Wallace Stevens Estetica Abstraccion PDF

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Wa l l ac e S t e v e ns a n d
t h e A e s t h e t ic s of
A b s t r ac t ion
Edward Ragg’s study is the first to examine the role of abstraction

throughout the work of Wallace Stevens. By tracing the poet’s inter-
est in abstraction from Harmonium through to his later works, Ragg
argues that Stevens only fully appreciated and refined this interest
within his later career. Ragg’s detailed close-readings highlight the
poet’s absorption of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-
century painting, as well as the examples of philosophers and other
poets’ work. Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction will
appeal to those studying Stevens as well as anyone interested in the
relations between poetry and painting. This valuable study embraces
revealing philosophical and artistic perspectives, analysing Stevens’
place within and resistance to Modernist debates concerning litera-
ture, painting, representation and ‘the imagination’.
edwa r d r ag g is a poet and teaches at Tsinghua University,

Beijing. He is co-editor of Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (2008).

Wa l l ace S t e v e ns a n d
t h e A e s t h e t ic s of
A bs t r ac t ion
E dwa r d R ag g
Tsinghua University, Beijing
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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accurate or appropriate.
The poet striding among the cigar stores,
Ryan’s lunch, hatters, insurance and medicines,
Denies that abstraction is a vice except
To the fatuous. These are his infernal walls,
A space of stone, of inexplicable base
And peaks outsoaring possible adjectives.
One man, the idea of man, that is the space,
The true abstract in which he promenades.
From ‘A Thought Revolved’ (1936), Wallace Stevens
Contents
Acknowledgements page ix
List of Abbreviations x
Introduction: ‘Stevensian’ and the question of abstraction

1935–2009 1
1 The abstract impulse: from anecdote to ‘new romantic’ in
Harmonium (1923) and Ideas of Order (1935) 30
2 The turn to abstraction: Owl’s Clover (1936) and the ‘un-locatable’
speaker in The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937) 55
3 The ‘in-visible’ abstract: Stevens’ idealism from Coleridge to
Merleau-Ponty 78
3.1 Romantic adaptations: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Stevens 78
3.2 Abstract analogues: Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, Stevens 88
3.3 The touch of Henri Focillon 101
3.4 Coda: the New Criticism and abstraction 107
4 Abstract figures: the curious case of the idealist ‘I’ 110

4.1 Taming ‘the guerrilla I’: the early poems of Parts of a World (1942) 110
4.2 From ‘robust poet’ to idealist ‘I’: ‘The Noble Rider and the
Sound of Words’ (1942) and ‘The Figure of the
Youth as Virile Poet’ (1943) 119
4.3 The human abstract in ‘Landscape with Boat’ (1940) 129
5 Abstract appetites: food, wine and the idealist ‘I’ 136

5.1 Tasting ‘Certain Phenomena of Sound’ (1942) 136
5.2 Hartford Bourguignon: ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ (1942) and
Cymbeline 143
vii
viii Contents
6 The pure good of theory: a new abstract emphasis 166

6.1 ‘Major man’ revised: ‘Paisant Chronicle’ (1945) and
‘Description Without Place’ (1945) 166
6.2 Writing ‘beyond’: ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ (1944) and
‘Three Academic Pieces’ (1947) 174
6.3 Pragmatic abstraction v. metaphor: ‘The Pure Good of Theory’
(1945) and Macbeth 185
7 Bourgeois abstraction: poetry, painting and the idea of mastery

in late Stevens 204
7.1 Mastery of life: at home with Wallace Stevens 204
7.2 Conclusion 228
Bibliography 232
Index 244
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for

their support: Fiona Green, Jean Chothia, Frances Gandy, Lee Jenkins,
Maud Ellmann, Bart Eeckhout, Simon Critchley, the late Richard
Rorty, Charles Altieri, J. Hillis Miller, John N. Serio, Michael Schmidt,
Eleanor Cook, Wang Ao; Ray Ryan, Maartje Scheltens and the staff of
Cambridge University Press; Sara Peacock for her excellent copy-editing;
Paul Giles and the staff of The Rothermere American Institute; the staff
and Fellows of Selwyn College, Cambridge; Sue Hodson and the staff of
The Huntington Library, San Marino (also for permission to quote from
The Wallace Stevens Archive); Melinda McIntosh and Mike Milewski
of the University of Massachusetts (also for permission to quote from
Stevens’ copy of Henri Focillon’s The Life of Forms in Art); The University
of Chicago Library (for permission to quote from Ronald Lane Latimer’s
papers); The British Association for American Studies; The British
Academy; and Lu Zhongshe and the staff of the Foreign Languages
Department, Tsinghua University. Special thanks are also due to my par-
ents, my parents-in-law, the late Tedman Littwin, Peter Roberts and, last
but not least, Fongyee Walker.
ix
Abbreviations
First citations present the full titles of Stevens’ works together, where rele-
vant, with date of first publication and/or date of composition. Subsequent
references are undated. The following abbreviations for major editions
and other resources are used throughout:
BL Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria ed. James Engell

and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1983), 2 vols.
CPP Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose ed. Frank Kermode
and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997)
CW William Shakespeare: The Complete Works ed. Stanley Wells and
Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), compact edition
L Letters of Wallace Stevens ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf,
1966; University of California Press, 1996)
OP Opus Posthumous ed. Milton J. Bates (London: Faber, 1990)
RLP Ronald Lane Latimer Papers, University of Chicago (xeroxed
without serial numbers in The Wallace Stevens Archive)
WAS The Wallace Stevens Archive, The Huntington Library, San
Marino, California
WSJ The Wallace Stevens Journal ed. John N. Serio (Potsdam,
NY: Wallace Stevens Society, Inc., 1977–2009)
x
Introduction: ‘Stevensian’ and the question
of abstraction 1935–2009
The idea of life in the abstract is a curious one and deserves some
reflection.1
Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by
the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between
‘the nostalgia of the infinite’ and ‘the nostalgia for the infinite’
defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of
the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal,
and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé). Personism,
a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows
about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind
of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the
first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace
Stevens what la poésie pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing
to do with philosophy, it’s all art.2
[R]ecently I have been fitted into too many philosophic frames. As
a philosopher one is expected to achieve and express one’s center.
For my own part, I think that the philosophic permissible (to use an
insurance term) is a great deal different today than it was a gener-
ation or two ago. Yet if I felt the obligation to pursue the philosophy
of my poems, I should be writing philosophy, not poetry; and it is
poetry that I want to write.3
Frank O’Hara’s mock-manifesto ‘Personism’ – and the ironic move-
ment of the same name ‘founded’ on 27 August 1959 over lunch in New
York – testifies as much to O’Hara’s poetic relationship with Wallace
Stevens as it reveals how Stevens was viewed only four years after his
death. ‘Personism’ also recalls O’Hara’s brilliance in constructing a poetic
1
Wallace Stevens, Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens ed. Holly Stevens (New
York: Knopf, 1977), 90.
2
Frank O’Hara, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ in Selected Poems ed. Donald Allen (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1994), xiii–xiv.
3
See L, 753.
1
2 Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction
‘personality’ equally as daunting and complex on the page as Stevens’,
if more beguiling for its surface, ‘personal’ appeal. O’Hara’s allegiance,
‘of the American poets’, to Whitman, Crane and Williams is clear.
But, as ‘Personism’ demonstrates, O’Hara had absorbed Stevens; just as
his range of international influences was as wide as, if not wider than,
Stevens’. ‘Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poésie pure was to
Béranger’: O’Hara is saying his ‘manifesto’ would, apparently, have proved
anathema to Stevens, just as ‘pure poetry’ could hardly have appealed to
Pierre Jean de Béranger, the French Republican whose popular ballads
initiated the scorn of Baudelaire. O’Hara intends a double-anachronism
where Béranger is trumped by the innovations of the later Symbolists and
Stevens is trumped by the advent of ‘Personism’ itself.
Stevens is probably the twentieth-century poet for whom the ‘nostalgia of
the infinite’ was most motivational. O’Hara alludes to de Chirico’s painting
of the same title (dated 1911, but composed a little later) with its distant yet
imposing tower flanked by a dominating, shadowy archway. In de Chirico’s
metaphysical phase, the ‘nostalgia’ experienced is inspiring and perhaps
reprehensible, refracted through Modernism’s soul-searching over questions
of reality and faith. Similarly, Stevens, despite his many affiliations with
French Symbolism, was no Mallarmé. As we shall see, a Mallarméan ‘pure
poetry’ of the ‘Idea’ was ultimately not something the Modernist Stevens
could endorse; and his initial 1930s ambivalence concerning abstraction
indicates a Modernist poet confronting the unsettling interim of two world
wars and the global economic consequences of the Depression.
As O’Hara knew, Stevens had also absorbed Modernist painting in
his own idiosyncratic way, undoubtedly affected by the representational
issues the new painting and sculpture confronted; even if, by his last dec-
ade, Stevens shunned the ‘professional modernism’ then quasi-canonical
by the 1940s and early 1950s.4 O’Hara probably read Stevens’ 1951 lecture
‘The Relations Between Poetry and Painting’ delivered at MOMA only a
few months before O’Hara would himself begin working there (MOMA
producing a pamphlet of Stevens’ paper). But it is, perhaps, Stevens’ the-
orizing bent that O’Hara’s wit intends to bait. Stevens could never have
been a ‘Personist poet’, if that ‘poet’ resembles the performance of the
intensely personal, yet elusive, ‘Frank’. However, Stevens did modify
his abstract spirit in his later career, oscillating between what this study
calls ‘cool’ and ‘warm’ abstraction.5 Indeed, would not Stevens have been
4
See L, 647.
5
The distinction is adapted from late 1940s and 1950s French art criticism. ‘Cool abstraction’
refers to the geometric ‘Art Concret’, ‘warm abstraction’ to more expressionist painting or any
Introduction 3
intrigued by O’Hara’s playful claim that ‘Personism’ is ‘so totally opposed
to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction
for the first time, really, in the history of poetry’? To what value can the
abstract wheel turn and come full circle? In O’Hara’s case, the answer is a
pregnant ‘zero’. In other words, this ironically original, ‘true abstraction’
represents the poet pushed to the extreme of the personal in verse, thereby
becoming an abstract version of the poet: genuinely removed from the
work rather than artificially divorced from it.
O’Hara could not have raised this issue in this way without Stevens’
prior posing of the question of abstraction. For a poet so affected by
the ‘death of the gods’, the lingering desire to capture the idea of ‘the
infinite’ or transcendent remained a strong feature throughout Stevens’
work.6 Simultaneously, Stevens’ poetry reveals a poet equally sensitive as
O’Hara to the implicit stances which the varying abstractness of his writ-
ing involves. For Stevens, abstraction represented a question of artistic
and philosophical proportions; and yet his natural inclinations were those
of O’Hara (adamantly in the ‘all art’ camp), resistant to assimilation into
‘too many philosophic frames’. Nevertheless, the philosophical leanings
of Stevens’ writing and its engagement with ‘abstraction’ are unmistak-
able. What Stevens made of philosophy is most noticeable in his expres-
sion of an abstract vocabulary, albeit a rhetoric essentially jettisoned in his
late career as the poet absorbed the consequences of abstraction.
Without doubt, Stevens remains among the more enigmatic, reclu-
sive, cosmopolitan, oft quoted (but under-read) and seriously playful of
the American poets to have emerged during the Modernist era. By turns
shy, brash, idiosyncratic, straight-talking, disinclined to read publicly (and
fiercely private), Stevens stage-managed his late-blossoming poetic career
from the confines of his vice-presidential office at The Hartford Accident
and Indemnity Company. Stevens had written poetry from his youth. But
it was only having discovered an initial niche in the new art and literature
of international Modernism that he gave voice to the striking performance
pieces of Harmonium (1923), many of which appeared in the ephemeral
pages of the little magazines. It would be some twelve years before Stevens
published a second volume: the defensive and defiant Ideas of Order (1935).
By the mid-1930s Stevens sought a poetic idiom adequate to the task of
addressing the role of abstract representation in an increasingly violent and
abstraction championing spontaneous creation or the ‘unformed’ (‘Art Informel’/‘Tachisme’).

