate through creating a sense of linguistic resistance and otherness.

Chapter One
Stevens’ Closures

The sun, that brave man, Comes through boughs that lie in wait, That brave man. …. Fears of my bed, Fears of life and fears of death, Run away. That brave man comes up From below and walks without meditation, That brave man. “The Brave Man”

WHITMAN, SANTAYANA, STEVENS: ANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE

In a retrospective lecture given in Glasgow in 1942, “The Music of Poetry,” T.S. Eliot gave an account of the developments in poetic discourse at the beginning of the 20^th century which he and Ezra Pound protagonized. The vision of poetic change in Eliot’s speech appeared to agree with a statement made by Stevens in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” a talk delivered at Harvard the year before, that “the imagination is always at the end of an era.” For Eliot, however, the idea that such revolutions are always happening—that a successful poem is itself a miniature revolution—coexists with the notion that revolutionary poetic changes, produced in reaction to the aloof refinement and expressive decay of fins-de-siècle, are cyclic, collective, and historically verifiable, spaced out at approximately a century’s interval:

Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes announce itself to be a return to common speech. That is the revolution which Word-sworth announced in his prefaces, and he was right: but the same revolution had been carried out a century before by Oldham, Waller, Denham and Dryden; and the same revolution was due again something over a century later. The followers of a revolution develop the new poetic idiom in one direction or another; they polish or perfect it; meanwhile the spoken language goes on changing, and the poetic idiom goes out of date.¹

Very conspicuously, Eliot’s Anglocentric history of poetry omits a voice which preceded Eliot’s own revolution—“something over a century” after Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads—with the uneven number of approximately seventy years, but with an equally powerful claim in the history of poetic transformation, and precisely in the name of a return to common speech: Walt Whitman. In this sense, the modernist agency of Eliot and Pound can be seen as fighting on two fronts. There is Whitman’s notion of poetic modernity, intent on clearing the ground of all obstacles for untrammeled expression, regarding struggles to perfect poetic technique as something of a non-issue. On the other side, there is poetry like Stevens’, which appears to flaunt its sound material and traditional metric form at the expense of the presentational powers of the poetic image. Interestingly, later Poundian objections to Stevens’ poetics have had a strong Whitmanian component, which suggests an often unacknowledged affinity at the core of Eliot and Pound’s versions of modernism and, not least, their normative legacies.

Although Stevens received his first poetic formation at a time when, as Robert Buttel explains, “the sweeping innovations of Whitman and the incisive wit and haunting suggestiveness of Emily Dickinson were largely ignored,”² he was, as Richardson points out, familiar with Dickinson and was to become well acquainted with Whitman.³ Stevens’s attitude towards Whitman was skeptical, like Eliot’s, but instructively different. In a late statement on Whitman, one of very few, Stevens argued that Whitman’s all-accepting poetic mind and utter lack of evasiveness appeared to have tied him all too closely to his own historical moment: “Whitman is disintegrating as the world, of which he made himself a part, disintegrates” (L 871).⁴ The unflattering conclusion, that the main value of Whitman’s poetry was as historical document, was bound up with the positive sense that Stevens was attempting to give to ideas of “escape,” “resistance” or “evasion.” As Bloom’s intricate argument on Stevens’ ‘influence-repressions’ suggests,⁵ however, Whitman and his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson were to leave traces in his poetry that may be most vital when not on the level of conscious allusion. Even if Bloom’s work does not often apply this intuition in terms of Stevens’ rhythmic and metric form,⁶ it is congenial with the argument I will make below. Like Bloom, I assume that Stevens’ “poetic stance,” which directly informs not only his diction and metaphors, but his prosody as well, is not just his own but to an important extent itself laid on him by tradition.

As opposed to the later moderns, whose poetics were shaped in periods of historical disenchantment and cultural pessimism, Whitman was at the outset intensely optimistic, anti-traditional and, in a strongly utopian sense, anti-historical. His pre-Civil War readjustment of poetic language did not only aim to connect (or, in Eliot’s words, re-connect) with a new language, but with a radically new world and new forms of interpersonal and ecological relations. The initial decree of “Song of Myself” that the “you,” the reader as well as a would-be poet, “shall no longer take things at second or third hand … / nor look through the eyes of the dead … / nor feed on the spectres in books”⁷ suggests an epistemological desire that poetry should no longer be a thing of second or even, as Plato claimed it was, third hand experience. It defines the newly discovered possibility of original, Adamic naming as essentially American. While the poetic (un)dead inhabiting books were European, the intended, ideal “you” for which the poet “will be waiting”—a person inhabiting a wished-for future—is an American on his way to become fully so. “The United States themselves,” Whitman writes in the preface to Leaves of Grass, “are essentially the greatest poem.”⁸ In “Song of Myself,” however, Whitman’s persona fears that he himself may—or has already—become such a bookish spectre: hence the paradoxical self-annulling imperative that “you shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me” but “look to all sides and filter them from your self,”⁹ admonishing the reader and future poet fully to assume self-reliance in perception and expression.

