WHEN THE IMAGINATION BACKFIRES

‘The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real’ :

Wallace Stevens, as we saw last time, virtually glorified the imagination. Therefore much of his best known poetry was about the imagination. This is hardly surprising. Wordsworth extolled nature and most of his best poetry was about nature. But there is a difference. When Wordsworth writes about nature he recreates his experience in connection with it. So that when he says in ‘Tintern Abbey’ that he is “well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being”, we are content to take him at his word. For he has already, through evocative description in the same poem, enabled nature to become as much a presence for us as for himself.

When, however, Stevens proclaims in ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’ that “God and the imagination are one”, he strikes no such responsive chord in us. He has, of course, earlier explained the reason for this declaration, namely the power of the imagination as ‘A light, a power, the miraculous influence” to reveal to him “an order, a whole, A knowledge” which resolves all “indifferences, into one thing..a single thing.” Yet we find it difficult to acquiesce in this insight with the readiness we show towards Wordsworth. The reason is that, unlike Wordsworth, Stevens does not convincingly evoke for us the personal experience that gives rise to his perceptions.

Not that there are no sense impressions or images. “Light the first lamp of evening”, “a single shawl wrapped tightly round us”, ‘That highest candle lighting the dark” and “the evening air”. These four are strewn among the six verses of the poem. Yet we do not feel that they come, as Keats would have poetry come, “as naturally as the leaves to a tree”. They are not, in other words, organically linked to the meditations of the poem. They seem to be chosen judiciously as illustrations of conclusions already reached rather than as sensed impressions that naturally evoke such conclusions, as in Wordsworth's case. In other words the poem is a construction of the fancy rather than a creation of the imagination. It reminds us of Ben Jonson's studied use of imagery in the poem we discussed at the start of this series on the imagination.

What does all this mean? Quite simply, this: whereas Wordsworth extols nature with the aid of the imagination, Stevens glorifies the imagination with the aid of the external world. But that is not how poetry works. The imagination is a faculty of the poet's mind, he is inspired and guided by it. He may acknowledge its role in formal and informal prose, such as in lectures and correspondence – as Stevens has done almost ad infinitum. But he does not proceed to celebrate it in his poetry itself. Or if he does, only indirectly or unconsciously, as Marvell does in ‘The Garden’ and Blake does in his famous tetrastich: “To see a world in a grain of sand” etc In other words the role of the imagination is merely implied in truly imaginative poetry, it does not become the subject matter of the poetry itself. That would be to make of the means of poetry an end. But that is precisely what Stevens does.

Emotional need

It could be argued that Emily Bronte does the same thing. After all, one of her poems is entitled ‘To Imagination’ and there are a couple more famous poems that are ostensibly about the imagination. But the point is that the subject matter, if we read between the lines, is not the imagination but Emily Bronte herself. It is her emotional need that is the mainspring of these poems. That is why we are so moved by them, why our heartstrings are touched by her and for her. In her last and greatest poem, ‘No Coward Soul is Mine’, she starts with herself: “No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the worlds storm-troubled sphere; I see Heavens glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.” It is her emotionally convincing expression of her own resolve that enables us to identify the imagination when she says, “Thy spirit animates eternal years, Pervades and broods above, Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears..” Through the recreation of personal experience she evokes for us this transformational or, to resort to the Coleridgean term, “esemplastic” role of the imagination.

It is this personal element that is missing in Stevens’ poems about the imagination-or at least those in which he presents himself as its devotee. He seems to embark directly on the speculations that lead to his conclusions. En route he develops the sense impressions that seem to be the basis of his speculations. But these are merely illustrations or philosophical analogies. Accordingly we are not affected emotionally, only intellectually; which is why we conclude that in such poems it is the fancy rather than the imagination that is at work. But what, it could be protested, about ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, probably Stevens’ best known poem? Surely this too is about the imagination and is an imaginatively successful poem? It certainly is, and the reason is that Stevens has found the objective correlative to his ideas about the imagination. The jar dominates not only the wilderness but the poem itself, and it is in contemplating its effect upon the landscape that we realise, without being told, that this is what the imagination does. It imposes upon the external world a sense of reality that is more real to the individual, the poet who positions the jar, than that world itself. The poem is symbolically meaningful, like the best poems of Blake, without the need for the sort of explicit commentary we find in ‘Final Soliloquy'.

Thus, when Stevens deals directly with experience and allows the imagery a symbolism of its own, the implied message that the imagination is central to man's perception of reality is acceptable. We are able to experience this ourselves. Another such poem, much longer than the Jar, is ‘The Idea of Order at Key West'. Here the personal involvement of the poet as well as the central symbol of the singing woman is beautifully developed to enable us to feel that “blessed rage for order” which the imagination helps fulfil. “She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang, the sea Whatever self it had became the self That was her song, for she was the maker.”

On the other hand, when Stevens sets out to philosophize about the imagination, either directly as in ‘Final Soliloquy’, or by personifying it as in ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans”, the poetry paradoxically ceases to be imaginative and becomes purely fanciful. In the latter poem the imagination is held to be the final reality that, like a divinity, gives its devotees flashes of insight into itself. The poetry here is unconvincingly solemn, as we saw last week. We are reminded of Keats’ distrust of poetry that “has a palpable intention upon us”; also of the complete comment partially quoted earlier: “That if Poetry comes not naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.”

Famous examples

We may cite too Eliot's line: “Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something upon which to rejoice.” Such poetry is philosophically constructed rather than imaginatively created. But the best comment on it is Stevens’ own, even if he would not have intended it to be applied to the two famous examples we have considered:“The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the minimum effect that it will ever have.” The conclusion is that the imagination, when it is glorified as a virtual deity, makes for flaccid poetry.

It is when it is invoked unobtrusively as a purely creative faculty of the mind that it enables the production of truly imaginative poetry. Stevens, though he may be the ultimate poet of the imagination, does not by any means furnish the finest example of the poetic imagination at work.