See Anna Moszynka, Abstract Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), 119–20, 129.
6
See CPP, 329.
pressingly ‘real’ world. What the poet had learnt from Modernist and also
Impressionist painting was, by 1935, in serious need of realignment and
refinement if the increasingly abstract tenor of Stevens’ poetry was to have
any meaningful relationship with a wider world.
Put differently, Stevens’ initial embrace of Modernist art and the nom-
inal ‘pure poetry’ of his first phase led to the desire to justify a mod-
ernized ‘pure poetry’ during the turbulent 1930s, not least following
Stanley Burnshaw’s criticism of Ideas of Order.7 Stevens became increas-
ingly ambivalent about abstract forms of artistic representation at the very
point where his own poetry tended toward an abstract aesthetic: one that
would eventually leave ‘pure poetry’ behind (even though the charge of
‘irrelevance’ would continue to stick).
This book is principally interested in the turn to abstraction and its
influential aftermath that occurred in roughly 1935 in Stevens’ work. That
the place of abstraction in Stevens remains underappreciated, misun-
derstood and the subject of considerable debate, makes careful ground-
clearing desirable. How did abstraction become a question for Stevens
as a poet? How has the issue of abstraction engaged Stevens’ critics? Did
Stevens’ attitudes toward abstraction change and do we find different
expressions of abstract writing throughout the corpus?
The book proceeds in broadly chronological fashion to exemplify how
Stevens came to discover and absorb abstraction, providing new read-
ings of the poetry and prose which chart the development of Stevensian
abstraction in the mainstay of the poet’s career from 1935 to 1955. Chapter 1
analyses the abstract impulse in Stevens’ writing and its nominal relations
with ‘pure poetry’ as expressed in Harmonium and Ideas of Order. Chapter
2 explores Stevens’ turn to abstraction in the mid-1930s – as exemplified in
The Man with the Blue Guitar – focusing on the emergence of a novel text-
ual speaker (addressed in Chapters 4 and 5) with Picasso’s influence as a
backdrop. Chapter 3 explains the philosophical relations between abstrac-
tion, idealism and phenomenology in Stevens’ work, illustrating how the
poet’s embrace of abstraction was conditioned by Romantic and phenom-
enologist leanings (the British Romantics, Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty and
Henri Focillon feature prominently). Chapter 4 then analyses the place
of abstract figures in Stevens’ mid-career, especially a neglected speaker,
Stevens’ idealist ‘I’, suggesting how this figure conditions an aesthetic
Stanley Burnshaw, ‘Turmoil in the Middle Ground’ New Masses 17 (1935), 41–2. For retrospect-
7
ive views, see Alan Filreis and Harvey Teres, ‘An Interview with Stanley Burnshaw’ WSJ 13.2
(1989), 109–21, and Burnshaw’s ‘Reflections on Wallace Stevens’ WSJ 13.2 (1989), 122–6.
Introduction 5
influenced by Cézanne’s notion of abstraction. Chapter 5 capitalizes on
this analysis to address the under-explored relations between Stevens’
meditations on gastronomy and abstract reflection (with Stevens’ idealist
‘I’ forming an important bridge). Chapter 6 then focuses on Stevens’ jet-
tisoning of an overt abstract vocabulary as his writing moved into a more
pragmatic mode of abstract inspiration. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses how
Stevens’ mature abstract work relates to his domestic life, combining art-
collecting, gastronomy and poetic meditation. In other words, the various
expressions of abstract writing with which Stevens experimented – his
‘cool’ and ‘warm’ abstract performances – only found full voice in the
‘bourgeois’ ruminations of his late career.
What emerges is a Stevens attracted to the mental processes enabling
abstract figuration rather than a poet mimicking abstract painting in ver-
bal form. ‘The Public Square’ (1923) with its ‘slash of angular blacks’ is,
perhaps, an early exception; but the mature Stevens was motivated by
ideas concerning abstraction rather than the realization of a pared-down
poetry of abstract implication.8 Once he had embraced abstraction as a
positive force in his writing – around 1937 – the main aesthetic challenge
Stevens faced was exploiting what abstraction offered. This would see him
dispatch the overt abstract rhetoric and specialist symbolism of ‘Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction’ (1942) and embrace a more boldly abstract
verse reflecting on the ‘baldest’ concepts: ‘metaphor’, ‘resemblance’,
‘description’, ‘analogy’, ‘the ultimate poem’. However sparse these con-
cepts appear, Stevens crafted from them a verse of humane abstract medi-
tation whose various expressions are intimately pursued throughout.
Opposite ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, some readers may be sur-
prised not to discover a detailed reading of this doctrinal poem.9 My
interest has rather been in those poems of abstraction that surround and
chime with ‘Notes’ throughout Stevens’ career; those which are perhaps
more a realization of abstract powers than Stevens’ more ‘theoretical’
poem can claim to be. Whilst I believe ‘Notes’ can be exonerated of
the aloofness to ‘reality’ laid at Stevens’ door by Marjorie Perloff, this
oft-read text – which has functioned as a vortex in Stevens criticism –
only adumbrates what abstraction was coming to mean to Stevens in
1942.10 Certainly, the poet was able to capitalize on his aesthetic discov-
eries in other 1942 texts (see Chapter 5’s readings of ‘Certain Phenomena
8
CPP, 91. 9 Ibid., 329.
10
See Perloff, ‘Revolving in Crystal: The Supreme Fiction and the Impasse of Modernist Lyric’ in
Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism ed. Albert Gelpi (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 41–64.
of Sound’ and ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’). But Stevens also sensed that the
trumpeting of abstraction in ‘Notes’ erred on too cold an aesthetic front,
hence perhaps his later proposition of a final, if unrealized, section for
the poem: ‘It Must Be Human’.11 As Chapter 6 makes clear with respect
to ‘Paisant Chronicle’ (1945), perhaps the ‘major man’ of ‘Notes’ was sim-
ply too abstracted to come alive for Stevens, even as he modified the
figure in this later poem.
Of course, this study does make repeated reference to ‘Notes’, and con-
textualizes the concept of a ‘supreme fiction’ in Chapter 3. However, I have
sought elsewhere to distinguish between this poem’s nominative power –
in contrast with ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ and ‘Description Without Place’
(1945) – and the abstract spirit of Stevens’ post-‘Notes’ verse.12 Whereas
‘Notes’ persistently names and signals its objects of aesthetic interest –
even where it ironizes nomination (‘But Phoebus was / A name for some-
thing that never could be named’) – the mature Stevens realized he could
fashion abstract poetry without recourse to an overt idiom, at least not
the abstract terminology of his 1942 work.13 For the mature Stevens, a
robust abstract poetry would never have to declare ‘The major abstrac-
tion is the commonal’; but rather would demonstrate or imply such an
imaginative possibility. What ‘Notes’ calls an ‘abstraction blooded’ other
Stevens poems would have to achieve, as the poet jostled with the innate
problems of conveying the ‘[i]nvisible or visible or both: / A seeing and
unseeing in the eye’.14 From the poet who declared as early as ‘A High-
Toned Old Christian Woman’ (1922) that ‘Poetry is the supreme fiction,
madame’ to the architect of ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ – discussed at
length in Chapter 6 – it is the evolution of Stevensian abstraction that
concerns the present work.15
But what picture has Stevens criticism painted of the poet’s abstrac-
tions? Scholars whose careers have shaped contemporary criticism –
Altieri, Bloom, Donoghue, Frye, Hillis Miller, Kermode, Vendler – have
all battled with Stevens before themselves becoming subject to the
skirmishes of younger scholars.16 Today, being a ‘Stevensian’ is not, at
11
See L, 863–4.
12
See Ragg, ‘Good-bye Major Man: Reading Stevens without “Stevensian”’ WSJ 29.1 (Spring 2005),
98–105; ‘Love, Wine, Desire: Stevens’ “Montrachet-Le-Jardin” and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline’
WSJ 30.2 (Fall 2006), 194ff.
13
CPP, 329. 14 Ibid., 336, 333.
15
Ibid., 47.
16
Select works include: Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems
of Our Climate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); Denis Donoghue, Connoisseurs
Introduction 7
least in North America, a cranky activity; and, as recent conferences
reveal, critical interest in Stevens will excite equally vociferous debate
in the twenty-first century and no doubt beyond.17 More even than
Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Moore, Pound or Williams, Stevens continues
to upset and inspire critics in the extreme. Arguably, he achieves first
place among twentieth-century poets for garnering the largest groups of
detractors and zealots, ones for whom abstraction often proves a burn-
ing issue.
As Lee Jenkins has observed, Stevens’ early reputation on both sides
of the Atlantic was dogged by charges of dandyism, effeteness, even irre-
sponsibility; charges variously traced to fin de siècle Aestheticism and the
Symbolist-inspired ‘pure poetry’ of Harmonium.18 Gradually, more posi-
tive accounts of Stevens’ relations with Aestheticism, Symbolism and
the Romantic poets have emerged.19 Nevertheless, doubt persists as to
whether Stevens has anything to say, irrespective of his undeniable talent
for poetic speech; raising suspicion his own work is hopelessly ‘abstract’
in a pejorative sense.20 From the late 1980s to the present, following the
aftermath of deconstructionist criticism, debate surrounding Stevens’
responses to social and political realities – particularly the Depression and
the Second World War – has been especially acute.21 But whilst historicist
accounts have yielded vital information about Stevens’ quotidian exist-
ence – as poet, art-collector and surety bond lawyer – there is obvious
disagreement as to how Stevens’ times affected his poetry and vice versa;
of Chaos: Ideas of Order in Modern American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984); Northrop Frye, ‘The Realistic Oriole: A Study of Wallace Stevens’ in Wallace Stevens: A
Collection of Critical Essays ed. Marie Borroff (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), 161–76;
J. Hillis Miller, ‘Theoretical and Atheoretical in Stevens’ in Wallace Stevens: A Celebration ed.
Frank Doggett and Robert Buttel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 274–85;
Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens (London: Faber, [1960] 1989); Helen Vendler, ‘The Qualified
Assertions of Wallace Stevens’ in The Act of Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens ed.
Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis Miller (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965),
163–78.
17
‘Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecticut’ (2004), University of
Connecticut; ‘Wallace Stevens’ (2004), University of London; ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens
in Europe’ (2005), Rothermere American Institute, Oxford. See WSJ 28.2, 29.1, 30.1.
18
Lee M. Jenkins, Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2000), 3–4.
19
See Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985); Michel Benamou, Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1972); George Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and
Stevens (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
20
See Marjorie Perloff, ‘Pound/Stevens: whose era?’ in The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the
Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 2.
21
See Melita Schaum, Wallace Stevens and the Critical Schools (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of
Alabama Press, 1988), 100–28, 129–82.
and it has been especially hard for historicist criticism to align contextual
politics with poetic practice.
Painted most negatively, Stevens is usually accused of being doomed
to a kind of aloof abstraction that disabled him from writing verse
adequate to his epoch; despite his avowal that the poet of ‘any time’
must discover ‘what seems to him to be poetry at that time’.22 He is fre-
quently charged with writing without feeling; and even ‘Stevensians’,
as Bates observes, can find the poet ‘emotionally unsympathetic’.23
Typically, the ‘abstract side’ of Stevens’ writing disappoints readers
who want literature to have an overt relationship with everyday life.
Halliday, despite his admiration, mounts ‘a moral critique of Stevens’
as a writer whose work apparently embodies ‘an objectionable with-
drawal […] from caring about […] individual other persons’.24 Such
didacticism overlooks not only the range of Stevens’ work, but the
reach of poetry itself. Sadly, the tendency to equate ‘the abstract’ with
‘the inhuman’ has triggered the majority of misplaced charges of oblivi-
ousness on Stevens’ part.
This nominally ‘inhuman’ side assumes a different complexion, how-
ever, once a more imaginative ear is given to abstraction. Vendler suggests
Stevens’ poetry specializes in ‘second-order reflection’ – rather than ‘first-
order personal narrative’. But, as Vendler suggests, this dichotomy masks
something subtler: ‘the distinction is so crude as to be false, because all
good poetry pretending to be first-order poetry […] is in fact implicitly
second-order poetry by virtue of its having arranged its first-order narra-
tive in a certain shape’.25 Thus Stevens cannot be superficially a ‘second-
order’ poet who transmutes ‘first-order’ concerns for precisely the reason
Vendler gives for the distinction’s failure to hold. Nevertheless, the idea
that an abstract poetic has an abundantly human task is given weight
by the calculated poetic interaction of ‘second-order’ and ‘first-order’
concerns.
Sympathetic critics, therefore, counter the inhumanity charge by sug-
gesting Stevens, like Yeats, is a high-priest of the imagination, an American
22
CPP, 639.
23
See Jenkins, Wallace Stevens, 3; George Lensing, ‘Wallace Stevens in England’ in Wallace
Stevens: A Celebration ed. Frank Doggett and Robert Buttel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980), 130–48; Carolyn Masel, ‘Stevens and England: A Difficult Crossing’ WSJ 25.2
(2001), 122–37; Milton J. Bates, ‘Pain is Human: Wallace Stevens at Ground Zero’ The Southern
Review 39.1 (2003), 169.
24
Mark Halliday, Stevens and the Interpersonal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 94.
25
Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1988), 75.
Introduction 9
Coleridge without Coleridge’s metaphysics, an Emersonian who knew
a thing or two about pain; even, paradoxically, because of a superficial
indifference to suffering.26 As Stevens himself remarked: ‘Sentimentality
is a failure of feeling.’27 Certainly, Stevens stands to one side of the crowd,
scrutinizing how poetry becomes a viable part of life; a writer unlikely
to be swept up by political or literary movements even as he was influ-
enced by them.28 The place of abstraction in that project is undeniable;
but the impetus for this study emanates from the misconceptions that
very abstract aesthetic has aroused.
One upshot of sympathetic historicist work, however, has been an over-
emphasis on the role Stevens’ poetry plays in responding to political and
social issues. Although Cleghorn declares Stevens ‘ideologically elusive’,
he suggests ‘Description Without Place’ exacts a ‘deconstruction’ of the
‘expansionist rhetoric’ of American foreign policy in 1945.29 Schaum views
Stevens as ‘centrally political’, arguing the poet ‘provides startling insights
into the fictions of history, the rhetorical “illusions” by which we as social
beings live and act’.30 Similarly, Brogan finds Stevens to be a ‘very polit-
ically involved poet’ who ‘dismantle[s] false public rhetorics’.31 Filreis also
claims Stevens’ misgivings about the New Critics – especially Allen Tate’s
ferocious response to the ‘Brooks–MacLeish’ call for a nationalistic war
literature – led the poet to adopt a ‘nationalist’ stance during the 1940s.32
Yielding to the pressure to answer Perloff’s damning appraisal of Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction, such responses over-state Stevens’ readability as a
politically concerned poet, sacrificing the particularities of the poetry to the
general argument that poetry challenges commonsensical understandings
of the world/‘reality’.33 Whilst Stevens criticism has been enriched by re-
examination of the interaction between history, politics and poetry, there is
26
See Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (London: Faber, 1987),
178–80.
27
CPP, 903.
28
See CPP, 665.
29
Angus J. Cleghorn, Wallace Stevens’ Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric (New York: Palgrave, 2000),
24.
30
Melita Schaum, ‘Lyric Resistance: Views of the Political in the Poetics of Wallace Stevens and
H.D.’ WSJ 13.2 (1989), 204, 200.
31
Jacqueline Brogan, ‘Wrestling with those “Rotted Names”: Wallace Stevens’ and Adrienne
Rich’s “Revolutionary Poetics”’ WSJ 25.1 (2001), 19, 23.
32
Alan Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1991), 80.
33
See Perloff, ‘Revolving in Crystal’, 41–64. Perloff refers explicitly to the Cummington Press edi-
tion. Elsewhere I refer to ‘Notes’ as a single poem, as it appears, tardily, in Transport to Summer
(1947).
obviously a danger in implying Stevens was this politicized, however ‘pol-
itical’ his apolitical gestures appear and however much political readings
might engage the prosodic and other poetic features of Stevens’ work.34
Historicist accounts have also shied from abstraction, unless the
concept is linked with the poet’s early isolationism or the later polit-
ical dimension of Abstract Expressionism. But the tendency to defend
Stevens excessively derives from the sheer abstract ambiguity of his often
enigmatic verse. With critical hindsight, it also appears that Stevens’
own abstract terms seemingly resist novel interpretation. ‘Major man’, a
‘new romantic’, a ‘supreme fiction’, ‘the first idea’, ‘the death of the gods’,
‘the imagination–reality complex’, ‘the fluent mundo’, ‘the abstract’
itself: the choice terms of Stevens’ mid-career furnish the reader with a
ready-made vocabulary for reading back into the poetry. It is an idiom
which provides the illusion that Stevens’ work constitutes a ‘harmo-
nious whole’, a tendency critics assume the poet encouraged in want-
ing to title his 1954 Collected Poems ‘The Whole of Harmonium’ (even
although Stevens actually spent a lifetime resisting a collected edition of
his work).35
Several critics complain of the effects abstract, and often binary,
terms serve critically. Leggett laments the ‘imagination-reality termin-
ology that has plagued Stevens criticism for decades’.36 Cleghorn observes
‘[b]inary oppositions function significantly in the Stevens critical legacy’.37
Proponents of a ‘theory’ through which readers can navigate Stevens’
work often strive in vain to discover the ‘metaphysic’, as Frye assumes,
that informs his ‘poetic vision’ or the ‘theory of knowledge’ that informs
Stevens’ ‘metaphysic’.38 Typically, in the absence of a discernible ‘theory’,
critics harness another vocabulary for support, either beyond or deriv-
ing from Stevens. Donoghue’s 1980 epiphany where he reports want-
ing ‘to give up [Stevens’] privileged terms, or to go beyond or beneath
them’ is telling, as is Vendler’s contemporaneous move to a vocabulary of
‘desire’.39
34
Filreis admits: ‘Those of us who have tried to make manifest the political life of an apparently
unpolitical poet found the requirements of the project were so daunting […] that we had to
make short work of sound in readings of poems where the music of words is obviously central’,
‘Sound at an Impasse’ WSJ 31.1 (2009), 21.
35
See L, 834, 829.
36
B. J. Leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory: Conceiving the Supreme Fiction (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 80.
37
Cleghorn, Wallace Stevens’ Poetics, 3.
38
Frye, ‘The Realistic Oriole’, 161.
39
Denis Donoghue, ‘Two Notes on Stevens’ WSJ 4.3/4 (1980), 44; Helen Vendler, Wallace
Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).
Introduction 11
Comparative work on Stevens has, therefore, proven critically popular.
Stevens’ abstract vocabulary appears less intimidating when contextualized
through Nietzsche, William James, Emerson, the British Romantics, other
American Modernists, or various Continental thinkers and writers. Not
only does comparison provide Stevens’ readers with various intellectual and
poetic contexts, it deflects the totalizing power Stevens’ mid-career vocabu-
lary wields. For Stevens criticism has not only suffered from binary oppos-
itions or enigmatic terms. Its main abstract figures, championed in ‘Notes’,
feature frequently in self-confirming readings of the poet’s work. A critical
idiom, ‘Stevensian’, establishes a hermeneutic circle in which the corpus itself
‘revolv[es] in crystal’, where every phase of Stevens’ writing is reducible to the
terminology that actually only dominates the period in which Stevens first
embraced abstraction: 1935–45.40 Among this book’s claims is that the ‘fluent
mundo’ is not co-extensive with the Stevens corpus; that Stevens’ need to
create a vocabulary advertising abstraction was born of the early 1930s and
did not survive the mid-1940s; that it was not until his final decade that he
fully absorbed abstraction; and that, if Stevens is to be read afresh, a revision-
ist account of how and why he was drawn to ‘the abstract’ must be found.
My concern, therefore, is more with re-examining what abstraction
represented to Stevens – through a combination of close-readings and
review of the documentary evidence, published and unpublished – and
less with arguing with Stevens critics on their own terms. As pragmatism
cautions, the latter would only give credibility to the very vocabulary one
wants to re-interpret or transcend.41 One example of ‘Stevensian’ at work,
however, should suffice in demonstrating how approaching so ‘abstract’ a
subject as ‘Stevensian abstraction’ requires careful choices of vocabulary.
Harold Bloom reads ‘Notes’ through Stevens’ ‘first idea’, the abstract
notion that poem itself scrutinizes, observing:
For Stevens, an image is an obsession […] and so he tries to demystify it by a
reduction to its First Idea, a Fate or reality supposedly beyond further reduction.
But […] he undergoes a recognition of the First Idea (itself an ‘imagined thing’
or image) and then finds he is in danger of being dehumanized by this Freedom
of substitution, since substitution is its own meaning, as though to-put-into-
question was what would suffice. Thus Stevens moves on to a fresh recognition
or retroactive meaningfulness of the First Idea as a potentia (both Power and
passion) or pathos, or as he says […] the fiction that results from feeling.42
40
CPP, 351.
41
See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 8–9; Philosophy and Social Hope (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), xviii.
42
Bloom, Wallace Stevens, 170.
Bloom struggles here to illuminate Stevens’ ‘first idea’, despite harnessing
his own Emersonian ‘triad’ of Fate, Freedom and Power. Bloom’s enig-
matic ‘American Orphism’ cannot ultimately compete with Stevens’ ter-
minology, as his resorting to both the ‘first idea’ and troping the poet’s
own phrases demonstrates (‘what [would] suffice’, ‘the fiction that results
from feeling’).43 This is not to imply Stevens’ work does not reflect on itself
or that it is illegitimate to refer to Stevensian terms per se. It is to stress the
tendency of an abstract vocabulary to dominate interpretation; although
I distinguish between Stevens’ terminology in situ and ‘Stevensian’, the
critical language requiring translation into less abstract idioms.
Stevens created, therefore, a seductive idiom which can encourage
uncritical familiarity (Leggett wittily observes that Bloom himself suffers
an ‘anxiety of influence’ over Stevens’ poetics).44 Richardson even insists on
the necessity of learning Stevens’ ‘language’ before approaching his verse.45
But this strategy risks foregrounding only one element of Stevens’ achieve-
ment at the expense of reading the poetry intimately. Similarly, if criticism
can only make limited use of ‘Stevensian’, comparative studies can suffer
from reifying a substitute language in place of reading Stevens at all. For
example, Bové’s analysis of ‘The Snow Man’ (1921) shows more familiarity
with Heidegger than it does with Stevens and risks rendering Heidegger
and Stevens unintelligible. Referring to Stevens’ ‘listener’, Bové writes:
He is ‘nothing himself,’ that is, he is ontologically identical with the other inso-
far as they are both part of ‘what-is’ existing in and by virtue of ‘nothing’ […]
He senses the falsity of the dualistic separation of res cogitans and res extensa and
sees the primordiality of Being-in-the-World, alongside the World, as a structure
of his own Being.46
Pragmatist discourse also urges not investing foundational or ‘metaphys-
ical’ priority in any one vocabulary. Rorty wryly comments of Heidegger’s
language: ‘Heideggerese is only Heidegger’s gift to us, not Being’s gift to
Heidegger’ (he also brings Heidegger and Derrida to task for re-capitulat-
ing what Heidegger himself calls ‘the tradition of onto-theology’).47 For
43
Ibid., 5; see CPP, 218–19, 351.
44
Leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 70.
45
Joan Richardson, ‘Learning Stevens’s Language: The Will & the Weather’ in Teaching Wallace
Stevens: Practical Essays ed. John N. Serio and B. J. Leggett (Knoxville, TN: University of
Tennessee Press, 1994), 140–55.
46
Paul A. Bové, Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), 190–1.
47
Richard Rorty, ‘Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Reification of Language’ in Essays on
Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Vol. ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 65; ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’ in Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980)
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 100.
Introduction 13
Rorty that tradition specializes in spawning dominant master vocabular-
ies with illusory qualities. Referring to Derrida, he warns: ‘We may find
ourselves thinking that what Heidegger thought could not be effed [sic]
really can be, if only grammatologically’.48 To trope Rorty, ‘Stevensian’ is
only Stevens’ gift to us, not the Abstract’s gift to Stevens.
Unsurprisingly, the word ‘abstract’ has occasioned conflicting debate.
Leggett notes the confusing tendency of associating abstraction with a)
isolating ‘reality’ without the interference of the imagination and b) cre-
ating poetry opposed to the concrete and physical.49 It will become clear
that I consider Stevensian abstraction an idealist process that coincides
with neither of these positions. Leggett himself traces Stevens’ ‘abstract’
to the poet’s reading of I. A. Richards’ Coleridge on Imagination (1934).
Although Leggett is right to link Stevensian abstraction with Coleridgean
idealism, I suggest a need to go beyond Richards’ Coleridge to the
Biographia Literaria and other idealist phenomena for support. Clearly,
no single textual source of influence exists for an imaginative process that
evolved gradually in Stevens. It is, therefore, through a range of vocabu-
laries that Stevens’ ‘abstract’ may be read afresh. The point of focusing on
the term is not merely that ‘major man’, a ‘supreme fiction’ and Stevens’
other figures are abstract. One simply cannot understand the poet Stevens
becomes, both during 1935–45 and throughout his career, without some
account of what abstraction meant to him personally and in practice.
As Patke observes, Stevens’ 1900 journal entry, noting that ‘the idea
of life in the abstract’ was a subject worthy of ‘some reflection’, proved
prophetic for the poet’s career.50 But what specific critical arguments con-
cerning abstraction should be grasped? Stevens’ occasional companion
Richard Eberhart appreciated how the abstract quality of Stevens’ writ-
ing represented ‘a spring to […] contemplation’.51 Anthony Hecht, though
ambivalent, observed Stevens’ interest in ‘the very beauty of the abstract
formulation of things’.52 Doggett, meanwhile, suggested Stevensian
abstraction ‘contains something of the drama of being and of a specific
existence’.53 Ellmann, keen to dispense with treating Stevens the man
and poet as categorically distinct, remarks: ‘Stevens presented a mode
48
Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’, 101.
49
50
Rajeev S. Patke, The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens: An Interpretative Study (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 130.
51
Richard Eberhart, ‘Notes to a Class in Adult Education’ Accent 7.4 (1947), 251–3.
52
Anthony Hecht, ‘A Sort of Heroism’ Hudson Review 10 (1957–8), 607.
53
Frank Doggett, Stevens’ Poetry of Thought (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1966), 216.
of apprehending reality that is also a reflection of the inner mechan-
ism of that reality’, adding that, in composition, Stevens ‘was both actor
and spectator’. Indirectly, ‘his poems are fragments of the grand con-
fession of his life’.54 It is partly this study’s intention to demonstrate the
role abstraction plays in that dramatization, particularly with regard to
Stevens’ quotidian experience, his gastronomic and aesthetically catholic
imagination.
This dramatic component, however, is rarely conceived as such. Randall
Jarrell was quick to question Stevens’ abstract side: ‘Little of Stevens’
work has the dramatic immediacy, the mesmeric, involving human-
ity, of so much of Yeats’ and Frost’s poetry […] [T]hese cool, clear, airy
poems, which tower above us […] ought to be sailing over other heads
many centuries from now’.55 Jarrell’s nuanced prose indicates reservation
and grudging admiration, implying the ‘flight’ of Stevens’ poetry is culp-
able in aiming for heights even a ‘poetry audience’ would find perplex-
ing. ‘Ought’ is similarly loaded: implying an unpalatable future where
Stevens’ poetry will continue to tower over its audience as it revels in its
own aerial detachment.
Although Schwartz discussed Stevensian abstraction as early as 1938 (as
Chapter 2 reveals), it was not until the 1940s that the subject was substan-
tially addressed. Such critical attention coincided not only with the collec-
tions following Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction but with Stevens’ post-war
anthology appearances (of which he kept personal copies).56 Stevens’
library testifies, in fact, to his minute tracking of the criticism appearing
after 1945 (to which Holly Stevens added), the poet binding in red leather
the 1945 Voices issue devoted entirely to his work.57 The year 1948 saw the
publication of Blackmur’s ‘Poetry and Sensibility’; 1949, Cunningham’s
‘The Poetry of Wallace Stevens’ and Frankenburg’s ‘Variations on
Wallace Stevens’; 1950, Louis Martz’s ‘The World of Wallace Stevens’ and
O’Connor’s monograph The Shaping Spirit. By 1952, Morse’s ‘Motive for
Metaphor’ composed the entire issue of Origin V, whilst Deutsch’s Poetry
in Our Time mounted an ambivalent critique of Stevens’ career.58 In the
54
Richard Ellmann, ‘How Wallace Stevens Saw Himself ’ in Wallace Stevens: A Celebration ed.
Frank Doggett and Robert Buttel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 170.
55
Randall Jarrell, ‘Very Graceful Are the Uses of Culture’ Harper’s 209 (1954), 100.
56
See Milton J. Bates, ‘Stevens’ Books at the Huntington: An Annotated Checklist (Concluded)’
WSJ 3.1/2 (1979), 25–6.
57
Voices ‘Wallace Stevens Issue’ 121 (1945).
58
R. P. Blackmur, ‘Poetry and Sensibility: Some Rules of Thumb’ Poetry 71.5 (1948), 271–6; J. V.
Cunningham, ‘The Poetry of Wallace Stevens’ Poetry 75.3 (1949), 149–65; Lloyd Frankenberg,
Pleasure Dome: On Reading Modern Poetry (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 197–267;
Introduction 15
poet’s final years, the Selected Poems was reviewed by Bernard Bergonzi
and the Collected Poems by Jarrell, whilst Schwartz was among the first to
write a retrospective following Stevens’ death.59
By 1956, however, William Carlos Williams observed: ‘I have no confi-
dence that anyone will read the poems of Wallace Stevens tomorrow. The
more reason those of us who will read them should make the most of it.’ 60 If
Stevens had not then attained a sizeable audience, the explosion in criticism
of the next half-century was something Williams was neither willing nor
able to anticipate (Williams was not alone in pondering Stevens’ reputation,
however).61 Only eight years later Riddel would write what remains one of
the best assessments of Stevens’ career (‘The Contours of Criticism’) in an
ELH Stevens issue with early essays by Pearce, Hillis Miller and Benamou.62
In the Voices issue Brinnin suggested that Stevens’ idealist abstractions
are essentially sensory:
Stevens possesses a belief in the reality of the sensory object […] Consequently
he is to be observed on sensuous excursions into the impure image itself, the
manifest object, and not to the image as a copy emanating from the Idea. If it is
possible to understand how it feels to be a pear, a green light on the sea, a bowl
of flowers, Stevens manages […] to say that he does.63
This recalls ‘A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts’ (1937) which imagines what
it feels like to be a rabbit or shade of a rabbit: where ‘nothing is left except
light on your fur’ and where one ‘feel[s] that the light is a rabbit-light’.64
Given that he only had access to Stevens’ work up to 1945, Brinnin’s
insight into the idealist quality of Stevensian abstraction was unusually
appreciative.
However, reviewing Transport to Summer, Blackmur declared Stevens
had grown ‘prolific, and sometimes prolix’. Although he admired Stevens’
Louis L. Martz, ‘The World of Wallace Stevens’ in Modern American Poetry ed. B. Rajan
(London: Denis Dobson, 1950), 94–109; William Van O’Connor, The Shaping Spirit: A Study
of Wallace Stevens (Chicago, IL: Regnery, 1950); Samuel French Morse, ‘Motive for Metaphor’
Origin V 2.1 (1952), entire issue; Babette Deutsch, Poetry in Our Time (New York: Henry Holt,
1952).
59
Bernard Bergonzi, ‘The Sound of a Blue Guitar’ Nine: A Magazine of Literature and the Arts 10
(1953–4), 48–51; Randall Jarrell, ‘The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens’ The Yale Review (1955),
340–53; Delmore Schwartz, ‘Wallace Stevens: An Appreciation’ The New Republic (22 August
1955), 20–2.
60
W. C. Williams, ‘Comment: Wallace Stevens’ Poetry 87.4 (1956), 237.
61
See Alan Filreis, ‘Stevens/Pound in the Cold War’ WSJ 26.2 (2002), 181–93. Filreis jokes about
‘the Great Stevensian Consolidation’, 186.
62
Joseph N. Riddel, ‘The Contours of Stevens Criticism’ ELH 31.1 (1964), 106–38.
63
John Malcolm Brinnin, ‘Plato, Phoebus and the Man from Hartford’ Voices 121 (1945), 30, 33.
64
CPP, 190.
‘absolute content of sensibility’, Blackmur was alienated by the ‘unusually
high number’ of words that are ‘recognizably a part of a special vocabu-
lary’, which ‘not charged and fixed by forces outside the vocabulary, will
obliterate the perceptions it specializes’. Evidently Blackmur felt short-
changed by Stevens’ abstract master-vocabulary (whose ‘meanings’ might
‘disappear with use’).65 Blackmur’s ‘An Abstraction Blooded’ had argued
that abstraction ‘requires constant iteration and constant experience’; but
his previous fervour for ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ proved unsus-
tainable.66 Frankenburg, by contrast, recognized the painterly qualities of
Stevens’ ‘abstract’, associating ‘A Study of Two Pears’ (1938) with Cézanne
and noting affinities between Stevens, Klee, de Chirico and Miró. Like
Brinnin, Frankenburg appreciated how an abstract poetic could paradox-
ically be intimate, suggesting: ‘Klee’s description […] of “a line taking a
walk” is congenial to the course of a Stevens poem’.67
But it was not until the 1950s that Stevens was even considered a writer
of ‘ideas’. In 1950 Martz paid tribute to Stevens’ ‘explorations into the
realm of the pure idea’, adding: ‘Stevens is often called a hater of ideas
and of reason […] Notes toward a Supreme Fiction should dispel any mis-
conception.’ Discussing ‘It Must Be Abstract’, Martz observed:
Note here the interaction of precise generality and precise concreteness, each
supporting and enriching the other, as if the abstract definition were a flower
or a grove. And indeed it is: the flower, the grove, perceived in candour, define
momentarily the observer’s place in the world.68
Martz understood how an ‘abstract definition’ might be the portal to
novel aesthetic experience.
However, even as supportive a reader as O’Connor struggled with
Stevens’ more abstract poems:
[Stevens’] abstraction[s] or generalization[s] […] will rarely if ever sound fatu-
ous. On occasion, however, the abstractions lack the power to arouse our feel-
ings. One finds such lines more often in the later poems, as in Esthétique du
Mal or A Primitive like an Orb. In ‘Chocorua To Its Neighbor’ […] one may
read with the sense that a subject is being made ready to declare itself […] but
finally come to recognize that the poem says […] in the first few stanzas all that
is to be said. ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ exhibits […] some of the same
weaknesses.69
65
Blackmur, ‘Poetry and Sensibility’, 271–3.
66
Blackmur, ‘An Abstraction Blooded’ Partisan Review 10.3 (1943), 298.
67
Frankenburg, Pleasure Dome, 221–2. Chapter 7 discusses Stevens and Klee.
68
Martz, ‘The World of Wallace Stevens’, 98, 100.
69
O’Connor, The Shaping Spirit, 131.
Introduction 17
Even critics who applauded Stevens’ ‘philosophical’ side were, therefore,
ambivalent about its ‘abstractions’. Failure to ‘arouse’ feeling was not the
only problem. The association of abstraction with generalization led critics
to see Stevens’ most abstract poems as un-poetic, ‘vague and unrealized’;
lacking the ‘subtly elaborated subject-matter’ O’Connor found in other,
perhaps equally abstract, but nominally more ‘approachable’ works.70
Morse, however, queried the assumptions at the root of typical portray-
als of Stevens’ work:
[T]he gusto that many readers would not question in […] the early poems, sim-
ply because it is directed toward things and sensory experience, seems to many
of those same readers almost morally reprehensible when directed toward ‘ser-
ious’ ideas. Stevens himself tends to accentuate this split between poetry and
philosophy in his description of philosophy as an ‘official view’ of being and
poetry as an ‘unofficial view’; but when he is […] writing poetry, he refuses to
acknowledge the split.71
Certainly, Stevens romanticized or vilified philosophy according to his
poetic needs, as Eeckhout notes. Eeckhout also describes ‘Stevens’ end-
less playing off of sense impressions against abstractions’.72 However,
as Chapter 4 suggests, this notion requires challenging because ‘sense
impressions’ and ‘abstractions’ are not necessarily conflictive. Stevens
delights in abstractions of sense impressions, or abstract notions that
re-invite imaginative scrutiny of our own senses. Speaking of Parts of a
World, Morse did complain that some poems ‘remain abstractions […]
[t]hey do not take on the “radiance” that Stevens cherishes’.73 But he was
alive to Stevens’ changing use of ‘abstraction’.74 Morse also defended
Stevens from ‘deliberately set[ting] out to epater les bourgeois’: ‘his con-
stant concern is rather to find some way to demonstrate that “The poet
is the intermediary between people and the world in which they live.”’75
The paradox Stevens’ readers confront is how abstract reflections conjure
commonality, ordinariness and ‘the normal’ without promulgating hol-
low generalizations. This is especially clear in the later poetry and is one
regard in which Stevens refined his developing sense of abstraction.
If Morse did not conceive the ‘bourgeois’ aesthetic Chapter 7
addresses below, Deutsch saw Stevens in domestic terms whilst sharing
70
Ibid., 131.
71
Morse, ‘Motive for Metaphor’, 57–8.
72
Eeckhout, ‘Stevens and Philosophy’ in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens ed. John N.
Serio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 107.
73
Morse, ‘Motive for Metaphor’, 23.
74
See ibid., 45–6. 75 Ibid., 20–1.
O’Connor’s reservations about abstraction. Noting Stevens’ ingenuity in
‘domesticat[ing] the savage Southern night’ Deutsch resisted the poet’s
‘abstract sound’, complaining that ‘the manipulation of sound values’
leads ‘far from the accepted language of poetry’.76 Admittedly, Deutsch
was seeking an idiom to tie down an elusive subject, reasonably suggest-
ing how Stevens’ ‘imagery tends to be visual rather than auditory […] yet
the tone-color of certain titles […] indicates his feeling for abstract sound’.
But what Deutsch meant by ‘abstract sound’ remains unclear: ‘[Stevens’]
work is divided between poems that are rich, clear transcripts of reality
and poems that talk rather abstractly about the gulf between the ultimate
reality and its various appearances’. Deutsch only helped foster the con-
ception of Stevens as an ‘aloof […] music maker’ who ‘lets a problem of
metaphysics or aesthetics usurp the poetry.’77
Such reductive criticism is compounded by over-attention to
Harmonium, as evidenced by Bergonzi’s review of the Selected Poems.78 In
1952, of course, commentators could not read the more ‘personal’ poems
of The Rock or ‘late Stevens’. Thus, Stevens’ work post-Harmonium tended
to be viewed as abstract evasion. If Bergonzi claimed it ‘foolish’ to accuse
the poet of ‘being cut off from reality’, he concluded Stevens’ ‘phenom-
enal world’ was ‘lonely and depopulated’.79 Although Stevens’ work up to
1952 is hardly ‘a barren achievement’, Bergonzi argued the poet had paid
‘the penalty of viewing the world purely as an aesthetic phenomenon’.80
As with R. S. Thomas’ ‘Wallace Stevens’, the notion that Stevens’ world
constitutes a solitary, dry abstraction has stuck, in large part because read-
ers are uncomfortable not merely with abstractions as generalizations but
with abstract ‘versions’ of feeling.81
Just as over-attention to Harmonium is traceable to a dislike of abstrac-
tion, so too is The Rock’s favourable reception, even though The Rock has
its own abstract poetics. Jarrell had, of course, read The Rock when he
reviewed Stevens’ Collected Poems. But it was Jarrell’s earlier reservations
concerning The Auroras of Autumn that galvanized his embrace of The
Rock, where he latterly discovered poems in which ‘it seems to us that
we are feeling […] what it is to be human’.82 This essay forms a pivotal
76
Deutsch, Poetry in Our Time, 243–4. 77 Ibid., 250, 377, 252.
78
Marius Bewley complained of this tendency as early as 1949 in ‘The Poetry of Wallace Stevens’
(Wallace Stevens: A Critical Anthology ed. Irvin Ehrenpreis [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972],
162–82). Bergonzi suggests Stevens’ ‘first volume remains unsurpassed’, 49.
79
Bergonzi, ‘The Sound of a Blue Guitar’, 51.
80
Ibid., 51.
81
R. S. Thomas, ‘Wallace Stevens’ in Collected Poems 1945–1990 (London: Orion, 2000), 135.
82
Jarrell, ‘The Collected Poems’, 342–3.
Introduction 19
moment in Stevens criticism, polarizing appreciation of The Rock at the
expense of the equally fine The Auroras of Autumn: ‘equally fine’ because
imagine The Auroras of Autumn without poems such as ‘Large Red Man
Reading’ or ‘This Solitude of Cataracts’, easily companion pieces to the
‘personal’ lyrics Jarrell favours in The Rock.
In 1951 Jarrell observed:
When the first thing that Stevens can find to say of the Supreme Fiction is that ‘it
must be abstract,’ the reader protests, ‘Why, even Hegel called it a concrete uni-
versal’ […] Stevens has the weakness – a terrible one for a poet, a steadily increas-
ing one in Stevens – of thinking of particulars as primarily illustrations of general
truths, or else as aesthetic, abstracted objects, simply there to be contemplated.83
As Leggett observes, this simplistically equates the abstract with gen-
eralization as a force opposed to the concrete/particular. What Jarrell
dismisses as inconsistency – that Stevens ‘is never more philosophical,
abstract, rational’ than when he tells the reader to have faith in ‘nothing
but immediate sensations, perceptions, aesthetic particulars’ – is, viewed
differently, a crucial aspect of Stevensian abstraction.84 Jarrell’s champion-
ing of The Rock, however, unfortunately led to a lack of appreciation for
Stevens’ more abstract late work.
Schwartz was more generous in his 1955 retrospective, observ-
ing: ‘Stevens, studying Picasso and Matisse, made the art of poetry vis-
ual in a way it has never been before’; as the poet variously combined
‘Shakespeare, Cubism, the Symbolist movement and modern philosophy
since Kant’.85 Just as Schwartz astutely recognized the abstract possibil-
ities of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ (see Chapter 2), he appreciated
early how Stevens synthesized abstract notions in contemporary art with
philosophical reflection, idealism especially. Contra Kenneth Burke –
who thought Stevens 150 years late in exploring idealism – Schwartz
understood it was not so much Stevens’ subject-matter that mattered, but
how one saw that poetry and how such verse actuates readerly vision.86
Stevensian abstraction re-examines how poetry might be ‘visual’, pre-
cisely through conjuring the ‘in-visible’ (a term Chapter 3 borrows from
Merleau-Ponty). Abstraction enables a poetry that, as ‘The Creations of
Sound’ (1944) remarks, makes the visible ‘a little hard / To see’ (note not
impossible to see).87
83
Jarrell, ‘Reflections on Wallace Stevens’ Partisan Review 18 (1951), 339.
84
Ibid., 341.
85
Schwartz, ‘Wallace Stevens’, 21.
86
See Eeckhout, ‘Stevens and Philosophy’, 110; also Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, 97.
87
CPP, 275.
In ‘The Contours of Stevens Criticism’ Riddel subsequently argued
that Stevens’ ‘final composure’ lies in ‘the power of the self to be […]
and to find its being in the act of mind that can create abstractions’.88
For Riddel, Stevens criticism had overlooked the poet’s career-long battle
to effect this achievement: ‘Critics who maintain that Stevens’ stylistic
changes are simply new jars for old moonshine sacrifice much of this sub-
stance in order to attain their own coherent view of the late poems’.89 The
present study explains how an abstract aesthetic had to grow on Stevens
in order for him to grow into it. Like Riddel, I refrain from totalizing
the corpus (‘The Whole of Harmonium’), however much Stevens’ self-
referential gestures are inter-textually engaging. The cracks in that world
beautifully emerge, in fact, in Stevens’ questioning of abstraction. It is
not that Stevens’ later work moves from the more baffling abstractions
of his middle phase (including The Auroras of Autumn) to the plainer,
more ‘domestic’ speculations of the late poetry. Such a claim misleads not
merely because ‘last Stevens’ involves such extremely abstract poems as
‘Of Mere Being’ or ‘As at a Theatre’, but because the final poetry actively
blends ‘personal’ and nominally ‘impersonal’ expression. Moreover, ever
since ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, if not before, Stevens purposively
incorporated ‘cool’ and ‘warm’ abstract gestures into his writing.
But we should also recall Kermode’s cautionary words: ‘Many books
and articles on Stevens fall into the trap of treating him as a philosopher
[…] [O]ne would hardly suspect that they were talking about a poet at
all’.90 Certainly, Stevens’ priority was to produce poetry, even although
he was aware of the intellectual changes then conjoining ‘disciplines’
(hence his comment concerning the changed ‘philosophic permissible’).91
However, the very fact Stevens tended to embrace philosophy when it
catalysed his poetry or reified ‘Philosophy’ as pejoratively ‘abstract’ when
it proved less than inspiring accentuates how abstraction engages poet-
ical/philosophical exchange. Irving Howe had suggested Stevens ‘himself
was partly to blame’ for the problem Kermode highlights (‘at his prolific
second-best he had a way of sounding like a versifying philosopher’).92
Nevertheless, it is critical to refine the relations between philosophy and
poetry in Stevens’ work, especially as abstraction often proves the sorry
bridge for more critical earnestness than the poetry deserves: a verse at
88
Riddel, ‘The Contours of Stevens Criticism’, 136.
89
Ibid., 134.
90
Frank Kermode, ‘Preface to 1989 edition’ in Wallace Stevens, xv.
91
L, 753.
92
Irving Howe, ‘Another Way of Looking at the Blackbird’ The New Republic (4 November 1957), 16.
Introduction 21
once philosophically playful and poetically preoccupied with experien-
cing ideas.
Kermode also warns: ‘There is a poetry of the abstract; if you do not like
it, even when it is firmly rooted in the particulars of the world, you will
not like Stevens’, adding: ‘Stevens approved the saying of Valéry’s Socrates,
that “Man fabricates by abstraction”.’ 93 Fredric Jameson would seemingly
exemplify Kermode’s point about abstract poetry dividing opinion. For
Jameson, Stevens’ ‘astonishing linguistic richness’ and his ‘impoverish-
ment or hollowness of content’ are ‘seeming[ly] irreconcilable’.94 Stevens’
language ‘at once empties itself by calling attention to its own hollowness
as that which is merely the image of the thing, and not the thing itself’.95
This reductive position implies Stevens’ idealism is essentially frustrated.
However, if Stevens tries to ‘touch’ reality – whilst necessarily being at
an aesthetic remove from ‘the real’ – such idealism affords him consid-
erable negative capability. Readers may complain the poetry lacks sus-
taining content, but their complaints constitute preferences for different
varieties of verse rather than compelling evidence for supposing ‘poetry’
and ‘abstraction’ are definitively opposed.
One further paradox has alienated critics: namely, that abstraction
shares in common things, even embodies ‘commonality’. Cook, however,
is refreshingly alive to this dimension:
My sense of Stevens’ word ‘abstract’ is consistent with I. A. Richards’s use in his
Coleridge on Imagination […] Richards conceives of an ‘ “all-inclusive myth” that
would provide the kind of nature “that the religions in the past have attempted
to provide for man.”’ Stevens starts ‘It Must Be Abstract’ with a play on ‘be,’ and
a doctrine of being is at the centre of Christian ‘supreme fictions.’96
Cook is quoting Leggett quoting Richards. On her reading, the ‘doctrine
of being’ allies fiction and abstract conception; just as Stevens would note
in quasi-theological terms: ‘the fictive abstract is as immanent in the mind
of the poet, as the idea of God is immanent in the mind of the theologian’.97
Cook thereby focuses the common sharing of beliefs abstraction breeds.
In fact, she goes further in her reading of ‘Notes’: ‘The revelation of major
man in his particulars should remain private, though in his abstraction,
93
Kermode, Wallace Stevens, 46, 102. See CPP, 883.
94
Fredric Jameson, ‘Wallace Stevens’ in Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens ed. Steven Gould Axelrod
and Helen Deese (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1988), 178.
95
Jameson, ‘Wallace Stevens’, 190.
96
Eleanor Cook, Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
97
L, 434.
major man is part of – rather, is – the commonal’.98 This constitutes a radi-
cal definition of Stevens’ hero figure. But in 1942 Stevens was not poetic-
ally equipped to convey how abstraction might comprise the ‘commonal’.
That was a project for his final decade. Nevertheless, Cook rightly hones
the multiple senses of Stevens’ ‘abstract’, even in the same sections of
‘Notes’: ‘“Abstract” as compendium merges with “abstract” as “inconceiv-
able” or “invisible” or “visible” or both.’ 99 These notions, particularly the
‘visible’ and ‘invisible’, are refined and synthesized throughout this book.
Beyond Filreis’ pioneering historicism, Longenbach’s account help-
fully contextualizes Stevens’ embrace of abstraction. For Longenbach, the
abstract spirit of Stevens’ early 1940s writing marks ‘not a retreat from the
political content of the social realism of the 1930s’ but ‘a rebellion against
the coercive demand of ideological explicitness’ and ‘an assertion of inter-
nationalist values’. Longenbach cites the 1943 Abstract Expressionist
manifesto ‘Globalism’, spearheaded by Rothko and Gottlieb, which
challenged the ‘narrow political isolationism’ still persisting after Pearl
Harbor. These painters sought ‘a language transcending the barriers of
nationality and class – the language of abstraction’.100 There was noth-
ing ahistorical or solipsistic to this approach. The Abstract Expressionists
were, Longenbach explains, resisting propagandist art precisely because
that art represented a caricature of the world.
Thus, ‘To say “it must be abstract” is to assert that “it cannot possibly
be otherwise than abstract” and that “it cannot possibly leave the histor-
ical world behind”’.101 Certainly, Stevens’ abstract side is misinterpreted if
construed as a desire to quit history or contemporary society. In harness-
ing Blanchot and Focillon especially, this book shows how Stevens cannot
sensibly be accused of such escapism. As Longenbach suggests: ‘the impos-
sibility of sustaining the imperative “it must be abstract” is not a failure to
be overcome but a dialectic to be embraced’, adding, ‘If the purely abstract’
necessarily evades us, ‘the continual effort to remake the supreme fiction is
the only way we can approach the condition of abstraction, retaining the
fiction’s availability to all people in all places and times’.102
98
Cook, Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War, 231. This goes further than Robert Pack, who
argues: ‘The hero is an abstraction, but as he appears in each poem he becomes the concretiza-
tion of the ideal’ (Wallace Stevens: An Approach to his Poetry and Thought [New York: Gordian,
1968], 157).
99
Cook, Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War, 231.
100
James Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 253.
101
Longenbach, Wallace Stevens, 254.
102
Ibid., 255–6.
Introduction 23
But it is Leggett and Altieri who have most persistently scrutinized
the workings of abstraction in Stevens. Leggett’s Wallace Stevens and
Poetic Theory disputes Doggett’s, Donoghue’s and Jarrell’s tendency to
equate abstraction with ‘an aphoristic and generalizing style’.103 However,
although Leggett rightly challenges this idea, Doggett’s conception of
Stevens’ ‘poetry of thought’ is more nuanced than this grouping sug-
gests.104 Leggett also disputes Martz’s attention to the ‘root meaning –
abstrahere, to draw away’ and questions how, ‘in a strange turnabout,
the abstract is associated with the concrete, the fully realized’.105 But ‘the
abstract’ should not be conceived as ‘the opposite of real’, a notion Leggett
derives from only part of Stevens’ reactions to philosophy, namely a
blunt-headed distinction between ‘the real’ and ‘unreal’, the ‘official’ and
‘unofficial’.106 Even if, as philosophically ‘harassing master[s]’, we main-
tain abstract poetic ideas are less ‘real’ than ‘the pans above the stove, the
pots on the table’, our distinction risks demoting ‘the abstract’ to a flight
of fancy where the ‘more abstract’ Stevens becomes, the more unread-
able, less relevant his poetry appears.107 Leggett inadvertently supports the
criticism that Stevensian abstraction equals negative removal from ‘real-
ity’. His uneasiness with Stevens’ most abstract poems – as he struggles to
defend their abstract qualities – suggests as much.
I dispute, therefore, a number of Leggett’s early arguments as well as
some aired more recently in Late Stevens: The Final Fiction.108 Leggett is
much closer to the spirit of Stevens’ poetry when he argues it captures ‘an
epistemology by which even the most sensuous detail remains radically
a product of abstraction’.109 Against this background, it is curious he did
not yield to Martz, who highlights abstraction’s realization of particu-
lars and ‘the observer’s place in the world’.110 What prevents Leggett from
embracing Martz, however, is the thought that Stevens might, after all,
be using ‘abstract’ in an unconventional sense. In other words, Leggett
appears stuck between claiming Stevens is conventional in his use of
103
104
Doggett’s ‘abstraction’ is actually linked with idealism and the ‘fictive’ (see Doggett, Poetry of
Thought, 107 and 207ff.).
105
106
See B. J. Leggett, ‘Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore: Two Essays and a Private Review’
WSJ 10.2 (1986), 81 and ‘Stevens’ Late Poetry’ in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens
ed. John N. Serio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 65.
107
See CPP, 415, 365.
108
B. J. Leggett, Late Stevens: The Final Fiction (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University
Press, 2005).
109
110
Martz, ‘The World of Wallace Stevens’, 100.
‘abstract’ (as opposing the ‘real’) whilst suggesting an unconventional role
for abstraction: namely, that it allies intimately with sensuous particulars,
something his Late Stevens seems bound to deny in its ambivalence con-
cerning Stevens’ most abstract poems (I also question Leggett’s lumping
together of Hillis Miller, Pearce and Riddel as adherents of an abstraction
aimed at reaching through to ultimate reality).111
Leggett does sensibly question the use of Stevens’ 1950s interest in
‘decreation’ to account for the poet’s 1942 understanding of abstraction.
He addresses, therefore, ‘the conception of abstraction that Stevens him-
self held when he wrote Notes’. But it is unlikely, as Leggett believes,
that Stevens took his 1942 reading of Henri Focillon literally in believ-
ing an absolute world of forms directs the artist.112 Late Stevens even
argues: ‘Stevens’ late poetry, unlike “Notes,” does in fact embody a version
of the supreme fiction, not merely as description or illustration but as a
belief given concrete form, realized.’113 Referring to a retrospective state-
ment Stevens made in 1954 – which identified his ‘supreme fiction’ as the
‘central theme’ to which his other poems concerning ‘reality’ and ‘imagin-
ation’ were ‘marginal’ – Leggett claims Stevens finally gave ‘form to what
was formless in “Notes”’.114 Certainly, the 1954 statement was revisionist.
For example, the more ‘accessible’ poetry of The Rock differs in expression
from the bejewelled rhetoric of ‘Notes’. But there is much more to Stevens’
final work than The Rock; and, as suggested, even The Rock offers a com-
pelling admixture of ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ abstract manoeuvres. For instance,
‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’, a poem where personal reflection is
almost absent, provides a subtle contrast to The Rock’s ‘warmer’ texts.115
But how can The Rock or other late work realize Stevens’ ‘supreme fic-
tion’, however modestly? Leggett’s inter-textual reading of Stevens – where
111
See Leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 21–2. Miller insists it is ‘impossible’ to ‘walk
barefoot into reality’ and claims ‘To place reality in the imagination by abstracting it does
not mean, however, twisting it into some unreal mental fiction. It means the power to carry
the image of the very thing alive and undistorted into the mind’, J. Hillis Miller, Poets of
Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965),
246–7. Pace Leggett and Miller, this last sentence does not sound like ‘reach[ing] the uncreated
rock of reality behind’. It is the ‘image’ of the very thing that is arrested rather than the thing
itself. Likewise, Riddel is more dialectical and idealist than Leggett suggests: ‘The poet […] not
only lives by abstraction but knows he lives by abstraction […] [H]e knows that although he
lives at the edge of things, he lives in the center of himself where abstractions are created’, The
Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State
112
113
See ibid., 15–16; Leggett, Late Stevens, 3.
114
L, 820. Leggett, Late Stevens, 3.
115
CPP, 451.
Introduction 25
Stevens is ‘read’ through other Stevens texts – encourages this notion.
Although Stevens’ work is unquestionably self-referential and self-
reflexive, Leggett thereby risks reading ‘late Stevens’ in almost purely
Stevensian terms. Certain readings also merely construe abstraction as
negative. For example, Leggett casts late and last Stevens as follows:
Although difficult from the beginning, Stevens’ poetry had become increasingly
theoretical and abstract, and thus increasingly obscure, since Parts of a World
in 1942 […] The Auroras of Autumn represents the culmination of this tendency.
[…] [T]he poems of The Rock are unexpectedly plain, stripped of the imagina-
tive flourishes and epistemological quandaries of the preceding volumes. Stevens’
late poems are thus not of a piece formally or stylistically, even if they address
many of the same themes.116
Whether or not Stevens became ‘increasingly obscure’ as his poetry
became ‘increasingly […] abstract’, those approaching The Rock for the
first time would be surprised to hear this is a poetry ‘stripped of the
imaginative flourishes’ and ‘epistemological quandaries’ of Stevens’ earlier
work. Certainly, The Rock addresses the quotidian in an idiom desiring
plainness or ordinariness. But this change of tone reveals a poet more
accommodated to abstraction rather than one correcting too abstract an
idiom. It is as though Leggett denies Stevens his more abstract poems
because they do not, apparently, sit comfortably with the ‘personal’
engagements of The Rock: Jarrell once again.
Admittedly, Leggett knows his position is complicated by the overtly
abstract ‘last Stevens’, the poetry written after such ‘final’ pieces as ‘Not
Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself’ and ‘The Planet on the
Table’. Referring to the uncollected poems in Opus Posthumous from
1954–55, Leggett claims: ‘As a group, these poems […] are less accessible
than the poems of The Rock, more abstract, less personal. “As You Leave
the Room,” “Of Mere Being” and “Reality Is an Activity of the Most
August Imagination” would have been at home in The Rock. “The Sail
of Ulysses” would not.’ 117 But if The Rock is ‘more personal’, how can ‘Of
Mere Being’ be ‘at home in The Rock’? Leggett himself describes ‘Of Mere
Being’ as one of ‘the coldest and most impersonal of the last poems’.118
Leggett’s negative rendering overlooks Stevens’ ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ expres-
sions of abstraction; which obliterate the nominal ‘tension’ in the late
poetry between abstract expression v. ‘reality’, between a ‘poetry of ideas’
v. one of domestic reflections on old-age or the quotidian.
116
Leggett, ‘Stevens’ Late Poetry’, 62. 117
Ibid., 74. 118
Ibid., 74.
By contrast, Altieri argues of Stevens’ work:
These exercises in abstraction have the important consequence of enabling us
to display to ourselves human powers […] One cannot defend Stevens’ ideas as
ideas without denying the paradox on which they are founded – that their value
as ideas is not in their truth claims per se but in the life they create within the
scene that displays them.119
This performative quality is crucial. Altieri maintains, however, that
Stevens was not aping Modernist art: ‘Stevens derived his principles from
painterly examples […] but familiarity need not entail influence […]
Stevens wants to pose poetic language as a form of abstraction more res-
onant and representative than anything produced for the eye.’ 120 Altieri
thus implicitly takes his lead from the Stevens who claims poetry should
be ‘a little hard / To see’.121 Stevens, for his part, was perhaps realizing
the claims of his early mentor Santayana: ‘The visible landscape is not a
proper object for poetry […] [T]here is a sort of landscape larger than the
visible, which escapes the synthesis of the eye; it is present to that topo-
graphical sense by which we always live in the consciousness that there is
a sea […] even when we do not see it’.122
Charles Tomlinson’s frustrations with Stevens are telling in precisely
this respect.123 In a 1964 interview, Tomlinson explained:
It was a case of being haunted [by Stevens] rather than of cold imitation. I was
also a painter and this meant that I had far more interest in the particulars of
a landscape or an object than Stevens. Stevens rarely makes one see anything in
detail for all his talk about a physical universe.124
Tomlinson added elsewhere:
[W]as there ever a poetry which stood so explicitly by a physical universe and
against transcendence, but which gives so little account of that universe, its
spaces, patterns, textures, ‘a world of canon and fugue’, such as Hopkins spoke
of seeing before him.125
119
Charles Altieri, ‘Why Stevens Must Be Abstract, or What a Poet Can Learn from Painting’ in
Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism ed. Albert Gelpi (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 89–90.
120
Ibid., 90.
121
CPP, 275. Altieri has recently explicated the ‘concrete abstractness’ in Stevens’ late poetry. See
Altieri, ‘Why “Angel Surrounded by Paysans” Concludes The Auroras of Autumn’ WSJ 32.2
(2008), 152.
122
George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Scribner’s, 1900), 274.
123
See Gareth Reeves, ‘A Ghost Never Exorcized: Stevens in the Poetry of Charles Tomlinson’
in Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic ed. Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg (London: Palgrave,
2008), 186–203.
124
Ian Hamilton, ‘Four Conversations’ London Magazine 4 (1964), 83.
125
Charles Tomlinson, Preface to The Necklace (Swinford: Fantasy Press, 1955), 5.
Introduction 27
This overlooks the creative power of Stevensian abstraction. For there is
a different vision involved in not making readers see things as directly
as Tomlinson craves. But I will return to the visible, the invisible and
Merleau-Ponty’s ‘in-visible’ in relation to Stevens’ abstract gaze below.
Altieri’s sense of abstraction, then, relates to unconventional modes of
‘seeing’; and what he calls the domination of ‘third person’ over ‘first per-
son’ concerns. Borrowing from Wittgenstein’s Notebooks to describe the
abstract ‘self’ or selves Stevensian poems generate, Altieri quotes:
Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? […] I think that nothing
in the visual field would enable one to infer that it is seen from an eye. The think-
ing subject is surely mere illusion. But the willing subject exists. If the will did not
exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call ‘I’ […] What
is good and evil is essentially the I, not the world […] The ‘I’ is not an object.126
Altieri adds: ‘This non-objective “I” […] could serve as the typical speaker
of a late Stevens poem.’ 127 By contrast, as Chapter 4 argues, Stevens’ ideal-
ist ‘I’ is a kind of object, maybe even a cipher for an impossible objectivity.
At the very least, that speaker is an abstract token, paradoxically intimate
with the personal by possessing hardly any, if any, individuating charac-
teristics at all.
But I want, finally, to return to the alleged problematic of ‘Stevens and
philosophy’, an issue informed by the very question of abstraction. Some
readers still view Stevens’ ‘poetry of ideas’ as a sorry departure from the
exotic verses of Harmonium. Simon Critchley’s Things Merely Are is an
apparent corrective. But the responses to the book have been even more
captivating. Critchley gingerly defends his approach:
Stevens’s verse shows us a way of overcoming epistemology […] I am not min-
ing Stevens’s verse for philosophical puzzles and aperçus in pleasing poetic garb.
Nothing would be more fatuous. On the contrary, I am trying to show […] that
Stevens’s poetry […] contains […] instructive philosophical insight, and […]
that this insight is best expressed poetically. […] I am painfully aware of the
fact that this entire enterprise is a performative self-contradiction[.]128
Eeckhout contends: ‘Critchley is clearly writing about “Philosophy and
Stevens” here. To him […] the notion of providing a “pleasing” aesthetic
“garb” to philosophical ideas is anathema and any attempt at treating phil-
osophy as subservient to the aesthetics of art-making is quickly dismissed
126
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–16 trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper, 1969), 80.
127
Altieri, ‘Why Stevens Must Be Abstract’, 110.
128
Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens
(London: Routledge, 2005), 4.
as fatuous.’ In other words, if Critchley wants to avoid the charge of ‘min-
ing Stevens’s verse for philosophical puzzles’, Eeckhout sees this as faux
subservience to poetry.129
Eeckhout’s own position proves compelling:
A residual antagonism between poetry and philosophy, then, is noticeable in
even the most elegant and admiring attempts at bringing the two together […]
Stevens himself was given to expressing this antagonism on occasion. In spite of
his own attraction to philosophy, and his well-attested appeal to philosophically
oriented readers, we should not be made to forget too soon that he remained a
poet first and foremost[.]130
But is it not possible to counter this ‘residual antagonism’ by dispatching
such reified categories as ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’? Derrida’s and Rorty’s
works, as Eeckhout knows, suggest as much. We might then at least avoid
the philosophical ‘running in circles’ Critchley represents (however much
an understandable ‘performative self-contradiction’).
Critchley defends his critical impetus as deriving from Stevens’ appar-
ent inability to transliterate ‘the philosophical content of his poetry
into philosophical prose’. But if Critchley is right in saying this con-
tent is ‘best expressed poetically’, how is Stevens’ ‘case’ an ‘oddity’?131
Critchley asks: ‘What is it about the particular meditative poetic form
that he developed that is able to carry genuine philosophical weight and
yet which is impossible to translate into prose?’ Yet the claim that such
‘philosophical weight’ is ‘impossible to translate into prose’ is different,
surely, from the suggestion Stevens failed to broach ‘philosophy’ convin-
cingly in his prose. Moreover, if a poetry–philosophy distinction is relin-
quished and Stevens’ texts are seen as different expressions of an evolving
abstract idiom, Critchley’s conundrum disappears.132
Paul Valéry, whose writing Stevens prefaced for a translation commis-
sioned in 1954, illustrates the positive combination of poetry and philoso-
phy.133 Bloom attributes Stevens’ sense of abstraction to Valéry.134 Valéry’s
129
Eeckhout, ‘Stevens and Philosophy’, 115.
130
Ibid., 116.
131
Critchley, Things Merely Are, 31.
132
For other responses to Critchley, see Charles Altieri, ‘Stevens and the Crisis of European
Philosophy’ in Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic, ed. Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg
(London: Palgrave, 2008), 70–1, and Krzysztof Ziarek, ‘“Without human meaning”: Stevens,
Heidegger and the Foreignness of Poetry’ in Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic ed. Bart Eeckhout
and Edward Ragg (London: Palgrave, 2008), 86–8.
133
Wallace Stevens, ‘Two Prefaces’ in Paul Valéry, Dialogues trans. William McCausland Stewart
(London: Routledge, 1957), vii–xxviii; reprinted CPP, 879–94.
134
Bloom, Wallace Stevens, 173.
Introduction 29
‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ (1939) – with which Stevens was perhaps
not familiar until 1948 – certainly coincides with my claims for Stevensian
abstraction; especially in arguing a ‘poet’s function […] is not to experi-
ence the poetic state’ but ‘to create it in others’.135 Valéry’s insistence on the
physical aspect of abstract thinking is also similar to Mauron’s emphasis
on the sensation of ideas.136 Lisa Goldfarb rightly observes that Stevens
criticism should pay greater attention to Valéry.137 The present work is
concerned more with Stevens’ relations with Focillon, Mauron, Blanchot
and Merleau-Ponty, but refers to Valéry throughout.
Finally, we should not forget the centrality of pleasure in Stevens’ work
and his enjoyment in projecting abstract notions. Stevens understood that
‘reality’ is mentally created but that its creation depends upon abstracting
‘real’ objects from the world. Consequently, the more abstract a notion
the greater the potential pleasure of realizing its ‘reality’. As the young
Marcel reflects on reading Bergotte in Proust’s The Way by Swann’s:
I no longer had the impression I was in the presence of a particular passage from
a certain book by Bergotte, tracing on the surface of my mind a purely linear
figure, but rather of the ‘ideal passage’ by Bergotte, common to all his books, to
which all the analogous passages that merged with it had added a sort of thick-
ness, a sort of volume, by which my mind seemed enlarged.138
Ideas or ‘ideals’ are, then, the palpable agents for touching and being
touched by ‘the thing itself’, for manipulating reality in the space where
mind and world interact. This kind of abstraction – based on an ideal
that is nonetheless part of ‘reality’ – is central to Stevens’ work and prac-
tice. As we shall see, it comprises a misunderstood aesthetic that actually
defines the poet’s contact with life at large.
135
Paul Valéry, ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ in The Art of Poetry trans. Denise Folliot, intro. T.
S. Eliot (London: Routledge, 1958), 60. The essay was also translated by Gerard Hopkins for
Essays on Language and Literature ed. J. L. Hevesi (London: Wingate, 1947), a book Stevens
owned in the 1948 edition; see Robert Moynihan, ‘Checklist: Second Purchase, Wallace Stevens
Collection, Huntington Library’ WSJ 20.1 (1996), 89.
136
See Valéry, ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’, 57–8.
137
Lisa Goldfarb, ‘“The Figure Concealed”: Valéryan Echoes in Stevens’ Ideas of Music’ WSJ 28.1
(2004), 39.
138
Marcel Proust, The Way by Swann’s trans. Lydia Davis (London: Penguin, 2003), 96.
C H APTER 1
The abstract impulse: from anecdote to ‘new

romantic’ in Harmonium (1923) and
Ideas of Order (1935)
In January 1935, answering Ronald Lane Latimer’s request for an inscribed

copy of Harmonium, Stevens wrote:
I shall be very glad to inscribe HARMONIUM. Some time ago a most agree-
able damsel called me up on the telephone to say that she was passing through
Hartford and would I inscribe her copy of HARMONIUM. I told her that I
wondered that she did not prefer to leave it without an inscription, since, so far
as I knew, that was the only copy without an inscription in existence. But I find
that I was, after all, mistaken.
Now, wouldn’t it be much better just to paste this amusing anecdote in your
copy?1
Stevens had good reason to be ironic about his first book. The poet knew
well that neither was Harmonium an autographed edition nor had his
signature been in demand following its publication in September 1923.
He could joke about ‘only one copy without an inscription in existence’
because, despite featuring in the little magazines, Stevens was not, like
Byron, made famous overnight.2 Agreeable damsels flung themselves
at his Romantic predecessor, but such advances were rare for Stevens.3
However, as so often in Stevens’ correspondence, surface humour accen-
tuates a deep-seated wit. Latimer was eagerly awaiting the manuscript of
Stevens’ second book Ideas of Order, and his request for an inscribed copy
of Harmonium jostled the poet’s nerves about his publishing prospects
almost twelve years on.
Harmonium had relied on anecdote as a poetic vehicle. Stevens’ suggest-
ing the anecdote of the ‘agreeable damsel’, rather than his own name, be
inscribed in Latimer’s copy indicates, then, the extent to which the poet
associated his 1923 poetics – even his own name and reputation – with
1
L, 273.
2
See Tony Sharpe, Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 111ff.
3
The arguably ‘agreeable’ Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhofen stalked Stevens in Manhattan.
See Williams, ‘Comment: Wallace Stevens’, 234.
30
The abstract impulse 31
anecdote. Anecdote was also the signature of Stevens’ earlier poetic
style, a hallmark traceable not merely to Harmonium but to those lyr-
ics experimenting with story-telling, constructing personae – as in ‘Peter
Parasol’ – and even effacing the name Wallace Stevens altogether (as in
the early pseudonyms ‘Kenneth Malone’ or ‘Carrol More’).4 Stevens’ sug-
gestion that the author of Harmonium had better paste an anecdote about
his own book of anecdotes into Latimer’s copy rather than sign his own
name does not merely comment on Harmonium, however. Whether or
not Latimer inferred as much, the poet was articulating the hope that
‘Wallace Stevens’ would stand for something new in 1935. Indeed, his
compiling of Ideas of Order for Latimer’s Alcestis Press rather than for his
trade publisher Alfred A. Knopf indirectly indicated the desire to tran-
scend the poetic that had initiated Harmonium.
The distance between Ideas of Order and Harmonium is not, however, as
great as Stevens wished. In fact, the dialogue between these books accen-
tuates the abstract impulse that led Stevens to create a modified idiom in
the mid-to-late 1930s. As much as the 1935 Stevens wanted to transcend
Harmonium, the difficulty he experienced in compiling and publishing his
first book haunted his second; not least in ‘Academic Discourse at Havana’
(1923/1929), which appeared in book form first in Ideas of Order, but which
derives from the Harmonium years.5 Indeed, Stevens’ desire to conceive
what by the mid-1930s he called a ‘new romantic’ had as much to do with
transcending the quasi-impromptu aesthetic of Harmonium – an unrepeat-
able, ‘one-off’ performance – as it had with conceiving a modernized ‘pure
poetry’ during the Depression (the problematic of Stevens’ ‘pure poetry’
is discussed further on p. 52).6 In fact, it was precisely Stevens’ misgivings
about the applicability of Harmonium in the changed world of the 1930s
that prompted his adjusted diction and the search for a novel voice. But in
order to understand Harmonium’s place in the origins of this new abstract
rhetoric one has to appreciate the tension manifest in Harmonium itself
between anecdote – a ‘poetic form’ suited to little magazine culture – and
poetry published in book form.
The root of ‘anecdote’ is anekdota: ‘things unpublished’. ‘Anecdota’ signify
‘secret, private, or hitherto unpublished narratives’ (OED 1). Commonly,
4
‘Peter Parasol’, CPP, 548. See J. M. Edelstein, Wallace Stevens: A Descriptive Bibliography
(Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 1973), 192–3.
5
CPP, 115–17.
6
Even before the Depression Stevens was urged not to ‘repeat Harmonium’: ‘“Harmonium” is a sub-
limation which does not permit of a sequel’, John Gould Fletcher, ‘The Revival of Aestheticism’
The Freeman 8.197 (19 December, 1923), 356.
an anecdote is ‘a detached incident […] told as being in itself interesting
or striking’ (OED 2.a). Poems such as ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ (1919), ‘Earthy
Anecdote’ (1918), among other Harmonium ‘Anecdote’ poems, caught the
attention of the little magazines precisely because they comprised ‘hith-
erto unpublished’, even private, narratives which for brevity and wit were
in themselves ‘interesting or striking’.7 But the majority of the Harmonium
poems, from ‘Valley Candle’ (1917) to ‘The Doctor of Geneva’ (1921), rely on
anecdote as an arresting narrative device.8 What is less obvious is Stevens’
unease in compiling these subtle ‘improvisations’ as a first collection. For
although his appearances in Contact or The Little Review comprised literal
publications, the ephemeral, experimental milieu of the little magazines was
radically different from the world of Knopf’s trade hardbacks. Stevens even
agonized over grouping his early poems. Finalizing ‘Pecksniffiana’ (1919), he
asked Harriet Monroe to exclude one poem because ‘it is cabbage instead
of the crisp lettuce intended’.9 Stevens would re-use the metaphor when
assembling Harmonium, writing to Monroe in late 1922: ‘to pick a crisp
salad from the garbage of the past is no snap’.10 Perhaps Stevens preferred
his anecdotes in a paradoxically unpublished state; or at least in the context
of the little magazines where, after all, they remained crisp.
Such anxiety stands behind one Harmonium poem especially. In 1921
Stevens submitted ‘From the Journal of Crispin’ for the Poetry Society of
South Carolina’s Blindman Prize. When Grace Hazard Conkling won the
award, Stevens revised the poem, initially for Pitts Sanborn’s Measure.11
Simultaneously, Carl Van Vechten cajoled Stevens into presenting a book
to Knopf, and only a few months after re-shaping the poem Stevens com-
pleted his manuscript.12 The revision of ‘From the Journal of Crispin’ is
significant, therefore, because it occurred precisely at the point where
Stevens pondered publishing his first major long poem after ‘Le Monocle
de Mon Oncle’ (1918) in little magazine or book form. The resulting poem,
‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ (1923), marks this tension. Never finally
submitted to any magazine, ‘The Comedian’ became the only poem in
Stevens’ manuscript to be written specifically for Harmonium.
‘From the Journal of Crispin’ and ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ are,
in their different ways, preoccupied with books. The final section of ‘From
the Journal of Crispin’ is entitled ‘The Idea of a Colony’, and although
that ‘colony’ remains imaginary – although it ‘may not arrive’ – Crispin’s
7
‘Anecdote of the Jar’ Poetry 15.1 (1919), 8; ‘Earthy Anecdote’ Modern School 5.7 (1918), 193, Others
5.6 (1919), 14; CPP, 60, 3.
8
CPP, 41, 19. 9 L, 214. 10 Ibid., 232. 11 Ibid., 226, 229. 12 Ibid., 232.
journal insists its ‘site / Exists’.13 Such a ‘colony’, if not realizable as a place,
is the space where Crispin’s journal is conceived as finally achieving the
reality of a book. The poem apparently dispels the solipsistic concern that
Crispin’s journal only ‘at the best, concerns himself’, insisting:
No, no: veracious page on page, exact.
As Crispin in his attic shapes the book
That will contain him, he requires this end:
The book shall discourse of himself alone,
Of what he was, and why, and of his place,
And of its fitful pomp and parentage.
Thereafter he may stalk in other spheres.
(CPP, 995)
As poet-figure, Crispin demonstrates the need to convert the hearsay

of a journal – replete with anecdotes about ‘Mexican sonneteers’ – into
the indisputable reality of a finished book.14 Stevens is, however, playful
because Crispin’s book – the text that ‘shall discourse of himself alone’ –
is alarmingly similar to the original journal which ‘at the best, concerns
himself’.15 Moreover, Crispin, having completed that book, ‘may stalk in’
rather than ‘talk of’ other spheres. ‘From the Journal of Crispin’ satirizes,
therefore, the desire to sum oneself up in a book, suggesting that the lit-
erary creator always stalks an unrealizable prey: for instance, the prize of
attaining the book that ‘will contain’ the poet himself.16
But where ‘From the Journal of Crispin’ comically questions how
Crispin can realize himself in a book, ‘The Comedian’ resigns itself to the
impossibility of concluding the poem Stevens actually needed to finish in
order to complete Harmonium. Significantly, ‘The Comedian’ leaves its
reader a choice of anecdotes with which to ‘conclude’ the poem, a choice
which nominally ‘decides’ what Crispin becomes:
Score this anecdote
Invented for its pith […] as Crispin willed,
[…]
Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote
Is false, if Crispin is a profitless
Philosopher, beginning with green brag,
Concluding fadedly […]
Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure,
CPP, 995. 14 Ibid., 989. 15 Ibid., 995.

