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Essay on Wallace Stevens

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As Marshall Walker asserts in his The Literature of the United States of America, Wallace Stevens is both an "unusually philosophical" and "an unusually poetic" poet (Walker, 1983: 138). He represents, in many ways a bridge between the Modernist concern for the fusing of socio-political and aesthetic discourses and the English and American Romantic tradition of finding truths and stabilities through art (Walker, 1983; Gray, 1986).

In this essay I would like to look at how both of these notions fit into Stevens' work and the larger poetic philosophies of the time. I will firstly look at Stevens' aesthetic sense, tracing its roots from the Imagism of Pound to Surrealism and then move on to look at the underlying sense of social malaise that was so much a part of the Modernist canon. Finally, I will attempt to assert that, in fact, these two form a symbiosis in Stevens' overall philosophy that provides a distinct timbre to his work and offers us many insights into late Modernist thought.

Ezra Pound's Imagism sought to rid the poem of the dense and highly enriched content of many late Victorian poets (Hughes, 1972: 3). It sought inspiration from the Japanese haiku and the fragmented Greek poetry of the Anthology. As Pound and F.S. Flint detail in their essay "Imagism" (1913), the Imagist poet:

"Use(s) no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

(Doesn't) use an expression as "dim lands of peace". It dulls the image…(and) Use either no ornament or good ornament." (Pound, Flint, 1913:200)

We can see how this relates, in a purely aesthetic way to Wallace Stevens. In his poem "Six Significant Landscapes" (Stevens, 1970: 72), for instance, the poet strips his images of all but the most visual and necessary description:

"An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white." (Stevens, 1970: 72)

Here Stevens mirrors the pared down images of the Japanese haiku or the stark expression of poems like Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" (Pound, 1990) or William Carlos Williams. In others, Stevens fuses the brevity of images with a highly charged colour sense that gives the verse a hyperreal quality, such as this stanza from "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (Stevens, 1070: 94):

"At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply." (Stevens, 1970: 94)

The paucity of decoration not only places Stevens' work within a tradition of Modernist poetry but also lends to it a delicacy of form as, even in his longer works such as "The Comedian as the Letter C" (Stevens, 1970: 27) there is a directness and a clarity that seeks to undercut the philosophical narrative.

As Daniel Fuchs suggests in his book The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens (1963) there is, as well as Imagism, a distinct surrealist vein running throughout all of Stevens' work (Fuchs, 1963: 164). The surrealist technique of juxtaposing unconnected images (Breton, 1990:36) and creating vortices of signification is used time and time again in Stevens' verse. In the poem "Public Square" (Stevens, 1970: 108) this technique is used in order to suggest an undercurrent of violence and repressed aggression, fractured through the partial confusion of a dream-state:

"A slash of angular blacks
Like a fractured edifice
That was buttressed by blue slants
In a coma of the moon." (Stevens, 1970: 108)

The surrealist juxtapositioning here through phrases such as "coma of the moon" and later in the poem "languid janitor" and "porcelain leer" lends a somatic quality to the image construction that reminds us of what Freud termed "condensation" (Freud, 1965: 312) or the condensing of two images into one to form a new, interpretive meaning.

Whereas Stevens made use of contemporary literary theories, his work is remarkably constant in a thematic sense. We receive the impression that Stevens is merely using Imagism and Surrealism for his own ends, drawing inspiration from their poetic sense in order to explore a more personal, lyrical aesthetic.

Stevens' volume Harmonium was published in 1923, just a year after Eliot's The Waste Land (Eliot, 1989) and the two works share many of the same thematic notions and tropes. In "The Snow Man" (Stevens, 1970: 9), for instance, Stevens not mirrors the opening cadences of Eliot's masterwork but also some of its socio-political exegesis:

"One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter." (Stevens, 1970: 9-10)

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