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Stevens, Wallacelocked

Stevens, Wallacelocked

  • James Longenbach

Subjects

  • North American Literatures

There are two ways to describe the career of Wallace Stevens. One would be this: after having been born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879, Stevens attended Harvard University and New York Law School; he began working in 1908 in the insurance industry, and in 1934 he was named vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he continued to work virtually until the day of his death in 1955. The other way of describing his career would be this: after publishing Harmonium in 1923, Stevens wrote no poems for almost a decade; but after his second book, Ideas of Order, appeared in 1935, he wrote consistently and in comparative obscurity for the rest of his life. His Collected Poems (1954) received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize after his death in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1955.

Other great modern American poets had real jobs: T. S. Eliot worked as a banker and a publisher; Marianne Moore was an editor; William Carlos Williams was a doctor. What distinguishes Stevens is that he never gave the impression of feeling any tension between the different aspects of his life. Instead, he thrived on their differences. He once quipped that “money is a kind of poetry,” but he more often emphasized that his daily life was in no really meaningful way poetic. In an essay called Surety and Fidelity Claims, he emphasized that his insurance work was above all else tedious: “You sign a lot of drafts. You see surprisingly few people. You do the greater part of your work either in your own office or in other lawyers' offices. You don't even see the country; you see law offices and hotel rooms.” Stevens embraced tedium—the world of what he called, in his poetry, the ordinary or the humdrum; in order to write poems at all, he needed to feel that his most fanciful poetic flights were balanced by a clear, no-nonsense engagement with the ordinary world. Depending on how we look at him, Stevens can seem like the most worldly or the most otherworldly of the modern poets.

You will never find Stevens sounding like Ezra Pound, who did Shelley one better by saying that poets should be the “acknowledged” legislators of their time. And you will not find in Stevens's poetry any of the aura of world-historical importance that clings to Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). For that reason, Stevens seemed during his lifetime to be out of step with most of the other moderns: his poems seemed too fanciful, too pretty, too unconcerned with the great questions concerning the fate of modern culture. But today, it has become clearer that Stevens was far from unconcerned with such questions; he simply did not address them in a style that carried with it the impression of cultural relevance.

Plain and Fancy

As a poet, Stevens's entire effort was, as he put it in Effects of Analogy, to press toward “the ultimate good sense which we term civilization.” But Stevens rightly understood that it is not a simple task to arrive at that good sense; our ordinary world is not easy to apprehend, and we cannot take our common-sense apprehensions for granted. In his late poem The Plain Sense of Things, he emphasizes that plainness is for him an achievement, the result of a never-ending struggle: “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined,” he says, going on to offer a little parable:

The great pond,The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all thisHad to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,Required, as a necessity requires.

These final lines of the poem equate the recovery of the “plain sense of things” with the assumption of a rat's low perspective on the world. The rat sees muddy water for what it is; viewed from a higher point of view, the surface of the water would be clouded by reflections. Yet Stevens's construction of this earthbound point of view is itself a highly imaginative act: the poem both describes and enacts the paradoxical notion that the absence of the imagination must be imagined.

It is impossible to be plain, Stevens suggests over and over again, without being fancy, and even if his poems tilt at times to either of these extremes, the poems always contain the specter of the opposite quality. In an early poem called The Snow Man, Stevens again emphasizes the difficulty of achieving a clear vision of the ordinary world. He says that “one must have a mind of winter” if one is to look at a bleak winter landscape and not attribute any human misery to the bleak natural world.

One must have a mind of winter … not to thinkOf any misery in the sound of the wind,In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the landFull of the same windThat is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,And, nothing himself, beholdsNothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Stevens is surely relying on a conventional literary topos here; Robert Frost reveals a similar interest in the wintery blankness of the natural world in poems like Desert Places. But Stevens also suggests here in The Snow Man, as he does in The Plain Sense of Things, that the act of emptying the mind is a highly imaginative act: to “behold” nothing, rather than merely to “regard it,” as the poems says, is to acquire some majesty. To distinguish a potent absence (“nothing that is not there”) from a potent existential presence (“the nothing that is” there) is to have achieved a kind of grandeur that Wordsworth would recognize.

The Snow Man is a well-known example of Stevens's quiet, meditative mode. At other times he can be extremely exuberant—playful to the point almost of seeming ridiculous (a quality whose positive function he wants us to consider). In Tea at the Palaz of Hoon, a companion poem to The Snow Man, Stevens writes with wild abandon not about the act of emptying the mind but about asserting that the mind is the source of everything—all perception, all value. The sound of this poetry is not plain.