13
Maurice Blanchot, after Mallarmé, argues that books accentuate the unattainable reality of the
16
poet’s ‘work’. See ‘The Essential Solitude’ in The Space of Literature trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 23.
[…]
And so distorting, proving what he proves
Is nothing, what can all this matter since
The relation comes, benignly, to its end?
So may the relation of each man be clipped.
(CPP, 36–7)
This is ‘concluding fadedly’. Delegating completion of the poem to

the reader is a Pyrrhic victory because neither anecdote is effectively
endorsed: ‘what can all this matter since / The relation comes, benignly,
to its end?’
‘Relation’ suggests here as much Stevens’ relationship with the poem as
it does Crispin’s with his cabin and daughters with curls. Although one
is supposed to decide Crispin’s ‘true’ character, as soon as Stevens relin-
quishes authorship Crispin becomes irrelevant. The ‘concluding’ phrase,
‘So may the relation of each man be clipped’ – clipped from the poem’s
main body in a single line – adds insult to injury as Stevens plucks him-
self from his own poem, leaving two ‘benign’ (because insignificant) anec-
dotes in his wake. As ‘Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze
Mille Vierges’ (1915) has it, Stevens’ reader is left to finish a poem ‘not writ
/ In any book’.17 It remains a poem which, despite Stevens’ invitation, the
reader cannot complete for him. But, whereas ‘Cy est Pourtraicte’ finds
ironic tension as an anecdote whose story is not ‘writ / In any book’ and
yet appears in Harmonium – and was later published as a book – ‘The
Comedian’ suffers from the reverse scenario. Each of the anecdotes posed
at the poem’s ‘close’ is written into the text but the reader cannot write
the end of Stevens’ poem for him.18 The relation has been clipped.
In failing to finish ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ Stevens could
hardly have felt the poem was the crisp lettuce intended. If Crispin, des-
pite his name, appears slightly soggy in Harmonium it is because Stevens
was not yet confident in compiling book collections, fearful, as he was, of
miscellany (the broad, organizing principle of ‘ideas of order’ illustrates
how his abstract impulse subsequently helped him overcome the prob-
lem). Nor had Stevens yet discovered how to utilize anecdote in longer
poems suitable for book publication. But how does this aesthetic tension
influence Ideas of Order as well as the creation of the abstract idiom which
would occupy Stevens for the next decade and beyond?
CPP, 17.
17
Wallace Stevens, Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges (San
18
Francisco: Cody’s Books, 1966).

One of the last poems Stevens wrote before his five-year poetic silence
is ‘Academic Discourse at Havana’ (1923/1929). Originally published as
‘Discourse in a Cantina at Havana’ (1923) and re-published in 1929 with
minuscule changes, the poem entered Ideas of Order through the backdoor
of Harmonium, where it remains largely unnoticed for the glare of Stevens’
Florida poems.19 Some accounts of the poet’s silence rely on Stevens’ own
claims that the arrival of Holly Stevens and increased insurance work
meant ‘[n]othing short of a coup d’état would make it possible […] to
write poetry now’. But Stevens’ complaints about such intrusions tell
only a partial story.20 In ‘Academic Discourse at Havana’ doubts emerge
concerning the poet’s role. In other words, this poem, written just before
and revised immediately after the poet’s silence, provides possible textual
clues as to why Stevens stopped writing and why he resumed in the early
1930s with a pointedly abstract vocabulary. That ‘Academic Discourse’
contrasts significantly with Stevens’ mid-1930s concept of a ‘new roman-
tic’, the new Florida poems and the ‘ideas of order’ motif accentuates how
Ideas attempts to overcome the tension surfacing in Stevens’ 1923 poem.
However, ‘Academic Discourse’ is closer to Ideas of Order than one might
think. The poem creates a tension within Ideas which contextualizes the
impetus for the poet’s ‘new romantic’ as symbolizing the aesthetic need
to re-adjust Harmonium’s gaudiness (an aim in which Ideas is only par-
tially successful). This aesthetic manoeuvre sheds light on the poet Stevens
became as he ventured into increasingly abstract terrain.
Before turning to ‘Academic Discourse’, however, I want to explore
Stevens’ 1930s ‘new romantic’. This concept is re-examined here not as
a tool for reading Ideas of Order, but as an example of the seductiveness
of Stevens’ new abstract rhetoric; one which has led Stevens criticism
into appealing but unrevealing hermeneutic circles. The ‘romantic’ first
appears in 1934:
It should be said of poetry that it is essentially romantic […] Although the
romantic is referred to, most often, in a pejorative sense, this sense attaches
[…] not to the romantic in general but to some phase of the romantic that has
19
Wallace Stevens, ‘Discourse in a Cantina at Havana’ Broom 5.4 (1923), 201–3; ‘Academic
Discourse at Havana’ Hound & Horn 3.1 (1929), 53–6. The poem was, however, anthologized
in Kimon Friar and John Malcolm Brinnin, eds, Modern Poetry: American and British (New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), 81–3.
20
L, 261, 244. See Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered: An Oral Biography
(New York: Random House, 1983), 244–5 and George S. Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s
Growth (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 119–21. Lensing also queries
Stevens’ ‘reasons’.
become stale. Just as there is always a romantic that is potent, so there is always
a romantic that is impotent.21
Stevens would re-use the term in his preface to Williams’ 1934 Collected
Poems and invoke the ‘romantic’ as both potent and impotent force in
reviewing Moore’s 1935 Selected Poems (a book he annotated heavily).22
By mid-1935 the potent ‘romantic’ became ‘new’:
When people speak of the romantic, they do so in […] a pejorative sense. But poetry
is essentially romantic, only the romantic of poetry must be something constantly
new and, therefore, just the opposite of what is spoken of as the romantic. Without
this new romantic one gets nowhere; with it, the most casual things take on tran-
scendence, and the poet rushes brightly […] What one is always doing is keeping
the romantic pure: eliminating from it what people speak of as the romantic.23
Here Stevens glosses ‘Sailing after Lunch’ (1935), submitted to Latimer’s
short-lived Alcestis magazine. The poem opens the Alcestis edition of
Ideas, advertising Stevens’ seductive term and noting its ‘pejorative’ sense
(‘It is the word pejorative that hurts’), along with the ‘transcendence’ the
poet achieves through a ‘new’ romantic:
Mon Dieu, hear the poet’s prayer.
The romantic should be here.
The romantic should be there.
It ought to be everywhere.
But the romantic must never remain,
Mon Dieu, and must never again return.
[…]
It is only the way one feels
[…]
To expunge all people and be a pupil
Of the gorgeous wheel and so to give
That slight transcendence to the dirty sail,
By light, the way one feels, sharp white,
And then rush brightly through the summer air.
(CPP, 99–100)
Note ‘the gorgeous wheel’ Stevens’ term comprises. The pejorative

sense of ‘romantic’ derives from contemporary critiques of Romanticism,
21
Wallace Stevens, Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book ed. Milton J.
Bates (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 31.
22
‘Introduction’ to William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems 1921–1931 (New York: The Objectivist
Press, 1934); ‘A Poet That Matters’ Life and Letters Today 13.2 (1935) (CPP, 768–71, 774–80). See
Stevens’ copy of Moore’s Selected Poems intro. T. S. Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1935).
23
L, 277.
particularly a Romantic aesthetic grown sentimental or clichéd (Stevens
refers to Irving Babbitt in his review of Moore).24 But the ‘new romantic’
becomes a self-perpetuating force where poetry rejuvenates itself because
it is ‘essentially romantic’. Through the one term Stevens establishes a
cycle of significance where ‘romantic’ does not merely mean two things
at once. Stevens’ ideal ‘romantic’ must be kept ‘pure’, and this means that
the impotent aesthetic is the site for the potent ‘new romantic’ to flourish.
Like the jar of ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, Stevens’ ‘romantic’ takes ‘dominion
everywhere’.25
Stevens’ notion thus becomes universalist: an infectious piece of
vocabulary absorbing any ascribable meaning. By 1940 the poet stated
‘Communism is just a new romanticism’, by which stage the trope had
apparently exhausted its range of reference.26 But even when applied to
poetics, the ‘romantic’ creates a linguistic circle both Stevens and his crit-
ics have found hard to master. When T. C. Wilson asked for the review of
Moore, Stevens replied:
Miss Moore is endeavoring to create a new romantic […] [T]he way she breaks
up older forms is merely an attempt to free herself for the pursuit of the thing in
which she is interested; and […] the thing in which she is interested […] is that
which is essential to poetry, always: the romantic. But a fresh romantic.27
That ‘fresh’ indicates Stevens’ awareness of the tautology that a poet is
‘romantic’ because she is interested in ‘the romantic’. Of Moore’s ‘romantic’
he writes: ‘Just what it means, Miss Moore’s book discloses’.28 But disclos-
ure is not something linguistic circles perform. They prefer the reiteration
of their own terms; as is evident in some critical responses to the ‘new
romantic’.
For example, Schulze and Bornstein take Stevens’ lead in conceiving
Moore’s ‘romantic’ as ‘hybridizing’. Both critics suggest that to ‘hybridize’
a poetic object – in Moore’s case the ‘moon-vines’ of Stevens’ review – is
to render it provisional, forever open to association.29 This provisionality
is then read back into the ‘new romantic’ because a fresh ‘romantic’ is
always provisional, something that rushes brightly on, unfixed. Referring
to the metaphysician in the dark twanging his guitar in ‘Of Modern
Poetry’ (1940), Bornstein observes: ‘Stevens has created a romantic image
of integration […] but his honest doubt has led him to provisionalize his
own creation by denying its independent actuality’.30 Similarly Schulze,
24
CPP, 778. 25 Ibid., 60–1. 26 L, 351. 27 Ibid., 278–9. CPP, 778.
28
29
See ibid., 778–9.
30
Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism, 4.
linking Stevens’ review with Ideas, concludes: ‘Stevens […] reads Moore
as achieving in form, rhetoric, and content the radical provisionality that
he proposes for the new romantic in “Sailing After Lunch”.’ 31 Ironically,
because the concept of provisionality derives from the ‘new romantic’
itself, such accounts offer only provisional readings of Stevens’ own self-
reflexive aesthetic. For if Stevens’ early 1930s poetic is read solely through
the vocabulary he supplies us, one puts on hold further inquiry into this
very specialist language. Bornstein borrows Stevens’ ‘new romantic’ to
argue for the poet’s over-arching ‘romanticism’, particularly opposite the
British Romantics.32 But, whilst Stevens undoubtedly modifies Romantic
themes, his use of ‘romantic’ varies throughout his career; and ‘the
romantic’ has a very particular currency in the 1930s it does not possess
elsewhere.33
By the mid-1930s, then, Stevens sought an abstract idiom he had not
previously required which attempted to transcend the nominally ‘impo-
tent’ aesthetic of Harmonium. However, Stevens craved rejuvenation
not because the Harmonium anecdotes were defective but because ‘The
Comedian as the Letter C’ inadvertently revealed he was uncomfortable
integrating anecdote into larger, more realized poetic projects (‘Song of
Fixed Accord’ is a late example of a Harmonium-style anecdote, but one
referring ironically to Harmonium’s ‘Depression Before Spring’).34 To effect
transition Stevens transformed the desire for a new aesthetic into a self-
reflexive language designed to overhaul dead ‘romantics’. Once Stevens
created his ‘new romantic’ he could write ‘Farewell to Florida’ (1936), the
poem that would open the trade edition of Ideas of Order and the trad-
itional point of reference for Stevens’ departure from Harmonium’s lux-
urious aesthetic.35
But I am not proposing that the ‘new romantic’ adequately accounts
for the different poetics of Stevens’ first two books. Whilst Ideas grows
out of Harmonium, Stevens’ 1930s rhetoric actually attempts to mask
the aesthetic problem it nominally represents. Specifically, Harmonium
affected Ideas not because the former was a stale ‘romantic’ (hatching a
31
Robin G. Schulze, The Web of Friendship: Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens (Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 114.
32
See Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism, 6–7.
33
‘Imagination as Value’ (1948) does discuss ‘the romantic’, but at this later stage Stevens merely
contrasts abstraction with a pejorative ‘romantic’: ‘The imagination is the only genius […] and
the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction. The achievement of the romantic, on the con-
trary, lies in minor wish-fulfillments and it is incapable of abstraction’, CPP, 728.
34
CPP, 441, 50.
35
Ibid., 97–8. See Kermode, Wallace Stevens, 55–6.
new aesthetic) but because the difficulty Stevens experienced in organ-
izing and completing Harmonium would haunt Ideas, even as his new
abstract idiom attempted to surmount the problem. Retrospectively, of
course, Stevens rationalized his poetic silence as precisely the aesthetic
decision to leave Harmonium behind. ‘Farewell to Florida’ confidently
summarizes ‘The snake has left its skin upon the floor’, an image befitting
the shedding of an outworn ‘romantic’ and, allegorically, the survival of
the poetic Stevens as merely the same animal in a new suit.36 But in 1929
no such certainty pressed to rehabilitate Stevens’ work.
‘Academic Discourse at Havana’, however, demonstrates how much more
than the aesthetic of Harmonium was at stake when Stevens resumed writ-
ing. Put differently, the difficulty Stevens experienced in finishing ‘The
Comedian as the Letter C’ (and Harmonium) affected Ideas of Order not
because Stevens needed to overcome the anecdote, but because the prob-
lem with the ‘end’ of ‘The Comedian’ implicitly questioned the poet’s role,
as the reader’s involvement in the ‘writing’ of that poem partially indicates.
‘Academic Discourse’, drafted not long after ‘The Comedian’, sees the poet
resume his role, but question his task. It is the poem straddling the self-
conscious transition between Harmonium and Ideas; and it is the text that sug-
gests reading Ideas of Order without sole recourse to Stevens’ ‘new romantic’.
‘Academic Discourse at Havana’ concerns the risks of investing faith
in cultural life in general and poetry in particular. Initially, however, the
poem apparently justifies social and aesthetic diversions:
Canaries in the morning, orchestras
In the afternoon, balloons at night. 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.
(CPP, 115)
Stevens admits that in an arena of orchestras and balloons the ‘air’ and
‘earth’ may not be as immediate as they should be (‘The air / Is not so
elemental nor the earth / So near’). However, Stevens’ abrupt ‘but’ defen-
sively insists that what keeps the wilderness alive ‘does not sustain us in
the metropoles’. Nevertheless, such metropolitan confidence is challenged
by a picture of imaginative decay:
36
CPP, 97.
Life is an old casino in a park.
The bills of the swans are flat upon the ground.
A most desolate wind has chilled Rouge-Fatima
And a grand decadence settles down like cold.
But to appreciate this contrast one needs to recall that ‘Academic
Discourse’ is not only remarkable as a neglected part of Ideas of Order. It
is one of the few Stevens poems directly influenced by the poet’s travel-
ling abroad, as he did to Havana twice in 1923.
For example, Stevens implies a preference for Spanish-Catholic deca-
dence over American, and possibly Jewish, culture. On his first trip to
Havana Stevens observed: ‘[t]he place is infinitely more Spanish than I
had supposed’.37 ‘Spanish’ apparently evokes colour, gaiety, exoticism:
The lamp-lighter with his long pole is lighting the lamps on the Prado. A man
on horse-back has just gone by dressed in white. The colors of the dresses in the
automobiles seem chiefly to be shades of pink and orange.38
Stevens stayed in a colonial Spanish setting, the Hotel Sevilla; and
his overall experiences of Spanish Havana bear directly on his poem.39
Canaries are Spanish song-birds; preferred in ‘Academic Discourse’ to
plaintive nightingales, the party-pooping authority of Jehovah and the
Biblical ‘great sea-worm’ (‘Jehovah’ implicitly echoing with ‘Jonah’).
Stevens also wrote to Elsie that he was going to meet ‘Mr. Marion, one of
the representatives of the Hartford Fire’ and that they were to have din-
ner at ‘the Casino, one of the show places of the city’.40 A ‘casino’ thus fea-
tured in Stevens’ apparent mixing of business and pleasure in Havana in
February 1923, and the aphorism ‘Life is an old casino in a park’ entered
the poem because the casino conjures both Havana and a climate of risk
(risk obviously being central to the insurance industry).41
That ‘casino’ is also Hispanic because Spanish survivors of the
Republic, dismembered after the Spanish–American war of 1898, referred
to their social establishments as ‘casinos’, whether gambling houses or
otherwise, whilst Americans accentuated their presence by frequenting
‘clubs’.42 Stevens subtly invokes, therefore, the decline of Spanish coloni-
alism in ‘Academic Discourse’ ii. Not only is life a dilapidated ‘casino’;
37
L, 234. 38 Ibid., 236.
39
Ibid., 234. See Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens: The Later Years 1923–1955 (New York: Beech
Tree, 1988), first two plates ff. 128.
40
L, 235.
41
Stevens was not, however, on official business when he met Marion (see L, 233).
42
See Roberto Segre et al., Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis (New York: John Wiley,
1997), 106.
those graceful swans find their bills ‘flat upon the ground’. All Catholic
colour lies frozen: ‘A most desolate wind has chilled Rouge-Fatima / And
a grand decadence settles down like cold’.43 Rouge-Fatima is Stevens’
composite of a casino starlet and the Virgin Mary, thought, as Rehder
notes, to have appeared in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917.44 But she is a chilly
figure set in a terrain whose grandeur has already waned.
Section iii, however, illustrates Stevens’ nominal fears for imaginative
engagement, not least in alluding to Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ (a reference
also contextualized by his Havana letter):
The swans … Before the bills of the swans fell flat
Upon the ground, and before the chronicle
Of affected homage foxed so many books,
They warded the blank waters of the lakes
And island canopies which were entailed
To that casino. Long before the rain
Swept through its boarded windows and the leaves
Filled its encrusted fountains, they arrayed
The twilights of the mythy goober khan.
The centuries of excellence to be
Rose out of promise and became the sooth
Of trombones floating in the trees.
(CPP, 115)
Just as Stevens met with an insurance contact in Havana, he also wears

here an insurance hat. The casino’s decline is traced to the inherent risk in
warding ‘the blank waters of the lakes / And island canopies which were
entailed / To that casino’. ‘Entail’ implies the legal act of bestowing an
‘inalienable possession’ (OED 1). Removing what was inalienable to the
casino necessarily involves the establishment in loss. In fact, the syntax
of ‘Academic Discourse’ accentuates its critique of denying the casino its
entailment. ‘Before the bills of the swans fell flat […] before the chronicle
of affected homage […] long before the rain swept through’: this anaphora
emphasizes the original act leading to the casino’s demise. Yet the main
cause of such dilapidation is having arrayed ‘the twilights of the mythy
goober khan’. What relation has Coleridge’s dream vision to ‘Academic
Discourse’ and why does ‘Kubla Khan’ become ‘goober khan’?
43
By contrast, in a gastronomically inspired letter, Stevens remarked: ‘I suppose that the shrimps
there [Mount St. Michel] are as fat as cherubs and that the sunsets are gorgeous with a Catholic
gorgeousness’, L, 620.
44
Robert Rehder, The Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 98. If overlooked,
the poem does appear in Morse’s ‘Motive for Metaphor’ (19) and Schwartz’s ‘Wallace Stevens: An
Appreciation’ (20–2).
In Coleridge’s poem a pleasure dome is constructed by annexing a
whole area of ‘fertile ground’ and populating it with ‘walls and towers’:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree[.]45
The pleasure dome’s exclusion of the wilderness initiates its own night-
marish transformation. Coleridge’s wailing woman causes the dome to
be transported to the sea. It is turned to ice amidst sounds of war and the
poem concludes with a warning to beware those who have drunk on the
‘milk of Paradise’: those prone to imaginative visions.46
But, despite surface similarities, ‘Academic Discourse at Havana’
and ‘Kubla Khan’ are crucially different. Certainly, both poems’ pleas-
ure domes are cordoned off, seeking an internal splendour distinct from
the ‘sunless sea’ in ‘Kubla Khan’ and the ‘blank waters of the lakes’ in
Stevens’ poem.47 But in ‘Kubla Khan’ the dome is transformed because
of Coleridge’s wailing woman, an external agent, whereas Stevens’ casino
declines because of the act of enclosure itself. There is no external agent,
not even Rouge-Fatima. Where Coleridge has an actual fountain ele-
vating the pleasure dome, Stevens has defunct ‘encrusted fountains’: the
dilapidated result of warding off the lakes entailed to the casino.
But what about arraying ‘the twilights of the mythy goober khan’?
Twilight naturally evokes Coleridge’s dream vision as well as a sense of
cultural demise. In Norse mythology the ‘twilight of the gods’ connotes
imminent destruction, whilst ‘twilight sleep’ (OED) constitutes partial
narcosis designed to ease the pains of childbirth (one thinks of Coleridge’s
taking laudanum before writing ‘Kubla Khan’). Stevens’ implication is
that to array the casino is to dress it in dangerous make-believe. Denying
Stevens’ dome its wild side is precisely what causes the casino’s destitu-
tion. Thus, Section i’s brusque assertion ‘the sustenance of the wilderness /
Does not sustain us in the metropoles’ is seriously questioned. Without
45
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’ (the 1816 text) in Poems ed. John Beer (London: J. M.
Dent, 1993), 205. Stevens quotes from the poem in an early journal, L, 82.
46
Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, line 54, 207.
47
Ibid., line 5, 205; CPP, 115.
that sustenance life becomes the illusion of an immortal fairyland. ‘The
centuries of excellence to be’ are nothing more than the surrealistic ‘sooth’
of ‘trombones floating in the trees’.
As the ‘mythy goober khan’ emerges as a contributing factor in the
casino’s being ‘boarded’ up, ‘Academic Discourse’ critiques such imagina-
tive indulgence:
The toil
Of thought evoked a peace eccentric to
The eye and tinkling to the ear. Gruff drums
Could beat, yet not alarm the populace.
The indolent progressions of the swans
Made earth come right; a peanut parody
For peanut people.
(CPP, 115)
The allusion to ‘Kubla Khan’ persists: those martial ‘gruff drums’ recall

Coleridge’s ‘Ancestral voices prophesying war!’48 Stevens’ ‘toil of thought’
also tropes Coleridge’s ‘toy of Thought’ from ‘Frost at Midnight’ (another
poem standing behind ‘Academic Discourse’).49 Stevens asserts that
imaginative obsessions create a false sense of security where the advance
of an army might ‘not alarm the populace’. But why should this consti-
tute a ‘peanut parody / For peanut people’?
To appreciate why ‘Kubla Khan’ becomes ‘goober khan’ we should
return to Stevens’ Havana letter. ‘Goober’ is, of course, American for
‘peanut’. A ‘goober khan’ is, perhaps, a ‘Leader of Peanuts’. Peanuts also
feature in Stevens’ Havana letter:
There are plenty of places where English is spoken but to move about freely it
is imperative to know Spanish. Even the Chinese speak it. There are a good
many Chinese here. They sell cakes, fish etc. One came up to me on the street
with a big box swung over his shoulder and said ‘Hot Peanuts!’ That’s the
life.50
Stevens associates peanuts with pleasurable consumption (‘That’s the
life’). What recommends Stevens’ Chinese peanut seller, however, is that
he has learnt English (and perhaps Spanish) to survive 1920s Havana.
By contrast, Stevens’ ‘peanut people’ prove less resourceful (the only
language they speak is ‘peanut’). In an unpublished letter Stevens later
observed: ‘Goober Khan merely means a fantastic little building where
48
49
Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798), line 23, 188.
50
L, 235.
they sell peanuts’.51 But the seller Stevens encountered in Havana possesses
no ‘fantastic little building’, and the casino in Stevens’ poem is destroyed
by the make-believe of occupying a ‘peanut’ world.
Admittedly, ‘Academic Discourse’ can invite over-earnest, ‘academic’
leaps of association. For example, was Stevens thinking about ‘Kubla
Khan’ because he was in Cuba and because he met a Chinese man selling
peanuts (the Khan, of course, occupied much of China)? But, whilst Cuba,
Kubla, and goober – like Jehovah/Jonah – apparently echo in Stevens’
mind, how do these verbal resonances bear on ‘Academic Discourse’ and
what stance does the poem adopt before Stevens’ lengthy poetic silence?
Section iii focuses a universalist v. nominalist debate in terms of con-
ceiving ‘reality’. Philosophically speaking, universalists believe in absolute
categories drawn from but irreducible to contingent cultural or intellec-
tual contexts, whereas nominalists contend the world consists in particu-
lars and that nothing is absolute.52 ‘Academic Discourse’ iii slides between
each position in representing ‘reality’ in general and Cuba in particular:
Politic man ordained
Imagination as the fateful sin.
Grandmother and her basketful of pears
Must be the crux of our compendia.
That’s world enough, and more, if one includes
Her daughters to the peached and ivory wench
For whom the towers are built. The burgher’s breast,
And not a delicate ether star-impaled,
Must be the place for prodigy, unless
Prodigious things are tricks. The world is not
The bauble of the sleepless nor a word
That should import a universal pith
To Cuba. Jot these milky matters down.
They nourish Jupiters.
(CPP, 116)
Stevens’ ‘politic man’ is universalist. The poem implies a degree of bour-

geois commonsense where the ‘burgher’s breast’ – and the homely reality
of ‘grandmother and her basketful of pears’ – embody the good citi-
zen’s account of life. Specifically, the grandmother and her daughters
are the stuff of ‘compendia’: convenient abstracts which organize (com-
pendere, ‘weigh together’) the world’s essentials. Stevens anticipates the
Stevens to Kimon Friar, 2 September 1947, WAS, 694.

51
See Simon Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996),
52
387, 264.
Ivory Tower rhetoric of the early 1930s as his politic man dismisses ‘the
ivory wench / For whom the towers are built’. But where Cleanth Brooks
would claim that the reading public not the modern poet inhabits the
Ivory Tower, Stevens allows his burgher’s argument almost full breath.53
Grandmother and pears are ‘world enough, and more’, but only if her
daughters are included with the ‘ivory wench’ (Stevens’ ‘to’ may, admit-
tedly, hedge the assertion).
Certainly, Stevens’ nominalist language subverts the politic man’s paro-
chial security. The poem implies the politic man’s universalism requires
the very things it rejects for self-definition. Stevens’ burgher ‘ordained /
Imagination as the fateful sin’. He gives authority to that of which he nom-
inally disapproves. Imagination becomes a ‘ fateful sin’ perhaps because the
burgher requires the ‘imagination’ as the straw-target from which to project
sensible compendia. Such complicity resounds in Stevens’ ‘prodigy’ which
connotes both ‘marvellous things’ and the ‘prodigious’, something abnor-
mal and/or enormous (OED). For Stevens’ townsman, the imagination’s
insubstantial character (‘a delicate ether star-impaled’) must not interfere
with ‘true’ prodigy, but he cannot escape the fear that ‘prodigious things
are tricks’. Thus the word ‘prodigy’ cannot maintain the constant meaning
the politic man requires precisely because ambiguous particulars – ‘prodi-
gious things’ – intrude on the compilation of words as universal signifiers.
‘Academic Discourse at Havana’, however, goes further by dismantling
its own dialectic. For neither can the world mean anything one wants it
to mean nor can the word ‘world’ have universal resonance, at least from
the vantage of Havana: ‘The world is not / The bauble of the sleepless nor
a word / That should import a universal pith / To Cuba’. Stevens’ poem is
wary of adopting any one philosophical scheme to envisage ‘world’/‘word’;
and clearly fears the negative abstraction implicit in treating the world as
‘bauble’. To engage in such ‘discourse’ is to seek final answers not indis-
tinguishable from those desired by the universalist ‘politic man’:
Jot these milky matters down.
They nourish Jupiters. Their casual pap
Will drop like sweetness in the empty nights
When too great rhapsody is left annulled
And liquorish prayer provokes new sweats: so, so:
Life is an old casino in a wood.
(CPP, 116)
53
Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, [1939] 1965), 68. Stevens referred to ‘Ivory Tower’ rhetoric as late as 1942 (see
Chapter 5’s discussion of ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’).
Stevens’ reader (or imagined poet) is asked to ‘jot’ these ‘milky mat-
ters’ down, as perhaps the academic seed capable of fostering ‘Jupiters’
(arguably whole new universes). Such matters are, however, ‘pap’, con-
noting baby-food, paper pulp and ‘undemanding reading-matter’ (OED).
The ‘discourse’ the poem envisages, then, is playfully gloopy. Like certain
philosophical schemes, or Stevens’ ‘new romantic’, such discourse engulfs
any meaning. Even the pap’s resembling ‘sweetness’ – dropping, manna-
like, from what in reality are ‘empty nights’ – humorously critiques the
metaphysical desire to look to the heavens for final solutions. This is a sat-
ire on the search for ‘prodigy’ because that word’s root prodigium means
‘portent’, and interpreting portents involves discovering what lies behind
the sign.
‘Academic Discourse’ thus proffers a complex language game. On the
one hand, it thrives on verbal associations: Cuba, Kubla, goober. On the
other, it satirizes investing too much faith in any discourse. Stevens’ ‘pap’
is apparently therapeutic, warding off the ‘too great rhapsody’ which
beguiles one into ascribing sacred meanings to compendia or the imagin-
ation. But the poem also casts the very desire to belittle the imagination –
to reduce its ‘milky matters’ to pap – as a paradoxical form of rhapsody;
as Stevens playfully dismisses the role of discourse in the poem’s own
linguistic game. ‘Liquorish’ (not ‘liquorice’) prayer ‘provokes new sweats’,
signifying that faith in a sole vocabulary is like dependence on liquor.
But the desperate prayer the poem ironizes actually re-connects Stevens’
text with its own allusive practice. For ‘Kubla Khan’ conjures its own
‘new sweats’ in the ‘deep romantic chasm’ where ‘fast thick pants were
breathing’.54
Stevens resolves in ‘Academic Discourse’ iii to consign his readers to the
wilderness. Mimicking the ‘academic’ desire to discover steadfast conclu-
sions, his initial aphorism ‘Life is an old casino in a park’ is rephrased: ‘so,
so: / Life is an old casino in a wood’. Amending ‘park’ to ‘wood’ places one
in a less manicured environment where life’s meditations might become
‘elemental’. But the rephrased aphorism does not enable the wilderness to
sustain us in the metropoles. It places the metropolitan in the wilderness,
one where no one can see the wood for the trees.
In questioning the validity of belief in any vocabulary Stevens’ poem
comes to ponder the role of the poet and perhaps the status of ‘pure
poetry’ (‘mere sound’). As if parodying Harmonium and Stevens’ own
early euphuism, Section iv asks:
54
Is the function of the poet here mere sound,
Subtler than the ornatest prophecy,
To stuff the ear? It causes him to make
His infinite repetition and alloys
Of pick of ebon, pick of halcyon.
It weights him with nice logic for the prim.
(CPP, 116)
That last line could have come from ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’.
But Stevens’ wit is directed here at the ‘function of the poet’, not the
poet’s autobiographical journey, whereas ‘The Comedian’ never doubts
‘the poet’, even if it dramatizes Stevens’ inability to finish his own poem.
Poetry itself may be ‘subtler’ than intricate ‘prophecy’ – ‘prophecy’, again,
invoking portents. But it is mistrusted here as mere sound and the mater-
ial of a ‘nice logic’ seemingly too comfortable for Stevens in late 1923. The
‘pick of ebon, pick of halcyon’ also recalls Harmonium, a dandyesque ref-
erence to yet another bird as well as plectrums, or ‘picks’, for serenading
guitars (as in ‘The Ordinary Women’).55 However, the halcyon, unlike the
canary or nightingale, is a mythological calmer of rough seas. Stevens
implicitly ironizes the notion of poetry as an all-harmonizing force and,
perhaps, Harmonium as the ‘halcyon days’ of his early poetic.
‘Academic Discourse’ iv does, however, invest faith in poetry. For all its
doubts about a luxuriant ‘pure poetry’, it credits verse with the ability to
‘reconcile us to our selves’ and to the ‘adroiter harmonies’ of ‘pacific words’.
Stevens anticipates the poetic material of Ideas of Order where ‘pacific’
implies both peace-inducing and the sea; where the ‘exhalations of the
sea’ in ‘Academic Discourse’ pre-figure ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’
(1934), a poem albeit closer to the Gulf of Mexico than the Pacific.56
But, unlike ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, ‘Academic Discourse’ ten-
tatively figures the poet’s ability to speak and mould ‘reality’:
But let the poet on his balcony
Speak and the sleepers in their sleep shall move,
Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors.
This may be benediction, sepulcher,
And epitaph. It may, however, be
An incantation that the moon defines
By mere example opulently clear.
And the old casino likewise may define
An infinite incantation of our selves
In the grand decadence of the perished swans.
(CPP, 117)
See CPP, 8.

55
CPP, 105–6.
56
Stevens’ ‘may’ suspends several ambiguities. The collocation of ‘bene-
diction’, ‘sepulcher’ and ‘epitaph’ sums up the poet-figure’s predicament
precisely. For ‘Academic Discourse’ questions whether the poet’s speech
blesses life or merely comprises distraction, at best an epitaph en route
to the grave. There is at least no indication that poetry will necessarily
‘define’ the ‘infinite incantation of our selves’, a role that is at least accred-
ited to song in ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ with its ‘[w]ords’ ‘of our-
selves and of our origins’.57
‘Academic Discourse at Havana’ is, therefore, a pivotal poem in Stevens’
early development, its concerns over imaginative creation anticipating the
poet’s own problematic silence from 1924 to 1929. In 1924 Stevens wrote
‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’ buoyed by his holiday cruise of October
1923, which saw him again stop in Havana.58 I am not, then, suggesting
‘Academic Discourse’ silenced Stevens. Nevertheless, the poem does pon-
der the function of verse more restlessly than Stevens’ self-confident ques-
tioning of poetry in old age. ‘Academic Discourse’ is also pivotal because
it talks to the poetics of both Harmonium and Ideas of Order, displaying
several qualities which create tension within Ideas itself.
‘Academic Discourse’ remains an ‘unmemorable’ poem both because it
is rarely read by critics and because Stevens forgot its original 1923 publi-
cation when submitting a ‘revised’ version to Hound & Horn in 1929. In
1938 Stevens recalled:
[N]o one could be more surprised than I was to find that the thing had appeared
in broom. I have a copy of hound and horn and also a copy of broom,
but have not compared the two versions, which are probably identical […]
[W]hen hound and horn wrote to me for something […] I had plainly forgot-
ten all about broom, although I remembered clearly thinking that the poem was
unpublished[.]59
The poem is uncannily like Stevens’ anecdote poems, giving the elusive
impression of being ‘unpublished’. But ‘Academic Discourse’ also creates
subterfuge in Ideas. As a ‘Cuban’ creation, it faces Stevens’ more famous
Florida poetry – ‘Farewell to Florida’, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ –
with a different gaze. In 1923 one Cuban poet wrote mournfully: ‘Florida
is a finger which points to Cuba.’ 60 But it is not just Florida that points.
If ‘unmemorable’, ‘Academic Discourse’ is also the poem that sounds
a radically different note in Ideas of Order from Stevens’ abstract ‘new
romantic’ or the ‘ideas of order’ motif. Written almost twelve years before
CPP, 106. 58 Ibid., 82–5. See L, 241. 59 L, 335.

57
Rubén Martínez Villena, untitled; cited in Geoff Simons, Cuba: From Conquistador to Castro
60
(London: Macmillan, 1996), 232.

Ideas was published it is less comfortable with abstract projection, adam-
ant the ‘world is not / The bauble of the sleepless’ and suspicious of ‘ivory
wenches’ in absence of wholesome ‘daughters’ (as Chapter 2 argues, it was
not until ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ that Stevens would effectively
embrace abstraction).
We saw earlier how Stevens’ ‘new romantic’ is universalizing. One nega-
tive feature of abstraction Stevens tried to check in his developing verse
is the tendency for abstract concepts to become meaningless ‘universals’.
John Dewey complained that certain philosophers specialize in ‘general
answers supposed to have a universal meaning that covers and dominates
all particulars’. For Dewey, such answers ‘do not assist inquiry. They close
it’.61 As with criticism of Stevens’ ‘new romantic’, rhetoric absorbing any
possible meaning also closes critical inquiry. The ‘ideas of order’ motif,
likewise, has a seductive hold over Stevens’ second book because, just as
any Stevens poem can be reduced to an ‘imagination’ v. ‘reality’ debate,
any Ideas of Order poem can be conceived in terms of ‘order’. ‘Academic
Discourse’, however, resists identification with Ideas because it will not
yield to one language, however abstract; at least, it distrusts philosoph-
ical answers which offer saccharine completeness. But the poem is also
proleptic, making its inclusion in Ideas of Order ironically opportune; as
it indirectly questions the material appearance of Ideas whilst pointing
up those contrasts of tone that make Ideas of Order sound uncannily like
Harmonium.
Ideas of Order was first published by Latimer’s Alcestis Press in August
1935.62 It was Stevens’ first ‘ornate’ book, a fact overlooked by critics
preoccupied with the Cummington Press’s exquisite Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction. Curiously, the typeface for so contemporary a book was
Inkunabula, a Gothic-looking script. Though attractive to bibliophiles,
Inkunabula was not entirely popular, particularly among those rais-
ing the book’s $7.50 retail during the Depression (Stevens’ 1954 Collected
Poems also retailed at $7.50 and was considered costly then).63 As Elizabeth
Bishop wrote of Ideas to Marianne Moore: ‘I am so pleased to have it –
but isn’t the print dreadful? – and the price?’64
Had Stevens remembered ‘Academic Discourse’ he might have thought
twice about Inkunabula (Stevens was personally involved in the text’s
61
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy in The Middle Works of John Dewey vol. xii ed. Jo Ann
Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 188.
62
Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (New York: Alcestis, 1935).
63
Edelstein, 16, Wallace Stevens, 113.
64
Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: The Selected Letters ed. Robert Giroux (London: Chatto, 1994), 45.
appearance). In ‘Academic Discourse’ the casino degenerates not merely
because of ‘the mythy goober khan’ but because a ‘chronicle of affected
homage foxed so many books’.65 ‘Foxing’ implies general trickery, but is
also the deliberate discoloration of books to make them look older (fake
editions display ‘fox-marks’, OED). Figuratively speaking, ‘Academic
Discourse at Havana’ is foxed in Ideas. The edition’s typeface aims to
hoodwink readers into thinking the poem and book are considerably
older. But ‘Academic Discourse’ is already older than its 1935 publication,
hailing from the Harmonium period. If Stevens enjoyed the tension of
approving an antiquated typeface for a book whose content is desperately
contemporary, the book has the last laugh. If Stevens thought he was cre-
ating a ‘new romantic’ in Ideas of Order the typeface he chose actually
suggests an outworn, or at least retrospective aesthetic.
If ‘Academic Discourse’ implicitly questions ‘pure poetry’, Stevens’ res-
ervations about the tone of Ideas actually led him to rehabilitate the quasi-
‘pure poetry’ of Harmonium. As Stevens admitted:
After I had made a tentative arrangement of material, it seemed […] that the
tone of the whole might be a bit low and colorless; and, since it is the tone of the
whole that is important, I might want to work on the thing, adding, say, 10 or 15
pages, in order to give a little gaiety and brightness.66
‘Gaiety and brightness’ remind one of Harmonium’s anecdotes; and
Stevens’ inclusion of ‘Dance of the Macabre Mice’ (1935), ‘Snow and Stars’
(1933), ‘The Sun This March’ (1930) and ‘The Brave Man’ (1933) illus-
trates the extent to which his second book is haunted by Harmonium.67
However, these poems would have appeared second-rate in Harmonium.
For all their surface ‘gaiety and brightness’, they offer a hollow tone within
Ideas. Stevens insisted: ‘the arrangement [of the book] is simply based
on contrasts; there is nothing rigid about it. Not every poem expresses
a phase of order or an illustration of order: after all, the thing is not a
thesis.’ But those contrasts also suggest the desire to recreate Harmonium
within the starker verses of Ideas. The Stevens who could make ‘much
bing, high bing’ was writing like his 1923 self but in a less conducive text-
ual and cultural arena.68
‘Academic Discourse at Havana’ does, however, implicitly suggest ways
in which to read Ideas of Order as a development beyond Stevens’ early
65
CPP, 115. 66 L, 272–3.
67
CPP, 101, 108, 108–9, 112.
68
L, 279. Note the contrast in diction between ‘Snow and Stars’ and ‘A Postcard from the Volcano’,
CPP, 108, 128.
poetic phase. For example, the poem fixates on buildings: the building
being the site where Stevens addresses aesthetic and social change in Ideas.
I mentioned earlier that Stevens’ poem anticipates the Ivory Tower rhet-
oric of the 1930s. In his preface to Williams’ Collected Poems Stevens asks:
What, then, is a romantic poet now-a-days? He happens to be one who still dwells
in an ivory tower, but who insists […] life there would be intolerable except for the
fact that one has […] such an exceptional view of the public dump and the advertis-
ing signs of Snider’s Catsup, Ivory Soap and Chevrolet Cars; he is the hermit who
dwells alone with the sun and moon, but insists on taking a rotten newspaper.69
This description offers something more palpable than the Protean ‘new
romantic’ for approaching Stevens’ second volume, whilst also indicat-
ing how the impulse to be abstracted from modern life (to dwell alone
‘with the sun and moon’) is not entirely an option for the contempor-
ary ‘romantic poet’ who still requires ‘a rotten newspaper’. Ideas is lit-
tered with buildings, particularly dilapidated ones like the casino of
‘Academic Discourse’ (note also Stevens’ later reference to ‘goober khan’
as a building).70 Such spaces may not provide exceptional views but do
occasionally overlook the public dump. ‘Farewell to Florida’ features a
‘shadowless hut’ bordered by ‘rust and bones’; ‘Botanist on Alp (No. 1)’,
(1934) describes a hotel ‘boarded and bare’; and in ‘Mozart, 1935’ the com-
poser’s poor house has stones hurled at the roof ‘because they carry down
the stairs / A body in rags’.71
Of course, in ‘Academic Discourse’, the imagination is implicated in
the casino’s decline. Similarly, Ideas of Order focuses situations of imagina-
tive ‘poverty’ bordering economic poverty and cultural neglect. Where
‘Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz’ (1935) intones ‘Too many waltzes have ended’
there is both an aesthetic criticism that the waltz has allowed itself to
become superannuated (to be ‘ended’) and the notion that ‘sudden mobs
of men’ have threatened the waltz into silence.72 The poet proclaiming
from his ‘balcony’ in ‘Academic Discourse’ may not herald a new aes-
thetic. But a traceable textual element in Ideas – dilapidated buildings –
situates the poet’s responses to the role of poetry in the mid-1930s more
concretely than the figure of the ‘new romantic’; even although these phe-
nomena deliberately contrast in the one poetic. This tension prefigures
Stevens’ later negotiation between abstract rhetoric and a poetry combin-
ing abstract ideas and physical imagery as interrelated phenomena.
CPP, 770. 70 Stevens to Friar, 2 September 1947, WAS, 694.