This urge for independence and freedom is envisioned by way of an image that will be a frequent, if negative, presence in Stevens’ poetry. To accomplish an original cognitive and expressive relationship to the world, the poet needs to leave the comfortable “perfumed” safety of “houses and rooms,”¹⁰ a dramatic, difficult but heroically unconditional act of opening up—“Unscrew the locks from the doors, / unscrew the very doors from their jambs!”¹¹—to an ambience called “the atmosphere,” an “odourless,” “undistilled,”¹² a-cultural space. This is not only an image of a new kind of ‘nomadic’ poetic freedom, but implies a theory of poetic language—in Cushman’s words, a “fiction of form”—in which the too comforting and too limiting houses and rooms represent the domesticated, habituated, but all too safe modes of poetic expression. Remarkably, in roughly the same era as Whitman, Emily Dickinson, the other towering poetic figure of late 19^th century America, wrote poetry in idiosyncratic, but recognizably traditional prosodic form, in which extreme domestic privacy, exclusivity and closure functioned as a ‘via negativa’ to epiphanic fulfillment. Dickinson’s poetry of rural Puritan America was in many senses a poetry of rooms, in which the “soul,” auto- and aristocratically “selects her own society / and then shuts the door.”¹³ Even if Stevens’ poetry displays an affinity to Dickinson’s in this respect¹⁴ it is decisively more urban, and very problematically so. It is here, I argue, that its relation to Whitman’s poetics becomes of great interest.

In “Song of Myself,” the exterior world is at once more dangerous, more real, more true and more intoxicating than the domestic sphere, and is frequently imagined as Nature in intimate communion with the respiratory and sexual functions of man. This happens less by virtue of metaphorical resemblance, in which nature is perceived to be analogical to or reflective of the human subject, than by a vision of the metonymical implication of things, which refer synecdochically, as parts, to an integral whole through contiguity and participation. Characteristically, Whitman’s long, often enumerative, lines appear designed to bring about a disorder in the synoptic, hierarchizing faculty of perception:

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs …¹⁵

More decisively, however, in an image that both radicalises and threatens to obliterate his poetry, the poetic doorways that have been opened lead out into chaotic city streets. Poetry’s ‘new world’ is urban:

The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders, …
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow balls,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs,
The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside born to the hospital …¹⁶

The metropolis was hugely important to Whitman’s poetry, as it was for contemporaries like Melville, Poe, Baudelaire and Pushkin.¹⁷ In Whitman’s case, the New York of mid-19^th century immigration and rapid expansion not only shaped his world view, but also the prosodic and graphic form of his verse, which was required to function both as an outlet for unrestrained subjective expression and enable a sequential vision of the city’s pristine and exhilarating scenery: Whitman’s extreme subjectivism is, as is frequently the case in modernist poetics, an objectivism.

The city, however, provided Whitman’s poetry with a larger and crucially different challenge. It could not be content with registering the city’s outward appearance, the sonic and visual realities of its myriad of activities—or, like Wordsworth, regard the dormant potentiality of a city empty of people—but also assumed the far greater burden of giving expression to the city’s turbulent, irrational and ethically challenging manifold of other selves and their irreconcilable realities:

What groans of over-fed or half-starv’d who fall sunstruck or in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the show or resonance of them—I come and I depart.¹⁸

Here, the indecisive syntax of the final sentence reveals a troublesome intuition, of immense value for a discussion of Stevens’ urban poetry—does the speaker really “mind them,” these others, or, finally, only their “show or resonance “? That is, are their voices just external material internalized by and enriching my poetry’s sonic or graphic texture, or is any portion of their deeper spiritual reality able transcend in or through the words of my poem? Despite the widespread acceptance of modern theories of arbitrary signification, or because of a deep-seated, often undeclared discontent with them, this sense of linguistic impasse is still a problem for later poetic theory. We can, it appears, live with the gap between language and humanity (and thus both between and in humans) only as long as we conceive of it as being itself indicated or expressed in art, and thus on some level transcended.

The attempt announced in “Song of Myself” to enable poetry to let new, mutually incompatible experiences occur in poetry, is also figured as a critique of structured harmony and euphony. The act of ‘unburying’ the ‘living’ speech muted by poetic and cultural decorum, and thus to become the channel for ‘long dumb,’ because ‘forbidden,’ voices, is imagined as a transformation of poetic language from pleasingly controlled metrical measure into an artlessly spontaneous, thorny and disharmonious—both “untamed” and “untranslatable”—“barbaric yawp” sounded “over the roofs of the world.”¹⁹ Certainly, even if contemporaries may have understood Whitman’s verse as barbaric, its peculiar combination of colloquial and quaintly old-fashioned language and its frequent reference to opera and oratorio,²⁰ may make it seem intensely musical to modern sensibilities. By virtue of the biblical and prophetic mode of anaphora, its principle of rhythmic coherence is located at the beginning of lines rather than at the end, enabling the reader/speaker to follow each phrase to its natural, speech-determined ending, enabling in prosody what Wordsworth called a “spon...

Table of contents

• Studies in Major Literary Authors
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Permissions
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Stevens’ Closures
• Chapter Two Motion and Voice
• Chapter Three Rejections
• Chapter Four Toward a New Aesthetics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Poems and Other Texts by Wallace Stevens