Not less because in purple I descendedThe western day through what you calledThe loneliest air, not less was I myself.What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.I was myself the compass of that sea:I was the world in which I walked, and what I sawOr heard or felt came not but from myself;And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

While The Snow Man is written in an oblique third person (“One must have a mind of winter”), Tea at the Palaz of Hoon is written in a regally assertive first-person voice. And in contrast to The Snow Man, this poem says that in order fully to experience the world we must not let the world speak to us but must recognize that we speak for the world: our grand visions come exclusively from within, not from without.

Reading Stevens, it is crucial that we not limit him to either of these points of view. Both The Snow Man and Tea at the Palaz of Hoon were collected in Stevens's first volume of poems, Harmonium (1923), and not only throughout that book but throughout his career, Stevens oscillates between these perspectives, weaving what he once called “an endlessly elaborating poem” between the poles epitomized by these two poems. Sometimes, as in Tea at the Palaz of Hoon, he emphasizes the mind's ability to fabricate elaborate metaphors or structures of belief, reminding us that all values are not naturally given in the world but are imposed on the world by human consciousness. At other times, as in The Snow Man, he cautions us to remember that those structures of belief inevitably collapse in the face of events of which human consciousness can make no sense.

This endless elaboration is not systematic; Stevens offers no consistent program other than the need continually to challenge one perspective with another. Eventually, however, he offered three tentative prescriptions for a viable belief system in his great long poem, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942): “It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Give Pleasure,” and—most important—“It Must Change.” However delightful the imagined palace of Hoon might be, we must not be allowed to grow accustomed to it. Sooner or later our most treasured metaphors, our most treasured beliefs, must be torn away, and we must begin again by distinguishing nothing from the nothing.

In many ways, the title of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction may stand for all of Stevens's poetry: throughout his career, Stevens was attempting to satisfy what the American pragmatist philosopher William James called the “will to believe.” The supreme fiction was, for Stevens, something to which we assent while knowing it to be untrue. Like James and the other pragmatists, Stevens was interested in the usefulness of the stories we tell rather than in their singular truth. “The truth,” said William James in a famous passage in Pragmatism (1907), “is what works,” and like James, Stevens worked hard to delete the definite article so often placed in front of the word truth: his interest is not in “the” truth, but in our never-ending efforts to reformulate what might usefully be considered to be truth.

The Early Work

“Sunday Morning,” one of the richest poems in Harmonium, is an early embodiment of Stevens's effort to formulate a supreme fiction—an idea or principle that might make provisional sense out of the chaos of experience. The poem consists of eight stanzas of fifteen blank verse lines and it moves, like most of Stevens's poems of middle or long length, by association and juxtaposition rather than by the unfolding of a linear argument or narrative (though the poem does contain bits of argument and of narrative). “In a skeptical age,” Stevens once said, “in the absence of a belief in god, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them for the support they give.” The eight sections of Sunday Morning offer differing perspectives on this proposition. The poem asks: How do we face our mortality without an assurance of some transcendental power? Where do we locate a sense of permanent value in a world that is exclusively finite and forever changing?

That is a topic common enough in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry; think of Matthew Arnold or Emily Dickinson. What distinguishes Stevens is that he does not spend much time wondering if there might be a world beyond us; he accepts that lack and transforms it into plenitude—a world of possibility. In the first stanza of the poem, there is no question of attending church on Sunday morning; we simply take pleasure in the sensual world around us.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and lateCoffee and oranges in a sunny chair,And the green freedom of a cockatooUpon a rug mingle to dissipateThe holy hush of ancient sacrifice.She dreams a little, and she feels the darkEncroachment of that old catastrophe,As a calm darkens among water-lights.The pungent oranges and bright, green wingsSeem things in some procession of the dead,Winding across wide water, without sound.The day is like wide water, without sound,Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feetOver the seas, to silent Palestine,Dominion of the blood and sepulcher.

But notice what happens here as soon as the everyday quotidian world is embraced. Though the woman is luxuriating in the coffee and oranges, and though the uncaged cockatoo seems to be an image of her freedom, the woman is still troubled by the encroachment of that old catastrophe: change, mortality, death. Those lovely earthly things—the oranges and green wings—begin to seem (because they themselves are mortal) like things in a procession of the dead. We recognize that these pleasures will not last forever; we wonder how we will continue to be happy without them. So, as the final lines of the stanza suggest, we are tempted for a moment to think back to silent Palestine, to the religious consolation that the poem rejected even before it began.