69
CPP, 97, 110, 107. 72 Ibid., 100.

71
But what relations exist, finally, between ‘pure poetry’ and abstrac-
tion? And how might these relations condition our views of Harmonium
and Ideas of Order? In the French Symbolist reading of Poe’s ‘The Poetic
Principle’, the ‘pure’ of la poésie pure ‘is equivalent to absolute, i.e. struc-
turing of sound without ostensible semantic content’.73 Poetry in this sense
aspires solely to the condition of music, has no direct semantic relation-
ship with the world and thus remains autotelic, autonomous, ‘abstract’ (as
in ‘detached’). This ideal derives, as in Poe, from aversion to the notion
of poetry possessing a didactic role. Certainly, Harmonium specializes in
poetry with no didactic function and frequently reflects on music and
speech – as in ‘To the One of Fictive Music’ and ‘Peter Quince at the
Clavier’ – as well as conjuring its own idiosyncratic sounds (most not-
ably in ‘Bantams in Pine-Woods’).74 Superficially, Stevens appears akin
to Mallarmé in seeking a poetry of the ‘idea’ miraculously untainted by
the intellectual operations ‘pure poetry’ eschews. This nominally applies
to Ideas of Order, but also to those reflective Harmonium poems con-
cerned with abstract concepts, for example ‘To the One of Fictive Music’,
‘Invective Against Swans’, ‘The Snow Man’ and so forth.75
What complicates this picture is the ironized nature of the many anec-
dote poems – which imagine both fictive and palpably human figures (as
in ‘The Doctor of Geneva’, ‘The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad’) and
those poems reflecting on perception or which focus representational,
even Imagist concerns (as in ‘Of the Surface of Things’, ‘Theory’, ‘Six
Significant Landscapes’, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’).76
These poems do not conceive poetry as being abstracted from reality, but,
rather, are intimate with the very perception of reality in verse.77
Admittedly, there is an abstract element to Harmonium that chimes
with ‘pure poetry’. But however stylized this poetry appears, it keeps drag-
ging the reader back into contact with Stevens’ ‘actual world’.78 Stevens’
lyric voice, his speaking ‘I’ – in ‘Domination of Black’, ‘Metaphors of a
Magnifico’, ‘The Apostrophe to Vincentine’, ‘Explanation’, ‘Two Figures
in Dense Violet Night’ or ‘Theory’ (where that ‘I’ is not in the service
of a persona) – is not nearly, for example, as non-subjective or abstract
73
Alex Preminger et al., eds, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1007.
74
CPP, 70, 72, 60. 75 Ibid., 70, 3, 8.
76
CPP, 19, 81, 45, 70, 58, 74.
77
The young Stevens, despite admiring Arcady, resisted the separation of art from life and fre-
quently queried literature’s ‘artificiality’ (see L, 24, 27, 42, 92).
78
L, 292.
as the later idealist ‘I’ Chapter 4 analyses below.79 The poems that place
us in Oklahoma, Tennessee and, most memorably, Florida, likewise ren-
der Harmonium far from ‘pure poetry’. We should dispute, then, Percy
Hutchison’s claim in his 1931 review of Harmonium that ‘[f]rom one end of
the book to the other there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind,
there is not a word that can arouse emotion. The volume is a glittering
edifice of icicles’, as if Stevens, like the dead in ‘Of Heaven Considered as
a Tomb’, merely occupied his own ‘icy Élysée’.80 Hutchison overlooks the
deeply ironized gestures Harmonium displays in works that, in their very
humour, cannot but help connect imagination and world, not least in the
figure of the desirous poet who imagines them.
If Stevens subsequently defined Ideas of Order as a ‘book of pure poetry’
he was not so much defining that poetry as, like Poe and the Symbolists,
resisting the didactic spirit (for which a Depression work would actively
have to serve the Depression).81 Nevertheless, Stevens struggled to nur-
ture his penchant for abstract writing as he responded to an increasingly
uncertain and violent world. As we shall see, what he would later describe
as a preference for ‘abundant poetry’ over ‘pure poetry’ conditioned the
development of his poetics and the role of abstraction within that work.82
Reflecting back on ‘The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician’ in
1944, Stevens wrote to Hi Simons: ‘I suppose this was written at a time
when I felt strongly that poems were things in themselves.’83 It was para-
doxically through exploring the limits of abstraction that Stevens could
mould his imagination to the production of poems constituting more
than merely ‘things in themselves’.
The danger Stevens sensed in 1935, however, was pejorative abstraction
(as the next chapter explores). Stevens knew Harmonium was an experi-
ment and that it would be necessary to be ‘as obscure as possible’ until
he had ‘perfected an authentic and fluent speech’ for himself.84 But as
early as 1918, Stevens was uncomfortable with an abstract aesthetic that
stifles appreciation for concrete things. Writing of Jean Le Roy’s ‘Instant
de Clarté’ – which Stevens would translate for The Modern School – the
poet wrote to Carl Zigrosser: ‘It is large, but has a German quality of cos-
mic abstractness, not now of the same piquancy of piquantness […] as the
79
CPP, 7, 15, 42, 58, 69, 70.
80
Percy Hutchison, ‘Pure Poetry and Mr. Wallace Stevens’ The New York Times (9 August 1931);
cited in Charles Doyle, ed., Wallace Stevens: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1985),
89.
81
CPP, 997. 82 L, 495. 83 Ibid., 463. 84 Ibid., 231.
specific, concrete thing one is keen for.’ 85 ‘Pure poetry’ perhaps tended
to a cosmic abstractness with which Stevens, an experimental poet with
abstract leanings, felt uncomfortable. That desire for the ‘piquancy of
piquantness’ witnesses a poet striving toward the abstract realization of
concrete, sensual things.
By 1935, then, Stevens sought the terms of the vocabulary which
would preoccupy him for the next decade. He could not have known he
would create such a language, but his ‘new romantic’ allowed firsthand
experience of the dangers and possibilities of seductive tropes. Such rhet-
oric bolstered a poet emerging from a prolonged silence. But Ideas of
Order tries too insistently to cut its obvious ties with Harmonium, and
‘Academic Discourse at Havana’ is essential to understanding what per-
haps conditioned Stevens’ silence and what actuated the rhetoric support-
ing Ideas. The final line of ‘Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery’ (1935)
claims: ‘the wise man avenges by building his city in snow’.86 In effect this
meant creating a rhetoric of the ‘abstract’, the seemingly cold, crystalline
poetic defining Parts of a World and ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’
(‘Like Decorations’ also ponders ‘man the abstraction’).87 But to confront
Stevens’ most unavoidable term – that part of the Stevensian rubric most
requiring translation – one has to understand how Stevens battled with
abstraction in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ and beyond.
85
Ibid., 210. CPP, 128.
86
Ibid., 126.
87
C H APTER 2
The turn to abstraction: Owl’s Clover (1936)

and the ‘un-locatable’ speaker in
The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)
How does it matter how I play

Or what I color what I say?
It all depends on inter-play
Or inter-play and inter-say,
Like tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee,
Or ti-ri-la and ti-ri-li
And these I play on my guitar
And leave the final atmosphere
To the imagination of the engineer.
I could not find it if I would.
I would not find it if I could.1
The two years following Ideas of Order formed a period of intense experi-
mentation for Stevens. Although he would omit ‘Owl’s Clover’ from the
1954 Collected Poems, his attempt at a quasi-allegory concerning the func-
tion of art in the Depression marked a greater engagement with ‘real-
ity’ than Ideas had achieved (despite poems such as ‘Mozart, 1935’).2 The
jacket statement to the trade edition of Ideas defensively asserted: ‘The
book is essentially a book of pure poetry.’3 Whilst Stevens acknowledged
‘economic […] political and social changes’, he apparently sought a mod-
ernized ‘pure poetry’ rather than abandoning one kind of verse for a
socially more responsive but poetically less sophisticated idiom.4 As we
have seen, however, Ideas of Order was anything but ‘pure poetry’ in the
sense of verse aspiring to the condition of music, of sounds miraculously
free from the significant world. Harmonium too thrived on a tension
between Symbolist experiment (‘To the One of Fictive Music’), poems
that revel in sonority (‘Bantams in Pine-Woods’) and more ‘theoretical’
1
Wallace Stevens, draft canto for ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, CPP, 999.
2
Wallace Stevens, Owl’s Clover (New York: Alcestis, 1936); CPP, 107–8.
3
CPP, 997. 4 Ibid., 997.
55
explorations of self and world (‘A High-Toned Old Christian Woman’,
‘Theory’, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, ‘The Snow Man’
and so on).
Stevens’ ‘Anecdote’ poems – and those pieces that are anecdotes in all
but name – actually represent all three of these Harmonium strains. If
Harmonium suggested the carnival atmosphere its ‘instrument’ implies
(harmoniums being both orchestral in range and comic in expression),
its ‘pure poetry’ cannot be as easily dismissed as early critics of the book
maintained. But ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ had fallen flat: a poem
that does not sound especially ‘comic’ and which reveals Stevens’ anx-
iety over completing Harmonium. In other words, if Stevens’ version of
‘pure poetry’ suggested negative abstraction to his critics (a pitfall Ideas
of Order was designed to surmount), the result for Stevens was a different
expression of abstract poetry: more ‘theoretical’ than before but clinging
to the slapstick of Harmonium in an inauspicious textual and contempor-
ary space.
When he wrote ‘Owl’s Clover’, however, Stevens experimented with a
long poem designed to realize civic and aesthetic aims. Both poem and
book would prove difficult to write. Referring to ‘The Old Woman and
the Statue’ (1935), Stevens noted: ‘It is a carefully worked thing, about
which I am in some doubt for that very reason. I like the slap-dash and
the fortuitous.’5 Just as Stevens had over-worked Ideas by lightening ‘the
tone of the whole’, the need to confront poverty and politics (what ‘one
reads in the papers’) dogged the poet, not to mention the urge to reply to
Burnshaw’s review of Ideas.6 Stevens was not used to applying his ‘own
sort of poetry’ to a contemporary ‘subject’, nor was he comfortable with
large chunks of unruly blank verse.7
Admittedly, the fate of ‘Owl’s Clover’ – published by Alcestis, then
drastically edited for The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems
before final exclusion from the 1954 Collected – was not solely the result
of Stevens over-working his poem.8 Nevertheless, Stevens failed in ‘Owl’s
Clover’ to conjoin convincingly the two types of poetry Ideas offered.
When he wrote ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, however, although his
compositional methods changed, Stevens re-created Harmonium’s ‘slap-
5
Wallace Stevens, ‘The Old Woman and the Statue’ The Southern Review 1.1 (1935): 78–81; Stevens
to Latimer, 27 May 1935, RLP.
6
Stanley Burnshaw, ‘Turmoil in the Middle Ground’ New Massses 17 (1935), 41–2.
7
L, 308. See letter to Latimer, 16 May 1936, RLP.
8
See Cleghorn, Wallace Stevens’ Poetics, 3–4; Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar and
Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 1937).
The turn to abstraction 57
dash’, discovering a contemporary focus that harnessed both his abstract
proclivities and the insouciance of tone in which Harmonium specialized.
Surprised at the frequency of his revisions, Stevens reported: ‘Apparently,
only the ones over which I take a great deal of trouble come through
finally. This is contrary to my usual experience, which is to allow a thing
to fill me up and then express it in the most slap-dash way.’ 9 Preserving
poetic spontaneity was the paradoxical achievement of Stevens’ revisions.
The rambling draft canto above shows how significant revision would
become for the formation of this hard-won poem.
Revision and planning are, naturally, two distinct activities. Whilst
Stevens later mapped the trajectory of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’,
he was not ready to write a multi-part long poem in 1936, despite the
achievements of ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ and ‘Sunday Morning’.10
Attempting to marry civic and poetic ‘fictions’, Stevens drifted toward an
aesthetic that neutralized dualism, particularly an ‘imagination–reality’
distinction. But what ‘Owl’s Clover’ and ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’
demonstrate is Stevens’ unease about a poetic that, if it evaded dualism,
might be dangerously ‘abstract’ (as if the negative press surrounding
Harmonium and Ideas of Order lived to haunt him). As he remarked in
December 1935: ‘[M]y real danger is not didacticism, but abstraction.’ 11
For what validity could his ‘civil fiction’ claim if its aesthetic was removed
from the world?
As ‘Owl’s Clover’ asserts in language reminiscent of the snakeskin shed
in ‘Farewell to Florida’:
A shade of horror turns
The bees to scorpions blackly-barbed, a shade
Of fear changes the scorpions to skins
Concealed in glittering grass, dank reptile skins.
The civil fiction, the calico idea,
The Johnsonian composition, abstract man,
All are evasions like a repeated phrase,
Which, by its repetition, comes to bear
A meaning without a meaning.
(CPP, 166)
Fearing the ‘abstract’ as ‘evasion’, something removed from its context –

those shed ‘dank reptile skins’ – Stevens ponders a poetic that risks ‘mean-
ing without a meaning’. What the poet could not have known was that he
was about to write a work which critiques abstraction in an abstract space.
L, 316.
9 10
CPP, 10–14, 53–6. L, 302.
11
‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ achieves this abstract locale through
‘repeated phrases’, but these hardly comprise the superficial ‘meaning’
‘Owl’s Clover’ rejects. In fact, repetition and rhyme create and dissolve
meaning in ‘Blue Guitar’; a poem that neither reads like a ‘Johnsonian
composition’ – which Stevens implies is writing a little too perfect and
self-contained – nor has any truck with an ‘abstract man’.12
Retrospectively, of course, Stevens attempted to distinguish carefully
between ‘Owl’s Clover’ and ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’:
The effect of Owl’s Clover is to emphasize the opposition between things as they
are and things imagined; in short, to isolate poetry […] The Man with the Blue
Guitar […] deals with the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and
things imagined.13
But if by ‘isolate’ Stevens describes poetry as interposing between the
‘opposition’ of things imagined and actual, his use of the verb betrays
the wariness of ‘Owl’s Clover’ toward isolated poetry: abstract evasion.14
Stevens characterizes ‘Blue Guitar’ as being not pejoratively abstract; as
intimate with ‘conjunctions’ between imaginative and actual life. In dif-
ferentiating the poems in this way, however, Stevens overlooked the battle
within ‘Blue Guitar’ between the poem’s assault on abstraction and the
creation of an abstract locale where an ‘un-locatable speaker’ speaks.
Stevens’ mature sense of abstraction as a creative process finds its ori-
gins in this 1937 poem. Before turning to ‘Blue Guitar’, however, the spe-
cific senses in which Stevens used the word ‘abstract’ during 1935–42, his
first abstract phase, should be refined. Before the earlier poems of Parts
of a World, like ‘The Candle a Saint’ (1939), Stevens’ use of ‘abstract’ is
essentially pejorative.15 Whilst ‘abstract’ can mean ‘separated from matter,
practice, or particular examples’, its negative connotations include ‘not
concrete’, ‘idealistic, not practical’ or even ‘abstruse’ (OED 1/2). To be
‘abstracted’ is to be ‘withdrawn in thought’ and, as a transitive verb, to
‘abstract’ is to ‘deduct, remove’ or even ‘steal’ something from its original
context. An ‘abstraction’ is variously defined as a ‘withdrawal’, the ‘pro-
cess of stripping an idea of its concrete accompaniments’ and ‘something
12
Canto xxx’s attempt ‘to evolve a man’ appears ironic (CPP, 149).
13
CPP, 998.
14
Glen MacLeod argues that Stevens initially resisted abstract art because he equated the notion
with geometric abstraction. See Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to
Abstract Expressionism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 92–6. MacLeod suggests
that Stevens’ ‘ambivalence about abstraction remained unresolved’ in writing ‘Blue Guitar’ (96).
Nevertheless, the poem galvanized Stevens’ turn to abstraction.
15
CPP, 205.
visionary’ (OED). In ‘Owl’s Clover’ Stevens fears abstraction as ‘eva-
sion’, an aesthetic withdrawal from what, in 1935, he calls the ‘actual
world’.16 Evasions are mental creations like ‘Johnsonian compositions’.
‘Johnsonian’ implies ‘using […] long words of Latin derivation’. Although
short, ‘abstract’ is of Latin derivation, from abstrahere meaning ‘to draw
away’ (OED). To ‘draw away’ – either by abstracting an object or remov-
ing oneself – preoccupied Stevens greatly in the late 1930s and early 40s.
In ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’ (1936) Stevens insists that the poet’s
response to ‘the pressure of the contemporaneous’ involves ‘resistance’ but
not ‘escape’.17 Stevens defiantly transformed his 1936 ‘resistance’ into posi-
tive ‘escapism’ in ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ (1942):
The poetic process is psychologically an escapist process. The chatter about escap-
ism is […] merely common cant. My own remarks about resisting or evading the
pressure of reality mean escapism, if analyzed. Escapism has a pejorative sense
which it cannot be supposed that I include in the sense in which I use the word.
The pejorative sense applies where the poet is not attached to reality, where the
imagination does not adhere to reality, which […] I regard as fundamental.18
By 1942, then, Stevens’ sense of abstraction resists the charge of escap-
ism (which is why he appears confident about re-defining ‘escapism’ posi-
tively). By the early 1940s, ‘abstraction’ indicates neither the failure of
the poet to ‘adhere to reality’ nor the imagination’s wilful distortion of
‘reality’, but a creative process where the idea of ‘poetry’ inspires real-
ized poems. Both ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ and ‘The Irrational
Element’ confront this phenomenon but are not comfortable calling it
‘abstract’. As Stevens pointedly wrote in defence of the ‘Blue Guitar’ can-
tos: ‘They deal with the relation or balance between imagined things and
real things […] Actually, they are not abstractions, even though what I
have just said about them suggests that.’ 19
The distance between ‘The Irrational Element’ and ‘The Noble Rider’,
however, marks Stevens’ gradual acceptance of an abstract poetic. By 1942
Stevens conceives a ‘possible poet’. The possible poet’s ‘power’ derives from
his ability ‘to abstract himself, and to withdraw with him into his abstrac-
tion the reality on which the lovers of truth insist’.20 But Stevens’ positive
16
L, 292. 17 CPP, 788. 18 Ibid., 661–2.
19
L, 316. Discussing Valéry, Stevens admitted: ‘It is difficult for me to think and not to think
abstractly. Consequently, in order to avoid abstractness, in writing, I search out instinctively
things that express the abstract and yet are not in themselves abstractions’ (L, 290). Note how
Stevens seeks an appropriate idiom, rejecting thinking ‘abstractly’, ‘abstractness’ and even
‘abstractions’ in favour of ‘the abstract’.
20
CPP, 657.
use of ‘abstract’ becomes clearer when the term is not, tautologically,
adopted to explain itself. As Chapter 3 argues – referring to Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Blanchot’s ‘work’, Merleau-Ponty’s ‘in-visible’ and Focillon’s
creative ‘life of forms’ – what the ‘mind’s eye’ creates bears both on how
Stevens wrote his poems and how his readers experience them. In writing
‘Blue Guitar’ Stevens realized that ideas concerning verse, although not
concrete, were nevertheless creative catalysts. His awareness of this phe-
nomenon appears as early as ‘The Irrational Element’: ‘There is […] an
unwritten rhetoric that is always changing and to which the poet must
always be turning. That is the book in which he learns that the desire for
literature is the desire for life.’ 21 But in 1936 this ‘unwritten rhetoric’ – or
the creative process that conceives it – Stevens could not call ‘abstract’.22
One consequence of this process, in Stevens’ case, was a poetry that,
despite proffering visual or physical imagery, remains hard to ‘see’. ‘The
Man with the Blue Guitar’ is an early example. But to understand how
Stevens creates a space (and speaker) that proves tricky to situate, the
dismantling in ‘Blue Guitar’ of its own dualism must be addressed. As
Stevens dissolves the dialogue between guitarist and audience, his poem
explores the dangers and allure of abstraction; an aesthetic development
which would have a massive effect on the poet Stevens becomes, both the
writer who requires a vocabulary of abstract ideas and, by 1945, the poet
who dispatches an overt abstract rhetoric.
The two most quoted parts of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ are can-
tos i and xxii. Canto i presents the poem’s dominant tension between the
‘imagination’ and ‘reality’, depicted in guitarist and audience:
The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’
And they said then, ‘But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.’
(CPP, 135)
21
Ibid., 790.
22
The lecture does envision, however, ‘a poet’ of ‘such scope that he can set the abstraction on
which so much depends to music’ (CPP, 786).
Canto xxii identifies poetry as an idea travelling metaphorically between
the ‘imagination’ and ‘reality’:
Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate? Is it
An absence for the poem, which acquires
Its true appearances there, sun’s green,
Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?
From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,
In the universal intercourse.
(CPP, 144–5)
Both cantos are central to understanding Stevens’ poem. Canto xxii dis-
cusses how the idea of ‘poetry’ effects the creation of poems themselves.
Stevens represents the ‘imagination’ at its most ‘unreal’ in the catachre-
ses of ‘earth feeling’ and ‘sky that thinks’. These are not flights of fancy
but examples of whatever might influence realized poems (‘From these it
takes’). This justifies what Stevens later means by the injunction ‘It Must
Be Abstract’. My interest here, however, is in exploring the textual behav-
iour of ‘Blue Guitar’. Without close reading, it is easy to overlook how
Stevens creates his own significant ‘absence of reality’ in the poem by
dismantling its dialogue between ‘imagination’ and ‘reality’.
Canto i underscores the confrontation between guitarist and audience
through rhyme:
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’
‘Are/guitar’ is not an adventurous rhyme. But ‘guitar’ already contains
the sound ‘ar’, as if the guitar itself is implicated in ‘reality’: how things
‘are’. Rhyme-order informs, in fact, the dialogue’s dialectic. In the first
couplet, the audience rhymes to give priority to the phrase ‘things as
they are’.23 This is its important clause, whereas having a ‘blue guitar’
represents a sorry diversion from ‘reality’. But the guitarist prioritizes
For the young Stevens on ‘things as they are’, see L, 68, 129, 150.
23
his guitar. Rejecting the audience’s rhyme-order, he asserts ‘things
as they are’ are changed not by the ‘guitar’ but upon it. Inverting
the rhyme-order to highlight the guitar itself – as well as emphasiz-
ing ‘upon’ to stress the guitar as the site of change and not its mere
cause – the guitarist thwarts the audience’s insistence on ‘reality’ as
arbiter of the tune. That argument proves compelling because the audi-
ence unconsciously adopts the guitarist’s preposition in its subsequent
appeal: ‘play […] / A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, / A tune upon the
blue guitar’.
Stevens’ guitarist also reverses the audience’s rhyme-order to detract
from the phrase ‘things as they are’, focusing instead on the participle
‘changed’. In the guitarist’s reply ‘things as they are’ becomes com-
pound, signifying ‘reality’ in general. This is not what Stevens’ audience
intends. When it suggests the guitarist does ‘not play things as they are’
the audience means he fails to represent how particular things really are.
The guitarist evades this charge by asserting ‘reality’ in general (‘things-
as-they-are’) is transformed through performance, whilst specific ‘things’
remain literally ‘as they are’. That Stevens does not hyphenate ‘things
as they are’ allows the guitarist’s verbal trick to creep into the poem
almost unnoticed. But the audience does recognize the ploy, even in
conceding the guitar might create an appropriate tune: ‘But play […] /
A tune upon the blue guitar / Of things exactly as they are’. That exact-
ing demand aims to countermand the guitarist’s riposte that ‘things as
they are’ in general are changed by guitar-playing.
The guitarist’s ‘are’ is also a springboard to ‘change’: ‘Things as they
are, / Are changed upon the blue guitar’. Unlike the audience, he prefers
‘are’ as an auxiliary and not intransitive verb. Canto ii marks such cre-
ative change as the guitarist becomes first person:
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.
If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
(CPP, 135)
The guitarist’s ‘patch[ing]’ refers back to the ‘shearsman of sorts’. Stevens
apparently conceived his shearsman as a tailor.24 When Renato Poggioli
was translating the poem in 1953 Stevens wrote that the speaker is ‘squat-
ting like a tailor (a shearsman) as he works on his cloth’.25 Like a tailor,
the guitarist not only mends but makes: his patching creates novel pat-
terns where, implicitly, there was once a worn-out creation, even hole or
void. This imagery anticipates canto xxii’s conception that the idea of
‘poetry’ plugs the gap of ‘an absence in reality’. Poetry, in this sense, is
an idea that creates the fabric of poems themselves, just as, in canto ii, ‘a
hero’s head’ (an ideal figure without corporal ‘reality’) is preferred. If we
conceive Stevens’ guitarist as a poet-figure, then the ‘shearsman of sorts’
is not merely a quasi-metaphor for the guitarist (‘of sorts’ as in ‘approxi-
mate’). He may be the poet whose printed words fill the whiteness of the
page, patching ‘reality’ with ‘sorts’ (as in ‘fount[s] of type’, OED).
Although in canto ii the guitarist retains his preferred rhyme-order,
however, his tune dismantles Stevens’ poem. ‘Things as they are’ stretches
over two couplets to rhyme with ‘blue guitar’, as if the canto were mim-
icking what it is to ‘miss’ serenading to ‘man’. Significantly, the rhyme is
separated by the word ‘serenade’:
If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
The second ‘serenade’ occupies what would have been the position of
‘things as they are’ in the guitarist’s rhyming couplet. That is, the ser-
enade the guitarist sings deliberately misses the harmony of the poem’s
dominant rhyme. Such disruptive song unpicks as much as it patches,
but in the ‘inter-play’ and ‘inter-say’ of Stevens’ rhyme even the guitarist’s
own rhetorical strategies are unwoven.
Stevens un-stitches ‘Blue Guitar’ because the poem cannot endorse the
dualism of ‘imagination’ v. ‘reality’. No sooner than the rhyming coup-
let breaks, canto iii spawns a string of unresolved subordinate clauses, an
effect in which Stevens’ poem specializes:
Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,
24
See Brazeau, Parts of a World, 201. 25
L, 783.
To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
To bang it from a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings…
(CPP, 135–6)
Lacking grammatical resolution, Stevens demonstrates exactly what his

‘blue guitar’ achieves when freed from having to rhyme with ‘things as
they are’. ‘Blue’ becomes the authoritative rhyme-maker (chiming with
‘true’). Note also how the emphasis on the adjective ‘blue’ rather than the
noun ‘guitar’ denies agency to the guitarist. Canto iii is not a continu-
ation of the guitarist speaking, but a violent song where Stevens retrieves
the very poem of which he remarked: ‘[T]here is a kind of secrecy between
the poet and his poem which, once violated, affects the integrity of the
poet.’ 26 Canto iii protects ‘Blue Guitar’ from violating that ‘secrecy’ by
seizing poem from guitarist, not least by appropriating the adjective
‘blue’. Stevens’ poem will even transform the word ‘adjective’ into a noun
(its ‘amorist Adjective aflame’) as if to assert that the descriptive word
becomes a thing, or noun-object, in its own right.27
By canto iv, therefore, the guitarist’s ‘are/guitar’ rhyme is implicitly
questioned, along with the claim that imaginative song is the site for
transforming ‘reality’:
So that’s life, then: things as they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?
(CPP, 136)
The anaphoric ‘all their manner’ views sceptically the idea that ‘reality’
can be captured in guitar-playing. The verb ‘pick’ has also changed. In
canto iii it connoted picking up by hand or wrenching open (to ‘pull
apart’ OED 6), describing the violent dissection of a man’s brain. In canto
iv, ‘picks its way’ connotes daintily selecting a viewpoint or assuming a
pose – as in to pick ‘one’s words, way, steps’ (OED 5). Where in canto
iii Stevens wrests the poem from the guitarist, picking away at ‘man’
Ibid., 361.
26
CPP, 141.
27
himself, canto iv satirizes the guitarist’s effete picking, both as a musician
with a ‘pick’/plectrum and a figure who cannot represent ‘reality’ because
he merely picks his way through life.
The poem thus dissolves the dialogue between ‘imagination’ and
‘reality’, dispatching guitar-playing as a metaphor for writing poetry.
Superficially, Stevens appears to leave his audience the last word:
Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,
Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.
(CPP, 136–7)
The audience’s desire not to hear of the ‘greatness of poetry’ is ironized

here by its requiring poetry for self-consolidation (‘Ourselves in poetry’).
Where earlier in ‘Blue Guitar’ the guitarist is analogue for the creating
poet, canto v elevates poetry over music, condescending to the guitarist
that only snatches of poetry inform his song: ‘Even in the chattering of
your guitar’. Poetry is envisaged supplying the dimensions of shade and
colour lost to a world where heaven is ‘empty’. But if the guitarist is subor-
dinated, the audience is critiqued for creating the bare world it occupies.
Where poetry is asked to ‘take the place of empty heaven and its hymns’,
one questions whether those hymns emanate from that world of ‘no shad-
ows’, the audience’s realm. Despite blaming ‘empty heaven’, the audience
creates the conditions under which it is dependent upon ‘poetry’.
But despite insisting nothing be ‘changed’, Stevens’ audience actually
switches places with his guitarist, a shift again signalled by rhyme:
A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in the tune as if in space
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.
(CPP, 137)
The audience speaks here through the guitarist’s preferred rhyme-order

(‘are/guitar’) absorbing the guitarist and his tune (‘A tune beyond us as
we are’); as the pronoun ‘we’ vies with the phrase ‘things as they are’. The
guitarist is addressed (‘As you play’), but no longer speaks.
Canto vi’s irony, however, is that the audience remains unaware of
sounding like a crypto-guitarist. It believes the only change the guitarist
can instrument is the ‘place of things as they are’. The actual, dimensional
‘space’ of ‘reality’ cannot be altered. The audience, therefore, attempts to
uphold a reality–imagination distinction even when exchanging places
with Stevens’ guitarist. Textually, this occurs not only with the audi-
ence adopting the guitarist’s rhyme. Once the phrase ‘things as they are’
changes places with ‘blue guitar’ to complete the guitarist’s rhyme, the
audience does occupy a new space, the guitarist’s world. The audience
prefers the ‘imagination’ to stay ‘beyond the compass of change’, fearing
the guitarist’s insistence on ‘change’ equals manipulation of ‘reality’. But
in articulating that desire the audience is itself transformed, entering the
guitarist’s semantic and textual locale.
Once guitarist and audience dissolve, Stevens’ dominant rhyme dis-
appears from the poem only to reappear in a few ironic instances. As
with Stevens’ fears for abstraction in ‘Owl’s Clover’, no sooner than the
imagination–reality dualism unfolds ‘Blue Guitar’ critiques the audi-
ence’s absolute desires. For canto vi – and the draft canto prefacing this
chapter – a ‘final atmosphere’ is dangerously removed. In the draft canto
it concerns ‘the imagination of the engineer’, perhaps another potential
‘Johnsonian composition’. However, rather than concede to a ‘final atmos-
phere’ Stevens’ speaker quips: ‘I could not find it if I would. / I would not
find it if I could’, a chiasmus anticipating the speaker in Stevens’ eventual
poem who enjoys similar evasions. But ‘evasion’ is precisely the shared
concern of both ‘Owl’s Clover’ and Stevens’ 1937 poem. ‘Blue Guitar’ is
more defensive than its draft canto, keen to critique an abstract imagina-
tive space, even as it constructs one after canto vi.
Canto vii, for example, worries about the cost of abstraction, venturing
a persona–poet in place of departed guitarist and audience:
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now
I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,
Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand
Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.
(CPP, 137–8)
Standing ‘remote’ leads to imaginative sterility, represented here by cold

guitar strings. There is an obvious fear of being abstracted from reality,
standing in the moon and not being ‘part of the sun’. Although Stevens’
‘I’ associates itself with the guitarist (as also in canto viii), ‘Blue Guitar’ is
not ultimately concerned with a guitarist, but with the figure who speaks
in Stevens’ poem. The ‘blue guitar’ persists, but increasingly lacks its
guitarist. Moreover, it is not only Stevens’ ‘I’ that poses questions about
where to ‘stand’. This ‘I’ becomes a speaker the reader cannot locate, an
abstract token and creator of meaning; a figure who cannot be detached
because it has no context from which to be removed (and it has no con-
text because its location is continually on the move).
Note, for example, how the speaker sounds like a guitarist but without
any sense of what his ‘playing’ effects:
I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;
And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.
(CPP, 138)
Stevens’ simile of ‘reason in a storm’ evokes Lear’s hysterical dialogue

in the storm scene of Shakespeare’s play, echoing Lear’s apostrophe to
‘thought-executing fires’ and his discourse with Poor Tom, the ‘philoso-
pher’, whom he asks: ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ Tom’s being labelled
‘the thing itself’ also chimes with Stevens’ ironic meditations on ‘things
as they are’.28 If the guitarist’s ‘twang’ is ‘like the reason in a storm’ then it
appears as superfluous noise, unless its ‘leaden’ sound enables ascertaining
where one is. Stevens’ ‘I’ does not admit to being lost, however, remaining
CW, 3.2.4: 959; 3.4.144: 961; 3.4.100: 961; and 3.4.145: 961.

28
enigmatic about its ‘twang’, just as Lear combats his ‘contentious storm’
through rhetoric, despite admitting: ‘This tempest in my mind / Doth
from my senses take all feeling else / Save what beats there’.29
To bring ‘the storm to bear’ perhaps signifies that the ‘twang’ defines
the ‘reality’ of the storm (‘bring to bear’ meaning to ‘apply or aim’, OED
13). Sixteen years after the poem’s composition Stevens assured Poggioli
that the phrase indicates ‘the poet is relaxed […] his words are full of
the storm but not part of it. Consequently, they control it and bring it
to bear: make use of it.’30 However, having invoked the storm, Stevens’
‘I’ merely ‘leave[s] it there’: a spatial/temporal phrase meaning to discon-
tinue playing and to situate that tune, perhaps for an audience. The older
Stevens aimed to help Poggioli render the poem in Italian and was writ-
ing in a peremptory, revisionist mindset.31 But Stevens’ reader can nei-
ther be sure of where ‘there’ is, nor where the ‘I’ positions itself. Stevens’
‘I’ becomes, as Lear says of Poor Tom, ‘Unaccommodated man’: a figure
without context.32
If, as canto ix suggests, this speaker is ‘merely a shadow hunched /
Above the arrowy, still strings, / The maker of a thing yet to be made’,
what relations govern speaker and poem?33 Once the poem’s main rhyme
unwinds, not only does its ‘I’ dominate: Stevens’ ‘blue guitar’ begins to
float. In fact, ‘Blue Guitar’ is not a poem about a guitarist but a text where
an elusive speaker aims to become the ‘blue guitar’. Stevens thereby sati-
rizes his speaker and critiques negative abstraction; the speaker’s desire to
become the ‘blue guitar’ being a parody of the ‘imagination’ as removed
and ‘unreal’. Even if one struggles, then, to locate Stevens’ speaker palp-
ably – the ‘maker of a thing yet to be made’ – one can ascertain the text-
ual ironies within which that ‘I’ is placed.
The elision of speaker and guitar forges a rupture which causes Stevens
to begin ‘Blue Guitar’ all over again in canto xiv. Even as early as canto
XII the speaker is unsettled by his own metamorphosis:
Tom-tom, c’est moi. The blue guitar
And I are one. The orchestra
Fills the high hall with shuffling men
High as the hall. The whirling noise
29
Ibid., 3.4.12–14: 960. 30 L, 783.
31
Stevens returned to this phrase with Poggioli (L, 791). However, he was uneasy about his
glosses: ‘You will understand that in converting a poem […] into plain English, one’s explana-
tions are bound to call for a certain amount of toleration’, L, 788.
32
CW, 3.4.100–1: 961. 33 CPP, 138.
Of a multitude dwindles, all said,
To his breath that lies awake at night.
I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.
(CPP, 140)
Recalling the ‘sleepless’ figure of ‘Academic Discourse at Havana’ (who

toys with the world as a ‘bauble’), canto xii critiques one who ‘lies awake
at night’, reducing the ‘whirling noise’ of the world ‘[t]o his breath’.34
Stevens’ all-consuming ‘I’ seems likewise solipsistic, but lacks fixed iden-
tity. Consuming everything, it cannot be located by reference to anything
else: ‘Where / Do I begin and end?’
Stevens’ ‘I’ retreats, then, to a hyper-abstract space, subsuming the
‘blue guitar’ and being subsumed by it. In this enigmatic elision the poem
almost breaks under the weight of the adjective ‘blue’:
The pale intrusions into blue
Are corrupting pallors… ay di mi,
Blue buds or pitchy blooms. Be content –
Expansions, diffusions – content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery,
The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,
The amorist Adjective aflame…
(CPP, 140–1)
Stevens ironizes here a poetry writ large, featuring excessive alliter-

ation – those repeated ‘b’ and ‘p’ sounds – and a chiasmus (‘Be content –
Expansions, diffusions – content to be’) which ironically fails to expand
on anything. This parodies a poetry of mere technique which, like the
abstract ‘evasion’ of ‘Owl’s Clover’, renders ‘meaning without a meaning’.
Even the ‘blue sleek with a hundred chins’ remains worryingly abstract; a
‘blue’ which, despite its plural visage, has no face.
Writing to Poggioli, Stevens claimed: ‘the amorist Adjective means
blue […] as a word metamorphosed into blue as a reality’.35 Yet, a few days
later, he countered:
Ibid., 116.
34
L, 783.
35
Perhaps my explanation was a bit too expansive. The poem in which this appears
[…] deals with the intensity of the imagination unmodified by contacts with
reality […] I took a look at this poem after I had written to you and thought that
the metamorphosis into reality […] was misleading. The poem has to do with
pure imagination.36
Stevens struggles here to read ‘Blue Guitar’ because his earlier inter-
pretation overlooked the irony in which the canto’s ‘Adjective’ fails to
represent ‘a word metamorphosed into blue as a reality’. Rather, canto
xiii is itself a ‘pale intrusion into blue’, a stuttering song corrupted by the
very adjective (now metamorphosed to the proper noun ‘Adjective’) that
had previously propelled the poem. ‘Pure imagination’ lacks substance: it
lacks abstractive power.
The ‘amorist Adjective aflame’ fizzles out, then, in an elliptical trail
leaving Stevens to re-begin ‘Blue Guitar’ at canto xiv, ironically with the
word ‘first’. This is like Joyce’s ‘preparatory to anything else’, the begin-
ning of the sixteenth episode of Ulysses which, as Jeri Johnson notes,
‘claims its power to begin Ulysses all over again’.37 But to understand the
significance of canto xiii’s demise, one must attend to Picasso’s appear-
ance in the poem:
Is this picture of Picasso’s, this ‘hoard
Of destructions,’ a picture of ourselves,
Now, an image of our society?
Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,
Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,
Without seeing the harvest or the moon?
Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?
(CPP, 141–2)
As MacLeod shows, ‘Blue Guitar’ is highly context-suggestive.38 Yet, des-

