Literary Review

Wallace Stevens’ poetry was principally concerned with the problematic relationship between “reality’ and ‘imagination.’

A year ago, Faber and Faber reissued Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems in a handsome new volume. Its distinctive dark blue cover will serve any new reader well as a clue to one of Stevens’s most cherished natural feature s; the sea which he used resonantly throughout many of his best poems. For a fan rediscovering this poet she loves, it is just a surface to the immense intellect, insight and emotional power flowing through Stevens’s work.

Stevens is unique in the rich and diverse mechanics of 20th century English poetry. He is enigmatic as a poet in that he published his first groundbreaking collection, Harmonium, only when he was 45 in 1923. Many other great poets h ave published at a much earlier age. Prodigies W.H. Auden and Paul Muldoon effectively published as undergraduates while Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney made their debut at the age of 27.

Intensely philosophical

Furthermore, although Stevens is categorised as a modernist, his work never had the gloom that gripped T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland”, W.B. Yeats’s “Second Coming” or Auden’s “Spain 1937”. This was despite the fact that he lived in the same compelling times. Contrarily, he was intensely and deeply philosophical but never politically engaged the way Auden or Vladimir Mayakovsky were. His poetic voice retained the same thematic direction throughout his career and was principally concerned with the problematic relationship between the ‘outside world’ and the ‘inside world’ or ‘reality’ and ‘imagination.’

In other poets, their themes have changed: Hughes was initially inspired by nature and then went to myth and finally confessional with “Birthday Letters”. Stevens follows a very flat trajectory by comparison.

However, this does not detract from the seriousness of the task Stevens was immersed in. He thought that the separation between what humans call ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’ was not as firm as we would like to believe. Reality and imagination as concepts are like porous rocks; they look waterproof but let the water drip in. Even worse is the idea that they are interchangeable.

This possibility provides the basis for Stevens’s oeuvre and he approaches it with profound sophistication. Often, he writes in a grand manner where many of the poems speak to the reader as long philosophical mediations. Stevens’s style and subject matter make him a difficult, but rewarding, poet to read with the reader having to engage deeply with his intellect.

What makes Stevens tough to interpret is his unique diction, which is a mixture of the hymn, the ornate and the bizarre. The bizarre is definitely worth exploring as it is more prevalent in his early work but is gradually weeded out as his voice matures and becomes more solemn.

Numerous examples of eccentricity can be located in Harmonium but a favourite is from “Bantams in Pine-Woods” where “Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan/Of tan with henna hackles, halt!” Some of these short lyrics can be looked on with humour but others such as “Life is Motion” just baffle. In its entirety it reads: “In Oklahoma/Bonnie and Josie/Dressed in calico/Danced around a stump./They cried/‘Ohoyaho/Ohoo’…/Celebrating the marriage/Of flesh and air.”

Remarkable beauty

On the other hand, Stevens wrote some of the most emotionally stunning lyrics of the 20th century. His famous “The Snowman” takes one’s breath away, literally. The reader feels the “misery in the sound of the wind” and the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”.

In longer lyrics, Stevens could be very musical and unbelievably plain-speaking. In “Academic Discourse at Havana” the first part of the poem says, “Canaries in the morning, orchestras/in the afternoon. That is/A difference, at least, from nightingales/Jehovah and the great sea-worm. The air/Is not so elemental nor the earth/So near./But the sustenance of the wilderness/Does not sustain us in the metropoles.”

These lines and images say nothing of solid philosophical substance, especially for Stevens, but here he demonstrates a different quality as a poet: an ability to say something with remarkable beauty.

Conceptually, “Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird” is one of Stevens’s most crucial poems as it examines the topography of the world in the metaphor of a blackbird through imagination. In this poem, perspectives change and Stevens points to reality shifting as imagination accompanies it in tandem. In Part VIII, Stevens reflects, “I know noble accents/And lucid, inescapable rhythms;/But I know too the blackbird is involved/ In what I know.”

Stevens established a specific terminology to talk about his theme and this in turn allowed him to create a special grid where he was able to discuss ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’. Poet Jay Parini writes that ‘reality’ was summed up in the words of “sky, day, north, rock, sun and blue” while “mind, night, south, wind, moon and green” was imagination.

Stevens saw a lot of what he was articulating as “things dark on the horizons of perception”. He says this in one of his last great poems “To an Old Philosopher in Rome”. What is critical though is realising these ‘things’ are “the two alike in the make of the mind”. Stevens thinks our world is a human construct and that ‘imagination’ and ‘reality’ in this poem are two sides of the same coin.

Philosophical detachment

Originally Stevens was more of an idealist regarding the powers of the poet and poetry. In “Another Weeping Woman” Stevens wrote, “The magnificent cause of being,/The imagination, the one reality/In this imagined world.” The poet is here to locate and express this magnificence.

A primary concern for Stevens with modern human society was that since religion had lost much of its power, something had to fill the void artistically, emotionally, spiritually and so forth. This was of course to be poetry but like any great poet, Stevens never let go of his sceptical side. There remained a philosophical detachment in all his work. In “Man Carrying Thing”, he declared “the poem must resist the intelligence/Almost successfully”. Perhaps Stevens by this statement meant that poetry is a tight rope; it must be an incentive which gives a participant something she wants but simultaneously allows room for intelligent criticism.

Stevens was like Yeats in that, as his career moved towards its end, he formulated the conclusion that his poetry and vision was less world making in reality then in imagination.

Wallace Stevens as an artist is up there with William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy and Yeats. These people were not only thought provoking but transformed the way we perceive ourselves.

Reading Stevens gives us as he says in his final poem, “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself”: “A new knowledge of reality.”