But we are not tempted for long. “Why should she give her bounty to the dead?” asks the second stanza. Why cannot the woman simply continue to find solace in pungent fruit and green wings? And what good is an idea of a divinity if it is merely elusive and ethereal, coming to her only in shadows and dreams? To be satisfied, we need the concrete, sensuous realities of the earth—not the vague mythologies of a world beyond the senses. The last lines of the second stanza reaffirm that earthly things, “the bough of summer and the winter branch,” will be the measures of the woman's soul. And yet the very way in which those earthly things are described once again raises the specter of their inadequacy: the full, weighted bough of summer becomes the barren branch in winter. The world fades; where then is our pleasure?

Having read only these two stanzas, we can see not only what the major preoccupations of Sunday Morning are but also how the poem works, how it moves. Sunday Morning offers not conclusions but a delicate interchange between doubt and affirmation: it is a potentially endless dialogue in which provisional assertions raise more questions in turn. The poem folds back on itself, revising, reconsidering. It forces readers to live in contingency, in change, and this formal principle will, at the end of the poem, be affirmed on the thematic level: change itself will become our only possible value.

The beginning of the fourth stanza restates the poem's dilemma.

She says, “I am content when wakened birds,Before they fly, test the realityOf misty fields, by their sweet questionings;But when the birds are gone, and their warm fieldsReturn no more, where, then, is paradise?”

The question is, once again, what do we do after the things we love die? The rest of the stanza provides one more provisional answer.

There is not any haunt of prophecy,Nor any old chimera of the grave,Neither the golden underground, nor isleMelodious, where spirits gat them home,Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palmRemote on heaven's hill, that has enduredAs April's green endures; or will endureLike her remembrance of awakened birds,Or her desire for June and evening, tippedBy the consummation of the swallow's wings.

These lines suggest that we must simply accept the idea that our earthly existence is all we have. Since there is no prophecy, no promise of eternal life, we must find permanence in nature: though summer turns to winter, April has a kind of permanence since it returns with the cycle of the seasons. The implication is that the earthly things we love—oranges, green wings—will always be returned to us.

But as the poem moves on, this answer is not good enough; it, too, must change. In the next stanza the woman says, “but in contentment I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.” The answer to this statement is pithy and severe: “Death is the mother of beauty,” says Stevens, echoing Keats, who said in the Ode on Melancholy, “she dwells with beauty—beauty that must die.” Less pithily aphoristic, more beautifully inconclusive, is Stevens's explication of this traditional sentiment.

She makes the willow shiver in the sunFor maidens who were wont to sit and gazeUpon the grass, relinquished to their feet.She causes boys to pile new plums and pearsOn disregarded plate.

All these little things give pleasure, says Stevens, because we are aware of death. The oranges and bright green wings are important precisely because we know they are not permanent; death is the mother of beauty and of love. And the following stanza suggests that even if we could experience heaven, a perfect world in which nothing ever changed or died, then we could not possibly find anything beautiful. Only a sense of impermanence and change grants the human condition meaning.

Depending on our sensibility, we might find that wisdom either threatening or consoling. But as we might expect by now, Stevens feels both threatened and consoled. Given a choice, he will never choose between alternatives; he will always find a way of sustaining both alternatives at the same time. So in the penultimate stanza of Sunday Morning, Stevens gives us a little desperation: he describes a kind of primitive ritual—a group of men attempting through ritual to lend, as Hart Crane said in The Bridge (1930), a myth to God.

Supple and turbulent, a ring of menShall chant in orgy on a summer mornTheir boisterous devotion to the sun,Not as a god, but as a god might be,Naked among them, like a savage source.Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,Out of their blood, returning to the sky.

We are probably meant to find these lines a little exaggerated. That is, it is crucial that this desperation is registered in the poem, because otherwise the poem would run the risk of seeming smug—as if existential despair were merely for other, less enlightened people. Still, the poem does not end here. In the final stanza, Stevens calms down, pulling back from the frenzy of ritual. He brazenly redefines the terms of Jesus's immortality, suggesting that his life had value not because he is said to have risen from the dead, but rather because, like all human beings, he died. Here is the final stanza of the poem:

She hears, upon that water without sound,A voice that cries, “The tomb in PalestineIs not the porch of spirits lingering.It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”We live in an old chaos of the sun,Or old dependency of day and night,Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,Of that wide water, inescapable.Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quailWhistle about us their spontaneous cries;Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;And, in the isolation of the sky,At evening, casual flocks of pigeons makeAmbiguous undulations as they sink,Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Like the opening lines of Sunday Morning, these lines give us images of decline and decay; the difference is that now we have a reason not to be afraid. At the beginning, beautiful things became objects in a procession toward death; at the end, we take consolation in that procession—in change, in mortality—recognizing that we value those things because we will lose them.