pite echoing Surrealist and Cubist topoi – and despite Stevens’ allusion
36
Ibid., 785.
37
James Joyce, Ulysses: The 1922 Text ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 569,
944.
38
MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Modern Art, 57–78.
to a ‘picture of Picasso’s’ – the poem is not cross-generically giving. The
most useful artefact behind Stevens’ text is not a painting but Christian
Zervos’ 1935 interview with Picasso; which MacLeod also discusses and
which Stevens later remembered to Poggioli, insisting he had ‘no particu-
lar painting of Picasso’s in mind’.39
Stevens’ ‘hoard of destructions’ tropes Picasso’s description of a paint-
ing as a ‘sum of destructions’:
A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destruc-
tions. I do a picture – then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost: the
red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.40
Despite the ‘destruction’ wreaked by the adjective ‘blue’ in canto xiii,
however, Stevens’ poem is concerned more with self-preservation than
destruction, which may account for substituting ‘hoard’ for Picasso’s ‘sum’
(hoarding being to ‘overstock […] in time of scarcity’, OED 3). However,
in ‘The Relations Between Poetry and Painting’ Stevens misremembered
Picasso’s phrase and his own, substituting ‘horde’ for ‘hoard’: ‘Does not
the saying of Picasso that a picture is a horde of destructions also say
that a poem is a horde of destructions?’41 Self-preservation and destruc-
tion (marauding hordes) are perhaps inextricable, particularly for the poet
who preserves poetry by destroying cliché, received ideas or other com-
monplace verbal associations.
But what relations exist between Picasso and Stevens’ troubled speaker
who observes ‘Things as they are have been destroyed. / Have I?’ What is
usually not discussed in comparing ‘Blue Guitar’ with Zervos’ interview
is Picasso’s distaste for ‘abstract art’. This revulsion reveals much about
Picasso’s and Stevens’ ideas concerning composition. Picasso argues:
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you
can remove all traces of reality. There’s no danger then, anyway, because the idea
of the object will have left an indelible mark. It is what started the artist off,
excited his ideas, and stirred up his emotions. Ideas and emotions will in the end
be prisoners in his work […] They form an integral part of it, even when their
presence is no longer discernible.42
Fully abstract art is impossible, then, because nothing can ultimately be
removed from its context; because the concept or object initiating the
39
L, 783, 786.
40
Christian Zervos, ‘Conversation avec Picasso’ Cahiers d’art 10 (1935); translated in Dore Ashton,
ed., Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views (New York: Viking, 1972), 8.
41
CPP, 741.
42
Ashton, Picasso on Art, 9.
artwork always influences the artist’s composition (‘It is what started the
artist off, excited his ideas, and stirred up his emotions’). For Picasso,
even if a picture is ‘destroyed’ – appearing ‘removed’ from its original
‘object’ – it draws from the object or idea inspiring its composition. Even
in destruction ‘nothing is lost’.
Earlier in the interview Picasso explains:
When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must
be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each
destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but
rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial.43
Picasso’s views chime with Stevens’ claims for ideas as imaginative
catalysts and the poet’s fear of abstraction. ‘Poetry is the subject of the
poem’ does not mean poetry’s ‘subject-matter’ is necessarily poetry itself,
as Julian Symons, who had published a shorter version of ‘Blue Guitar’,
assumed (Symons concluding Stevens was, in fact, evading his ‘actual
world’).44 Rather, Stevens implies that the idea of creating poetry, what-
ever its subject-matter, actuates the poem. To borrow Picasso’s phrase, the
idea ‘form[s] an integral part of’ the poem ‘even when [its] presence is no
longer discernible’, and even when the ‘original’ objects of inspiration are
impalpable ‘ideas and emotions’.
Admittedly, for Picasso ‘abstract art’ is impossible, whereas ‘Blue Guitar’
fears the ‘unreality’ of excessive abstraction. ‘A Thought Revolved’ (1936)
may observe that ‘The poet […] / Denies that abstraction is a vice except /
To the fatuous’, but the poem Stevens wrote a year later is genuinely wor-
ried about an ‘I’ who speaks in an abstract zone where dualism disap-
pears.45 ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ swings free from the ‘real’ world
from which it projects its imaginative creations because ‘things as they
are have been destroyed’. This creates epistemological doubt in which the
mysterious locale where Stevens’ ‘I’ speaks provides few certainties. The
statement about the destruction of ‘things as they are’ is the only sentence
in canto xv that is not a question. Stevens’ speaker is no surer whether or
not Picasso’s painting does comprise ‘an image of our society’ than it is
of its own identity, the signifiers of its presence and the nature of those
signs: ‘Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood / And whichever it
may be, is it mine?’
43
Ibid., 9.
44
See Julian Symons, ‘A Short View of Wallace Stevens’ Life and Letters Today 26 (1940): 215–24; L,
292.
45
CPP, 171.
The uncertainty of inhabiting an abstract space is clear: ‘Do I sit,
deformed, a naked egg, / Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon, / Without
seeing the harvest or the moon?’ ‘Shine On Harvest Moon’ (c. 1908) was
a popular song Pennsylvania singer Ethel Waters performed in the 1920s
and 30s. It exists in multiple versions. Written by Nora Bayes and Jack
Norworth, the song became part of the 1936 film The Great Ziegfeld
directed by Robert Z. Leonard, a musical tribute to Florenz Ziegfeld.46
The chorus reads:
Shine on, shine on harvest moon
Up in the sky.
I ain’t had no lovin’
Since January, February, June or July.
Snow time ain’t no time to stay outdoors and spoon.
So shine on, shine on harvest moon
For me and my gal.47
Waters’ version reads: ‘Don’t know why / There’s no sun up in the sky /
Stormy weather / Since my gal and I ain’t together’ (Waters also per-
formed her own rendition of ‘Stormy Weather’ at the Cotton Club in
1933).
Stevens told Poggioli about ‘a popular song entitled Good-bye, Good-
bye Harvest Moon’, but which song he intended remains a mystery.48
‘Shine On Harvest Moon’ concerns missing out on ‘lovin’’. Perhaps ‘Blue
Guitar’ (which ‘brings the storm to bear’) combines one or more songs
about frustrated love and stormy relationships.49 Certainly, canto xv’s
abstracted speaker is distanced from reality and physical companionship.
Being ‘deformed, a naked egg’ suggests a body self-consciously preoccu-
pied with being unattractive, reaping no harvest of love and finding noth-
ing romantic in the moon. The ‘harvest moon’ is the full moon appearing
closest to the autumn equinox. But it is a lunar event without reality for
a figure that sees neither the ‘harvest’ nor the ‘moon’, nor derives com-
fort from the intimacy of human warmth which remains at a depressing
remove.
Abstract tragedy thus befalls the speaker who, having wanted to become
the ‘blue guitar’, by canto xv confuses the signs and confines of a fragile
existence. The ‘imagination’ stretched to what Stevens calls ‘pure irreality’
46
See http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/20813/The-Great-Ziegfeld/overview.
47
The song’s earliest publication is, perhaps, 1918 (Historic American Sheet Music collection, Duke
University, http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm).
48
L, 783. 49 CPP, 138.
can only dissemble its creations if it attempts to stay ‘apart’.50 Stevens
adds: ‘I do not desire to exist apart from our works and the imagination
does not desire to exist apart from our works […] Imagination has no
source except in reality, and ceases to have any value when it departs from
reality.’ 51 Fearing an existence ‘apart’ and without ‘any value’ permeates
Stevens’ poem. But ‘Blue Guitar’ does create a meaningful locale, even if
(or because of the fact that) its speaker undergoes protean shifts affect-
ing the poem’s textual geography. Despite reviews suggesting flippancy,
William Carlos Williams hit the nail on the head in describing ‘Blue
Guitar’ as ‘thirty-three virtual lyrics’.52 Williams did not only mean that
these were lyrics in all but name; Stevens’ cantos are also projections of
what poetry might be (troping the optical sense of ‘virtual image’, OED
1/2). Indeed, Stevens’ inspiration derives from an imagined space for his
speaker that is virtual because it is always ‘yet to be made’, always on the
point of creation.
By dissolving its opening dialogue, then, ‘Blue Guitar’ creates an elu-
sive space where Stevens confronts his fear of abstraction and creates a
world for an ‘un-locatable’ speaker. In 1937, however, Stevens was not
ready to call his creation ‘abstract’. During composition, Stevens observed
of his drafts to Latimer:
They deal with the relation or balance between imagined things and real things
which […] is a constant source of trouble to me. I don’t feel that I have as yet
nearly got to the end of the subject. Actually, they are not abstractions, even
though what I have just said about them suggests that […] [W]hat they really
deal with is the painter’s problem of realization: I have been trying to see the
world about me both as I see it and as it is. This means seeing the world as an
imaginative man sees it.53
In the Zervos interview Picasso also confronts ‘the painter’s problem of
realization’. But, for Picasso, realization is not intrinsically problematic
because ‘abstract art’ is impossible: there can be no composition removed
from reality. Thus the artist need not fear any discrepancy between what
niggles Stevens: ‘see[ing] the world […] as I see it and as it is’. Indeed,
Stevens’ lingering fears over abstraction derive from upholding the
imagination–reality distinction ‘Blue Guitar’ overcomes. If ‘reality’ and
‘imagination’ are incommensurable, then the artist is necessarily in dan-
ger of evading ‘reality’ and becoming pejoratively abstract. Stevens’ 1937
50
L, 360. 51 Ibid., 362, 364.
52
William Carlos Williams, ‘a troubled man who sings well’ New Republic 50 (1937), cited in
Doyle, Wallace Stevens, 173.
53
L, 316.
poem is worried about rendering ‘meaning without a meaning’, but it also
witnesses the creation of a speaker that transcends the poet’s imagina-
tion–reality obsession, a voice which creates the poem as it speaks.
Note, for example, how in canto xxviii Stevens’ ‘I’ struts through the
poet’s concluding couplets as though it owned the page. Realizing, finally,
it is ‘a native of this world’, Stevens’ speaker confidently declares:
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.
(CPP, 148; emphasis added)
This ‘profounder strength’ is observable in the speaker’s movement from one

end of the poetic line to the other, appearing four times in three lines (a text-
ual quality of the idealist ‘I’ Stevens creates in the late 1930s and early 40s).
Note, also, how the poem’s original dialogue has become the play-thing
of the speaker, who dispatches the very worries Stevens reveals to Latimer.
‘Things’ can only be what the ‘I’ thinks of them, and can only be realized
imaginatively ‘on the blue guitar’. This realization comes with resigning
oneself to the reality of possessing an ‘I’, an identity. For if Stevens’ speaker
evades self-definition, it cannot relinquish its textual and poetic reality.
Where do we reach at the close of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’?
Stevens revels in his mobile, ‘un-locatable’ speaker. Canto xxxii turns
its back on the fixity of ‘definitions’ in language reminiscent of Auden’s
‘Stop all the Clocks’ (1936): 54
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
[…]
Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.
(CPP, 150)
The canto critiques the very philosophical questions Stevens’ poem ponders
(and its readers frequently ask), dispelling the epistemological uncertainty
of ‘You as you are?’ with the flat rebuttal: ‘You are yourself.’ Just as Coleridge
54
W. H. Auden, Collected Poems ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, [1976] 1994), 141.
recognizes the creative ‘subject’ is ‘groundless’ and yet remains ‘the ground
of all other certainty’, Stevens insists the ‘self’ is assertive by resisting medi-
ation: ‘Nothing must stand / Between you and the shapes you take’.55 This
accounts for the rejection of ‘rotted names’, the terms of any language,
including an imagination–reality distinction, that might confine Stevens’
‘self’. The canto also provides an image for the abstract imagination Stevens
will develop after 1937. The appeal to speak of ‘what you see in the dark’
accentuates the paradoxically visible aspects of a shady virtual world where
the idea of ‘poetry’ is a pre-text for realizing poems themselves.
As Chapter 3 explores, this emphasis anticipates what Merleau-Ponty
calls the ‘in-visible’ (among other compelling analogues in Proust,
Mauron, Focillon and others). Merleau-Ponty’s term refers not to what
we cannot literally see, but to our imaginative conception of the visual.
Beyond Auden’s poem, a better textual parallel for canto xxxii is Hardy’s
‘Shut Out That Moon’ (1904). Hardy’s speaker desires a purely mental
imaginative space in order to create poetry because the actual moon is
beguiling and leads to sterility:
Close up the casement, draw the blind,
Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.
Step not forth on the dew-dashed lawn
To view the Lady’s Chair,
Immense Orion’s glittering form,
The Less and Greater Bear:
Stay in; to such sights we were drawn
When faded ones were fair.56
Hardy’s imperatives chime not only with Stevens’ poem (‘Throw away the
lights’); his ‘strewn’ ‘lutes’ also resound with Stevens’ ‘monstrous lutes’
(from canto xix). Significantly, Hardy advocates an armchair imagin-
ation. His main imperative ‘Stay in’ unwittingly describes Stevens’ idealist
or phenomenologist imagination where to look deeply within oneself is,
as for Proust and Cézanne, to scrutinize the world in the deepest sense.
Hardy’s speaker, like Stevens’, prefers to conceive the world in the
abstract. Banal reality cannot satisfy the poet’s imagination; and yet,
BL, I, Ch. 12, 260.

55
Thomas Hardy, Selected Short Stories and Poems ed. James Gibson (London: Dent, 1992), 170–1.
56
paradoxically, the ‘ordinary’ aids the poet’s creations (‘ordinariness’ and
‘the normal’ becoming critical in late Stevens):
Within the common lamp-lit room
Prison my eyes and thought;
Let dingy details crudely loom,
Mechanic speech be wrought:
Too fragrant was Life’s early bloom,
Too tart the fruit it brought!57
Hardy writes more tragically than Stevens here, but his poem coincides
with ‘Blue Guitar’’s injunction to avoid ‘light’, to speak of what one ‘see[s]
in the dark’: images anticipating the kind of poet Stevens becomes in the
late 1930s and beyond.
By the end of ‘Blue Guitar’, therefore, Stevens embraces an abstract
imagination; even if, in 1937, he cannot call it by name. Canto xxx even
parodies the desire to ‘evolve a man’. Thinking of man in the abstract, the
poem playfully constructs a ridiculous figure, an ‘old fantoche / Hanging
his shawl upon the wind, / Like something on the stage, puffed out’.58
Perhaps Stevens ironizes his own emergent abstract tendencies. But there
is no fear here of falling under the weight of ‘the Adjective’ or creating
a ‘Johnsonian composition’. Stevens’ capitulation to the direction of his
new poetic defines the story of this poem and his later work. When he
observed that he had not ‘as yet nearly got to the end of the subject’ he
could not have been more correct. By 1938 the ‘abstract’ already held the
solution to the poet’s ‘imagination–reality complex’. Abstraction would
help create the poet’s specialist vocabulary, but it would also outlive
Stevens’ ‘figure[s] of capable imagination’, not least after 1945.59 Delmore
Schwartz, in his 1938 review of ‘Blue Guitar’, observed: ‘There is always
an abstractness present; everything is turned into an object of the imagin-
ation.’ Schwartz correctly saw Stevens was in danger of being labelled ‘too
poetic’. But the scare quotes Schwartz gives the phrase in his review indi-
cate he saw salvation for the poet. Stevens’ work is ‘located […] in the
middle of everything which concerns us’, a position paradoxically estab-
lished through the voice of the poet’s ‘un-locatable’ speaker.60
Hardy, Selected Short Stories and Poems, 171.

57
CPP, 149. 59 Ibid., 226.

58
Delmore Schwartz, review of ‘Blue Guitar’ Partisan Review 4.3 (1938), 52.
60
C H APTER 3
The ‘ in-visible’ abstract: Stevens’ idealism from

Coleridge to Merleau-Ponty
3.1 Rom a n t ic a da p tat ions: W or d s wor t h,

C ol e r i d g e , S t e v e ns
I still have had

Thy after-sojourn in the self-same place
Present before my eyes, have played with times
(I speak of private business of the thought)
And accidents as children do with cards,
Or as a man, who, when his house is built,
A frame locked up in wood and stone, doth still
In impotence of mind by his fireside
Rebuild it to his liking. I have thought
Of thee, thy learning, gorgeous eloquence,
And all the strength and plumage of thy youth,
Thy subtle speculations, toils abstruse
Among the schoolmen, and Platonic forms
Of wild ideal pageantry, shaped out
From things well-matched, or ill, and words for things –
The self-created sustenance of a mind
Debarred from Nature’s living images,
Compelled to be a life unto itself,
And unrelentingly possessed by thirst
Of greatness, love, and beauty.1
In The Prelude Wordsworth expresses doubts about Coleridge’s ideal-
ist imagination. Wordsworth observes his friend has introspected to the
extent that the ‘actual world’, as Stevens calls it, no longer influences
Coleridge’s imagination.2 Coleridge lives on the ‘self-created sustenance
of a mind / Debarred from Nature’s living images, / Compelled to be
1
William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850 ed. Jonathan Wordsworth et al. (New York:
Norton, 1979), 1805 version, Book Sixth, lines 297–317: 200, 202.
2
L, 292.
78
The ‘ in-visible’ abstract 79
a life unto itself’. But in charging Coleridge with relinquishing his tal-
ent to ‘Platonic forms of wild ideal pageantry’ Wordsworth checks his
own tendency toward conceiving Coleridge’s life in the abstract. That is,
Wordsworth is wary of having ‘played’ with Coleridge’s ‘after-sojourn’, of
transporting himself to the ‘self-same place’ of Coleridge’s life and times
but conjuring there ‘accidents as children do with cards’. The distance
between imaginative creation and the ‘reality’ of what Coleridge endures
is satirized in the ‘man, who, when his house is built’ – although ‘locked
up in wood and stone’ – rebuilds it ‘to his liking’. Such ‘private business
of the thought’ marks a form of ‘impotence’ for Wordsworth. Where the
Hardy of ‘Shut Out That Moon’ wants to ‘Stay in’ to counter the beguil-
ing intrusions of ‘that moon’, Wordsworth critiques the inadequacy of the
man ‘by his fireside’ who cannot see his own house for what it is.
The Prelude repeatedly confronts the degree to which the mind constructs
‘reality’ and is influenced by ‘Nature’ in its creations; a Wordsworthian
preoccupation as early as ‘Tintern Abbey’.3 Rorty’s Contingency, Irony,
and Solidarity opens with the statement: ‘About two hundred years ago,
the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of
the imagination of Europe.’ 4 Wordsworth himself insists: ‘In weakness
we create distinctions, then / Deem that our puny boundaries are things /
Which we perceive, and not which we have made’.5 Wordsworth, like
Stevens, oscillates between wanting to touch ‘reality’ and recognizing
that conception of the ‘real’ is ineluctably mental: ‘I conversed / With
things that really are’, but only as ‘the mind / Is lord and master, and […]
outward sense / Is but the obedient servant of her will’.6
The Prelude indicates, however, that Wordsworth thought the imagin-
ation could be tamed from idealist excess through conversation with
‘Nature’. The ‘poetic spirit’ of life at large stems from an active dialogue
between perceiver and perceived. Wordsworth conceives his ‘infant babe’
as ‘[a]n inmate of this active universe’, revealing the creative reciprocity
between child and world:
From Nature largely he receives, nor so
Is satisfied, but largely gives again;
3
Wordsworth examines ‘all the mighty world / Of eye, and ear, – both what they half create, /
And what perceive’, Complete Poetical Works ed. Thomas Hutchinson rev. Ernest de Selincourt
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), lines 105–7, 164–5.
4
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 3.
5
The Prelude 1805, Book Second, lines 222–4: 76. See also the two-part Prelude, Second Part, lines
253–5: 20.
6
The two-part Prelude, Second Part, lines 442–3: 25; The Prelude 1805, Book Eleventh, lines
270–72: 430.
[…]
his mind,
Even as an agent of the one great mind,
Creates, creator and receiver both,
Working but in alliance with the works
Which it beholds. Such, verily, is the first
Poetic spirit of our human life[.]7
Coleridge, by contrast, has apparently relinquished contact with an active
world. Wordsworth charges him with mistaking ‘words for things’, with
falling prey to etymology and scholastic word-coining, absorbed in ‘sub-
tle speculations, toils abstruse / Among the schoolmen’. Checking his
own abstraction, Wordsworth claims not to rebuild Coleridge’s past ‘to
his [own] liking’; whilst, being ‘unrelentingly possessed’, Coleridge is,
apparently, ‘compelled’ to live in the isolation of his own perceptions: a
life unto itself.
This is hardly an even-handed portrayal of Coleridgean idealism.8
But Wordsworth’s fears for Coleridge help illustrate the anxiety Wallace
Stevens underwent during the mid-1930s over abstraction, the political
climate of Stevens’ own epoch being as disconcerting as the aftermaths
of the French Revolution. Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s confrontations –
continued in the Biographia Literaria – also contextualize Stevens’ rela-
tions with his Romantic forebears. However, although the poet derived
much from the British Romantics, Coleridge especially, in forging an
abstract vocabulary, Stevens was neither a latter-day Romantic nor a
Romantic in quasi-Modernist clothes.9 Unlike Yeats, Stevens would never
claim ‘We were the last romantics’, even where, contemporaneously, the
poet manipulated Romantic themes.10 Yet, whilst Stevens’ relations with
the Romantics have been repeatedly discussed, little scrutiny exists of
how Stevens’ modern idealism combines with abstraction.11 That interest
was stimulated not only by the Romantics, but by Stevens’ college read-
ing of Arnold, Pater, Emerson and William James. However, the poet’s
7
The Prelude 1805, Book Second, lines 266–76: 78, 80.
8
‘Dejection: An Ode’ may lament: ‘I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and
the life, whose fountains are within’ (lines 45–6, 351). But this debilitated speaker cannot solely
represent Coleridgean idealism.
9
Joseph Carroll, Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana
State University Press, 1987), 5–8. Whiting suggests Stevens’ ‘romantic irony’ constitutes a thor-
oughly Modernist response. See Anthony Whiting, The Never-Resting Mind: Wallace Stevens’
Romantic Irony (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
10
W. B. Yeats, ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’ in The Poems ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent, 1994),
294.
11
Altieri’s work is an exception. See also Peterson, Wallace Stevens.
modernized abstractions would take shapes the Romantics and their suc-
cessors could not have predicted.12
Stevens’ ‘abstract’ and the elusive terms beloved of ‘Notes Toward
a Supreme Fiction’ trope Coleridge and Wordsworth, particularly
Coleridgean poetic theory, transforming Romantic subject-matter into a
novel poetics. Both Stevens’ poetry and his attitudes to inspiration also
anticipate phenomenological concepts of the imagination, emergent con-
temporaneously but not popularized until after Stevens’ death. Stevens’
Coleridgean inheritance and reading of Focillon, Blanchot and possibly
Merleau-Ponty present alternative idioms for re-describing the ‘abstract’.
Thus I borrow Blanchot’s concept of the ‘work’ and Merleau-Ponty’s
‘in-visible’ to paint Stevens’ ‘abstract’ in a new light, also referring to
Hegelian idealism in introducing Stevens’ idealist ‘I’: the complex first
person Chapters 4 and 5 address in greater detail. These idioms combine
with the work which probably influenced Stevens’ sense of abstraction
the most: Focillon’s The Life of Forms in Art (‘one of the really remarkable
books of the day’).13 The final part of the chapter observes Stevens’ ori-
ginality in troping Romantic themes in a New Critical climate dismissive
of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, for Stevens’ emphasis on
abstraction in 1940s America defied the New Critics’ re-writing of English
Literature and poetic theory.
What relates idealism to abstraction and what might Stevens have
learnt from Coleridge? Philosophically, idealism signifies any ‘doctrine
holding that reality is fundamentally mental in nature’.14 Clearly, Kantian
idealism differs from Coleridgean idealism (and the German Idealists
who influenced Coleridge); and no one idealism can account for the idio-
syncratic play with ‘reality’ Stevens embraces poetically. Where Kant
holds that we cannot know ‘things as they are’ in themselves, that sub-
ject and object are forever divided and that the mind constructs ‘real-
ity’ through the illusions of space and time, Coleridge protests that the
12
Stevens underlined Matthew Arnold’s point that ‘[i]t is the business of the critical power […] to
see the object as in itself it really is’ in his copy of Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1895),
6. For the Emersonian/Jamesian inheritance, see Doggett, Stevens’ Poetry of Thought; Poirier,
The Renewal of Literature; Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism
and American Literary Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and David
M. La Guardia, Advance on Chaos: The Sanctifying Imagination of Wallace Stevens (Hanover,
NH: University Press of New England, 1983).
13
CPP, 671. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art trans. Charles B. Hogan and George
Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1989), originally published as La vie des formes (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1934). Stevens’ copy of the book is the Hogan and Kubler translation
published by Yale University Press in 1942 (University of Massachusetts collection).
14
Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 184.
imagination transcends the subject–object distinction, arguing that we
understand intuitively a universe in which we participate actively (like
Wordsworth’s creating ‘babe’).15 Where Coleridge holds the infinite ‘I
AM’ of the ‘primary IMAGINATION’ derives from a Supreme Being,
Stevens overhauls Coleridge, suggesting that, with ‘the death of the gods’,
one must construct a ‘supreme fiction’.16 Stevens simultaneously fashions
an idealist ‘I’, not as metaphysical as Coleridge’s ‘I AM’, but with powers
similar to Coleridge’s ‘secondary’ imagination: the force that ‘dissolves,
diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create’.17
What relates idealism to abstraction is the phenomenon already
observed in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’. Once any dichotomy is col-
lapsed – ‘imagination–reality’, ‘subject–object’ – ‘reality’ appears a ter-
tium quid, a third entity ‘intermediate between mind and matter’ (OED).
Either one accepts the idealist notion that humans create this intermediate
‘reality’ or one concludes that the idealist conjures ‘the real’ abstractly, at
the dangerous remove Wordsworth detects in Coleridge. In other words,
if we do not subscribe to any brand of idealist thought we will accuse
idealists of living in the ‘self-created sustenance’ of minds ‘debarred’,
as Wordsworth states, from ‘Nature’s living images’. We will accuse the
idealist of being abstracted from the ‘actual world’.
By 1938 Stevens had gradually overcome the concern that his poetry
was detached from ‘reality’. During the mid-1930s excessive abstraction
haunted his writing. A rarely quoted part of the ‘Adagia’ (c. 1934–40)
reads: ‘Abstraction is a part of idealism. It is in that sense that it is ugly.’18
Yet Stevens was also convinced that ‘[w]hat we see in the mind is as real
to us as what we see by the eye’.19 If Stevens still exhibited concern that
what the mind sees and what the eye perceives may constitute different
‘realities’, by the end of the 1930s he was more accommodated to idealism
and abstraction. In the same period Stevens’ manipulation of Coleridge
becomes most explicit in Parts of a World and ‘Notes’.
In ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ Stevens upholds
Coleridge’s distinction between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’; and refers
to ‘Dr. Richards’, indicating his reading of I. A. Richards’ Coleridge on
Imagination.20 His personal copy of Richards also illustrates how Stevens
absorbed Richards’ idealist paraphrases of Coleridge: ‘The colours of
Nature are a suffusion from the light of the mind, but […] the shaping
15
See Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics ed. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 35ff.
16
See BL, I, Ch. 13, 304; I, Ch. 10, 200.
17
BL, I, Ch. 13, 304. 18 OP, 187. 19 CPP, 903. 20 Ibid., 648.
spirit of Imagination, comes from the mind’s response to Nature’ (a pas-
sage Stevens marginally lined).21 Stevens also underlined: ‘It is the privil-
ege of poetry to preserve us from mistaking our notions either for things
or for ourselves. Poetry is the completest mode of utterance.’ 22 The obses-
sion with ‘parts’ and ‘wholes’ – essential to Parts of a World – also owes
much to Coleridgean rhetoric. The Biographia Literaria utilizes ‘parts’
and ‘wholes’ in discussing everything from sense perception to the ‘har-
monious whole’ in which the ideal poem consists. Certainly, the poet
who considered calling his Collected Poems ‘The Whole of Harmonium’
digested Coleridgean poetic theory.23
Moreover, Stevens would have composed several of the Parts of a World
poems – such as ‘Landscape with Boat’ (1940) – before he read Focillon.
Thus, although Focillon’s analysis of Viollet-le-Duc influenced ‘Notes’,
Stevens was already meditating on spatial/semantic dimensions before
reading The Life of Forms in Art.24 Coleridge offered Stevens a synecdochal
idiom for describing the relations between the poem, literature as a whole
and the imagination. Stevens’ desire to ‘think about the world without its
varnish and dirt’ – to become a thinker of ‘the first idea’ – also chimes with
Coleridge’s view of the function of poetry (as reiterated by Santayana).25 In
collaborating on the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge aimed ‘to excite a feeling
analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from
the lethargy of custom’. Coleridge, like Stevens, wants poetry to penetrate
the ‘film of familiarity’ formed by the ‘lethargy’ of habitual perception.26
21
I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (London: Kegan Paul, 1934), Stevens’ copy, 152.
22
Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, Stevens’ copy, 163.
23
BL, II, Ch. 14, 15. Stevens’ rhetoric of ‘parts’ and ‘wholes’ is also Mallarméan. Mallarmé finds
a ‘harmony […] somewhere in the parts of the total poem […] Everything will be hesitation,
disposition of parts, their alternations and relationships […] contributing to the rhythmic total-
ity’ (‘Crisis in Poetry’ in The Norton Anthology of Western Literature ed. Sarah Lawall [New
York: Norton, 2006], 1562). However, Stevensian abstraction should be distinguished from
Mallarméan ‘pure poetry’ because Stevens is restless with a poetic where ‘essences are dis-
tilled and then embodied in Idea’ (1561). Stevens’ ‘never-resting mind’ (CPP, 179) prevents him
from embracing a world of pure essences or ideas. As Michel Benamou suggests: ‘Purity will
have to shed its Mallarméan connotations of inaccessibility and non-being before finding its
way into Stevens’ imaginary world’ (‘Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination’ in The
Act of Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens ed. Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis Miller
[Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965], 108).
24
See CPP, 334. Stevens marked the following: ‘architectural masses are rigorously determined
by the relationship of the parts to each other and of the parts to the whole’, Focillon, The Life of
Forms in Art, 71; Stevens’ copy, 22.
25
L, 427, CPP, 330–1. Santayana observes that once the poet removes ‘the veil of convention […] we
are better able to dominate any particular experience and […] to change its scale’, Interpretations
of Poetry and Religion, 266.
26
BL, II, Ch. 14, 7.
Such parallels can be extended infinitely. Where Stevens envisages a ‘flu-
ent mundo’, Coleridge insists that the genius ‘rest[s] content between thought
and reality’ as if occupying ‘an intermundium’ of his or her own making.27
Coleridge’s and Stevens’ obsession with ‘fiction’ also indicates their shared
conviction that ‘reality’ is linguistically inscribed.28 But the point here is
to demonstrate how Coleridgean discourse helps us to conceive Stevens’
‘abstract’: both to show Coleridge’s influence on Stevens’ terminology and to
borrow Coleridge’s idiom to re-describe Stevens’ most elusive term.
Stevens read Coleridge at Harvard, if not before. The poet’s personal
library reveals his reading of the ‘Everyman’ series of Romantic poets
edited by Ernest Rhys. Rhys’ The Prelude to Poetry contains Wordsworth’s
Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, chapters from the
Biographia and Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’, all of which Stevens margin-
ally marked.29 But Stevens’ 1930s re-working of Romantic theory derived
from an aesthetic epiphany in which abstraction and idealism unite, and
Coleridge is only one element in Stevens’ imaginative development. It is
unlikely that Stevens actively read the Biographia, or Coleridge at large,
in writing Parts and ‘Notes’. He had also absorbed Mallarmé, whose own
idealism promised an attractive Symbolist edge: ‘we have the right […] to
madly detach [things] until we fill that void and thus endow them with
splendour […] I demand from writing nothing else’.30 Mallarmé, a cru-
cial influence on Blanchot, is part of a complex of figures whose idioms
enable us to re-assess Stevens’ emergent sense of abstraction.
However, Stevens’ modernizing of Coleridgean idealism does occur in
the late 1930s, as Peterson notes.31 Stevens’ later sensitivity to the similarity
of his terminology to Romantic theory is also telling. In 1953 he claimed:
While, of course, I come down from the past, the past is my own and not some-
thing marked Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc. I know of no one who has been par-
ticularly important to me. My reality-imagination complex is entirely my own
even though I see it in others.32
But if Stevens’ past is not ‘something marked Coleridge, Wordsworth,
etc.’ it is marked by those writers; and Stevens’ ‘reality-imagination
27
Ibid., I, Ch. 2, 32.
28
Coleridge coins ‘suffiction’ in preference to ‘supposition’ because, like Stevens, he views percep-
tions as fictions (BL, I, Ch. 5, 101–2).
29
Ernest Rhys, ed., The Prelude to Poetry: The English Poets in the Defence and Praise of Their Own
Art (London: Dent, 1894).
30
Stéphane Mallarmé, Mallarmé in Prose ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions,
2001), 37.
31
Margaret Peterson, Wallace Stevens and the Idealist Tradition (Epping: Bowker, 1983), 37–57.
32
L, 792.
complex’, among other seductive figures, was hardly his own.33 However,
in order to understand what occasions the surface similarities between
Stevens and Coleridge, I must elucidate how Coleridgean language bears
on Stevensian abstraction.
Leggett plausibly argues that Stevens expanded his concept of
abstraction from Richards’ Coleridge on Imagination. Richards describes
words as ‘abstractive fictions’, indicating Coleridge’s belief that lan-
guage and ideas are intermediate creations between matter and mind.34
For Leggett, abstraction ‘enables the imagination to free itself from the
dilemma of the mind-world duality’.35 Moving beyond the critical ten-
dencies to think the injunction ‘It Must Be Abstract’ means either a) iso-
lating ‘reality’ itself without the interference of the ‘imagination’ or b)
opposing Stevens’ poetry to the concrete, Leggett suggests that Stevens’
slogan signifies ‘the inability of the poet’s fiction to escape the artificial
and therefore abstract nature of language’.36 But whilst Leggett is correct
that Stevens’ ‘abstract’ transcends a ‘mind-world duality’ we must look
beyond Richards’ secularizing of Coleridge’s metaphysics to re-describe
Stevens’ term.
Admittedly, in the idiom of ‘Notes’, assessing Coleridge’s influence and
the effect of Richards’ Coleridge hardly boils down to a ‘choice between’
influences, but it can be a ‘choice of’.37 That is, one need not choose
between Coleridge and Richards’ Coleridge as influences on Stevens, but
can speculate as to which of these influences had the greater effect on the
poet. The trouble with Stevens’ ‘abstract’ is that – like the ‘new roman-
tic’ – it encourages tautological paraphrase. As an adjective it is alarm-
ingly empty, requiring other epithets for self-definition. ‘Abstract’ is also
an empty noun, seemingly connoting the very formlessness it represents.
But a Coleridgean idiom partially enables escape from the emptiness
Stevens’ ‘abstract’ superficially encourages.
Coleridgean abstraction derives from the etymology of the word ‘idea’.
In the Biographia Coleridge opposes Hume’s ‘materialist’ explanation of
the ‘idea’ and Hartley’s ‘associationism’, doctrines that, for Coleridge,
render ideas mechanical by-products effected in the mind by ‘Nature’.38
Coleridge summarizes the materialist position thus:
33
Bornstein bizarrely claims: ‘Stevens rightly insisted that his doctrines were his own’
(Transformations of Romanticism, 175).
34
Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 83.
35
36
Ibid., 39. 37 See CPP, 348.
38
See BL, I, Ch. 6, 107–8.
Whenever we feel several objects at the same time, the impressions that are left (or
in the language of Mr. Hume, the ideas) are linked together. Whenever therefore
any one of the movements [is] renewed through the senses, the others succeed
mechanically.39
Coleridge opposes Hume by disinterring the etymology of ‘idea’:
I here use the word ‘idea’ in Mr. Hume’s sense […] though against my own
judgement […] The word, ’Iδεα, in its original sense […] represented the visual
abstraction of a distant object, when we see the whole without distinguishing
the parts.40
An ‘idea’ is, then, a ‘visual abstraction’. With respect to ‘a distant object’
the mind conceives a ‘whole’ without distinguishing specific ‘parts’. In
Coleridge’s idealist scheme, however, subjects and objects are inextricable.
In reading Biographia Chapter 14, Stevens marginally lined Coleridge’s
insistence that ‘[i]n order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we
must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts […] [W]e must then
restore them in our conceptions to the unity in which they actually co-
exist’.41 Thus Coleridge derides the notion that humans are ‘merely passive
to an external power’, subject to an object-dominated world.42 No division
between subject and object exists because the ‘I’ is an active creator of
‘reality’, mediating the space of Kantian dualism. Like the ‘un-locatable’
speaker in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, Coleridge’s ‘I’ is significantly
‘groundless’. It is the force that ‘in the very idea […] precludes all ground
[…] It is groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other
certainty.’ 43
For the Christian Coleridge, this ‘I’ derives from the creator ‘I AM’.
What should be observed here, however, is Coleridge’s formation of sub-
jectivity as a self-reflexive idea (a notion shared with Hegel). Celebrating
the imagination as the mind’s faculty to conceive itself, the Biographia
argues:
There are evidently two powers at work […] active and passive; and this is not
possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and pas-
sive. (In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty
[…] the imagination […].)44
For Coleridge, the imagination allows the mind to conceive itself. This
‘intermediate faculty’ enables conception of self. It is an abstract force
39
Ibid., I, Ch. 5, 96. 40 Ibid., I, Ch. 5, 97.
41
Stevens’ copy of Rhys, The Prelude to Poetry, 158.
42
BL, I, Ch. 5, 90. 43 Ibid., I, Ch. 12, 260.
44
Ibid., I, Ch. 8, 125.
not because it conceives a logically ‘groundless’ ‘I’ removed from ‘reality’,
but because it creates the space where self can exist: ‘the ground of all
other certainty’. ‘Blue Guitar’ had asked ‘What is there in life except one’s
ideas?’ not to deny the presence of a physical world but to affirm the self
which constructs the idea of that world.45 As Stevens’ speaker insists: ‘I
am a native of this world’, where, in the end, ‘things are as I think they
are’.46 If that certainty is relinquished, so is the ‘I’ who claims knowledge
of its very existence.47
Coleridge helps, then, in re-conceiving Stevens’ ‘abstract’ by showing
how the imagination conceives itself and its relation to the ‘actual world’.
Contrary to Wordsworth’s fears in The Prelude, Coleridgean idealism
links imagination and world intimately. Despite the concerns of ‘Blue
Guitar’, by 1938 Stevens also discovers abstraction as a positive creative
process. Chapter 2 explored Stevens’ realization that conceiving poetry
as an idea could inspire the creation of actual poems (‘Poetry is the sub-
ject of the poem’).48 The ‘unwritten rhetoric’ of ‘The Irrational Element
in Poetry’ anticipates Stevens’ belief that fictive notions may actuate cre-
ation.49 As the ‘Adagia’ notes: ‘Poetry is the expression of the experience
of poetry’, adding: ‘Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of
the idea within the poem of the words’.50
The reciprocity between the idea of ‘poetry’ and writing generated
by the abstraction of that idea signifies Stevens’ idealist strain. Leggett
suggests that a ‘detailed analysis of the first section of “Notes” would be
required to match Stevens’ use of idea with Coleridge’s’.51 But no such
match is necessary to translate Stevens’ term. Coleridge is, as Leggett
observes, not a source for Stevens. Rather, Stevens’ echoes of Coleridge
establish a context for re-interpreting the ‘abstract’ as a modern form of
idealism. Rather than say the injunction ‘It Must Be Abstract’ derives from
Coleridge and Stevens’ reading of Richards, one can borrow Coleridgean
idealism to flesh out the ‘abstract’. Rather than suggest that Coleridge
provides Stevens with the concept of the imagination as self-reflexive idea-
maker, one can venture that Stevens is a modern idealist whose recon-
structed idealism contrasts with Coleridge. One can, therefore, mark the
distance between Coleridge and Stevens rather than simply map their
overall similarities.
45
CPP, 144. 46 Ibid., 147–8.
47
Paul Valéry remarks, ‘The “I” is that which “responds” or is able to respond to anything at all’
Cahiers/Notebooks trans. Paul Gifford et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000) vol. i, 351.
48
CPP, 144. 49 Ibid., 790. 50 OP, 190, 199.
51
3.2 A b s t r ac t a n a l o gu e s: Bl a nc ho t,
M e r l e au-P on t y, S t e v e ns
The distance between Coleridge’s idealism and Stevens’ emerges through
further translation. During Stevens’ lifetime phenomenological think-
ers re-interpreted the philosophical position the Romantics and German
Idealists established for the self. Resisting physiological accounts of per-
ception (just as Coleridge and Schelling opposed ‘mechanical’ pictures of
the mind), phenomenologists presupposed a self capable of perceiving phe-
nomena.52 Such thinkers were preoccupied with the role imagination plays
in transforming perception; and it is no coincidence that Stevens would
develop an interest in Heidegger, the pre-eminent philosopher of ‘Being’
and the thinker Kermode finds coinciding most with late Stevens.53
But Stevens also expressed interest in French writers and theorists
who borrowed from Heidegger’s philosophy in explicating the relations
between literature and the imagination, between writers and their works.
Writing to Peter Lee in 1955 Stevens remarked: ‘I love Maurice Blanchot.’ 54
Stevens came to Blanchot through the Nouvelle Revue Française, probably
through the essay ‘The Disappearance of Literature’.55 But the intimacy of
Stevens’ reading of Blanchot is not at point in considering the American
poet’s position in the late 1930s and early 40s. Similarly, although in an
unpublished letter to Paule Vidal Stevens requested a copy of ‘Eloge de
la Philosophie, an inaugural lecture by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, Stevens’
digestion of Merleau-Ponty, if he read him, is not at issue.56 Rather,
Blanchot’s and Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of the imagination proffer
terms that give Stevens’ ‘abstract’ form. Making Stevens’ term corporeal
enables us to read his middle to late phases afresh and without indebted-
ness to the poet’s own vocabulary. I will also note how French Symbolism,
especially Mallarmé, informs Blanchot. For it is no exaggeration to say
that in the 1950s Stevens was primed to respond to Blanchot because
of Blanchot’s essentially Modernist twist on Mallarméan ideas. Indeed,
Stevens’ absorption of Focillon gave the poet an even wider context for
52
See Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: From Husserl to Lyotard (London: Routledge,
1993), 5.
53
Frank Kermode, ‘Dwelling Poetically In Connecticut’ in Wallace Stevens: A Celebration ed.
Frank Doggett and Robert Buttel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 256–73.
54
L, 879.
55
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Où va la littérature (I)’ Nouvelle Revue Française 7 (1953); reprinted as ‘The
Disappearance of Literature’ in The Blanchot Reader ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell,
1995), 136–42.
56
Stevens to P. Vidal, 9 December 1953, WAS, 2984.
combining the abstract spirit of all these writers in what is a remarkable
confection of writerly and painterly influences.
In ‘The Essential Solitude’ Blanchot explains that the ‘work’ is an ideal
to which the writer is drawn but cannot achieve alone:
The writer writes a book, but the book is not yet the work. There is a work only
when, through it […] the word being is pronounced. This event occurs when the
work becomes the intimacy between someone who writes it and someone who
reads it. […] [I]f solitude is the writer’s risk, does it not express the fact that he is
turned, oriented toward the open violence of the work, of which he never grasps
anything but the substitute – the approach and the illusion in the form of the
book? The writer belongs to the work, but what belongs to him is only a book.57
For Blanchot, the writer merely owns his books, whilst the ‘work’ evades
him as an abstract ideal particularized only for individual readers. The
writer’s ‘solitude’ ensures he cannot read his own work. But this very
inability sustains the writer as his only life-line with the ‘work’, just as,
for Kierkegaard, the despair of the unbeliever paradoxically establishes a
relationship with God.58
As Blanchot observes:
[T]he writer never reads his work. It is, for him, illegible, a secret […] [H]e is
separated from it. However, his inability to read the work is not a purely nega-
tive phenomenon. It is, rather, the writer’s only real relation to what we call the
work. The abrupt Noli me legere brings forth, where there is still only a book, the
horizon of a different strength.59
The ‘work’ becomes, then, a necessary fiction. Like Stevens, Blanchot sees
a fictive ideal as directly catalysing imaginative creation. In ‘Mallarmé’s
Experience’ Blanchot notes how the ‘unreal’ influences the ‘real’ – a
favourite Stevensian theme – and that the ‘fictive’ seemingly enables our
own fictions: ‘This language of the unreal, this fictive language which
delivers us to fiction, comes from silence and returns to silence.’ 60 A silent,
almost unnameable ‘abstract’ is what Stevens demands of his ‘supreme
fiction’. As ‘Notes’ insists, teetering on naming its object: ‘The sun / Must
bear no name, gold flourisher, but be’.61 Stevens’ ideal there and elsewhere
is the communication of the incommunicable which, for Blanchot, is the
silent ‘work’ itself.
57
Blanchot, ‘The Essential Solitude’, 23.
58
See Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’ intro. W.
Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 470.
59
Blanchot, ‘The Essential Solitude’, 23–4.
60
Blanchot, ‘Mallarmé’s Experience’, 39.
61
CPP, 330.
‘Mallarmé’s Experience’ also describes in Heideggerian terms the ten-
sion between a text’s ‘reality’ and the distance between text and ideal:
The poet strives […] to create the ‘poem-thing,’ […] the language of mute
being. He wants to make of the poem something which all by itself will be
form, existence, and being[.] […] We call this powerful linguistic construc-
tion […] the work. And we call it being. But it is from this perspective neither
one nor the other[.] […] [The poem] is a being, and for this reason it is by no
means close to being, to that which escapes all determination and every form
of existence.62
Despite the individual poem’s existence, no text can realize the ‘work’
because that ideal always eludes realization (‘that which escapes all
determination and every form of existence’). Blanchot’s interest in
Mallarmé doubtless stems from Mallarmé’s abstract ‘Book’: a univer-
sal text akin to Blanchot’s unattainable ‘work’ which Mallarmé rep-
resented in The Book.63 Such an ideal cannot exist concretely, but is
what Stevens calls ‘immanent’; like the ‘I’ of ‘Blue Guitar’, it is ‘there’
but cannot be fixed. As Mallarmé remarked to Valéry: ‘to conceive of
literature […] we have to reach this “high symphony” that perhaps no
one will manage’.64
Stevens refined his own notion as follows:
The abstract does not exist, but it is certainly as immanent: […] the fictive
abstract is as immanent in the mind of the poet, as the idea of God is immanent
in the mind of the theologian. The poem is a struggle with the inaccessibility of
the abstract.65
In ‘The Disappearance of Literature’ Blanchot extends such ‘inaccess-
ibility’ to the idea that literature travels ‘toward itself, toward its essence
which is disappearance’.66 Nevertheless, the poet persists in inspecting the
‘source’ of his own activity. The ‘work’ evades him, but its influence on
his imaginative life inspires his unrealizable dream.
Such pressure is, for Blanchot, irreducible to specific cultural or social
needs:
62
Blanchot, ‘Mallarmé’s Experience’, 42.
63
See Mallarmé, Mallarmé in Prose, 125–33. For a previous discussion of Blanchot’s ‘work’, see
Edward Ragg, ‘Pragmatic Abstraction v. Metaphor: Stevens’ “The Pure Good of Theory” and
Macbeth’ WSJ 30.1 (2006), 25. Josh Cohen also refers to Mallarmé, Blanchot, Schlegel and Stevens
with regard to an ultimate ‘book’ in ‘“The strange unlike”: Stevens’ Poetics of Resemblance’
(Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic ed. Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg [London: Palgrave,
2008], 107–18).
64
Mallarmé, Mallarmé in Prose, 7.
65
L, 434.
66
Blanchot, ‘The Disappearance of Literature’, 136.
[T]he poem is the depth which opens onto the experience which makes it pos-
sible […] the work itself become the restless, infinite pursuit of its own source
[…] [W]hile historical circumstances exert their pressure on such movements
[…] – so it is said that the writer, who takes as the object of his activity the
uncertain essence of that activity, is merely reflecting what is becoming his own
precarious social position – they are not on their own capable of explaining the
significance of this pursuit.67
The reciprocity between ‘work’ and poem – where each text is involved
in the ‘infinite pursuit of its own source’ – is significantly trans-histor-
ical. In Stevens’ creation of a ‘supreme fiction’ that is ‘poetry’ – but a
fiction only glimpsed in ‘notes’ leading toward itself – we find a correla-
tive to Blanchot’s unattainable work. But we also uncover what most
upsets Stevens’ harshest critics: an imagination seemingly swinging free
from historical contingency. The slogan ‘It Must Be Abstract’ inadvert-
ently makes Stevens’ poetry appear ‘abstracted’ from ‘reality’. But Stevens
and Blanchot are neither a-historical nor aloofly removed. The function
of Stevens’ ‘abstract’ is to re-connect poet and reader with a palpable,
‘real’ world. If Stevens would never write the war poetry of Karl Shapiro,
Randall Jarrell or Keith Douglas, his early 1940s idealist ‘I’ epitomizes an
imaginative process which rejuvenates perception of life. As for Coleridge
and Santayana, abstract imagining helps one pierce the ‘film of familiar-
ity’, re-animating contact with life at large.68
During the early 1940s, however, Stevens still felt it necessary to
defend poetry from having to respond directly to social and political
phenomena: a pressure derived from the turbulent 1930s, but which, by
the 40s, was coloured by isolationism and the USA’s subsequent entry
to the Second World War. Following Pearl Harbor, Stevens was par-
ticularly alienated by the ‘Brooks–MacLeish’ controversy and the ‘new
nationalism’ demanded of American writers (see Chapter 5). If Stevens
could have read in 1942 what Blanchot wrote in the early 1950s he might
have discovered an alternative way of presenting his ‘abstract’. However,
in The Life of Forms in Art, Stevens did find support for his sense of the
artwork’s transcending the local and contemporary conditions of its cre-
ation. Stevens’ reading of Focillon in 1942, therefore, predisposed him to
the Blanchot of the early 1950s. However, I discuss Blanchot’s abstract
‘work’ first because the concept aids appreciation of Focillon’s specula-
tions on abstract forms.
Ibid., 139.
67
See Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 261–6.

