A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens

Eleanor Cook

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400827640
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Wallace Stevens is one of the major poets of the twentieth century, and also among the most challenging. His poems can be dazzling in their verbal brilliance. They are often shot through with lavish imagery and wit, informed by a lawyer's logic, and disarmingly unexpected: a singing jackrabbit, the seductive Nanzia Nunzio. They also spoke--and still speak--to contemporary concerns. Though his work is popular and his readership continues to grow, many readers encountering it are baffled by such rich and strange poetry.
Eleanor Cook, a leading critic of poetry and expert on Stevens, gives us here the essential reader's guide to this important American poet. Cook goes through each of Stevens's poems in his six major collections as well as his later lyrics, in chronological order. For each poem she provides an introductory head note and a series of annotations on difficult phrases and references, illuminating for us just why and how Stevens was a master at his art. Her annotations, which include both previously unpublished scholarship and interpretive remarks, will benefit beginners and specialists alike. Cook also provides a brief biography of Stevens, and offers a detailed appendix on how to read modern poetry. A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens is an indispensable resource and the perfect companion to The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, first published in 1954 in honor of Stevens's seventy-fifth birthday, as well as to the 1997 collection Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose.

Glosses

Harmonium

Harmonium was published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 1923, with a second, slightly enlarged edition in 1931. The 1923 edition is dedicated “To my wife,” and the 1931 edition “To my wife and Holly.” Later collections bear no dedications. The 1923 collection gathers together sixty-eight poems published from 1915 to 1922 (C49–C79 in Morse, Bryer, and Riddel). Three poems from 1923 were cut in the second edition, “The Silver Plough-Boy” (OP 17, LOA 42), “Exposition of the Contents of a Cab” (OP 41, LOA 52), and “Architecture” (OP 37–39, LOA 66–67). The Collected Poems (1954) reprints the 1931 edition, where the 1923 poems end with “Nomad Exquisite” (CP 95), followed by fourteen additional poems, then by “Tea” and “To the Roaring Wind,” which end both editions.

Stevens’s subsequent collections generally publish most poems in approximate chronological order, but this one does not. A 1915 poem, “Tea,” is the penultimate poem in both editions, while the latest poem chronologically, “Floral Decorations for Bananas,” appears about halfway through. The order of the opening poems is skilfully designed. The overall order conceals Stevens’s growing sense of frustration and malaise, most evident in the long poem, “The Comedian as the Letter C,” which was rewritten and much expanded in the summer of 1922 (L 229), but appears about a third of the way through Harmonium. (See also the note to “The Snow Man.”)

The harmonium is a musical instrument invented about 1840, “a keyboard instrument, the tones of which are produced by free metal ‘reeds’, tongues or vibrators’, actuated by a current of air from bellows, usually worked by treadles; a kind of reed-organ” (OED; for more information, see EB, “harmonium”). It is a good word for poetry, given the longstanding tropes of pastoral reeds, the reeds of Pan et cetera, for poetry, as well as the organ-tropes of Milton, Dickinson, and others. The word is derived from Greek and Latin harmonia, so that it also suggests questions of harmony, including the older idea of the harmony of the universe, as it moves in accordance with the unheard heavenly music of the spheres. Note especially the next sentence in the OED: “Strictly distinguished from the American organ by the fact that the air is driven outwards through the reed-pipes, whereas in the latter it is sucked inwards; but the name is sometimes extended to include the American organ.” This means that the word is also a happy trope for American poetry in 1923, because it distinguishes it in kind from British poetry. The troping of musical instruments runs throughout Stevens’s work, on which see Hollander in Buttel and Doggett. (On his wife’s piano and her accomplished playing, see the biography.) Stevens’s first title was “The Grand Poem: Preliminary Minutiae” (L 237–38, 1923), which Knopf wisely discouraged; he wanted to subtitle his Collected Poems “The Whole of Harmonium” (L 831), but it did not happen.

Earthy Anecdote

Modern School 5 (July 1918), also in Others 5 (July 1919) with “Life Is Motion,” another Oklahoma poem; CP 3, LOA 3.

To open, a poem with a distinctive Stevens flavor, and a distinctive American voice and place. Generally, this is a poem about two different kinds of energy encountering each other, often read as a fable about nature and art. Specifically, it is a fable or, more precisely, an anecdote that lends itself to different plots, as does “Plot against the Giant,” three poems later. Stevens said there was no symbolism in the poem, but added that there was “a good deal of theory about it” (L 204, 1918). On possible “theory,” see notes on the title and on “Oklahoma” below. Stevens’s sinuous free verse works with skilful repetition and enjambment; the bucks’ “swift, circular line[s]” also describe themselves as poetic lines.