Probably the most important thing about Sunday Morning is that it ends with images of change: the ripening fruit, the pigeons that sound so much like the swallows in Keats's ode To Autumn. Stevens wants us to recognize the tenuousness or provisionality of his own conclusions. The American literary critic Kenneth Burke once said that true poems continually turn against “their own best discoveries,” and Stevens's poems do this aggressively. No matter what he says, you can be sure of two things: first, that he will say it again, and second, that he will say the opposite somewhere else. The movement of both individual poems and the whole of his oeuvre is motivated by this logic: having offered a temptingly complete fiction, Stevens must again acquire (as he puts it in The Snow Man) a “mind of winter,” scraping away the fiction he has erected in order to face the cold, stark reality of a changing world. As a result, his poems seem constantly to rewrite themselves as they move forward; in addition, whole poems seem like rewritings of earlier poems. This is why the entire body of Stevens's poetry can sometimes seem of one piece: a giant, fluctuating poem about the attempt to formulate a supreme fiction about the human desire to attribute plausible meanings to the world.

The Middle Period

After publishing Harmonium in 1923, Stevens wrote no poetry for almost a decade; the silence did not seem to bother him because other aspects of his ordinary life were just as fulfilling as the act of writing poems. When he began to write poems again in the early 1930s, however, he did seem somewhat chastened: while the poems continue to address elaborate philosophical themes, they also record Stevens's awareness of social conditions a little more plainly. But the effect of this new sobriety is to make Stevens's fanciful side seem all the more crucial; Stevens could not honor the ordinary world by other than extravagant means.

In retrospect, consequently, even the well-known Sunday Morning does not give us the whole of Stevens. Its final lines are beautiful, echoing with the whole romantic tradition of poetry; reading them, we feel the shadows not only of Keats but of Milton, Whitman, and Tennyson. But seemingly we also feel that those lines are slightly in danger of seeming earnest; they lack the playfulness, the verbal exuberance that at other moments is an integral part of Stevens's worldview. The Man on the Dump, first published in 1939 and then collected in Parts of a World (1942), offers a provocative adjustment: the poem registers the social conditions of the Great Depression but does not confuse seriousness with sanctimoniousness.

Throughout The Man on the Dump, Stevens plays with the “waste land” imagery that for a long time seemed like such an integral part of Eliotic modernism: we live on the dump. But for Stevens, that is not such a bad place to live. He is not saying that our world has become a wasteland; he is saying that the dump is a good metaphor for what the world has always been. Here are the poem's opening lines:

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon BlanchePlaces there, a bouquet. Ho-ho … The dump is fullOf images. Days pass like papers from a press.The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,And so the moon, both come, and the janitor's poemsOf every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,The cat in the paper bag, the corset, the boxFrom Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.
The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.The freshness of morning, the blowing of days, one saysThat it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffsMore than, less than or it puffs like this or that.The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the greenSmacks like fresh water in a can, like the seaOn a cocoanut—how many men have copied dewFor buttons, how many women have covered themselvesWith dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, headsOf the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.One grows to hate these things except on the dump.

Stevens offers here a homeless man on a garbage dump. But we begin to sense right away that he means this figure to stand for all of us: the man on the dump has a name, Cornelius Nepos, who was not just anybody. Nepos was a Roman historian who wrote a vast history of the world in three volumes; the Roman poet Catullus dedicated his poems to Nepos. So by borrowing that name, Stevens suggests that this man on the dump is a kind of historian—someone who makes a record of the world for future generations, someone to whom poets look for records. He also suggests that the making of such records is precarious business; the work of Cornelius Nepos has by and large been lost.