68
How does Stevens discuss his abstract figurations and does Blanchot’s
idiom help portray Stevens’ practice? The poet certainly resisted explain-
ing his poems in letters to Latimer, Hi Simons, Henry Church and
others. Less appreciated, however, is the imaginative satisfaction Stevens
derived from discussing poetry in the abstract. Blissfully unaware of the
future publication of his letters, Stevens confessed: ‘I like the idea of talk-
ing about poetry without any attempt to fix what one says in print’ (‘talk’
amounting here to letter-writing).69 One example of not ‘fix[ing] what
one says’ was Stevens’ protracted discussion with Church over endow-
ing a ‘Chair of Poetry’, initiated in 1940. Stevens’ intent as a poet and
lawyer to endow the Chair was serious enough (as his ‘Memorandum’
indicates).70 But Stevens wanted to discuss a ‘theory of poetry’ whether
or not the Chair materialized. As Church devised the Princeton Mesures
lectures, Stevens actually suggested calling the series ‘Theory of Poetry’.71
But he had no theories of versification, or any specific theory, in mind.
He simply wanted to discuss poetry as an abstract topic.
One letter to Church oscillates between describing ‘specimens’ of
poetry (created poems on the page) and an abstract ‘whole’ from which
such poems derive inspiration:
To most people poetry means certain specimens of it, but these specimens are
merely parts of a greater whole. I am not thinking of the body of poetic litera-
ture, because that whole body is merely a group of specimens. I am thinking
of the poetic side of life, of the abstraction and the theory. This sounds rather
mussy, but I shall not stop to bother about that.72
In conceiving ‘specimens’ as ‘parts’, Stevens was not imagining poems
emanating from a ‘body of poetic literature’. That ‘whole body’ is ‘merely
a group of specimens’. Instead, he conceives ‘a greater whole’, an ‘abstrac-
tion’ where poetry is the idea inspiring those specimens. When Stevens
and Church returned to discussing the Chair in 1942, the poet revelled in
merely talking about poetry as an idea:
I am glad that we can go back to the subject of a Chair of Poetry, which I should
really like to write to you about now and then, as an abstract subject, without
the slightest thought of ever trying to talk you into doing anything about it
actually.73
In Blanchot’s terms, Stevens was happiest exploring the ‘uncertain essence’
of his own ‘activity’, pursuing poetry as ‘an abstract subject’. Knowing
L, 392.
69 70
Ibid., 376ff. Ibid., 382.
71 72
Ibid., 383. 73
Ibid., 427–8.
he could produce poems through the ‘infinite pursuit’ of poetry’s own
‘source’, Stevens eagerly discussed that elusive origin ad infinitum.
Stevens’ ‘supreme fiction’ would prove even more captivating. Criticism
has tried to decipher what a ‘supreme fiction’ means, and the correspond-
ence provides obvious clues. Stevens explained: ‘I have no idea of the form
that a supreme fiction would take. The NOTES start out with the idea
that it would not take any form: that it would be abstract.’ 74 That a ‘fic-
tion’ should not attain form parallels Blanchot’s insistence that the ‘work’
‘escapes all determination and every form of existence’. As Hegel argues
in Phenomenology of Spirit, what is ‘abstract’ is precisely immediate and
formless. But what the criticism also often overlooks is the highly physical
effect Stevens’ abstract figures have on his imaginative nervous system
(which illustrates how ‘immanent’ his ideas are).
For example, Stevens describes his ‘supreme fiction’ as a ‘thing’ attach-
ing itself to his person:
When I get up at 6 o’clock in the morning […] the thing crawls all over me; it
is in my hair when I shave and I think of it in the bathtub. Then I come down
here to the office and, except for an occasional letter like this, have to put it to
one side. After all, I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of
books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction.75
Chapter 5 argues that this need for ‘Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese’
and ‘lots of books’ was actually coterminous with Stevens’ desire for ‘supreme
fiction’. What makes this letter fascinating is the proximity of palpable, phys-
ical objects (wine, grapes, cheese, endive, books) to that abstract ‘supreme
fiction’, especially where the abstraction affects Stevens’ imagination ‘physic-
ally’ (‘the thing crawls all over me; it is in my hair when I shave’).
But note how, without its indefinite article, ‘supreme fiction’ almost
risks becoming a definite article, like wine, grapes, or books; whereas,
when Stevens refers to ‘a supreme fiction’ he insists ‘it would not take any
form: it would be abstract’.76 ‘Extracts from Addresses to the Academy
of Fine Ideas’ (1940) also revealingly combines articles and abstraction
(‘There was that difference between the and an, / The difference between
himself and no man’), where ‘an’ refers to an abstract ‘empty place’ as
opposed to a defined space (‘the empty place’).77 As Chapter 5 adum-
brates, this slightly earlier poem precedes the gastronomic ‘Montrachet-
Le-Jardin’ in Parts of a World, the later text acting as a ‘commentary’ on
‘Extracts from Addresses’.
Ibid., 430.
74
Ibid., 431.
75
Ibid., 430.
76
CPP, 230.
77
If the ‘abstract’ desires, then, to be mediated – to become ‘an abstrac-
tion blooded’ or ‘an abstraction given head’ – the already mediated can
be re-configured imaginatively only through abstraction (otherwise the
senses numb to the habitual or mundane).78 Stevens’ ‘etc., etc., etc.’ sug-
gests further desired items to be purchased through office work, but the
acquisition of these physical items is clearly on a par with ‘supreme fic-
tion’ (which is also part of office life, albeit via correspondence). In short,
Stevens’ imaginative pleasure thrives on an abstract dialectic: where phys-
ical palpability vies with abstract re-configuration, at work, at home. Just
as Hegel insists that the abstract work, although immediate, seeks a phys-
ical form enabling mediation, Stevens’ ‘supreme fiction’ is almost physical
(‘the thing crawls all over me’), for Stevens’ abstract terminology cannot
escape tautology unless it assumes a quasi-physical shape or name.79
The need for palpability arises from what Benjamin Lee Whorf (that
other famous Hartford employee) calls ‘linguistic binomialism’.80 As
Whorf explains: ‘Our language patterns often require us to name a phys-
ical thing by a binomial that splits the reference into a formless item plus
a form.’ This proves effective for physical objects, as in ‘stick of wood,
piece of cloth, pane of glass’ or ‘cake of soap’.81 It is less successful for
abstract qualities, as in the title Ideas of Order. The nouns ‘idea’ and
‘order’ are immaterial and, via Whorf’s binomial, conjure poetic ambi-
guity. Similarly, if palpable descriptions for Stevens’ ‘abstract’ cannot be
found the term will always evade our grasp.
Chapter 2 defined Stevens’ poetry as abstract not merely because it relies
upon idealist conception, but because its themes and figures are ‘hard
to see’.82 ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ demonstrates how, although
78
Ibid., 333, 380. See also Ragg, ‘Pragmatic Abstraction v. Metaphor’, 11ff.
79
See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit trans. A. V. Miller, foreword and notes by J. N.
Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 429. Valéry likewise suggests abstract thought becomes
physical: ‘[A] sudden concatenation of ideas, an analogy, would strike me in much the way the
sound of a horn in the heart of a forest makes one prick up one’s ears, and virtually directs the
co-ordinated attention of all one’s muscles toward some point in the distance, among the leafy
depths’ (‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’, 57–8).
80
See Brazeau, Parts of a World, 19.
81
Benjamin Lee Whorf, ‘The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language’ in
Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, [1956] 2000), 141.
82
Michel Benamou argues Stevens mastered ‘a sort of pulse that alternately dilates and narrows the
field of vision’, ‘Wallace Stevens: Some Relations Between Poetry and Painting’ in The Achievement
of Wallace Stevens ed. Ashley Brown and Robert S. Haller (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1962),
233. Bonnie Costello observes: ‘although Stevens was endowed with a rich visual imagination, one
does not experience a strong engagement of the visual faculty in reading his poetry’, adding that
Stevens ‘blocks visual thinking’ (‘Stevens and Painting’ in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace
Stevens ed. John N. Serio [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 169).
Stevens’ speaker is textually identifiable, the reader struggles to locate its
elusive ‘I’. This quality derives not only from Stevens’ dense diction and
imagery. It is what makes Stevens a poet who a) thinks abstractly and b)
creates abstract poetry. The poetry that is ‘hard to see’ also perhaps differ-
entiates Stevens’ ‘abstract’ from Abstract Expressionism, or certain modes
of painterly abstraction (Stevens’ 1930s reservations about creative isola-
tion also chime with Picasso’s dismissal of ‘abstract art’).83 Stevens’ poetry
does not pare language down to its basic elements; as the most extreme
abstract art achieves on the visual/material level. Just because the ‘abstract’
is immediate does not mean Stevens adopts non-physical or non-concrete
language (Stevens’ favoured term is, after all, ‘immanent’). Rather, his
concern is with aesthetic experience which does find instructive analogies
in painterly abstraction from Cézanne to Klee; not least in Francis Bacon
who thought abstractly but spent a lifetime resisting ‘abstract art’.
Bacon claims that ideas for paintings inspired his work to the extent
that his pictures appeared self-generating:
I can daydream for hours and pictures fall in just like slides. But it doesn’t mean
that the pictures that I finally end up with have anything to do with the paint-
ings that dropped into my mind […] I think of the disposition of the forms and
then I watch the forms form themselves.84
Stevens approaches this process not by observing ‘forms form themselves’
but by creating imaginative works inspired by formless ideas. Unlike
Bacon, who claims to see – literally or figuratively – the source of his
inspiration, Stevens transforms an invisible ‘abstract’ into poems which,
however visual, remain hard to visualize. But to refine what is meant by
the difficulty of ‘seeing’ Stevens’ poetry, I want to explore Merleau-Ponty’s
notion of the ‘in-visible’.
Merleau-Ponty attempts a novel vocabulary for describing vision,
stressing the imagination’s role in creating the phenomenon of ‘the visual’
itself. Rejecting Sartre’s negative account of the imagination as solipsis-
tic, Merleau-Ponty also coincides with Blanchot’s and Stevens’ views of
inspiration. As Merleau-Ponty explains:
Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: […]
the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible […] – one cannot see it there
83
‘Abstract Expressionism’ is clearly an amorphous term, as Pollock and de Kooning are notably
more ‘expressionist’ than ‘abstract’. See Charles Harrison, ‘Abstract Expressionism’ in Concepts
of Modern Art ed. Nikos Stangos (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), 169–211.
84
David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 134, 136.
and every effort to see it there makes it disappear, but it is in the line of the visible,
it is its virtual focus, it is inscribed within it[.]85
The difficulty in visualizing what Merleau-Ponty articulates only reflects
the phenomenon he describes, at least if one clings to a conventional
‘invisible’. Meaning may be invisible, but that does not mean it cannot
be perceived. Merleau-Ponty dispatches the common sense of ‘invisible’,
suggesting the ‘visible’ always contains another meaning, a ‘secret coun-
terpart of the visible’: the ‘in-visible’. Like Stevens’ abstract, this cannot
be seen, but, idealistically speaking, undeniably exists.
Like Coleridge, Merleau-Ponty believes every notion of ‘the real’ derives
from imaginative acts. Dispatching a mind–body dualism, he suggests
one’s sense of the body is itself an imaginative projection:
It is not the utilizable, functional, prosaic body which explains man: […] the
body is precisely human to the extent that it discovers its symbolic and poetic
charge.86
Merleau-Ponty’s view of the imagination is not, however, merely another
instance of how ‘abstract’ creations impact on our sense of the ‘real’.
Stevens’ abstract figures – and the process that creates them – are ‘in-
visible’. His poems conjure physical and visual imagery, but, paradoxic-
ally, remain ‘hard to see’. As noted, ‘The Creations of Sound’ precisely
insists on the poetic virtue of making ‘the visible a little hard / To see’.87
‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ (1949) likewise describes ‘desire’
as ‘set deep in the eye, / Behind all actual seeing, in the actual scene […]
Always in emptiness that would be filled’. It is abstraction’s ultimate role
to fill that void.88
Merleau-Ponty also observes how ‘the distinctive feature of the imagin-
ation’ is ‘not to affirm the real presence of its object’, which actually
affirms his awareness that ‘real presence[s]’ are created by perceiving sub-
jects.89 As ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ indicates, it is precisely poet-
ry’s job to challenge, even dissolve, binary distinctions between reality
and imagination, subject and object, body and mind, the material and
85
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 215.
86
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Existence et dialectique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971),
85; as translated in Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 114.
87
CPP, 275.
88
Ibid., 398. Stevens also writes of ‘a visibility of thought, / In which hundreds of eyes, in one
mind, see at once’, ‘things seen and unseen’ and puns on ‘sight and insight’ (CPP, 416, 415, 404).
89
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘On Sartre’s Imagination (1936)’ in Texts and Dialogues ed. Hugh J.
Silverman and James Barry Jr, trans. Michael B. Smith et al. (London: Humanities Press, 1992), 113.
immaterial. Such dissolution is the shared goal of Coleridge’s and Hegel’s
thought and, clearly, a quality in which Stevens’ poetry excels. But, as
‘Blue Guitar’ also explores, poetry is both limited to and liberated by
its verbal relationship with things visible and invisible, unlike painting.
As Eeckhout would argue, it is precisely this limit that proves product-
ive. When the young Stevens read The Laocoön, he marginally marked
Lessing’s observation that the poet is able to ‘raise this degree of illusion
in us by the representation of other than visible objects’.90
Stevens’ own references to vision indicate the imagination’s powers and
limits. For him, the poet is ‘the priest of the invisible’, whose ‘tongue is
an eye’.91 By the mid-1940s, once Stevens had begun to absorb abstraction,
two developments followed: a) he modified the overtly abstract termin-
ology of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ and b) Stevens discovered a
less advertised, even surreptitious, language of the ‘in-visible’, conceiving
the ‘thing’ that is impossible to visualize but which nonetheless exists.
After 1942 one hears little in Stevens’ work of a ‘supreme fiction’, ‘the first
idea’, ‘major man’, or even ‘the abstract’ itself. By this stage, Stevens had
absorbed such a creative notion of abstraction he no longer required the
inspiration of an exemplary vocabulary, at least not one in which abstrac-
tion was necessarily explicit. As Chapters 6 and 7 explore, abstraction in
late Stevens positively combines ordinariness, normality, a ‘bourgeois’ life
with abstract speculations on the imagination that make such nominally
‘common’ realities extraordinary. Achieving this fecund ‘normality’, para-
doxically through a refined poetic, became the project to which Stevens
gestured repeatedly in the late 1940s and early 50s.
Significantly, during the heyday of Stevens’ abstract rhetoric, a com-
plex speaker enters the verse: an ‘I’ who is self-conscious and self-reflex-
ive but unlike the Romantic ‘I’ of Stevens’ predecessors. But in order to
explain how this ‘I’ is nonetheless idealist (despite being ‘non-subjective’),
I want to draw on Hegel’s notion of self-consciousness. The chapter will
then re-evaluate Focillon’s influence on Stevensian abstraction, noting the
originality of Stevens’ reconciliation of abstraction with idealism in the
unsympathetic climate of the New Criticism.
In Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Hegel ambitiously aimed to reconcile
Kant’s ‘subject’ and ‘object’. As we have seen, Stevens, like Wordsworth,
oscillates between the desire to touch ‘reality’ and the knowledge that the
90
Stevens’ copy of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, The Laocoön, and Other Prose Writings of Lessing
trans. and ed. W. B. Rönnfeldt (London: W. Scott, c. 1895), 78, 88.
91
OP, 195, 193.
‘real’ is mentally constructed. For Hegel, the creative ‘I’ conceives itself
as an object of speculation. Subject and object thus conflate to form an
ultimate ‘self-consciousness’. Hegel insists the Kantian ding an sich can-
not be left outside consciousness. If ‘unknowable’, it is also caught up
in the mind’s creative powers: ‘it comes to pass for consciousness that
what it previously took to be the in-itself […] was only an in-itself for
consciousness’.92
If there is movement, then, between subject and object consciousness
creates it (‘[T]he “I” is the content of the connection and the connecting
itself’).93 Hegel’s difficulty, however, is to present this novel consciousness
without relying on the Kantian terminology he wants to transcend. As
with Merleau-Ponty’s ‘in-visible’, Hegel engages the problem of re-equip-
ping old terms for new uses. Although he retains ‘subject’ and ‘object’,
Hegel’s fluid consciousness also inadvertently describes the space Stevens’
elusive poetry occupies in the early 1940s.
For example, Hegel claims:
Thought becomes fluid when pure thinking […] recognizes itself as a moment,
or when the pure certainty of self abstracts from itself – not by leaving itself out
[…] but by giving up the fixity of its self-positing, by giving up not only the fix-
ity of the pure concrete, which the ‘I’ itself is […] but also the fixity of the dif-
ferentiated moments which […] share the unconditioned nature of the ‘I’.94
As noted, the ‘I’ of ‘Blue Guitar’ is both a fluid thinker and one who
relinquishes ‘the fixity of its self-positing’. Stevens’ ‘I’ becomes certain of
itself – ‘abstracts itself’ – not by standing apart from ‘reality’, but by dis-
missing the positions convention dictates, by relinquishing the hold of
such ‘rotted names’ as ‘subject’, ‘object’, ‘mind’ and ‘world’.95 No one can
locate Stevens’ ‘I’, despite its textual positioning, because its location is
definitively fluid.
As Hegel explains, that the human mind is capable of self-reflection
informs consciousness:
Consciousness knows and comprehends only what falls within its experi-
ence; […] [E]xperience is the name we give to […] [the] movement, in which
the immediate, the unexperienced, i.e. the abstract […] becomes a property of
consciousness also.96
92
See also Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 76–124. Hegel,
Phenomenology of Spirit, 54.
93
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 105.
94
Ibid., 20. 95 See CPP, 150.
96
Likewise, for Merleau-Ponty, effective ‘perception’ is ‘the thought of
perceiving’:
[T]he thing itself no more leaves the circle of our thoughts than does the imagin-
ation, which is also a thought of seeing, but a thought that does not seek the
exercise, the proof, the plenitude, that therefore presumes on itself and is only
half-thought.97
What conjures Stevens’ imaginative behaviour here is the way an
‘abstract’ is a living part of the mind. Imagination is, for Merleau-Ponty,
the ‘thought of seeing’, and for Hegel the abstract is ‘immediate’: some-
thing only given movement by the self-conscious mind that realizes that
what is abstract is ‘also a property of consciousness’. This portrayal of the
relationship between ‘imagination’ and ‘reality’ underlies the struggle
Stevens encounters with abstraction and idealism (Stevens taking solace
in a secular idealism that keeps the unruly side of abstraction in check).
Hegel’s radical philosophy offers, therefore, a new way of thinking not
only about Stevens’ ‘abstract’ but also his poetic ‘I’, the neglected idealist
figure Chapters 4 and 5 explore in the 1938–45 verse. Before re-examining
Focillon’s pervasive influence on Stevens, however, I want to summarize a
number of aspects common to idealism and abstraction, briefly discussing
Hegel’s concept of the abstract artwork. This summary draws together
what needs to be carried over to subsequent chapters’ detailed readings of
those poems featuring Stevens’ complex ‘I’.
Stevens’ ‘abstract’ defines the development of a gradually evolving aes-
thetic. Even when Stevens no longer required explicit ‘figure[s] of cap-
able imagination’, his attachment to abstraction enhanced.98 That is, the
abstract tendency lives on in his work after Stevens ceases referring heavily
to ‘abstraction’. This ‘abstract’ should be understood in two senses: first,
as an adjective describing the habit of imagining ideas in order to realize
particular poems (the ‘theory of poetry’, the ‘Chair of Poetry’, a ‘supreme
fiction’) and second, as a quality describing the phenomenon readers
experience in struggling to visualize what Stevens’ poetry evokes. This
second phenomenon defines the elusive space of ‘The Man with the Blue
Guitar’, but it becomes a stronger component in Stevens’ work after 1937.
Idealism specializes in abstractive thinking, as the mind always con-
jures one’s sense of ‘reality’. What unites Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hegel,
Focillon, Blanchot and Merleau-Ponty, among others, is the view that
Merleau- Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 29–30.

97
CPP, 226.
98
the object, the ‘thing-in-itself’, cannot be removed from experience, but
is ‘created’ by consciousness. Self-consciousness is not an index of the
mind: it is the index. This Hegelian view has a bearing on the nature in
which Stevens’ idealist ‘I’ is self-aware.
Phenomenology of Spirit also defines the ‘abstract artwork’. For Hegel
the ‘work of art, as immediate, is abstract and individual. As for itself, it
has to move away from this immediate and objective mode towards self-
consciousness’. Simultaneously, however, the creative artist aims to turn
himself into an abstraction:
What belongs to the substance, the artist gave entirely to his work, but to him-
self as a particular individuality he gave in his work no actual existence: he could
impart perfection to his work only by emptying himself of his particularity,
depersonalizing himself and rising to the abstraction of pure action. In this first
immediate production, the separation of the work from his self-conscious activ-
ity is not yet restored to their unity. The work by itself is not, therefore, actually
an inspired work; it is a whole only together with its genesis.99
Hegel’s artist empties himself of particularity, depersonalizes himself in
the impossible hope of ‘rising to the abstraction of pure action’, whilst
the created work, although deriving from the artist, aims not to appear
‘an inspired work’ (even although it can only be whole ‘together with its
genesis’). The artwork thus strives to appear without an artist: a quality
encouraging readers/viewers to consider the work without the overt, even
disruptive, presence of the artist. This pragmatic tension engages Stevens’
1940s and 50s work, illustrating its positive impersonality as well as the
characteristics of the first-person speakers or other constructed ‘personae’
who derive pleasure from the objects and thought-processes which also
apparently inspired Stevens. As Chapter 4 recounts, Stevens would laud
‘the determining personality’ of his favourite painter Cézanne precisely
because that ‘personality’ controls, without dominating, the painter’s
often abstract works.100
Relevant here is Hegel’s account of the abstract work’s aim to attain
self-consciousness and the artist’s aim to abstract himself from his cre-
ation. As noted earlier, Stevens’ ‘supreme fiction’ is surprisingly phys-
ical, almost entering a ‘real’ modality, like Rhine wine, books and ‘good
cheese’. Every elusive Stevensian term similarly begs for physical or palp-
able identification. In Ideas of Order the ‘new romantic’ appears in images
of dilapidated buildings. If these buildings are not ‘self-conscious’ they

99 100
Stevens, Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects, 53.
are indices of Stevens’ elusive ‘new romantic’. The converse pattern Hegel
detects in the artist is the desire to remove oneself from one’s art, to
become an abstract ‘poet’. The ‘possible poet’ is, therefore, forever impli-
cated in the abstract poetry Stevens would go on to create.
3.3 Th e t ouc h of H e n r i F o c i l l on
How did Henri Focillon contribute to Stevens’ emergent sense of abstrac-
tion? Focillon’s nuanced exploration of the ‘life of forms’ undoubtedly
conditioned Stevens’ maturation as an artist.101 I cannot re-evaluate the
total argument of The Life of Forms in Art, but will substantiate how
abstraction is central to Focillon’s thinking and how his ideas apparently
affected Stevens.
For Focillon, ‘forms’ live a life of their own, but are not autonomous.
He claims initially: ‘the life of forms has absolutely no aim other than
itself and its own renewal’. However, speaking of Raphael’s School of
Athens, Focillon insists: ‘Here, the metamorphosis of shapes does not alter
the factors of life, but it does compose a new life.’ 102 Focillon voices this
distinction because, for him, forms develop independently of aesthetic
categories, especially those of traditional art history:
Each style passes through several ages and several phases of being. This does not
mean that the ages of style and the ages of mankind are the same thing. The life
of forms is not the result of chance. Nor is it a great cyclorama neatly fitted into
the theatre of history and called into being by historical necessities. No. Forms
obey their own rules – rules that are inherent in the forms themselves, or better,
in the regions of the mind where they are located and centered[.]103
Focillon adds: ‘form is qualified above all else by the specific realms in
which it develops’.104
But however independent Focillon finds ‘form’, central to his thought
is the human contact (or ‘touch’) indicating his own idealism. The idealist
dialectic at the heart of his theory depends upon forms nominally devel-
oping of their own accord whilst also belonging to ‘the regions of the
mind where they are located and centered’. What likely touched Stevens’
imagination was Focillon’s positive abstractions. Speaking of ‘sculptural
quality’, Focillon notes in a Proustian vein:
101
See Leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 15. My interpretation of Focillon’s influence dif-
fers significantly from Leggett’s, however.
102
Focillon, The Life of Forms, 44.
103
Ibid., 52. 104 Ibid., 66.
The axes are an abstraction. In considering an armature […] a mere sketch in
wire endowed with the physiognomic intensity of all abbreviations […] or [a]
pure ornament, we realize that our sight must invest them all […] with sub-
stance. And it must do this in the twofold recognition, on the one hand, of their
utter and terrifying nudity, and on the other, of the mysterious and vital halo of
the volumes with which we must envelop them […] because the exigency already
lies within ourselves.105
Such idealism figures matter and space in physical and mental ter-
rains: ‘[F]orms that live in space and in matter do live in the mind. But
the important question is to know what they do there, how they behave
[…] and, finally, what turmoil or activity they undergo before taking
shape, if […] it is true that being forms, even in the mind, they can have
no “shape”’.106
Stevens quoted heavily from this section of Focillon’s study (‘Forms
in the Realm of the Mind’) in ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’
(1943): ‘In one of the really remarkable books of the day […] Henri
Focillon says: Human consciousness is in perpetual pursuit of a language and
a style.’ 107 Chapter 4 discusses the significance of this particular reference
in a deeper analysis of Stevens’ lecture. What should be observed here is
the idealist basis of Focillon’s assertion: ‘It is my belief that there is no
antagonism whatsoever between mind and form, and that the world of
forms in the mind is identical in principle with the world of forms in
space and matter: they differ only in plan or, possibly, in perspective.’ 108
Moreover, Focillon’s emphasis on consciousness inexorably pursuing ‘a
language and a style’ is essentially aesthetic: ‘its activity […] is an artistic
activity’.109 Such aestheticism testifies both to the power of abstraction
and to the ‘life of forms’ as an evolutionary, ahistorical phenomenon.
Numerous examples of abstraction as an artistic force litter Focillon’s
analysis. Form is
a kind of fissure through which crowds of images aspiring to birth may be intro-
duced into some indefinite realm – a realm which is neither that of physical
extent nor that of pure thought […] Form is never the catch-as-catch-can gar-
ment of subject matter. No, it is the various interpretations of subject matter that
are so unstable and insecure. As old meanings are broken down and obliterated,
new meanings attach themselves to form.110
105
Ibid., 77–8. 106 Ibid., 118.
107
CPP, 671. Stevens underlined this passage in his copy (52).
108
109
Ibid., 118. 110 Ibid., 35–6.
This ‘fissure’ arises from an abstract void: ‘Even before it becomes for-
mal […] the simplest ornamental theme […] has already given accent to
the void in which it occurs and has conferred on it a new and original
existence’.111
Focillon’s strategic difficulty, however, is to avoid his own account of
abstraction sounding impalpable. He therefore tends toward metaphors
that give abstractive theories shape. Referring to Botticelli, Focillon
notes:
He knows and practices […] every device that permits the likely construction of
linear and aerial space, but the beings who move within the space itself he does
not completely define. They preserve a sinuous and ornamental line […] that
might be described in the undulations of a dancer who […] is purposely seeking
to compose such or such a figure.112
The metaphor of the line forming ‘the undulations of a dancer’ assists
Focillon as he recognizes ‘a frontier […] between the worlds of actual life
and of abstract space against which [the human] profile is fixed’.113
Focillon not only harnesses arresting metaphors for abstract proc-
esses; he suggests human ‘touch’ defines creative abstraction, remarking
in Hegelian manner: ‘form is not only […] incarnated […] it is invari-
ably incarnation itself’.114 But such incarnation is seemingly not self-
generating:
[A] value, a tone do not depend alone on the properties […] touching them,
but on the way in which they are placed, that is, ‘touched.’ Because of this,
a painting is not the same thing as a painted barn door or wagon. Touch is
structure. It imposes on the form of the animate being or the object its own
form, which is not merely value and color, but also […] weight, density and
motion.115
As ‘Three Academic Pieces’ (1947) shows, abstraction precisely enables the
mind to confer ‘weight, density and motion’ on objects.116 Stevens was
certainly taken with Focillon’s ‘touch’, underlining the last two sentences
of the above in his personal Life of Forms.117 But Focillon’s urge to phys-
icalize his discussion through ‘touch’ not only aims to avoid pejoratively
abstract analysis but is influenced by his conviction that hackneyed forms
are themselves hollow abstractions lacking weight or substance.118
111
Ibid., 66. 112 Ibid., 85. 113 Ibid., 93. 114 Ibid., 101.
115
Ibid., 110. 116 See Chapter 6.
117
Stevens’ copy, 47. Stevens also marginally noted Focillon’s ‘Definition of touch’, 46.
118
See Focillon, The Life of Forms, 82.
What precludes negative abstraction, then, is the ‘touch’ of arresting,
definitive styles. Focillon is adamant that ‘style’ influences the metamor-
phosis of form. In a passage Stevens marked, Focillon argues: ‘form is
primarily a mobile life in a changing world. Its metamorphoses endlessly
begin anew, and it is by the principle of style that they are above all coordi-
nated and stabilized. This term has two very different, indeed two oppos-
ite meanings. Style is an absolute. A style is a variable.’119 The evolutionary,
ahistorical notion of ‘style’ Focillon proposes deeply impressed the Stevens
who would later embrace Blanchot; who, as noted, also highlights the pri-
macy of artistic labour over historical and sociological contingencies.120
For Focillon, ‘style’ as ‘an absolute’ transcends local conditions. He
offers a Proustian conception of artistic progress:
The word ‘style’ in its generic sense indicates a special and superior quality in a
work of art […] that allows it to escape the bondage of time. Conceived as an
absolute, style is not only a model, but also something whose validity is change-
less[.] […] In utilizing style as an absolute, we give expression to a very funda-
mental need: that of beholding ourselves in our widest possible intelligibility
[…] our most universal aspect, beyond the fluctuations of history, beyond local
and specific limitations. A style, on the other hand, is a development.121
This passage clearly grabbed Stevens (who underlined all of the sentence
beginning ‘In utilizing style’). Focillon adds that ‘a style’ is constituted
of ‘its repertory, its vocabulary […] its system of relationships, its syntax’.
Metaphorically speaking, abstraction is that ‘syntax’. It is ‘the very instru-
ment’, in Focillon’s words, through which Stevens’ mid-career vocabu-
lary ‘wields its power’.122 Just as Focillon’s forms evolve within art as a
whole, Stevens experienced his ‘development’ precisely in Focillon’s sense
of naturalist change: ‘This activity on the part of a style in the process of
self-definition, that is, defining itself and then escaping from its own def-
inition, is generally known as an “evolution”.’ 123
Clearly, it would be tendentious to suggest that Stevens was influenced
by Focillon because his own vocabulary can be read metaphorically in
Focillon’s terms. But consider how Focillon suggests that ‘all formal envir-
onments give birth to their own […] styles of life, vocabularies, states
of awareness […] [I]s not the essential attribute of any environment that
119
Focillon, The Life of Forms, 44; Stevens’ copy, 8.
120
Stevens would note: ‘Style is not something applied. It is something inherent, something that
permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found […] It is not a dress. It may be said to
be a voice that is inevitable’ (CPP, 845).
121
Focillon, The Life of Forms, 46 (Stevens’ copy, 8).
122
Ibid., 46. 123 Ibid., 47.
of producing its own myths […]?’124 Then consider how Stevens’ 1940s
abstract vocabulary is inextricable from a formal environment replete
with fictions (‘its own myths’). Focillon’s ‘naturalism’ also proves com-
pelling: Stevens forever insisting on change and adaptation as both a quo-
tidian necessity and an essential part of his poetics. For example, Stevens
would later resist John Crowe Ransom’s depiction of his work as invested
in ‘nobility’, despite acknowledging Ransom’s persuasiveness:
Mr. Weinstock of Knopf’s was eager to use something that you had said for the
purpose of publicity. The trouble is that once one is strongly defined, no other
definition is ever possible, in spite of daily change.125
Stevens’ insistence on adaptation obviously chimes with Focillon’s wish
‘to dispel the impression that the notion of a world of forms is mere meta-
phor and to justify […] the methods employed [in his study] by biology’.126
It is not merely that Stevens’ personal ‘style’ evolved across his oeuvre. His
work also gestures to Focillon’s style ‘as an absolute’ in that he desired
his ‘harmonious whole’ to be conceived in universalizing terms, as a
Parnassian poetic irreducible to local contingencies.
Could Stevens, therefore, be partly to blame for the reductive terms
in which he is sometimes read? I suggest Focillon’s style ‘as an absolute’
remained an abstract dream for Stevens, and dispute, therefore, Leggett’s
suggestion that the poet took Focillon literally in believing there was an
absolute world of forms out there directing the artist.127 Stevens did under-
line Focillon’s observation that ‘a definite style is not merely a state in the
life of forms, nor is it that life itself: it is a homogeneous, coherent, formal
environment, in the midst of which man acts and breathes’. But the poet
embraced the ‘life of forms’ and its representative styles more as ‘“psy-
chological landscapes,” without which the essential genius of the envir-
onments would be opaque and elusive for all those who share in them’ (a
passage Stevens also marked).128 Stevens’ imaginative interest lay, there-
fore, in an idealist dialectic where psychology and artistic form mutually
influence each other rather than in an autonomous ‘life of forms’. It was
precisely the abstract idea of a ‘life of forms’ that piqued Stevens’ poetic
interest.
Stevens also seems to have been impressed by Focillon’s extended dis-
cussion of the artist’s role(s). Focillon’s conception of the artist is, again,
124
Ibid., 60–1. 125 7 October 1954, WAS, 1542.
126
127
See Leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 15–16.
128
Focillon, The Life of Forms, 60; Stevens’ copy, 16.
Proustian: ‘We are content with an age-old acquisition, with an auto-
matic, perhaps worn-out knowledge buried inside ourselves. This the art-
ist exposes to fresh air and brings to life again.’ 129 To create such exposure,
the artist’s intentions are kept on hold; at least, there is no linear relation-
ship between intention, execution and the realized work: ‘a work of art is
not the outline or the graph of art as an activity; it is art itself. It does not
design art, it creates it. Art is made up, not of the artist’s intentions, but of
works of art.’ 130 As we shall see with Cézanne, temperament (what Stevens
calls ‘determining personality’) enables a robust art unclouded by inten-
tion. Focillon maintains similarly: ‘the life of forms is undoubtedly more
or less affected by the temperament’.131
As with Stevens’ ‘fluent mundo’, the artist also creates a new world:
[T]he artist develops, under our eyes, the very technique of the mind; he gives
us a kind of mold or cast that we can both see and touch […] [H]e is creating a
world – a world that is complex, coherent and concrete.132
In composing ‘Description Without Place’, Stevens would later insist to
José Rodríguez Feo that ‘the power of literature is that in describing the
world it creates what it describes’. Referring to Feo’s journal Orígenes,
Stevens remarked: ‘You are describing a world and by describing it you
are creating it.’133 Focillon perhaps ballasted Stevens’ 1945 conviction. For
example, the poet underlined the following: ‘true technique is creative
activity. At the cross-roads of psychology and physiology, forms arise with
all the authority of outline, mass, and intonation’ (adding his own mar-
ginal reminder: ‘True technique is creative activity’).134
Finally, Stevens would have been equally entranced with the idea that
the artist makes of his life the necessary conditions of his art. As Focillon
argues:
[E]ach life is its own piece of fiction […] a sequence and combination of adven-
tures […] There happens in the life of each one of us something roughly analo-
gous to that which happens in the written novel […] We too […] create our own
myths, our own style, with greater or lesser relief and authority […] Here, for
example, we have Chardin, perfectly contented to remain within the modest cir-
cle of a narrow bourgeoisie, or Delacroix, buried in his lonely studio, or Turner,
deliberately hiding himself behind an incognito as protection against outward
circumstances.135
129
Focillon, The Life of Forms, 167. 130 Ibid., 33.
131
Ibid., 125. 132 Ibid., 119. 133 L, 495.
134
Focillon, The Life of Forms, 130, Stevens’ copy, 59.
135
Chapter 7 will discuss the paradoxical fecundity of Stevens’ ‘bourgeois
abstraction’ further (to raise Feo again, observe how Stevens writes about
the Cuban poet’s domestic situation in the narrative poem ‘The Novel’).136
Chapter 5’s discussion of ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ also reveals how the
‘bourgeois’ becomes, for Stevens, a portal to extraordinary realizations,
including the realization of the ‘ordinary’. But what should be observed
here is Focillon’s on-going influence on Stevens and how Focillon’s work
helps us to assess Stevens’ development as an abstract artist.
3. 4 C oda : t h e N e w C r i t ic i s m a n d a b s t r ac t ion

