WALLACE STEVENS
Poetry is the supreme fiction':
 TS Eliot said that a modern poet must necessarily be difficult
because of the complexity of his times. That Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
is a difficult poet not even the hardiest of the myriad Stevens scholars
will deny. Edmund Wilson said, “Even when you do not know what he is
saying, you know that he is saying it well.” Stevens seems, in fact, to
have made it his aim to be difficult. “The poem must resist the
intelligence almost successfully. Illustration:” That is how his poem,
“Man Carrying Thing”, opens. It goes on:
“A brune figure in winter resists Identity. The thing he carries
resists...Accept them, then, As secondary (parts not quite perceived Of
the obvious whole.....Things floating like the first hundred flakes of
snow Out of the storm we must endure all night, Out of a storm of
secondary things) A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.” Stevens
seems to be saying here, as Eliot put it in one of his poems, that
“mankind cannot bear very much reality”, only a few representative
things, a synecdoche of reality as it were, which is bad-hence
real-enough. It is, in this instance, a thought movingly expressed, the
poem ending, “We must endure our thoughts all night, until The bright
outside stands motionless in cold.”
Interestingly, this poem is about poetry itself. Indeed, much of
Stevens’ poetry is, the outstanding example actually being entitled, “On
Modern Poetry.” It begins, “The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it
repeated what Was in the script.” The modern poem has to find what will
satisfy the modern context unlike in the past when poetic subject and
style were virtually predetermined. “It has to be living, to learn the
speech of the place.
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Wallace
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It has to face the men of the time and meet the women of the
time.....It has to construct a new stage...” Idiom and style have to
suit the post-1914 generation, so have subject matter and theme. Hence
the modernism of the first poem, with its harshly bright images, minimal
narrative, virtually prose idiom and obviously unconventional subject.
Stevens was one of the founding fathers of the Symbolist cum Imagist
tradition in English poetry, along with Eliot and Pound.
“And, like an insatiable actor...speak words that...in the delicatest
ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the
sound Of which, an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to
itself expressed..” Recalling Eliot’s theory of impersonality, the poet,
like the playwright, is in abeyance. It is the poem, like an actor, that
finds the right words to tell the invisible audience-the unknown reading
public-what it already knows but cannot express for itself.
This sounds like a sophisticated way of saying what Keats had said
very plainly in one of his letters: “I think poetry should surprise by a
fine excess, and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as the
wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost as a remembrance.
Its touches of beauty should never be....making the reader breathless
instead of content.”
Perhaps Stevens’ best-known poem, apart from “Sunday Morning” which
for all its protracted sonority is over-rated and derivative, is
“Anecdote of the Jar”, short enough to quote entirely:
“I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made
the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
“The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air.
“It took dominion every where. The jar was gray and bare. It did not
give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.”
The poem is Blake-like in the way its simplicity heightens its
symbolism. The jar’s domination of the wilderness has been thought to
illustrate the manner in which man’s civilisation has degraded the
natural world, but this may be a simplistic paraphrase. Bearing in mind
Stevens’ ideas about poetry above, the poem seems to be telling us that
our conception of the wide world of reality (the wilderness) is
determined by our narrow consciousness (the jar) and this, as far as
each of us is concerned, is the true reality, however “gray and bare.”
The title and subject of the poem seem to allude to Keats’ “Ode on a
Grecian Urn” and, whereas that poem ends “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
- that is all you know on earth, and all you need to know”, this seems
to be saying the same thing about consciousness and truth.
A less grandiose conclusion than Keats’, but perhaps more profound –
and fraught with more danger.
For the cultivation of one’s own consciousness as the ultimate
reality can, due to the degree of self-absorption this entails,
degenerate into a sophisticated form of hedonism. In his “Notes on
American Poetry”, MI Kuruvilla aptly describes this as “the cultivation
of emotion as an end in itself, a cult of personal sensitivity.” Without
the restraints dictated by traditional values, this tendency could well
lead to the dividing line between this so-called sensitive hedonism and
the brash hedonism practiced by society growing dangerously thin.
That Stevens was aware of this danger is evident from “The Emperor of
Ice Cream.” In this poem a woman lies dead in her parlour while in the
kitchen a cigar-smoking man is filling cups with “concupiscent curds” of
ice cream for the mourners, young men and women dressed appropriately
but with little other respect for the dead, “the wenches dawdling and
the boys bringing flowers in last month’s newspapers.”
The corpse is to be covered with a sheet once embrodered by herself.
“If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is and
dumb.” Both verses end with the refrain, “The only emperor is the
emperor of ice-cream.” The traditional emperor, whether death or God, is
of no account. Even the funereal occasion cannot prevent pleasure-loving
society from celebrating with ice-cream, the symbol of the vulgar
hedonism of modern-day society. The poem is both satirical and cynical,
as if resigned to the very hedonism it deplores.
Such cynicism seems to be the negative side of Stevens’ view that
poetry is ultimately a “supreme fiction”. This is what he tells “A
High-Toned Old Christian Woman”: “Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame,
Take the moral law and make a nave (church centre) of it And from the
nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms,
like windy citherns (lutes) hankering for hymns.”
Religion, according to Stevens, was the original fiction erected upon
the notion of the moral law as perceived by the conscience. “But take
the opposing law and make a peristyle (cloister), And from the peristyle
project a masque (pantomime) Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones.” Poetry can take the opposing hedonistic
viewpoint and make a religion of any “squiggling” notion of the moment
since, as we saw earlier, consciousness is truth and the poem is the
supreme expression of that truth.
The Victorian critic, Matthew Arnold, foresaw that “most of what now
passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”
The poetic achievement of Wallace Stevens suggests the fulfillment of
that prophecy, though hardly in the transcendent manner that Arnold
envisaged.
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