It has been noted that the dump is not a negative image for Stevens, but notice that in the poem's opening lines, the dump does not seem to be particularly entrancing. It seems a bit dull, and yet it contains what Stevens calls “the janitor's poems of every day.” Stevens suggests at least two things with that line: that all human endeavors are in some sense poetry and that the idea of poetry, in all its nobility, is contained within even the most mundane human effort. Even a list of things on the dump (the wrapper on the can of pears, the cat in the paper bag, the box from Esthonia) can be a kind of poetry. And Stevens seems to prefer this kind of poetry of everyday things to a gaudier kind of utterance; his repetition of the words “dew” and “dewy” make gaudy things seem silly:

dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, headsOf the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.One grows to hate these things except on the dump.

We need the dump, says Stevens. We need to be grounded in a world of necessity in order to appreciate fanciful things, just as in Sunday Morning we need to face our mortality in order to appreciate beauty—just as Stevens himself needed to go to work at the Hartford Insurance Company every day until he died.

But subsequent lines explain that this world of necessity, this world of everyday things on the dump, can seem ordinary in the worst sense of the word (dull, complacent) if we do not work to make something out of that world.

Now, in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),Between that disgust and this, between the thingsThat are on the dump (azaleas and so on)And those that will be (azaleas and so on),One feels the purifying change. One rejectsThe trash.That's the moment when the moon creeps upTo the bubbling of bassoons. That's the timeOne looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon(All its images are in the dump) and you seeas a man (not like an image of a man),You see the moon rise in the empty sky.

In contrast to Sunday Morning, in which seasonal change offers real consolation, the return of spring seems here like nothing but dull repetition—azaleas and so on. Stevens wants the world to change, but he is insisting that to sit back and let the world change is not enough. Meaningful change must be worked for; it must be imagined, added to the dump. And we begin to do that, says Stevens, by rejecting the trash. The implication here is that not everything on the dump is trash; the good stuff must be sifted out and preserved. And by making this selection, by choosing to shape the dump, we cause more interesting changes to take place: the moon rises, and what once seemed to be a pile of tires now seems like an elephant. But notice that what has changed here is not so much the dump as such; what has changed is our way of perceiving it. We are able to see possibilities where before there was only trash.

The emphasis here is that Stevens means the man on the dump to be a representative for all humankind, and that becomes clearer in the poem's final lines. In the last stanza, Stevens no longer describes the individual actions of the tramp but describes what “one” does, what everyone does, on the dump. Here are the key lines, lines that resonate throughout all of Stevens's poetry: “One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. / One beats and beats for that which one believes.”

Beginning with Sunday Morning, as already noted, many of Stevens's poems are about the act of formulating something in which we might provisionally believe. The Man on the Dump is one of Stevens's most wonderfully profound poems about this problem because it is just a little bit ridiculous—it does not quite take itself seriously. In Sunday Morning we dance like savages in the sun for what we believe; Stevens moves away from that hysterical image in the poem's final lines. By contrast, in The Man on the Dump we beat a tin can for what we believe. This action makes The Man on the Dump feel like the grown-up version of Sunday Morning. The poem is not only less earnest; it even tries to make the important work it describes seem a bit silly. It refuses to confuse the serious with the sanctimonious. It reminds us that at our moments of greatest power, we must remember most clearly our limitations. And in its final lines, The Man on the Dump offers a primal but slightly absurd image for poetic expression, for the making of supreme fictions. Here is the poem's provocative last stanza, beginning with the lines about beating an old tin can:

One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.One beats and beats for that which one believes.That's what one wants to get near. Could it after allBe merely oneself, as superior as the earTo a crow's voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the earSolace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,Is it a philosopher's honeymoon, one findsOn the dump? Is it to sit among the mattresses of the dead,Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and sayInvisible priest; is it to eject, to pullThe day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

We beat our old tin can, remaking and transforming the dump. And as we do so, we ask a sequence of questions. Does the nightingale, that traditional image for poetic inspiration, torture our ears? The implied answer is no, not really; the dump is not such a dramatic place. Then, the poem asks, is the dump a place of peace—a place for the philosopher's honeymoon, where all answers are given? The answer once again is no, not really; the dump is far from perfect. Nor is the dump the place of “aptest eve” or a place where grackles, those ugly little birds, become the voices of an “invisible priest.” The poem's final line asks the question the poem has been approaching all along: “Where was it one first heard of the truth?” Where, in other words, do we discover value and permanence in this dump of a world? And the answer is one sentence, two words, two syllables that are the same syllable: “The the.”