Stevens’ positive notion of abstraction could not have been more alien to
the New Criticism, then gathering pace in the late 1930s and early 40s.
Ransom’s The World’s Body and Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry
were both published in 1938. By 1939 Brooks had also finished his polem-
ical Modern Poetry and the Tradition.137 In the Kenyon, Sewanee, Southern
and Partisan reviews the New Critics espoused distaste for Romanticism
generally and abstraction especially. For the New Criticism, science and
technology were essentially abstractive, removing objects from their con-
texts, thereby creating an artificial understanding of ‘reality’.138 Art, by
contrast, would re-unite the object with the ‘real’ world. Ransom saw the
‘trope’ as the quality enabling art its return to the actual. The process is,
as Stevens would agree, a fiction. But, unlike Stevens, Ransom opposes
this process to abstract thought:
We are aware of how science abhors the figurative, the tropical […] Art on its
side abhors propositions, or it should. When the trope begins to reduce to a
proposition, we are coming out of the solid world of art into the abstract plane of
science. We are also relapsing further from the world of actuality, of which art is
the closest fiction that we can have.139
As Ransom claims, art ‘attempts to restore the body which science has
emptied’.140
‘Abstract’ was also a tell-tale word for the debased Romanticism the
New Critics proscribed. In his review of George Frisbee Whicher’s This
Was A Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson Tate accused Whicher
136
See CPP, 391.
137
John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (New York: Scribner’s, 1938); Cleanth Brooks and
Robert Penn Warren, eds., Understanding Poetry (New York: Holt, 1938); Brooks, Modern Poetry
and the Tradition.
138
John Crowe Ransom, ‘The Arts and the Philosophers’ Kenyon Review 1.2 (1939), 196.
139
Ibid., 198. 140 Ibid., 198.
of abstracting a ‘single quality’ from the nominally ‘single “mood”’ of
Dickinson’s poetry in order to define her place in literary history (practis-
ing what Tate labels ‘post-Romantic expressionism’).141 Tate was adopting
the laudable New Critical practice of reading texts not merely as histor-
ical documents but as literary artefacts. It was a new type of reading.142 If
Tate does not call Whicher’s reading habits abstract, his criticism is clear.
However, Kenneth Burke, a tangential but related figure, castigated what
Tate bemoaned and called the habit ‘abstract’: ‘[W]hen we are talking of
a work as it is, realistically, we must consider it in its totality, not singling
out some one feature and treating this, in its isolation, as the “essence” of
art’. For Burke, such an ‘essentializing’ process ‘abstracts one ingredient
in a work as the significant element, and overlooks the rest’.143
Admittedly, Stevens’ ‘abstract’ has nothing to do with this critical
mishap. But Stevens’ term does relate to Romantic idealism, even as a
Modernist adaptation. The Romantic poets who shaped Stevens’ early
sense of poetry were, by the 1940s, being rejected in the journals where
Stevens was himself publishing (the word ‘abstract’ becoming the favoured
pejorative marker appended to the Romantics in New Critical literature).
Brooks lauded verse in which ‘the poet has been just to the complexity
of experience, and has not given us an abstraction in the guise of experi-
ence’, criticizing Shelley for displaying a ‘confusion of abstract generaliza-
tion with symbol’.144 When Ransom wrote to Stevens, applauding ‘Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction’, he claimed to prefer the ‘non-philosophical’
parts of the poem. But he must have had one eye on further submissions
for Kenyon Review. Having decried abstraction for the best part of a dec-
ade, Ransom wrote:
I’ve just been reading Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction […] Nobody can do such
poems, besides you. I like the best the innocent, non-philosophical ones, […]
Yet I’m absolutely for the philosophical position you occupy.145
Ransom was, at least, careful not to discuss explicitly the poem’s first
‘philosophical’ section, ‘It Must Be Abstract’.
The distance between Stevens and the New Critics marks, therefore,
the ingenuity of the poet’s rehabilitation of a modernized ‘Romantic’
141
Allen Tate, ‘The Poet and Her Biographer’ Kenyon Review 1.2 (1939), 202.
142
See René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: American Criticism, 1900–1950 (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1986), 146.
143
Kenneth Burke, ‘The Calling of the Tune’ Kenyon Review 1.3 (1939), 282.
144
Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, 44, 237.
145
John Crowe Ransom, Selected Letters of John Crowe Ransom ed. Thomas Daniel Young and
George Core (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 316.
aesthetic. Clearly, Stevens’ battle with abstraction comprises part of that
picture, constituting a secular idealism. Surprisingly, the ‘I’ who domi-
nates much of the late 1930s and early 1940s verse has received scant atten-
tion in Stevens criticism. This idealist figure is a major textual force in the
period when Stevens creates his abstract rubric. Tellingly, perhaps, the ‘I’
also drops out of Stevens’ verse, along with the lion’s share of his abstract
idiom, around 1945. The next chapter, therefore, explores the full extent of
Stevens’ idealist ‘I’, observing the poet’s creation of a speaker without pre-
cedent in poetry written in English, unique to Stevens’ time and since.
C H APTER 4
Abstract figures: the curious case

of the idealist ‘I’
4 .1 Ta m i ng ‘t h e gu e r r i l l a I’: t h e e a r ly p oe m s
of p a r t s o f a w o r l d (194 2)
In 1938 Stevens entered one of the most fecund phases of his writing car-
eer. With The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems he reached the end
of an experimental period, during which he realized abstraction’s poten-
tial and the poetic possibilities of a novel first-person speaker. If Stevens
had not answered his speaker’s question in ‘Blue Guitar’ – ‘Where / Do I
begin and end?’ – he was certainly more confident about employing this
elusive ‘I’ as a speaker, especially in an abstract space.1 In the poetry fol-
lowing ‘Blue Guitar’ Stevens would break new ground, attracting fewer
comparisons with a dandy or Surrealist aesthetic (apart from in the eyes
of Cleanth Brooks and Yvor Winters).2
Even Picasso’s influence on Stevens waned. In 1938, approving a ‘just
placing of Picasso’, Stevens copied down Herbert Furst’s summary of
‘Guernica’:
Picasso, unfortunately, has made his name pre-eminently as an intellectualist
[…] [H]is fame rests entirely on his cool and calculated exploitation of the elem-
ents of formal design, with or without psychological associations. Away from
Nature! was his slogan. Much of his work […] remained, except as a matter of
abstract designing, unintelligible. Nevertheless, there has appeared in his oeuvre
abstract form, solidly modelled, that had a grim significance of human emotions
[…] Picasso is not a painter […] he is an over-intellectual designer who moves
one to thought, but not to feeling.3
Endorsing Furst’s portrayal, Stevens conveniently forgot the 1935 Zervos–
Picasso interview and the influence Picasso himself wielded on ‘The
1
CPP, 140.
2
Cleanth Brooks, ‘A Retrospective Introduction’ (1965) in Modern Poetry and the Tradition, xxi;
Yvor Winters, ‘Wallace Stevens, or The Hedonist’s Progress’ in The Anatomy of Nonsense (Norfolk,
CT: New Directions, 1943), 88–119.
3
Stevens, Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects, 61, 63.
110
Abstract figures 111
Man with the Blue Guitar’. Far from preaching the ‘slogan’ ‘Away from
Nature!’, Picasso told Zervos that ‘abstract art’ was impossible because
the painter ‘always start[s] with something’. Even if the artist ‘remove[s]
all traces of reality’ the ‘idea of the object will have left an indelible mark’
on his creation.4 For Picasso, objects and inspiration derive from Nature.
They are not created by intellectual abstraction. As he recalled: ‘I go for
a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get “green” indigestion. I must
get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it.’ 5 Stevens himself
echoed Picasso’s observation in ‘The Greenest Continent’: ‘The voice / In
the jungle is a voice in Fontainebleau.’ 6
Admittedly, Furst acknowledges that from Picasso’s ‘abstract form’ the
‘grim significance of human emotions’ appears. But the portrayal Stevens
favours renders Picasso ‘an over-intellectual designer’, one who ‘moves
one to thought, but not to feeling’. Stevens endorses Furst’s desire to have
it both ways. Picasso’s abstract art confines him to a realm of ideas, but it
is through ‘abstract form’ that the artist discloses ‘human emotions’. On
the one hand, Picasso possesses, like Wordsworth’s Coleridge, the ‘self-
created sustenance of a mind / Debarred from Nature’s living images’
(‘Away from Nature! was his slogan’).7 On the other, Picasso conveys emo-
tion through ‘abstract form’. On closer inspection his paintings are, Furst
suggests, not ‘as “mad” as they looked’.8
My point in highlighting how Stevens revised his view of Picasso is
to demonstrate how the poet was, by 1938, devising an abstract aesthetic
of his own.9 As Chapter 3 argued, this involved forging a modern ideal-
ism, affirming the phenomenon of a creative subject, an active ‘I’. In ‘Blue
Guitar’ this ‘I’ occupies an abstract locale, frustrating any attempt to
describe its position in dualistic terms. In fact, the ‘I’ must be ‘un-locat-
able’, must be continually mobile if it is to convey the fluid meditation
Hegel also discovers in his phenomenology.
Significantly, the poems Stevens wrote immediately after ‘Blue Guitar’
feature idealism and the textually invasive ‘I’ who dominates much of
the 1938–45 verse. Even more than ‘Blue Guitar’, these 1938 poems render
Stevens’ ‘I’ idealist. In 1937 Picasso’s troubling ‘image’ for ‘our society’
haunts Stevens’ speaker:
4
Ashton, Picasso on Art, 9.
5
Ibid., 10. 6 CPP, 162.
7
Wordsworth, The Prelude Book Sixth, lines 312–13: 202.
8
9
Stevens showed increasing frustration with derivative Modernism, complaining: ‘There is no
painting because the only painting permitted is painting derived from Picasso and Matisse’, L,
622. See Chapter 7.
Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?
(CPP, 142)
By 1938, however, Stevens surmounted both Picasso and abstraction as

‘destabilizing’ influences. Simultaneously, Stevens’ first person experiences
a less traumatic textual life, becoming both theme and poetic choreog-
rapher. Although the poet overlooked his debt to Picasso in confronting
abstraction, Stevens’ 1938 poems foreground the idealist speaker born of
the poet’s own struggle with an abstract aesthetic.
The ‘Canonica’ series comprising the first twelve poems of Parts of
a World marks this transition.10 In ‘The Poems of Our Climate’ (1938)
Stevens emphasizes the unavoidable reality of the creative self. As Brogan
argues, he critiques an Objectivist poetic – especially Williams – both in
his wry title and the poem’s bare imagery:
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that.
(CPP, 178)11
‘Pink and white carnations’ remain insufficient because Stevens can-

not evade the desirous mind that lends his carnations colour. The poem
allows an unmediated ‘objective’ view articulation only to query its valid-
ity. Imagining a scene where the ‘snowy scents’ and unruly, perceiving ‘I’
are purged of ‘evilly compounded’ subjectivity, the poem wryly re-affirms
the existence of the ‘I’ that creates the scene.
Stevens imagines the impossibility of a world where carnations and
their perceiving ‘I’ are merely objects. But even if such a world is imag-
ined, a desirous ‘I’ returns to haunt the scene:
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
Wallace Stevens, ‘Canonica’ The Southern Review 4.2 (1938): 382–95.

10
See Jacqueline Brogan, ‘Wallace Stevens: Poems Against His Climate’ WSJ 11.2 (1987): 75–93.
11
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
(CPP, 179)
Even if, then, a re-created ‘vital I’ could become ‘fresh in a world of white’ (a
totally abstracted environment) one cannot avoid subjective desire: ‘Still one
would want more, one would need more’. As the poem insists: ‘There would
still remain the never-resting mind’. Significantly, Stevens cannot accept a
Mallarméan ‘pure poetry’, despite his obvious inheritance of Mallarméan
themes and ideas.12 His ‘vital I’ evades neutralization just as, for Brogan, the
poem resists the illusion of an Objectivist poetic in which ‘pink and white
carnations’ stand for themselves unmediated by a perceiving mind.
‘The Poems of Our Climate’ implies, therefore, that every environment
has a creator, even ‘unmediated’ aesthetics:
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
(CPP, 179)
This is a major crossroads for Stevens. The turn to ‘what had been so
long composed’ and the insistence that the ‘imperfect is our paradise’
anticipate ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, especially the view that
the world requires perpetual stripping of its veneers before imagina-
tive re-composition. Stevens’ poem does not, however, prefer a purely
abstract space stripped of veneers, as, for the idealist, unmediated envir-
onments do not exist. Instead, as Focillon observes: ‘technique must
extract from matter forces that are still vital and not vitrified beneath a
flawless varnish’.13 This positive abstract quality, as Longenbach notes,
would attract Robert Motherwell to this very poem in his 1944 essay
‘Painters’ objects’.14
12
For example, Stevens inherits Mallarmé’s drive to transcend ‘the poet’s own personal and pas-
sionate control of [the] verse’ (‘Crisis in Poetry’, 1561).
13
See L, 427; Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, 106.
14
‘Stevens’s poem bolstered his [Motherwell’s] assertion that […] a purely abstract painting,
divorced from the historical world, would be undesirable – even if it were possible’ (Longenbach,
Wallace Stevens, 254).
Stevens’ idealist ‘mind’, however, can only re-invigorate a created
world if, as for Wordsworth, brute ‘reality’ – a necessarily ‘imperfect’
paradise – is its starting point. Our climate is already ‘composed’ and
cannot be whitewashed. It is necessarily imperfect because the ‘never-
resting mind’ cannot rest content with perfection (an inhuman ‘world
of white’). Stevens also engages ‘sound’ here, a persistent preoccupation
of the 1938–45 verse, as ‘stubborn sounds’ inform the mind’s ‘delight’.15
Stevens’ abstract poetic is undeniably preoccupied with sound, as is
its idealist speaker; as if it is only through sound(s) that the senses of
poetry and world unite. But it will take a fuller study of ‘sound’ in
Stevens to chart the poet’s changing uses of this word; and to assess
how the sonorous qualities of his verse relate, or otherwise, to abstrac-
tion (‘sound’ is addressed here in discussion of ‘The Noble Rider’,
however).
Stevens’ ‘vital I’ has not yet become an active poetic agent. It remains a
theme. His concern with the transformative mind and, implicitly, the ‘I’
who speaks in his verse is hypothetical, just as in ‘Notes’ Stevens adver-
tises ‘the abstract’ before creating his mature post-1942 aesthetic; one
where ‘abstraction’ is no longer a required term, even if Stevens cannot
help but refer occasionally to his primary aesthetic transformation in sig-
nificant instances.16
‘Prelude to Objects’ (1938) also features the ‘self ’ as theme. But this
poem does anticipate the potential of Stevens’ ‘I’, by lauding a ‘self ’ who,
through beholding himself, perceives the world more intimately:
If he will be heaven after death,
If, while he lives, he hears himself
Sounded in music, if the sun,
Stormer, is the color of a self
As certainly as night is the color
Of a self, if, without sentiment,
He is what he hears and sees and if,
Without pathos, he feels what he hears
And sees, being nothing otherwise,
Having nothing otherwise, he has not
To go to the Louvre to behold himself.
(CPP, 179)
15
See Anca Rosu, The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of
Alabama Press, 1995), 138–58.
16
For ‘abstraction’, ‘abstract’ and ‘the abstract’, see John N. Serio and Greg Foster, Online
Concordance to Wallace Stevens’ Poetry (www.wallacestevens.com/concordance/WSdb.cgi).
Stevens affirms here his favourite painter Cézanne’s dictum that ‘Nature
is on the inside’ (a comment Merleau-Ponty also cites approvingly).17
Like the speaker in ‘Blue Guitar’ who asserts ‘I am, I speak and move /
And things are as I think they are’ the poem celebrates a ‘self’ who both
‘feels what he hears / And sees’ and ‘is what he hears and sees’ (note Stevens
inverts these phrases because feeling confirms perception of self rather
than signalling fleeting emotion).18 For all the Cézannes in ‘the Louvre’,
Stevens’ ‘self’ needs neither to commune with art nor travel the world to
achieve his nature: very much the Stevensian stance epitomized by Hardy’s
injunction in ‘Shut Out That Moon’ to ‘[s]tay in’.19 Like ‘The Poems of
Our Climate’, ‘Prelude to Objects’ also identifies sound as a source of self-
realization, lauding the self who ‘hears himself / Sounded in music’.
But if Stevens apparently swings free from his ‘actual world’ – par-
ticularly in stating ‘he has not / To go to the Louvre’ – he is ironically
accentuating Émile Bernard’s recollections of Cézanne’s conversation and
aphorisms. Stevens paints a ‘self’ who is not solipsistic but an aesthetic
creator, in the model Cézanne proposes. Bernard published his descrip-
tion of Cézanne and the painter’s aphorisms in L’Occident in 1904. But
Stevens could have read Cézanne’s views in any number of texts (the aph-
orisms profoundly influencing Picasso, Braque and the Cubists, as well as
Matisse).20 Bernard writes:
[H]e [Cézanne] made himself a new optics, for his own had been obliterated,
swept away by a boundless passion for too many images, print, paintings. He
wanted to see too much; his insatiable desire for beauty made him examine the
multiform tome of Art too much; henceforth […] if he now goes to the Louvre
[…] it is in view of stripping down appearances[.]21
Thus, although Cézanne still ‘goes to the Louvre’, it is to strip down
‘appearances’; an aim Stevens obviously shares with the painter in ‘Notes’
(and, of course, in ‘The Poems of Our Climate’).
But Cézanne was actually keener on communing with Nature than
visiting the Louvre. As he wrote to Bernard:
The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We should not, however,
content ourselves with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious
17
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’ in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on
Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics ed. James M. Edie
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 164.
18
CPP, 148.
19
See Chapter 2.
20
See Françoise Cachin et al., Cézanne (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 36.
21
Émile Bernard, ‘Paul Cézanne’ L’Occident (1904) in Cachin et al., Cézanne, 37.
predecessors. Let’s take leave of them to study beautiful nature, let’s understand
to disengage our minds from them, let’s seek to express ourselves in accordance
with our personal temperaments.22
Cézanne’s insistence on personal temperament undoubtedly appealed
to Stevens. Of the twenty aphorisms Bernard recorded, several illus-
trate Cézanne’s conviction that ‘[p]ainting after nature is not copying
the objective, it’s realizing our sensations’.23 This does not mean the artist
‘occupies’ his work, however, as Bernard quickly observed:
[T]he more the artist works […] the more he distances himself from the opacity
of the model serving as his point of departure, the more he enters into a painting
without adornment whose sole aim is itself. The more he abstracts his painting,
the more he gives it a simplified amplitude[.]24
The artist’s painting thus reveals ‘personality’ but not personal individu-
ality. As Cézanne wrote to Bernard: ‘The thesis to develop […] is to give
the image of what we see, forgetting everything that appears in front of
us. Which, I think, should permit the artist to give all of his personality,
large or small’.25
Both Cézanne and Stevens imagine ‘personalities’ who do not need to
go to the Louvre to behold themselves. Anchored in nature, such ideal-
ist figures reveal their perception of the world through the ‘personality’
of their art. They forget ‘everything that appears in front’ of them not
because the world is bereft of physical reality but because in a world of
appearances perception matters. As Proust’s Marcel observes: ‘The only
real journey […] would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with
new eyes.’ 26 Cézanne’s ‘new optics’ conveys precisely the ‘personality’
embodying novel vision. Likewise, in the late 1930s, Stevens creates an ‘I’
who has definite ‘personality’ but is not a cipher for individual gripes or
reflections.
In 1937 Stevens copied extracts from Graham Bell on Cézanne into his
commonplace book. Citing Bell’s observation that ‘Cézanne’s peculiar
determination [is] to pin down his sensation’, Stevens added:
I note the above both for itself and because it adds to subject and manner the
thing that is incessantly overlooked: the artist, the presence of the determining
personality. Without that reality no amount of other things matters much.27
22
Cited in Cachin et al., Cézanne, 18. 23 Bernard, ‘Paul Cézanne’, 37.
24
Cachin et al., Cézanne, 37. 25 Cited in ibid., 17–18.
26
Marcel Proust, The Prisoner and The Fugitive trans. Carol Clark and Peter Collier
(London: Penguin, 2003), 237.
27
In ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’ (where Cézanne’s letters are
quoted successively) Stevens’ ‘personality’ follows Cézanne’s term closely,
indicating the refracted traces of perception the artist communicates and
the ‘personality’ the artwork seemingly attains for itself.28 Stevens read
similar observations in Focillon, also a prominent element within his
1943 lecture: ‘the life of forms is undoubtedly more or less affected by the
temperament’.29 If Picasso ended up, for Stevens, at the abstract remove
Wordsworth detects in Coleridge, then Cézanne is exemplary because he
exudes personality without falling into solipsism or imaginative indul-
gence: ‘It was of the temperament of the artist that Cézanne spoke so fre-
quently in his letters’. This ‘temperament’ engages what Stevens calls the
‘whole personality’ shaping works of art.30
Cézanne also epitomizes the idealist strain outlined in Chapter 3.
For Stevens, the painter becomes the exemplar of an abstract aesthetic
the poet realizes in the late 1930s. Stevens would have recognized how
the term ‘abstraction’ accompanied Cézanne. In 1945 Lionello Venturi
applauded the painter’s abstract style:
[He] could so abstract his style […] from any given experience of nature and yet
convey through his abstractions so profound an interpretation of the nature of
things, that every artist and also many laymen have in the last forty years seen
nature with the eyes of Cézanne himself.31
Venturi marvels at Cézanne’s ‘new optics’, enabling one to see through
‘the eyes of Cézanne himself’ but without the intrusion of the painter’s
individual struggle to create. For Stevens this variety of vision derives
from a ‘determining personality’. Such an abstract artist is also the idealist
creator Hegel favours in Phenomenology of Spirit. Stevens’ ‘self’ does not
need to visit the Louvre because – as with Cézanne’s view that ‘Nature is
on the inside’ – his palette already comprises himself interacting with the
world.
‘Prelude to Objects’ focuses a self untroubled by epistemological doubt,
where self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are coterminous in
poem and person alike (Stevens will later elide poet and poem directly).32
He also applies a kind of verbal paintbrush. Another reason the self does
28
See CPP, 671–2.
29
Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, 125.
30
CPP, 671.
31
Lionello Venturi, Painting and Painters: How to Look at a Picture, from Giotto to Chagall (New
York: Scribner’s, 1945), 179.
32
See L, 346, 354. Stevens does not articulate a final position, but does affirm ‘the thing and its
double always go together’, L, 354.
not need to ‘go to the Louvre’ is not because it rejects what Bernard calls
the ‘tome of Art’; rather, ‘reality’ is conditioned by ‘the eyes of Cézanne
himself’. Our vision is influenced by art and the personalities who deter-
mine that vision. As Stevens insisted in 1938: ‘Cézanne has been the source
of all painting of any interest during the last 20 years’.33
Accordingly, even if one visits the Louvre, one sees more than pictures
on the wall. The world itself is revealed through artistic creation, a revela-
tion that for Stevens equals self-revelation:
Granted each picture is a glass,
That the walls are mirrors multiplied,
That the marbles are gluey pastiches, the stairs
The sweep of an impossible elegance,
And the notorious views from the windows
Wax wasted, monarchies beyond
The S.S. Normandie, granted
One is always seeing and feeling oneself,
That’s not by chance.
(CPP, 179–80)
This idealist confection of painting (‘each picture’), reflection (‘glass’,

‘mirrors multiplied’) and metamorphosis (the ‘marbles’ turned ‘gluey pas-
tiches’, the world beyond the Louvre a ‘wax’ work) marks the inescap-
able fact that one ‘is always seeing and feeling oneself’. Even the S.S.
Normandie, whose regular route could have conveyed Stevens from New
York to Le Havre – whence he could proceed to the Louvre – lacks aes-
thetic allure. There is no prelude to objects. The ‘prelude’ is certainly not
the ‘self’ who views a world of objects. Stevens’ title is playful because
radical idealism privileges neither the self who manipulates objects nor
the objects themselves because it denies a subject–object dualism. In the
absence of that distinction there can be no prelude privileging either per-
ceiver or perceived.
But Stevens’ poem does offer a ‘determining personality’ of its own: ‘It
comes to this: / That the guerilla I should be booked / And bound’.34 This
‘guerilla I’ is an assailant operating outside conventional practices: a first
person specializing in ‘irregular fighting’ (OED). Stevens battles with this
speaker in ‘Blue Guitar’, but by 1938 can joke about the need, in marked
legal language, to bring his ‘guerilla I’ to book because he had already,
bibliographically speaking, booked and bound that speaker in The Man
33
Stevens to Wilson E. Taylor, 31 March 1938, WAS, 3853.
34
CPP, 180.
with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems. The ‘nigger mystics’ of this ‘I’ – an
alarming caricature of ‘voodoo’ spell-binding? – are also ironized; para-
doxically, because the poem insists they be transformed from ‘foolscap’ to
‘wigs’. ‘Foolscap’ is a size of paper, but obviously elides ‘fool’s cap’, denot-
ing the jester with his cap and bells. Stevens quips his ‘I’ is both a serious
textual phenomenon – bound in paper – but also an object of mirth, lack-
ing a serious audience (the ‘I’ desires the solemnity of a legal ‘wig’ rather
than a fool’s cap). The poem implies, however, that ‘wigs’ can be taken no
more seriously than any other definitive headgear (Stevens’ tone is simi-
lar to the apostrophe to the ‘beards’ of ‘Extracts from Addresses to the
Academy of Fine Ideas’).35 However, if the ‘guerilla I’ is not as dangerous
as Stevens maintains, his idealist ‘I’ does invade the early 1940s poetry.
‘Prelude to Objects’ signals that the poet (and a poetic ‘I’) need not fear
solipsism or perverse abstraction. The poem’s last section addresses the
‘Poet’ himself, insisting that, just as Cézanne shapes our vision of every-
thing, the poet creates our sense of self-image: ‘We are conceived in your
conceits’. Stevens could joke about a ‘guerilla I’ because he had already
wrest control of that assailant in ‘Blue Guitar’. Realizing an ‘I’ and affirm-
ing an abstract imagination are, in fact, one and the same manoeuvre
in Stevens’ late 1930s work. But before demonstrating how his idealist ‘I’
choreographs the early 1940s poetry, I want to turn to ‘The Noble Rider
and the Sound of Words’ and ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’,
re-interpreting these lectures through their interest in speakers and what
Stevens calls the ‘process of the personality of the poet’.36 The chapter then
demonstrates how Stevens presents his idealist ‘I’, among other abstract
figures, in milieux distinguished by food, wine and aesthetic meditation,
concluding with a short reading of ‘Landscape with Boat’. This is pre-
liminary to Chapter 5’s exploration of ‘Certain Phenomena of Sound’
and Stevens’ most abstract ‘gastronomic’ poem ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ as
we move into further uncharted critical territory: namely, the relations
between gastronomy, desire and abstraction in Stevens’ mature writing.
4 .2 F rom ‘robus t poe t ’ to i de a l is t ‘I’: ‘Th e Nobl e

R i de r a n d t h e Sou n d of Wor ds’ (194 2) a n d ‘Th e
F igu r e of t h e You t h a s V i r i l e Poe t ’ (1943)
‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ provides a rare instance of
Stevens critically reading another author’s work, namely Plato’s Phaedrus.
Ibid., 229.
35 36
Ibid., 670.
This reading illustrates Stevens’ growing awareness of how textual speak-
ers influence readers. Although Stevens borrows Plato’s ‘charioteer’ pri-
marily as an example of a figure of lost imaginative resonance (as a waning
symbol of ‘nobility’), what is often overlooked in this lecture is Stevens’
relish for Plato’s speaker. In fact ‘The Noble Rider’ initially foregrounds
Plato’s words rather than Stevens’:
In the Phaedrus, Plato speaks of the soul in a figure. He says:
Let our figure be of a composite nature – a pair of winged horses and a charioteer.
Now the winged horses and the charioteer of the gods are all of them noble […] while
ours are mixed; and we have a charioteer who drives them in a pair, and one of
them is noble and of noble origin, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble origin […]
I will endeavor to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal
creature. The soul or animate being has the care of the inanimate, and traverses the
whole heaven in divers forms appearing; – when perfect and fully winged she soars
upward, and is the ruler of the universe; while the imperfect soul loses her feathers,
and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground.37
Stevens knows it is not Plato who speaks here but Socrates. The lecture
postpones reading the text as a dialogue – each speaker possessing his
own rhetorical agenda – because Stevens wants to influence his audience’s
response(s) to Plato.
Stevens is, in fact, peremptory, as he aims to delimit our understanding
of Plato’s figure:
We recognize at once, in this figure, Plato’s pure poetry; and […] we recognize
what Coleridge called Plato’s dear, gorgeous nonsense. The truth is that we have
scarcely read the passage before we have identified ourselves with the charioteer,
have, in fact, taken his place […] [S]uddenly we remember, it may be, that the
soul no longer exists and we droop in our flight and at last settle on the solid
ground. The figure has become antiquated and rustic.38
But whilst Plato’s passage might constitute ‘pure poetry’ – what Stevens
labels ‘all imagination’ – the reader/listener does not necessarily identify
‘with the charioteer’ or take his place as Stevens prescribes.39 ‘The truth is
that we have scarcely read’ forms a rhetorical ploy through which Stevens
delimits the interpretation with which he can account for Plato’s figure
having become ‘antiquated and rustic’. For if we ‘identify ourselves with
the charioteer’, we automatically participate in the experience of this fig-
ure’s downfall. Indeed, if we agree the figure falls for its unreality then
Stevens’ reading gives credence both to our nominally fine reading skills
37
Ibid., 643. 38
Ibid., 643. 39
Ibid., 645.
(ones attributed to us by Stevens) and to the validity of the imagination–
reality equilibrium: what ‘The Noble Rider’ famously describes as the
‘interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals’.40
But Stevens’ attempt at controlling interpretation is more than rhet-
orical. He mimics the conviction and authority of Socrates, aping ‘Socratic
rhetoric’, especially Socrates’ taste for conjunction:
Something else than the imagination is moved by the statement that the horses
of the gods are all of them noble, and of noble breed or origin. The statement
is a moving statement and is intended to be so. It is insistent and its insistence
moves us. Its insistence is the insistence of a speaker, in this case Socrates, who,
for the moment, feels delight […] in the nobility and noble breed. Those images
of nobility instantly become nobility itself and determine the emotional level at
which the next page or two are to be read.41
This ‘Socratic rhetoric’ is self-reflexive: ‘The statement is a moving state-
ment and is intended to be so. It is insistent and its insistence moves us.’
Such diction determines how ‘the next page or two’ of ‘The Noble Rider’
are ‘to be read’.
For Stevens cajoles his audience – also, implicitly, the readers of The
Necessary Angel – to participate in a similar experience to that which he
credits Socrates with making. The insistence of an ‘insistent’ speaker
proves catching. Even if the reader does ‘not quite yield’ to the nobility
of Plato’s figure, it is easy to ‘recognize’ the strength of the ‘robust poet’
Stevens identifies in Plato/Socrates:
The result is that we recognize […] the feelings of the robust poet clearly and
fluently noting the images in his mind and by means of his robustness, clearness
and fluency communicating much more than the images themselves.42
This announces an idealist poetic figure. Stevens’ ‘robust poet’ neither
copies nature nor merely transcribes mental pictures. He communicates
‘much more than the images themselves’. Like Cézanne, he conveys his
own ‘robustness’, clarity and ‘fluency’ by evoking mediated images. The
‘robust poet’ conveys what Stevens had described in 1938 as the ‘deter-
mining personality’.
But we should focus also on the other overlooked aspect of this lec-
ture: that ambiguous phrase ‘the sound of words’.43 In 1942 ‘the sound of
40
Ibid., 659. 41 Ibid., 644. 42 Ibid., 644–5.
43
Stevens struggles to address ‘the sound of words’ theme: ‘Here I am, well-advanced in my paper,
with everything of interest that I started out to say remaining to be said’ (CPP, 659). ‘Say[ing]’ is
thus preliminary to having ‘said’ something, as though Stevens’ own rhetoric is inscribed with
‘sound’ in the senses of noise (or ‘talk’) and of having ‘sounded out’ an idea or having articulated
something profound.
words’ refers initially to literature’s grasp on the imagination over time,
particularly literature losing cultural resonance, a phenomenon to which
Stevens alludes in quoting Croce’s The Defence of Poetry.44 In a passage
from which Stevens does not quote, Croce remarks:
I will not conceal a feeling […] which I have had during the last twenty years: […]
that if I recite aloud a line or stanza of Dante or Petrarch or Foscolo, their voices
find no echo: a sense of a surrounding atmosphere strange, hostile and contemp-
tuous; a sense of sacrilege in bringing into it those gentle and exalted words,
born in a different world and addressed to a different world.45
‘Sound’ would even come to take on a different resonance for Stevens. By
1944, for example, when Stevens wrote ‘The Creations of Sound’, ‘sound’
has attained a ‘different’ hold on the poet’s imagination; as Chapter 6
demonstrates, by this period Stevens’ confidence in abstraction was such
that he could take the barest concept or idea as a source of inspiration.46
But to understand Stevens’ ‘I’ in the poems following the ‘Canonica’
series (and in ‘The Noble Rider’) one must appreciate the highlighted
‘personality’ of ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’. This lecture usu-
ally attracts attention for its Stevensian ‘agreement with reality’.47 As
Filreis suggests, by 1943 Stevens opted to replace the imagination–reality
equilibrium of ‘The Noble Rider’ with an emphasis on facing ‘reality’
head-on.48 For Filreis, this shift reflects Stevens’ awareness that he would
be addressing a ‘refugee audience’ at Les Entretiens de Pontigny, Mount
Holyoke College, in August 1943 (where his paper was chaired by Gestapo
survivor Jean Wahl).49 However, ‘The Figure of the Youth’ is not overtly
concerned with the social and political reality of Nazi-occupied Europe
and certainly not with the specific experiences of refugees. Such a reality
exerts pressure on the lecture, but Stevens’ preoccupations in ‘The Figure
of the Youth’ only relate to that pressure in an indirect sense: namely,
through the freedom represented by the ‘figure of the youth’ who realizes
44
See CPP, 652.
45
Benedetto Croce, The Defence of Poetry: Variations on the Theme of Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon,
1933), 29. For an early insight into ‘the thought of sound long ago’, see L, 117.
46
The ‘different poet’ of ‘The Creations of Sound’ is undeniably a verbal creation. But his ‘sound’
is not oral. He does not speak in Stevens’ poem. If we ‘say ourselves in syllables that rise / From
the floor, rising in speech we do not speak’, it is because poetry reliant on abstraction re-con-
ceives poetic speech (CPP, 274–5). As ‘Description Without Place’ insists: ‘It matters, because
everything we say […] is description without place, a cast / Of the imagination, made in sound ’.
The poet’s words – and the reader’s absorption of those words – thus transform what this later
poem mischievously calls the ‘plainly visible’. See WSJ 33.1 (2009) for a fuller study of ‘sound’.
47
CPP, 676.
48
Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, 28.
49
Ibid., 100.
his own imagination. Stevens’ main preoccupation is with sketching the
figure ‘The Noble Rider’ describes as the ‘robust poet’, for the idealist ‘I’
who reflects this ‘robust poet’ is not pejoratively abstracted from the world
but aims to re-establish fresh contact with ‘reality’ through imaginative
meditation.
Stevens also insists that the world in which his ‘youth’ lives is ‘apart
from politics’:
There is a life apart from politics. It is this life that the youth as virile poet lives,
in a kind of radiant and productive atmosphere. This is the life of that atmos-
phere. There the philosopher is an alien. The pleasure that the poet has there
is a pleasure of agreement with the radiant and productive world in which he
lives.50
This was an important statement for Stevens because in 1954 it became
the Epilogue to one of the few recordings he made.51 There is nothing
incompatible in claiming a realm of experience beyond the political
sphere whilst also acknowledging how political realities exert pressure on
this ‘life apart’. At least, it can hardly be claimed the ‘agreement’ Stevens
speaks of throughout ‘The Figure of the Youth’ indicates a growing social
commitment, or, as Filreis suggests, reveals Stevens becoming, even
unwittingly, a new ‘nationalist’.52 If Stevens urges an ‘agreement with real-
ity’ it is to convey how an idealist, abstract imagination is not reducible to
the political sphere, even if it is influenced by it. The world ‘apart’ is not
removed from the grubby realm of international politics but simply needs
to affirm itself as a valid part of life. Stevens even suggests that ‘with his
sense of the heaviness of the world’ the poet ‘feels his own power to lift,
or help to lift, that heaviness away’.53 The poet – and Stevens – emerges as
a ‘spiritual epicure’ who realizes the cost of the freedom in which he can
savour life’s senses.54
Ostensibly ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’ addresses a ‘def-
inition of poetry’, but Stevens conflates this theme with the figure of
the poet.55 Coleridge is for Stevens ‘a man who may be said to have been
defining poetry all his life’, even if his definitions ‘no longer impress us
primarily by their validity’.56 The Biographia insists:
What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the
answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction
50
CPP, 678.
51
Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens Reads (New York: Caedmon, [1956] 1998), audiotape.
52
See Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, 80.
53
CPP, 682. 54 L, 394. 55 CPP, 667. 56 Ibid., 667.
resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images,
thoughts, and emotions of the poet’s own mind.57
Stevens replicates, then, a Coleridgean habit, even if he attempts to dis-
tance himself from the definitions Coleridge represents. Stevens also
quotes Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry where Shelley ventures an ‘approxi-
mation’ of poetry through the figure of the poet and via the poem as the
site of human knowledge.58 As Stevens insists, ‘we have no difficulty in
recognizing poetry’, and ‘we may be accounting for’ this phenomenon
‘if we say that it is a process of the personality of the poet’.59 Such con-
flation makes ‘The Figure of the Youth’ a self-referential performance –
similar to the self-reflexive ‘The Noble Rider’ – in which lecture, lecturer
and ‘youth’ become one and the same poet speaking. Specifically, Stevens
transforms his paper into a portrait of the figure of the ‘youth’ becoming
an idealist ‘I’. But because the Romantics nominally lack the modern ‘val-
idity’ Stevens craves, ‘The Figure of the Youth’ employs more contempor-
ary intellectual support to explicate ‘the personality of the poet’.
Stevens’ tone becomes defensive, however, because his citations inter-
fere with painting his idealist ‘youth’:
[W]ithout indirect egotism there can be no poetry. There can be no poetry with-
out the personality of the poet, and that, quite simply, is why the definition of
poetry has not been found and why, in short, there is none. In one of the really
remarkable books of the day, The Life of Forms in Art, Henri Focillon says:
Human consciousness is in perpetual pursuit of a language and a style. To assume
consciousness is at once to assume form. Even at levels far below the zone of definition
and clarity, forms, measures, and relationships exist. The chief characteristic of the
mind is to be constantly describing itself.
This activity is indirect egotism.60
Stevens reiterates here an argument he read in Mauron’s Aesthetics and
Psychology.61 Mauron stresses that ‘expressive art’ requires ‘the creation of
a language’, effecting ‘the transmission of a state of mind’.62 Referring to
Mauron’s examples for this process, Stevens even paraphrased Mauron in
his own copy of Aesthetics and Psychology, marginally observing: ‘which
end in the creation of a language’.63 A few pages earlier, Stevens also
57
BL, II, Ch. 14, 15. 58 CPP, 670. 59 Ibid., 670.
60
Ibid., 670–1. Stevens underlined this passage in his copy of Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, 52
(1989 edition, 118).
61
See CPP, 661.
62
Charles Mauron, Aesthetics and Psychology trans. Roger Fry and Katherine John (London:
Hogarth, 1935), 57.
63
Mauron, Aesthetics and Psychology, 57, Stevens’ copy.
wrote: ‘In the case of expressive art, it is a transmission through sensation
of a state of mind.’ 64
But citing Focillon neither adds to the effect of describing the ‘pro-
cess of the personality of the poet’ nor helps Stevens update his Romantic
forebears. Shelley himself insists that poets’ language is ‘the hieroglyphic
of their thoughts’ and imagines each poet developing his own idiom to
convey his ‘invisible nature’, adding: ‘[I]t is by no means essential that a
poet should accommodate his language to […] traditional form’.65 In fact,
the young Stevens marginally lined this precise passage in reading Shelley
for the first time.66
Perhaps Stevens’ dissatisfaction with failing to ‘modernize’ his sub-
ject – either by citing Focillon or flouting Cézanne on ‘the tempera-
ment of the artist’ – accounts for how ‘The Figure of the Youth’ abruptly
changes tack.67 The text moves from aphoristic, quasi-academic diction to
painting Stevens’ ‘younger figure’ impressionistically, as though Focillon’s
thesis about language and style were compositionally rather than intel-
lectually inspiring the poet. In a text littered with italicized quotations,
Stevens switches to speaking in ‘quotations’ from his poetic youth. This
speech is also italicized but not for citational purposes. Stevens imagines a
‘central purity’ where his abstract youth speaks not merely to himself but
to a reader.
If, however, in this ‘elevation’ Stevens emphasizes that the poet ‘com-
municates to the reader’, Stevens’ audience is also conceived as participat-
ing in this speech:
Here as part of the purification that all of us undergo as we approach any central
purity […] we can say:
No longer do I believe that there is a mystic muse, sister of the Minotaur. This is
another of the monsters I had for nurse, whom I have wasted. I am myself a part of
what is real, and it is my own speech and the strength of it, this only, that I hear or
ever shall.
These words may very well be an inscription above the portal to what lies
ahead.68
It is a remarkable moment. The Necessary Angel is frequently read for
Stevensian topoi: for the ‘pressure of reality’, poetry as ‘an unofficial view
of being’, or the imagination–reality complex.69 It is rarely considered
64
Ibid., 54, Stevens’ copy.
65
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry in The Major Works ed. Zachary Leader and Michael
O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 678–9.
66
Stevens’ copy of Rhys, The Prelude to Poetry, 171.
67
See CPP, 671–2. 68 Ibid., 680. 69 See ibid., 650, 667.
for the poetic speakers it employs. One stylistic habit of Stevens’ idealist
‘I’ is its repeated appearance in textual spaces. The pronoun appears five
times in the above speech poet–lecturer and audience share. This ‘I’ also
dominates Stevens’ lecture at large and is the last voice heard at its close,
as Stevens conjures ‘personality’ as theme and technique: ‘It is the spirit
out of its own self, not out of some surrounding myth, delineating with
accurate speech the complications of which it is composed.’ 70
‘The Figure of the Youth’ also identifies its ‘I’ as an Antaen figure
reliant on ‘reality’. Stevens rejects the mysticism he believes inherent in
metaphysics: ‘when we are in agreement with reality, we find […] that we
cease to be metaphysicians’.71 However, although the lecture discusses the
‘unreal’, this first person’s purpose – as for any self-respecting idealist – is
to ‘create his unreal out of what is real’, where the ‘unreal’ is fanciful but
‘credible’ fiction; just as, conversely, what Stevens calls ‘irreality’ influences
the ‘reality’ of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’.72 This explains the phrase
‘No longer do I believe that there is a mystic muse, sister of the Minotaur […]
I am myself a part of what is real’. Dispatching his Ariadne – to whom I
will return shortly – Stevens affirms the connection his idealist ‘I’ makes
with an audience; as the audience is encouraged to participate in the very
imaginative creation the speaker embodies (‘participate’ being a favoured
verb of that other audience-conscious lecture ‘The Noble Rider’).73
Stevens stridently emphasizes this connection, defending his ‘I’ from
‘double characters’ (‘the poetic philosophers and the philosophical poets’)
and from dubious ‘metaphysicians’:
He is able to read the inscription on the portal and he repeats:
I am myself a part of what is real and it is my own speech and the strength of it,
this only, that I hear or ever shall.
He says, so that we can all hear him:
I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those
around me. And I am imagination, in a leaden time and in a world that does not
move for the weight of its own heaviness.74
The lecture oscillates between affirming the personality Stevens’ ‘I’ con-
jures – ‘it is my own speech […] this only, that I hear’ – and acknowledging
this sense of self is ‘neither more nor less’ real ‘than those around me’. The
pressure of ‘a leaden time’ impinges here; and Filreis correctly observes
that ‘weight’. But Stevens’ ‘I am’ pushes back repeatedly. ‘The Figure of
Ibid., 675. 71 Ibid., 679.

70 72
Ibid., 679; L, 360. 73
See CPP, 645.
Ibid., 676–7, 682.
74
the Youth’ does eventually attain the ‘personality’ Cézanne admires: the
abstract achievement neither removed from life nor disturbed by the art-
ist’s individual struggle. Stevens’ ‘determining personality’ depends on
its ability to inculcate what Shelley calls ‘perpetual sympathy’ and what
Coleridge describes as the transformation of ‘our admiration of the poet’
into ‘our sympathy with the poetry’.75 It is a sympathy Stevens’ 1940s com-
ments on the relations between poet and poem also illustrate.
‘The Figure of the Youth’ strives, then, to create an idealist ‘I’, a speaker
from whom we derive spiritual rejuvenation. The audience is invited to
‘join him’, the ‘virile poet’, in his own imaginative communion with the
‘real’, as if the ‘robust poet’ of ‘The Noble Rider’ had become a ‘virile’,
solid self. Stevens asks: ‘Can we suppose for a moment that he will be
content merely to make notes, merely to copy Katahdin, when, with his
sense of the heaviness of the world, he feels his own power to lift, or help
to lift, that heaviness away?’76 Katahdin is a Maine mountain. Like the
New Hampshire mountain Chocorua, it evokes for Stevens the need to
confront ‘reality’ (‘Chocorua to Its Neighbor’ was also written in 1943).77
But true to Cézanne, one must not ‘copy Katahdin’ or ‘make notes’ rep-
resenting the ‘actual’. In a world of appearances the imaginative ‘I’ must
convey its perception of ‘Katahdin’, lifting life’s ‘heaviness’ off the shoul-
ders of those confined to the monocular vision of despair.
This makes all Stevens’ readers potential idealist visionaries. Although
‘The Figure of the Youth’ ends by invoking the ‘sister of the Minotaur’,
Stevens’ ‘virile poet’ neither falls into ‘metaphysics’ nor denies participa-
tion. Stevens insists that as ‘we say these things’ not only does the ‘virile
poet’ come alive; he becomes an abstraction through which ‘we’ realize
the ‘intensity’ of our own feelings:
As we say these things, there begins to develop, in addition to the figure […]
seated in our midst, composed, in the radiant and productive atmosphere with
which we have surrounded him, an intimation of what he is thinking as he
reflects on the imagination of life, determined to be its master and ours. He is
thinking of those facts of experience of which all of us have thought and which
all of us have felt with intensity, and he says:
Inexplicable sister of the Minotaur, enigma and mask, although I am part of
what is real, hear me and recognize me as part of the unreal. I am the truth but
the truth of that imagination of life in which with unfamiliar motion and man-
ner you guide me in those exchanges of speech in which your words are mine, mine
yours.78
Shelley, 679; BL, II, Ch. 14, 16–17.