TITLE: “Earthy”: of the earth, rather than gross; see Stevens’s important remarks on “the great poem of the earth” (NA 142, LOA 730, 1948). Harmonium opens with the word “earthy,” and both editions close with “To the Roaring Wind,” an invocation to the element of air. Traditional invocations come at the beginning, and call on the Muse for inspiration. Stevens has changed the order. Though the opening six poems in Harmonium do not invoke the Muse, they all focus on muse or genius loci figures that are both earthy and American.

“Anecdote”: beyond the common meaning, “a secret or private, hitherto-unpublished narrative”; Stevens worked with this minor genre in 1918–20. (See titles CP 51, 55, 57, 76; OP 31, 43; LOA 41, 44, 46, 60, 539, 550. See also “anecdotal” CP 13, LOA 11, and “anecdote,” CP 45, LOA 36, 37.) The Concordance shows no other uses of the word beyond these dates.

“bucks”: Stevens objected to an illustration of his poem that resembled “original chaos,” whereas he had in mind “something quite concrete: actual animals” (L 209, 1918).

“clattering”: not usually a sound made by bucks, who more often graze or gallop.

“Over Oklahoma”: an oddly skewed preposition that distances this poem from realistic narrative, moving its “actual animals” toward tale or fable, generically anecdote. The word “Oklahoma” functions in this generic context, while also recalling history. (On Oklahoma’s turbulent history, especially in Stevens’s lifetime, see, e.g., Dictionary of American History, ed. Cutler.) As an Indian name, said to mean “red men” or “land of red men,” Oklahoma also evokes the tragic Indian history of this area. As an old name and a new state (1907), Oklahoma embodies the paradox of old and new in one (cf. “Oklahoman” in OE XVI). Rhetorically, “Oklahoma” echoes the k———cla of “bucks clattering” in a sound scheme, one of many schemes on place-names in Stevens.

“firecat”: though an actual animal (L 209), mysterious and still resisting simple identification. (Minor Indian legends tell of a cougar or mountain lion who brings either helpful or destructive fire. Recent retellings use the word “firecat,” but the relevant Smithsonian historical volumes on the American Indian do not record the word.) Cf. the force of poetry or of the spirit as a lion or cat in MBG XIX, “Poetry Is a Destructive Force,” OE XI, etc.

Invective against Swans

Contact 2 (Jan. 1921), with “Infanta Marina”; CP 4, LOA 3–4.

Oddly, no swan appears in this invective against swans. Or not so oddly, for the poem’s silent premise is “All your swans are geese.” As elsewhere (CP 142–45, 342–43, 397; LOA 115–17, 299–300, 343), swans are associated with stale or dead conventions. No fertile earth exists in these Old-World-style parks. In contrast to “Earthy Anecdote,” this poem uses couplets in regular iambic pentameter, some rhyme, imitative older syntax (e.g., “which that time endures”), i.e., it is an old-style poem.

TITLE: again the title identifies the genre, again a minor genre.

“A bronze rain from the sun”: an aged, autumnal version of Zeus visiting Danaë in an impregnating shower of gold. The old gods now lack potency.

“Paphian”: the swan, like the dove, is the bird of Venus.

“chilly chariots”: Venus has a chariot drawn by swans; “chilly” wittily revises such standard tropes as “snowy chariot.”

In the Carolinas

Soil 1 (Jan. 1917), as part of “In the South,” Pt. II of “Primordia”; CP 4–5, LOA 4.

While the Carolinas may be a fertile part of the earth, the “Timeless Mother” here (Mother Nature?) is not always welcoming. As with the opening poem, this is a small poem that implies a good deal. A quatrain, then a tercet, then a couplet, all unrhymed, are cast as a short dialogue.

“aspic nipples / … vent”: not the usual food (breast-milk), but playing between a nourishing meat-jelly and a sense of death; cf. the deadly asp or aspic that Cleopatra laid on her breasts (Antony and Cleopatra V.II.233ff.). The snaky verb “vent” is in charge. In contrast to a nourishing alma mater, Stevens suggests an aspera, or bitter, mother. (Cf....