What are we to make of that? There are a number of ways to read that wonderful final sentence, but Stevens is probably suggesting that we only began to think of the truth as single and unchanging when we put the word “the,” the definite article, in front of the word “Truth.” Like the pragmatist philosopher William James, Stevens is saying that we diminish our world if we believe in a single-minded, exclusive concept of truth. If we do entertain such a notion, then our dump will, in fact, look like a wasteland—a falling away from some greater, more attractive state of existence. But if we conceive of truth as a plurality, a state of becoming rather than a state of perfection, then we will begin to feel at home in our world. Instead of lamenting its decline, we will pick up the never-ending task of change.

Stevens always published The Man on the Dump beside a poem called On the Road Home, which begins with lines that help us to think about the phrase “the the.”

It was when I said,“There is no such thing as the truth,”that the grapes seemed fatter.The fox ran out of his hole.

Stevens emphasizes here that when we escape from “the” truth, when there is no longer any such thing as “the” truth, then we can accept the wonder of the world's trash; our pleasures seem fatter, more satisfying, and even wild animals (exemplars of our own wish for freedom) seem more exquisitely free. Our freedom hinges on our ability to redescribe the world—to throw over old descriptions, old doctrines, formulating new ones that will in time be rejected as well.

Toward the Final Achievement

The Man on the Dump and On the Road Home were published side by side in Parts of a World in 1942, the same year that Notes toward a Supreme Fiction was first published as a chapbook. Five years later Notes toward a Supreme Fiction would appear as the final poem in Transport to Summer (1947), where it seems deceptively like a finale rather than the foundation on which Stevens's later poems rest. Building on the shorter poems of Parts of a World (and looking back to Sunday Morning), Notes toward a Supreme Fiction represents Stevens's best effort to describe what is valuable about ordinary experience; simultaneously—but not paradoxically—it is Stevens's most fancifully elaborate poem. It is the poem for which his earlier work seems in retrospect to prepare and the poem on which the many extraordinary poems of his prolific final years depend.

As has been mentioned, Notes is divided into three parts (“It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” and “It Must Give Pleasure”), each part consisting of ten cantos of twenty-one lines each. The supreme fiction must be abstract in the sense that it must be abstracted from experience—a constructed rather than a given thing. It must change because the world for which it accounts changes; a fiction that is useful at one historical moment may not be useful at another. Finally, the supreme fiction must give pleasure in the most profound sense of the word: it must make the human condition tolerable. The woman in Sunday Morning yearns for “imperishable bliss,” but in Notes, Stevens speaks less desperately of “accessible bliss” and “expressible bliss”: he wants to describe the pleasure that might be found even in the repetitive grind of our ordinary waking hours.

The first canto of “It Must Be Abstract” begins by instructing the “ephebe” or student to “become an ignorant man again,” discarding all outmoded fictions. He must attempt to see the sun not as Phoebus Apollo but purely and simply as itself. “The Sun / Must bear no name,” says Stevens, but as in The Snow Man and The Plain Sense of Things, he also recognizes that it is difficult to achieve this purity of vision. In the second canto Stevens consequently acknowledges that “not to have is the beginning of desire”: old fictions must be discarded only so that we may begin the task of constructing new ones. “From this the poem springs,” says Stevens in crucial lines from canto 4: “that we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves.” We need fictions in order to make our lives bearable, and much of the remainder of Notes proposes and discards various fictions, moving back and forth between what Stevens calls an “ever-early candor” (the willed state of ignorance) and a “late plural” (the fullness of the achieved fiction). One could also think of this vacillation occurring between the poles represented by The Snow Man and Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.

In the eighth canto of “It Must Be Abstract,” Stevens begins to propose a particular fiction. Like the poems of Parts of a World, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction was written during World War II, and for a time Stevens entertained the idea of heroism as the fiction necessary to a war-ravaged culture. But in Notes, Stevens insists that the heroic (or what he now calls the idea of “major man”) cannot be divorced from ordinary experience. Major man is given an ordinary name (“MacCullough”), but Stevens describes him only generally and says that we must “give him / No names”—as if the act of identifying major man too clearly would compromise his usefulness as our supreme fiction. Yet the poem dramatizes our impatience (“Who is it?”), and Stevens finally offers us a glimpse of this great “rabbi” or “chieftain” in the final lines of canto 10. Expecting a figure of magnitude, we meet instead the man on the dump—a tramp “in that old coat, those sagging pantaloons,” a single figure who unites “these separate figures one by one.” Stevens makes the appearance of MacCullough seem like the Resurrection (“Cloudless the morning. It is he”), but this embodiment of the heroic ideal is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary. Similarly, the poem itself must use extraordinary means, great flights of metaphor, in order to make us feel the wonder of the everyday world.

Having offered this fiction of the hero, however, Stevens immediately drops the idea, never to return to it: no fiction can be counted on to last forever and we must force ourselves to turn against our discoveries, testing them against a changing world. In canto 3 of “It Must Change,” Stevens suggests that our hero could too easily become rigid and absurd, like the majestic statue of General Du Puy: “There never had been, never could be, such / A man.” The general was “rubbish in the end,” suggests Stevens, “because nothing had changed.”

Throughout Stevens's poetry, statues often serve as emblems of fictions that need to be changed. But in Notes, as in The Man on the Dump, even the changing world surrounding the statue does not change enough. The first canto of “It Must Change” rejects seasonal change as merely predictable: “It is a repetition … not broken into subtleties.” Although the birdsong in canto 6 recalls Shelley's Ode to the West Wind (“Bethou me, said the sparrow”), the birdsong also yields the “granite monotony” of mere repetition. Once again, Stevens insists that meaningful change is something we do not merely observe but must help to enact; our fictions must be as rigorously dismantled as they are constructed.

The low points of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction are these moments in which our ordinary world seems incapable of sustaining us—of offering more than the repetition of the same old thing. “To sing Jubilas at exact, accustomed times,” says Stevens in the first canto of “It Must Give Pleasure,” is merely “a facile exercise.” As a possible antidote to this vision of conventional piety, Stevens offers the Canon Aspirin, the supreme individualist, the man of extravagant imaginative power. In canto 5 the Canon consumes an elaborate meal of “lobster Bombay with mango / Chutney” but also takes note of the simple life of his sister and her daughters. Unlike the Canon, the sister lives in a world of other people; she holds her daughters “closlier to her by rejecting dreams.” However attractive the Canon's extravagance may initially seem, he is finally an ineffectual dreamer—a fiction maker who is content to live within his imagination, refusing to test his dreams against the ordinary world. “He imposes orders” on the world rather than discovering them, says Stevens in canto 7; he “establishes statutes” instead of keeping his fictions malleable.

But having rejected ordinary repetition and extraordinary imaginative power, Stevens reaches the crisis point of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction in canto 8: he asks “What am I to believe?”—the same bald question that lies at the heart of Sunday Morning and The Man on the Dump. His answer (“I have not but I am and as I am, I am”) has several important connotations: he stands alone with poetry (the repeated “I am” embodying the rhythm of the iambs in the iambic pentameter line), with imagination (which Coleridge defined in the Biographia Literaria [1817] as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”) and also with the ordinary self (“as I am”) in the ordinary world. In canto 9 of “It Must Give Pleasure,” the climax of the entire poem, Stevens is now able to embrace mere repetition as the highest good. Once scorned as monotonous, birdsong now seems redeeming:

These things at least compriseAn occupation, an exercise, a work,A thing final in itself and, therefore, good.

Everyday experience that once seemed merely “common” is now treasured precisely because it is “common”—both ordinary and communal, a meal not eaten in solitude (like the Canon Aspirin's meal) but shared with other people.

One of the vast repetitions final inThemselves and, therefore, good, the going round
And round and round, the merely going round,Until merely going round is a final good,The way wine comes at a table in a wood,And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf
Above the table spins its constant spin,So that we look at it with pleasure, lookAt it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps,The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,But he that of repetition is most master.

As these lines suggest, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction does not offer a vision of another world as our consolation. Instead, it goes to extraordinary lengths to reveal that the most ordinary experience is our highest value; the heroic state of mind is exceptional only inasmuch as it allows us to take pleasure in everyday experience. In these lines from canto 9, Stevens the poet and Stevens the insurance lawyer (who emphasized the dull routine of his work in Surety and Fidelity Claims) have made each other possible.

In the final canto of “It Must Give Pleasure,” the newfound pleasure of repetition is linked to the spinning of the planet—the “fluent mundo.” But if these concluding lines make Stevens's supreme fiction sound dangerously whole and complete, the poem's coda jolts us back into the historical moment that provoked Stevens to write the poem in the first place: “Soldier, there is a war.” We need to feel this line as an intrusion into the dangerously beautiful world that Notes toward a Supreme Fiction works to discover. “It is a war that never ends,” Stevens continues, “Yet it depends on yours.” Stevens wants to assert the importance of the poet's struggle with language in a time of war, yet he is careful not to equate the poet's struggle with the soldier's: they are

parallels that meet if only inThe meeting of their shadows or that meetIn a book in a barrack.

Speaking here is the same Stevens who in 1939 responded to a Partisan Review questionnaire about the role of the writer in a time of social crisis by saying that a “war is a military state of affairs, not a literary one.” This is not an aesthete's credo; Stevens knew that a socially responsible poet must acknowledge the limitations of poetry. As Notes toward a Supreme Fiction suggests, part of the strength of poetry is its ability to turn against itself, converting every certainty into an ambiguity.

Later Years

After Notes toward a Supreme Fiction appeared as the final poem in Transport to Summer, Stevens would publish two more major books of poetry: The Auroras of Autumn (1950) and the final section of his Collected Poems (1954), called The Rock. These volumes contain both complicated long poems that build on the foundation of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (The Auroras of Autumn, An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, The Rock) and an astonishing variety of shorter poems that continue to address the questions that had troubled Stevens even before he wrote Sunday Morning.

In the very late River of Rivers in Connecticut, for instance, Stevens speaks as a man who has seen the River Styx, the river that divides the world of the living from the world of the dead. But he hangs back, focusing our attention on a river “this side of Stygia,” an ordinary river that is just as great as the mythic river.

On its banks,No shadow walks. The river is fateful,Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.He could not bend against its propelling force.
It is not to be seen beneath the appearancesThat tell of it. The steeple at FarmingtonStands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.
It is the third commonness with light and air,A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction…Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing,
Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-loreOf each of the senses; call it, again and again,The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

In Sunday Morning a “procession of the dead” seems to wind across “wide water.” Here, in contrast, the earthly river seems sparsely populated even when compared with the afterlife; there is no shadow on its banks, no ferryman to take us across. The force of the river could not be mastered by Charon (who ferries the souls of the dead across the Styx), suggesting that the earth cannot be encompassed by any myth. The river itself is a “commonness”; it has no metaphysical depth beneath its appearance. The things of this world (even our images of transcendence—the steeple) are merely reflected back to us in the river's shining surface. Yet the river is a wonder (“river of rivers”) precisely because it holds us so firmly within our ordinary existence. Hanging on to a life that will soon end—his own life—Stevens finds the ultimate consolation in an image of meandering process, something that “flows nowhere.” And he invites us to join in that process, a process that is at once the endless becoming of the earth and the endless project of his poetry; we must give the unnamed river its name “again and again.”

“The final belief,” said Stevens in a collection of aphorisms called Adagia, “is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” Speaking here is both a poet and an insurance executive who spent every day of his life attempting to fabricate the value of human property and life. Far from lamenting the partialness of his fabrications, Stevens celebrated it: “the imperfect is our paradise,” he said in The Poems of Our Climate. Far from being threatened by our inability ever to know for sure, he celebrated partial knowledge—what he called “flawed words and stubborn sounds.” Stevens feared nothing more than he feared certainty, especially when he sensed it in his own poems. So if he is known as the poet who insists that we create the fictions by which we live, he must also be known as the poet who insists most bracingly that we must discard our most treasured formulas for living. “The poem must resist the intelligence,” Stevens remarked on more than one occasion: “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.”

Selected Works

  • Harmonium (1923)
  • Ideas of Order (1935)
  • The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)
  • Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
  • Parts of a World (1942)
  • Transport to Summer (1947)
  • The Auroras of Autumn (1950)
  • The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (1951)
  • The Collected Poems (1954)
  • Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose (1957)
  • The Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966)
  • The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play (1971)
  • Collected Poetry and Prose (1997)

Further Reading

  • Bates, Milton. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. Berkeley, Calif., 1985. The best all-around introduction to Stevens's work and life.
  • Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca, N.Y., 1977. A highly idiosyncratic but usually brilliant reading of all of Stevens's major poems.
  • Litz, A. Walton. Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens. New York, 1972. A detailed and attractively plainspoken account of the first half of Stevens's career.
  • Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. New York, 1991. A reading of Stevens's major poems in relationship to the social and intellectual history of his time.
  • Poirier, Richard. Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge, Mass., 1992. An account of the relationship of Stevens (as well as Emerson, Frost, and Stein) to American pragmatist philosophy.
  • Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems. Cambridge, Mass., 1969. A groundbreaking reading of Stevens's longer poetic sequences.