75
CPP, 682.
76
Ibid., 263–8.
77 78
Ibid., 685.
Superficially, Stevens closes with a pact between the ‘virile poet’ and
Ariadne. But this speech is meant to chime with what ‘all of us have
thought’. Thus the phrase ‘your words are mine, mine yours’ does not imply
a secret ‘agreement’ between Stevens’ figures: it is an exchange of speech
through which Stevens appeals to his audience. But to understand this
gesture one must appreciate what Ariadne lends to the supplication of the
poet’s ‘I am’.
Ariadne is not only sister to the Minotaur; she is lover of Theseus who,
condemned to imprisonment in Daedalus’ maze, slays King Minos’ beast
and escapes the labyrinth thanks to Ariadne’s ball of thread. Despite flee-
ing Crete with him, Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus on Naxos where,
taking pity on her, Dionysus marries her, thereby ensuring her immortal-
ity.79 Stevens’ ‘I’ addresses, then, an immortal, although unconventional
Muse. However, the lecture resists the mystical allure Ariadne represents
(‘No longer do I believe that there is a mystic muse, sister of the Minotaur’).80
If the poet has immortality in mind, it is literary (as Ariadne has spun
many a yarn). For example, in Ariadne’s Thread J. Hillis Miller alludes to
Nietzsche’s ‘Klage der Ariadne’, explaining how Dionysus’ relationship
with Ariadne features interpersonal exploration. Nietzsche has Dionysus
declare to Ariadne: ‘Ich bin dein Labyrinth’ (‘I am your labyrinth’).81
Stevens’ ‘I’, however, emphasizes Ariadne’s capacity as a guide (‘you guide
me in those exchanges of speech’).
But in ‘The Figure of the Youth’ there is no end to being guided
through the labyrinth of the ‘unreal’, ‘the imagination of life’. If Ariadne
divines Dionysus’ labyrinthine ‘personality’, the final speech Stevens gives
his ‘virile poet’ conjures the infinite discovery Stevens hopes his listeners
will experience through his own abstract ‘I am’. Just as Ariadne is ‘enigma
and mask’, the ‘virile poet’ represents the elusive identity of the imagin-
ation itself. But what distinguishes an ‘enigma’ from a ‘mask’? A mask
conceals ‘true’ identity, creating new or imagined character. An enigma
remains a ‘riddle’ or ‘puzzling person or thing’, etymologically suggesting
to ‘speak allusively’, deriving from the Greek ainos (‘fable’, OED). To be
enigmatic, then, is to trade in allusive tales. Ariadne comprises the site of
several myths which allude to each other. Similarly, when the ‘virile poet’
alludes to her Stevens invites layer upon layer of imaginative association.
79
M. C. Howatson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 53–4.
80
CPP, 680.
81
J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 1.
It is a rhetorical gesture through which Stevens’ idealist ‘I’ aims to speak
directly to his audience: ‘your words are mine, mine yours’.
What the early 1940s lectures from The Necessary Angel illustrate, there-
fore, is Stevens’ realization of the robust first person who also speaks in his
early 1940s poetry. This ‘I’ is foregrounded in the 1938 ‘Canonica’ series.
But by 1940, in ‘Landscape with Boat’, Stevens converts a philosophizing
third person into the aesthetic ‘I’ who colours such poems as ‘Certain
Phenomena of Sound’ and ‘Holiday in Reality’. ‘Landscape with Boat’
also reveals the milieux where Stevens’ ‘I’ creates and is created: places
often defined by gastronomic tokens significant to its meditations. My
reading forms a bridge with Chapter 5’s analysis of ‘Certain Phenomena of
Sound’, where an idealist ‘I’ and gastronomic aesthetic combine. The pre-
sent chapter concludes by summarizing the overall effects of Stevens’ ‘I’,
noting its originality in contradistinction to New Critical poetic speakers
and against the backdrop of Stevens’ Romantic precursors.
4 .3 Th e h u m a n a b s t r ac t i n ‘L a n d s c a pe w i t h
B oat ’ (194 0)
‘Landscape with Boat’ is the most self-referential poem of Parts of a World,
not because it refers to its own status as a poem, but because it expli-
citly advertises ‘parts’, a ‘centre’ and ‘the truth’, the choice themes of Parts
itself. The poem is occasionally overlooked by scholars, perhaps because it
fits ‘too well’ into Stevens’ fourth volume. Eeckhout suggests ‘Landscape’
is ‘clearly programmatic’, sounds ‘a disputatious and dogmatic ring’ and
in ‘flat and unredeeming language enacts only too well what it sets out to
represent’.82 But whilst Eeckhout does find much redeeming in Stevens’
language, he bases his reading of the poem on a negative view of abstrac-
tion which disables conceiving the end of ‘Landscape with Boat’ as an
idealist celebration. By assuming the balcony scene at the poem’s close is
co-extensive with the abstract aesthetic critiqued at the start of the poem,
Eeckhout reads ‘Landscape’ as a blindness on Stevens’ part to his own
abstract proclivities.
In what follows I want simply to demonstrate a) the radical transmu-
tation of a philosophizing ‘He’ to an idealist ‘I’ and b) a coterminous
movement where Stevens rejects ultimate abstraction in favour of con-
ceiving ideas as a means re-establishing contact with ‘reality’. For, whilst
Bart Eeckhout, Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (Columbia, MO: University
82
of Missouri Press, 2002), 174.

‘Landscape with Boat’ is influenced by painting, it does not necessar-
ily engage with abstract art in the way Eeckhout and others assume.83
Recalling Chapter 3, Stevensian abstraction comprises an imaginative pro-
cess which does not yield a pared-down, non-concrete aesthetic. Instead,
Stevens shares Francis Bacon’s tendency to think about artefacts in the
abstract, as imaginative catalysts for creative work. This is not the same as
embracing Abstract Expressionism or endorsing the kind of ‘non-human’
art the poet associated with Picasso a few years prior to this poem.84
‘Landscape with Boat’ presents a painterly ‘ascetic’ whose desire to cut
through appearance suggests abstract imagining:
An anti-master-man, floribund ascetic.
He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.
He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see
And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,
A naked man who regarded himself in the glass
Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,
Without blue, without any turquoise tint or phase,
Any azure under-side or after-color.
(CPP, 220)
Following ‘The Poems of Our Climate’, Stevens critiques the desire to

whitewash the world. Certainly, the 1940s Stevens wants to strip away
appearance; but what differentiates a poem like ‘Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction’ from the attempt of the ‘anti-master-man’ to strip the world bare
is that ‘Notes’ knows that the discovery of the ‘first idea’, or a ‘supreme
fiction’, is inspiringly unrealizable. What ‘Notes’ appreciates is the cre-
ative energy derived from being a ‘thinker of the first idea’.85 ‘Landscape
with Boat’, however, simply critiques the attempt to push through appear-
ance to an impossible world without colour (a sky ‘without blue’, or any
colour, is arguably hardly a sky). That Stevens’ ‘He’ is figured in painterly
diction only testifies to the impossibility of breaking out of any medium
into pure form. If ‘He brushed away the thunder’, there remain traces of
the brush-strokes the ‘anti-master-man’ makes.86
83
See Eeckhout, Wallace Stevens, 175–6; Cleghorn, Wallace Stevens’ Poetics, 44–5.
84
MacLeod does, however, address how Stevens’ poetics chimes with abstract painting following
the Second World War and with the Abstract Expressionists’ responses to Stevens (see MacLeod,
Wallace Stevens and Modern Art, 143ff.).
85
CPP, 333.
86
Cohen notes Simons’ reading of the poem in connection with Mallarmé’s ‘L’Azur’ (Cohen, ‘The
Strange Unlike’, 115).
Stevens’ ‘He’ is also ironized as over-intellectualizing. Whilst this fig-
ure realizes the impossibility of discovering a ‘neutral centre’, he remains
prey to rhetoric desiring a ‘single-colored’ truth:
It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.
It was easier to think it lay there. If
It was nowhere else, it was there and because
It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,
Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing that he reached
In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw
And denying what he heard. He would arrive.
He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,
To be projected by one void into
Another.
(CPP, 220)
Stevens’ playful language accentuates how this ‘He’ is already subject

to the ambiguity which questions discovering unambiguous ‘truth’.
‘Supposed’ conveys ‘assumed’, as in logical supposition and ‘imagined’,
signifying creative acts. ‘Sup-posing’ is literally ‘placing under’ (from the
French poser). Within the thought that is ‘easier to think’, truth is neatly
placed in ‘uncreated night’, awaiting discovery. But on the idealist and
pragmatist view where truth is made not found, ‘supposing’ is creating,
and creation involves changing the appearance of places – just as in ‘Blue
Guitar’ canto vi the words ‘place’ and ‘space’ change places significantly.
Stevens’ ‘He’ moves, then, from logical supposition to creating ‘truth’,
where a rhetoric of rejection paradoxically enables his speaker to move
around: ‘He would arrive’ in ‘a place that he reached, by rejecting what he
saw / And denying what he heard’. Rather than cause inertia, the refusal
‘to live’, to walk instead ‘in the dark’ enables Stevens’ ‘He’ to discover a
new locale. Note also how this third person disappears in his ‘suppos-
ing’, not reappearing until the phrase ‘a thing that he reached’. The poem
implies that the philosophical thirst for final answers disables movement.
Like the ‘un-locatable’ speaker of ‘Blue Guitar’, Stevens’ ‘He’ will not
become mobile without relinquishing logical supposition.
Stevens’ speaker is thus conceived in a specialized setting where an
idealist ‘I’ is imagined (if only ‘he’ could ‘suppose’ this for himself):
Had he been better able to suppose:
He might sit on a sofa on a balcony
Above the Mediterranean, emerald
Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms
Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe
A yellow wine and follow a steamer’s track
And say, ‘The thing I hum appears to be
The rhythm of this celestial pantomime.’
(CPP, 221)
Being ‘better able to suppose’ means imaginatively changing places: remov-

ing oneself from an ‘ascetic’ world and reclining on a balcony overlooking
the Mediterranean. Stevens’ ‘He’ seemingly discovers himself in an envir-
onment of ‘palms’, a ‘yellow wine’ and ‘a steamer’s track’: as if the boat, or
its trace, only become ‘real’ parts of the poem’s landscape when the ‘He’
relinquishes his world without colour and becomes painter of the scene.
The imagined ‘I’ shapes an idealist epiphany. ‘The thing I hum appears
to be / The rhythm of this celestial pantomime’ affirms how appearances
are mental creations. A ‘pantomime’, originally, was a ‘dumb show’ not
a festive play, just as ‘celestial’ refers etymologically to ‘the sky’ rather
than anything metaphysical. The ‘celestial pantomime’ implies the world
presents us with a spectacle, but not a language (which awaits creation, be
it musical, visual or verbal). Whatever the language, however, the poem
realizes the powers of the idealist mind upon which Stevens frequently
meditates in the early 1940s.
‘Landscape with Boat’ also illustrates the human dimensions of
Stevensian abstraction. By transforming a philosophizing ‘He’ into an
idealist ‘I’ Stevens rejects meaningless abstraction in favour of an inter-
personal imagination. Some readers oppose ‘the abstract’ to the human.87
But Stevens’ modern idealism relies on abstraction for the human task
of refreshing ‘reality’. To be ‘abstract’ is to re-discover the human, re-
invigorating our physical and sensual impressions.88 Eeckhout, however,
sees ‘Landscape with Boat’ as problematic, caught between critiquing its
abstract ‘ascetic’ (which he compellingly associates with Mondrian) and
the creation of the abstract ‘I’ at the poem’s close.89 Specifically, Eeckhout
opposes abstraction to Stevens’ perception of ‘sensuous particulars’:
Even if a modicum of self-irony […] inform[s] the description of the ascetic,
Stevens still manages rather easily […] to come down on one side of the debate,
ignoring […] his own strong inclination toward abstraction and his own regular
87
See Eeckhout’s reading of ‘The Snow Man’ (Wallace Stevens, 85) and Leggett, Wallace Stevens and
Poetic Theory, 17–26.
88
Leggett suggests ‘even the most sensuous detail remains radically a product of abstraction’,
Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 40.
89
Eeckhout, Wallace Stevens, 176.
distrust of the sufficiency of sensuous particulars […] ‘Landscape with Boat’ is
an affirmation of the sensuous particulars of this world […] but it is also, surrep-
titiously, an exorcism.90
But Stevens never evinced a ‘regular distrust’ of ‘the sufficiency of sen-
suous particulars’, unless Eeckhout intends the questioning of the senses
abstraction encourages before re-configuring perception. Such particulars
become tokens of the imaginative space where an idealist poetic re-estab-
lishes contact with ‘reality’. But Eeckhout assumes these ‘sensuous partic-
ulars’ belong to the illusory realm of what Coleridge and Shelley call the
‘film of familiarity’, and that, by lauding abstraction, Stevens attempts to
transcend an indulgent, physical world rather than seeing that realm as a
portal of discovery.91
Mallarmé asks: ‘Why should we perform the miracle by which a nat-
ural object is almost made to disappear beneath the magic waving wand
of the written word, if not to divorce that object from the direct and the
palpable, and so conjure up its essence in all purity?’92 But Stevens does not
share Mallarmé’s desire to dispense entirely with habitual perception. His
aim is not to transcend ‘the direct’ and ‘palpable’, but, through abstrac-
tion, metamorphose our very sense of palpability. Eeckhout’s reading of
‘Landscape with Boat’ attributes to Stevens a Mallarméan distrust of sen-
suous particulars, perpetuating a tradition that ultimately opposes the
abstract to the human. But from an idealist perspective, visual and sen-
sual tokens are opportunities. A ‘yellow wine’ might initiate novel inter-
action with life itself.
What, then, characterizes Stevens’ idealist ‘I’? First, it is textually inva-
sive, appearing frequently in small chunks of verse as well as dominating
the poems in which it appears. Second, it is paradoxically non-subjective.
For Stevens’ readers the ‘I’ forms a source of abstract attraction, almost
a cipher upon which any desire may be projected. Stevens’ ‘I’ is thus an
emblem for the abstract imagination described here and earlier, a ‘self’ of
aesthetic hypersensitivity to colour, sound, smell, touch and taste. Although
a first person, it allows Stevens to abstract himself from his own poem and
to give his abstract ideas sensual reality through the aesthetic spaces the ‘I’
apparently creates (or to which it has access). Stevens’ ‘I’ invites readers into
the poem not as quasi-creators of the poem itself – which David Walker
sees as being a component of the nominally ‘transparent lyric’ – but as an
90
Ibid., 183.
91
BL, II, Ch. 14, 7; Shelley, The Major Works, 698.
92
Mallarmé, ‘Crisis in Poetry’, 1562.
emblem for the imagination which conjures the poem’s own meditations.93
In Hegel’s sense, the poet abstracts himself from his poem, but his readers
turn the abstract ‘I’ of the poet’s imagination into the mediated spirit who
establishes fresh contact with the world.
Although Stevens criticism has addressed the role of speakers, no
prior account of this unusual first person, born of ‘Blue Guitar’, exists.94
Although idealism has been discussed, this criticism has not focused on
Stevens’ first-person speaker either.95 Certainly, Stevens’ ‘I’ does not con-
form to any precedent for lyric speakers in poetry written in English, and,
contemporaneously, was alien to the New Critical view of poetic voic-
es.96 In fact, the poet’s idealist ‘I’, if it derives from Romantic philosophy,
is thoroughly Modernist; albeit more in line with Proust’s and Woolf’s
explorations of self than those of Eliot, Pound, Williams or Moore.97
Altieri asserts that Modernism is ‘characterized by the gradual domin-
ation of third-person over first-person terms’ in ‘understanding the psyche’
and conceiving ‘social relations’. Stevens’ ‘I’ paradoxically communicates
‘third-person’ concerns, transcending reduction to ‘first-person terms’ by
creating the abstract space where readers reflect on imaginative possibil-
ities. Altieri ponders if ‘the lyric imagination’ could ‘assume a version of
the third-person position’.98 Stevens’ ‘I’ achieves this assumption precisely.
As Valéry also observes: ‘The most enduring “I” is the most impersonal’.99
Chapter 3 suggested that Stevensian terms beg for physical realiza-
tion, noting how the poet’s ‘supreme fiction’ exerts a ‘physical’ hold over
Stevens’ quotidian imagination. When he reports liking ‘Rhine wine,
blue grapes’ and ‘good cheese’ as much as ‘supreme fiction’, Stevens does
not compartmentalize the abstract term as different in kind from these
gastronomic items. If anything, insurance work requires putting ‘supreme
fiction’, like the enjoyment of food and wine, temporarily ‘to one side’.100
93
See David Walker, The Transparent Lyric: Reading and Meaning in the Poetry of Stevens and
Williams (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
94
See Daniel Schwarz, Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (New York: St
Martin’s Press, 1993), 7; Vendler, Words Chosen Out of Desire, 15; Eeckhout, Wallace Stevens, 39.
95
See Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), 224–6; Peterson,
Wallace Stevens and the Idealist Tradition; Whiting, The Never-Resting Mind; Jennifer Bates,
‘Stevens, Hegel, and the Palm at the End of the Mind’ WSJ 23.2 (1999), 152–66.
96
See Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry, liv.
97
To appreciate the distance between Stevens’ speaker and Romantic selfhood, see Michael
O’Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), xiii–xiv; and
Leon Waldoff, Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics: The Art and Psychology of Self-Representation
(Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 8.
98
Altieri, Painterly Abstraction, 333.
99
Valéry, Cahiers/Notebooks vol. i, 322.
100
L, 431.
But Stevens’ sense of his profession affording him the possibility of living
the good life is clear.101 What is less obvious is how all these elements are
inextricable in the poet’s quotidian meditations.102
The next chapter illustrates the importance of understanding Stevens’
gastronomic references as involving much more than the occasional reflec-
tions of a gourmet, reading ‘Certain Phenomena of Sound’ as a special
case in which Stevens’ idealist ‘I’ speaks, before embarking on a longer
analysis of ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’.103 The physical and sensual in Stevens
are often the sites for the catalysis of his abstract imagination, and the
tendency to oppose the sensual to the abstract denies readers insight into
this aspect of Stevens’ work. The ‘mastery of life’, of which Stevens speaks
later in his career, is explored in greater detail, along with his gastronomic
aesthetic, in Chapter 7. The next chapter begins by exploring how Stevens’
idealist speaker thrives on the gourmet spirit that makes its poet a ‘spirit-
ual epicure’ in every sense of the phrase.104
101
But Stevens also ruminated imaginatively on office life (see L, 776). In ‘Surety and Fidelity
Claims’ (1938) he commented of the ‘claim man’: ‘After twenty-five years or more […] he finds
it difficult sometimes to distinguish himself from the papers he handles and comes almost to
believe that he and his papers constitute a single creature, consisting principally of hands and
eyes: lots of hands and lots of eyes’, CPP, 799.
102
Stevens wrote ironically to Feo: ‘the […] Valery which I read yesterday got mixed up with a
lot of Rhine wine that I had for lunch and kept falling out of my hand. When I had finished I
thought it was a truly wonderful work and felt relieved that it was over […] Either one of these
books with Rhine wine or Moselle would be hard to improve on’ (L, 757).
103
Frank Lentricchia argues Stevens’ ‘good cheese’, Rhine wine, grapes and books are ‘substitutes
for supreme fiction money can buy’, Ariel and the Police (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1988), 228–9. They are not substitutes but inspirational, even symbolic, objects which play
an active role in Stevens’ quotidian imagination, where the humdrum and ‘sublime’ unite in
abstract meditation.
104
L, 394.
C H APTER 5
Abstract appetites: food, wine

and the idealist ‘I’
5.1 T a s t i ng ‘C e r ta i n Ph e nom e n a of S ou n d’ (194 2)

Stevens’ gastronomic references could inform an entire study in their own
right. The elusive ‘lobster Bombay’, mango chutney, Burgundian wines
(Meursault, Le Montrachet, Chablis, Corton), Champagne, persim-
mons, pears, peaches, strawberries, even a glass of water: these are only
some of the stimulants affecting Stevens’ literal and abstractive palate.1
Gastronomy in Stevens often unites ‘high ideas’ with living, immediate
pleasures. As the poet wrote to Henry Church: ‘Being, as I think of it, is
not a science but merely eating duck, or doing some such thing.’ 2 Such
calculated flippancy is a reminder to Stevens’ more earnest Heideggerian
readers that ‘being’ was hardly the ‘be-all and end-all’ for this poet.
Numerous Stevens poems refer to bread and wine, where such staples
imply imaginative and domestic well-being, whether present or disturb-
ingly absent.3 Following Santayana, Stevens gave the word ‘poverty’ a par-
ticular resonance; sensing economic and imaginative hardships frequently
conjoin.4 Domestic comforts thus take on aesthetic significance in the
poetry, not least through gastronomy. That significance chimes with the
argument I make for Stevensian abstraction: namely, that aesthetic medi-
tation re-connects us with the world and that an abstract aesthetic poten-
tially maximizes its number of gourmet readers.5
1
See CPP, 347, 234–7; L, 682, 684, 761, 682, 393; CPP, 180, 206, 207, 181–2.
2
L, 453.
3
See CPP, 106–7, 142, 229, 246, 350 and 352.
4
See ibid., 8–9. Santayana argues that poetry ‘shakes us out of our servile speech and imaginative
poverty’ (Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 266). In a more abstract vein, he claims: ‘[T]he
superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that
can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt’ (The Sense of
Beauty, 68).
5
Feo early pondered Stevens’ aesthetic love of wine (see Brazeau, Parts of a World, 141). Rehder
mentions the poet’s gourmandism, suggesting Stevens wrote poetry because the ‘feelings’ he nur-
tured in his ‘private, homemade, mundane connoisseurship’ were ‘not self-sufficient’ (Rehder,
The Poetry of Wallace Stevens, 30). However, Stevens’ gastronomic loves should not be relegated
136
Abstract appetites 137
Stevens no doubt delighted in Mauron’s claim that ‘[w]ithout the ori-
ginality of artists our human world would lose half its taste’ (underlining
the phrase in his personal copy). Stevens added a marginal note: ‘It is ori-
ginality [that] enriches the world’, a comment indicating his conviction
that poets, among other artists, should be the acknowledged legislators.6
Mauron’s notion that artworks arrest present sensation rather than imply-
ing future action is also gastronomically expressed:
In ordinary life we sometimes pause […] before a tree […] or at a table even,
with a mouthful of wine, our attention concentrated wholly on the delicate black
savour […] rolling between the palate and the tongue. In such moments […] we
are all like artists, because instead of putting an end to the stimulus by a prompt
reaction, we keep it in suspense.7
The artist thus ‘transforms us, willy-nilly, into epicures’. Mauron finds
the ‘bliss of gourmets’ to be coterminous with the pleasure artworks cre-
ate.8 Stevens undoubtedly enjoyed being a ‘spiritual epicure’ himself, and
appreciated aesthetic suspense, underlining Mauron’s ‘Through our very
immobility, the excitement is multiplied.’ 9 He also wrote marginally of
Mauron’s ‘epicures’: ‘and constitutes a stimulus, which we enjoy in its
own sense, since it entails no reaching beyond the enjoyment of the sen-
sation it provokes. Thus the basis of the aesthetic emotion is the aesthetic
attitude; contemplation without any idea of making use of the object of
contemplation.’ 10
Like Stevens, Mauron understood the vitality ‘luxury’ can afford
(Stevens underlining the first two sentences of the following):
Biologically, human pleasure is a luxury […] a point in our curve above the per-
fect zero which represents absence of pain. Art is part of this luxury. We add
aesthetic joys to our life as we add condiments to our soup, to give it a little more
flavour.11
No doubt Stevens appreciated Mauron’s defence of the ‘luxury’ of
abstraction, which appeals to ‘the domain of the senses’ precisely because
we hold our perception of our own senses ‘in suspense’.12 Like Stevens,
beneath the aesthetic values of poetry or painting. His imagination welcomed perceptual pleas-
ures whether or not they became pretexts for poetry.
6
7
Ibid., 32.
8
Mauron, Aesthetics and Psychology, 37, 46.
9
See L, 394.
10
Mauron, Aesthetics and Psychology, 38, Stevens’ copy. Stevens also marked Mauron’s later com-
mentary on the artist’s ‘contemplative epicurism’, 105.
11
Mauron, Aesthetics and Psychology, 70–1.
12
Ibid., 19.
Mauron also opposed the ultimate abstraction critiqued in ‘Landscape
with Boat’ because in a world without colour there can be neither sense
nor feeling. Similarly, Francis Bacon criticized extreme abstraction for
lacking this human element: ‘Anything in art seems cruel because real-
ity is cruel. Perhaps that’s why so many people like abstraction in art,
because you can’t be cruel in abstraction.’ 13 As Klee observed ambivalently
of a landscape in one of his Bauhaus lectures: ‘it is still too hard […] to
stay alive in such abstractions and not to forget entirely the bridge that
carries from natural rhythm to its precise representation’.14
Robert Motherwell, in another book Stevens owned, went further:
A weakness of modernist painting nowadays […] is inherent in taking over or
inventing ‘abstract’ forms insufficiently rooted in the concrete, in the world
of feeling where art originates, and of which modern French poetry is an
expression.15
But in a poetic that can abstract feeling, reality, cruelty and the inher-
ent luxury of ‘pleasure’ multiple emotions may be encompassed. Stevens
learnt as much from Mallarmé, and perhaps, as Motherwell’s comparison
invites, from Valéry too.
Admittedly, Stevens is accused of writing without feeling. Some read-
ers ponder, with Berryman, whether there was ‘something […] not there
in his flourishing art’.16 R. S. Thomas’ ambivalent ‘Wallace Stevens’ also
observes:
There was no spring in his world.
His one season was late fall;
The self ripe, but without taste.17
But Stevens’ poetry does encourage readers to taste, imagine, create
and re-create through abstract discovery. As Kermode insists: ‘There is a
poetry of the abstract; if you do not like it, even when it is firmly rooted
in the particulars of the world, you will not like Stevens.’ 18 Stevens could
13
Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 200.
14
Paul Klee, Paul Klee: Dokumente und Bilder aus den Jahren 1896–1930 (Bern: Verlag Benteli,
1949), 11, Stevens’ copy. I am grateful to Bart Eeckhout for his translation. For Klee’s influence
on Stevens, see CPP, 750 and Chapter 7.
15
Robert Motherwell, ‘Prefatory Notice’ in Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (New
York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1950), unpaginated. Stevens refers to this work in ‘The Relations
Between Poetry and Painting’ (CPP, 749). He is mentioned in text by Harold Rosenberg as
one of the poets following the First World War who had been ‘enthusiastically frenchified’
(unpaginated).
16
John Berryman, ‘So Long? Stevens’ in The Dream Songs (London: Faber, 1993), 238.
17
Thomas, ‘Wallace Stevens’, 135.
18
Kermode, Wallace Stevens, 46.
never be a ‘personal’ poet, if by ‘personal’ we imagine the naïve read-
erly response of abstracting for ourselves the precise depths of the poet’s
‘personality’. Rather, Stevens’ poems invite readers into the celebratory,
festive imagination those texts themselves evoke and re-create incessantly.
As Blackmur observes, Stevens’ verse ‘does not so much record sensibility,
it creates it, adds to it; it is part of the regular everlasting job of making
over again the absolute content of sensibility’.19
Stevens indirectly defended this idea by underlining Mauron’s obser-
vation that artists ‘have reached this point of detachment and tenderness
through pure sensibility – their perception of differences’.20 In a revealing
marginal comment, Stevens explicitly links the epicure’s delight in sus-
pension with the world of taste in all senses: ‘Just as the artist is immobile
before nature, so he is immobile before his own nature, at least enough
so to control it: not wholly merely to live his state of mind, nor wholly
merely to pause and taste it’.21 This is a tension we find repeatedly in the
abstract gestures Stevens’ own poems and letters make.
Gastronomic and aesthetic meditation also combine in several poems
where Stevens’ idealist ‘I’ predominates. ‘Certain Phenomena of Sound’
is the best example, but the less well-known ‘Anything Is Beautiful If You
Say It Is’, ‘The News and the Weather’ and ‘Holiday in Reality’ are close
in spirit.22 Aesthetic ‘characters’ in Stevens, often seated at café tables, also
symbolize the pleasures of imagining abstractly.23 As Chapter 6 argues,
when Stevens jettisoned an explicit abstract vocabulary his verse still
retained abstract aspects in poems where figures meditate or consume.
My interest in ‘Certain Phenomena of Sound’, however, is to show how
Stevens’ idealist ‘I’ behaves. But I will also observe how sound, gastron-
omy and narrative affect this first person’s textual behaviour.
‘Certain Phenomena of Sound’ teems with images of sound:
The cricket in the telephone is still.
A geranium withers on the window-sill.
Cat’s milk is dry in the saucer. Sunday song
Comes from the beating of the locust’s wings,
That do not beat by pain, but calendar,
Nor meditate the world as it goes round.
Someone has left for a ride in a balloon
Or in a bubble examines the bubble of air.
19
Blackmur, ‘Poetry and Sensibility’, 271.
20
21
Ibid., 61. 22 CPP, 191–2, 237–8, 275–6.
23
See CPP, 210, 277, 294.
The room is emptier than nothingness.
Yet a spider spins in the left shoe under the bed –
And old John Rocket dozes on his pillow.
It is safe to sleep to a sound that time brings back.
(CPP, 255–6)
Several images communicate how silence contextualizes sound. Just as

peace and quiet aid listening, the chances of hearing the ‘cricket in
the telephone’ are paradoxically enhanced if it is ‘still’. In a ‘bubble
of air’ or room ‘emptier than nothingness’ the possibility of hearing
the infinitesimal sound of the ‘spider’ that ‘spins in the left shoe under
the bed’ is likewise enhanced. The specificity of ‘left shoe’ helps us
imagine an ear sensitive enough to locate the exact space where the
spider spins.
Such imaginative activity enables sounds inaudible or from the past
to be ‘heard’. ‘Old John Rocket’ is antiquated or derives from a narrative
concerning the past. Stevens imagines him dozing on his pillow, and this
‘sound’ comforts the imagined sleeper of the poem’s ‘present’. If ‘[i]t is safe
to sleep to a sound that time brings back’ we actively imagine the sound
of ‘old John Rocket’ asleep. An abstract imagination ‘hears’ sounds either
dead to the world or inaudible, which partly accounts, paradoxically, for
the poem’s later concern with vision. Stevens’ imagination acts out that
synaesthesia where what we see is what we hear, where we ‘visualize’ what
is otherwise thought inaudible.
Section ii turns from impersonal ‘narrative’ to a conversational
register:
So you’re home again, Redwood Roamer, and ready
To feast… Slice the mango, Naaman, and dress it
With white wine, sugar and lime juice. Then bring it,
After we’ve drunk the Moselle, to the thickest shade
Of the garden. We must prepare to hear the Roamer’s
Story…
(CPP, 256)
Here, leisured consumption – Moselle and dressed mango – contextual-

izes a compelling narrative, as does reposing in the protective ‘thickest
shade of the garden’; just as, in ‘Notes’, ‘lobster Bombay’ and Meursault
are preludes to the Canon Aspirin’s meditation on his sister.24 Stevens’
24
By ‘Moselle’ Stevens probably means the little-known French region rather than Germany’s
Mosel; see CPP, 347–8 and discussion of ‘Notes’ in analysis of ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’.
ellipses accentuate the delight in preparing to hear the story the poem
merely suggests, as we infer the experience of preparing to hear the
‘Roamer’s Story’.
But ‘Certain Phenomena’ reverts to its initial abstract meditation on
sound:
… The sound of that slick sonata,
Finding its way from the house, makes music seem
To be a nature, a place in which itself
Is that which produces everything else, in which
The Roamer is a voice taller than the redwoods,
Engaged in the most prolific narrative,
A sound producing the things that are spoken.
(CPP, 256)
This ‘place’, where ‘The Roamer is a voice taller than the redwoods’,
defines the very abstraction in which Stevens specializes. Music does not
convey what ‘nature’ is. Rather, sound and music ‘seem / To be a nature’.
The Roamer’s voice is a ‘sound producing the things that are spoken’.
Although this is literally true, Stevens also implies the voice creates these
‘things’, the meanings they possess. What The Roamer’s narrative conveys
is proof-positive that the human imagination creates its world.
‘Certain Phenomena’ iii, however, features an idealist ‘I’ who seem-
ingly ingratiates the reader into sympathy with the very philosophy and
spirit of the poem itself:
Eulalia, I lounged on the hospital porch,
On the east, sister and nun, and opened wide
A parasol, which I had found, against
The sun. The interior of a parasol,
It is a kind of blank in which one sees.
So seeing, I beheld you walking, white,
Gold-shined by sun, perceiving as I saw
That of that light Eulalia was the name.
Then I, Semiramide, dark-syllabled,
Contrasting our two names, considered speech.
You were created of your name, the word
Is that of which you were the personage.
There is no life except in the word of it.
I write Semiramide and in the script
I am and have a being and play a part.
You are that white Eulalia of the name.
(CPP, 256–7)
In so sound-obsessed a poem, these visual themes are striking. Eulalia’s
appearance justifies and is informed by the ‘light’ of her name. St Eulalia
is the Spanish patron saint of rain, miscarriages, torture victims and sail-
ors. That Stevens’ Eulalia is bedecked in sunlight seems tongue-in-cheek.
But Stevens knows Eulalia, as martyr, can represent any article of pious
devotion. Stevens’ ‘I’ views Eulalia through a ‘blank’. The speaker’s para-
sol becomes ‘an interior’, and if the ‘interior of a parasol’ is ‘a kind of
blank in which one sees’ then Stevens’ ‘I’ embraces indirect vision. Just
as, earlier in the poem, the very absence of sound invites ‘listening’, this
‘blank’ enables Stevens’ speaker to see Eulalia. The idealist ‘I’ conjures
images for the very act of mind through which Stevens’ poems derive.
The aim is not to create a speaker who explains what it means to cre-
ate Eulalia, but to evoke the process in which Eulalia is created by an
imaginative voice.
What complicates this imagery is another name: ‘Semiramide’. Stevens’
idealist ‘I’ does not usually assume personae. But, conventionally speak-
ing, the speaker is not Semiramide. Written words contrast with the cur-
rency of names here as names become privileged over textual nomination.
‘Semiramide’ is the eponymous queen of Rossini’s tragic opera. But to
appropriate her name is simply to play a part: ‘I write Semiramide and in
the script / I am and have a being and play a part’. That ‘Semiramide’ is
italicized accentuates her textual nature. Eulalia, by contrast, is, beguil-
ingly, the thing itself. She is credited as being ‘that white Eulalia of the
name’.25 But it is Stevens’ genderless speaker who, in appropriating diction,
creates Eulalia’s significance. The speaker innocuously claims: ‘I beheld
you walking, white, / Gold-shined by sun, perceiving as I saw / That of
that light Eulalia was the name’. Beholding constitutes visual acquisition,
deriving from the Old English bihaldan (‘to keep’). Perceiving, likewise,
derives from the Latin capere (‘to take’). Eulalia does not so much inspire
this mysterious ‘I’ as gain her inspiration from Stevens’ speaker.
‘Certain Phenomena’ involves multiple changes of tone: moving from
impersonal narrative, to a first-person plural conversational register (revert-
ing to impersonal reflection in section ii), before mounting a first-person
‘lyric’. The poem seemingly gestures toward the realization of its ‘I’: the
speaker self-identified seven times in section iii alone. But the poem’s
close hardly constitutes conventional lyric. Recalling Altieri, the poem’s
lyrical ‘I’ assumes the authority of ‘third-person terms’, representing not
25
Perhaps the name also conjures the ‘tall grasses of the Eulalia family’ (L, 28) Stevens enjoyed in
various hues.
a subjective but an interpersonal space. Certainly, the speaker does not
refer to itself self-consciously (this ‘I’ never says ‘my’). It is, rather, the
textually invasive speaker Stevens’ early 1940s poetry adopts, who disap-
pears from the corpus around 1945 once Stevens dispatches an explicit
abstract vocabulary.
But I want next to turn to ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’, perhaps the most
elusive poem exhibiting Stevens’ marriage of gastronomic and abstract
concerns. Following analysis of this pivotal long poem, I briefly outline
what should be carried over to Chapter 6’s discussion of Stevens’ re-cast-
ing of his overtly abstract 1942 idiom.
5.2 H a r t f or d B ou rgu ig non: ‘Mon t r ac h e t-L e -J a r di n’

(194 2) a n d c y m b e l i n e
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ was published in early 1942 in Partisan Review.26
Stevens’ poem appeared alongside Victor Serge’s ‘On The Eve’ (a graphic
account of the humiliation of the French under Nazi occupation) and
‘On The “Brooks-MacLeish Thesis”’, a heated dismissal of Van Wyck
Brooks and Archibald MacLeish’s nationalist call for a patriotic, pref-
erably non-Modernist, literature in time of war.27 ‘On The “Brooks-
MacLeish Thesis”’ involved condemnation from Allen Tate, John Crowe
Ransom, Louise Bogan, Lionel Trilling, William Carlos Williams and
Henry Miller. Stevens’ poem thus occupied a milieu debating the direc-
tion literature should take only three months after Pearl Harbor and US
entry to the Second World War.
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ does not speak directly to that conflict, with
regard to either the Occupation or American involvement. However, like
‘Esthétique du Mal’, the poem confronts an increasingly disturbing world
(‘the x malisons of other men’); speculates – like many other Parts of a
World poems – on the figure of the hero (‘Man must become the hero
of his world’); and is preoccupied with appropriating spaces (‘of Terra
Paradise / I dreamed’) or existing at the mercy of occupying influences
(‘Consider how the speechless, invisible gods / Ruled us before, from
over Asia’).28 Although ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ is not concerned with
‘war literature’, it is representative in the sense, albeit vague, expounded
by Partisan Review’s editors: ‘Our main task now is to preserve cultural
values against all types of pressure and coercion. Obviously we can-
not even speak of the survival of democratic civilization apart from the
Partisan Review 9.1 (1942), 34–7.

26
Ibid., 23–33, 38–47.
27
CPP, 235–6.
28
survival of our entire cultural tradition.’ 29 Stevens would never write the
war poetry of Shapiro, Jarrell or Douglas, just as he refrained from the
literary-political invective of Tate and the New Critics.30 But, as I have
argued elsewhere, this demanding poem, with its engaging French title,
must have appealed symbolically to Partisan Review’s editors, especially
to their belief that literature under war should be as challenging as ever,
if not more so.31
Initially, ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ appears far from partisan. Yet it
emerges as a ‘pro-French’ poem retaining the poetic advantage of saying
nothing overtly pro-French.32 My analysis here focuses on Stevens’ favour-
ite French wine region, Burgundy, discussing the place of Stevens’ title
in a poem that eroticizes imaginative terrains and plays with vinous allu-
sion. Although I have previously discussed the poem’s portrayal of love,
I return here to Stevens’ ingenious allusion to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline,
one illuminating how ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ shares that play’s taste for
assumed names and beguiling identities.33 If the shape-changing of the
amour characterizes the imaginative work of this ‘Francophile’ poem, its
Protean subtlety resides in appearing to wrest a piece of France and pro-
ject it into Stevens’ own backyard: an abstract appropriation implicit in
the poem’s very title.
Few discussions of ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ have considered the rela-
tionship between the poem and its title, perhaps because, unlike those
of Stevens’ other ‘Francophile’ poems, this particular title remains coy,
refusing to invite a ‘manner’ of reading. ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’
ironizes ‘men at forty’, themselves prone to irony; ‘Esthétique du Mal’
confronts the relationship between aesthetics and human suffering.34 The
title ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’, however, does not offer explicit clues as to
how to read a poem which itself forges no sustained relationship with
France. The closest it gets is the ‘chateaux’ of stanza twenty-six, combined
29
Partisan Review 9.1 (1942), 2.
30
His distaste for MacLeish was, however, aired to James Thrall Soby (see Brazeau, Parts of a
World, 119).
31
See Ragg, ‘Love, Wine, Desire’, 183–209.
32
Longenbach suggests Stevens’ early 1940s abstract writing marks ‘not a retreat from the pol-
itical content of the social realism of the 1930s’ but ‘a rebellion against the coercive demand
of ideological explicitness’ and ‘an assertion of internationalist values’ (Wallace Stevens, 253).
The ‘internationalist’ ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ may indirectly represent an aesthetic corrective to
‘Brooks-MacLeish’.
33
See Ragg, ‘Love, Wine, Desire’. For love, desire and erotic attention, see Vendler, Wallace Stevens
and Barbara M. Fisher, Wallace Stevens: The Intensest Rendezvous (Charlottesville, VA: University
Press of Virginia, 1990). ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ does not feature in either study, however.
34
CPP, 12.
with the Franco-derived ‘lascive’, ‘malisons’, ‘friseured’ and ‘demoi-
selles’.35 In fact, one might think ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ entirely fictional,
an invented place-name (or other proper noun) with only a passing, even
eccentric, relationship with France.
But ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ does evoke Burgundy and the shadow of
Occupation. Le Montrachet is a Grand Cru vineyard situated in the heart
of Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune. Planted with some of the world’s most
prized Chardonnay, it is shared geographically between the villages of
Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet. Vineyard site, however,
takes precedence over village name. Thus, ‘Le Montrachet’ is typically
prominent on the labels of wines made from this Grand Cru appellation.
Indeed, the names of many Burgundian villages are double-barrelled to
reflect their associations with particular Grands Crus. Gevrey-Chambertin
signals its proximity to Le Chambertin (the vineyard Napoleon allegedly
had his troops salute), Chambolle-Musigny appropriates Le Musigny, and
Vosne-Romanée incorporates the famous vineyard of La Romanée.
The case of Le Montrachet is unusual, however, because it is claimed
by competing villages: Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet
(until the late nineteenth century called Puligny and Chassagne). The
name is also etymologically compelling, mont rachet meaning ‘shaven
mountain’. Le Montrachet was originally known as Mons rachicensis
(‘uncultivated hill’) and, by the thirteenth century, as Mont-Rachat (‘bare
hill’): an ideal spot for growing grapes.36 Its gentle slope is complexly ori-
ented, but no mountain. The noun ‘Montrachet’ is also infectious because
the other Grands Crus associated with these two villages likewise hyphen-
ate to raise status: as in Chevalier-Montrachet, Bâtard-Montrachet,
Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet and Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet.
Bâtard (‘bastard’) signifies much about Burgundian culture as well as
forging a relationship with Stevens’ poem. Burgundy’s vineyards are subdi-
vided geographically, qualitatively and proprietarily. For example, Bâtard-
Montrachet is not as cherished as Le Montrachet, although in practice the
quality of wines deriving from each Grand Cru depends more on standards
of viticulture and winemaking than terroir (the variously defined French
term conveying the unique aspects of a vineyard’s locale). Hundreds of
different climats, each with its own terroir, are further subdivided propri-
etarily, a legacy of Napoleonic inheritance law which stipulated assets be
Ibid., 235–6.
35
Jacky Rigaux, Burgundy Grands Crus trans. Catherine du Toit (Clemency: Terre en vues, 2007),
36
106.
divided equally among offspring. The situation is reflected in the names of
Burgundian domaines today, along with the advantages of intermarriage
between families. Thus Chassagne-Montrachet boasts the domaines of
Fontaine-Gagnard, Gagnard-Delagrange and Jean-Noël Gagnard as well
as Albert Morey, Bernard Morey, Jean-Marc Morey, Marc Morey (et Fils!),
and Michel Morey-Coffinet. Historically speaking, then, legitimacy was
especially important among Burgundian families.37
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ echoes this phenomenon in the lines ‘Bastard
chateaux and smoky demoiselles, / No more. I can build towers of my
own’.38 In this covert allusion to a ‘bastardized’ Montrachet (perhaps
even Bâtard-Montrachet), the ‘smoky demoiselles’ evoke a particular
Burgundian site, ‘Les Demoiselles’ being a part of Chevalier-Montrachet.
A ‘demoiselle’ is an unmarried bourgeois woman. The word appears in
Stevens’ copy of Dictionary of the French and English Languages (1876), sig-
nifying a ‘young lady; girl; unmarried or single lady, single woman; maid;
miss; spinster; damsel; attendant, waitress; ( formerly) gentlewoman’.39
The subplot ‘Les Demoiselles’ was owned, during the 1880s, by the two
Viollot sisters, commonly addressed as ‘Mesdemoiselles’.40 In a poem
preoccupied, therefore, with occupying and ‘owning’ spaces – be they
actual locales or abstractions of desire – Stevens’ title assumes a canny
resonance.
But what about that title’s hyphenation, Stevens’ inversion of ‘Le
Montrachet’ and the ‘lower key’ tag jardin? There is no site in Burgundy
called ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’. There is a parcel of vines around Puligny-
Montrachet known as ‘Le Jardin’, but this is not officially recognized and
does not appear on wine labels or regional maps. It is, therefore, unlikely
Stevens knew of the ‘Le Jardin’ vines (even supposing they were called ‘Le
Jardin’ in the early 1940s). Instead, Stevens follows the Burgundian habit
of raising status by stressing proximity to a valuable locale, as though the
garden of 118 Westerly Terrace presented everything Le Montrachet could
offer the poet as armchair imaginative traveller.
Stevens probably read of Le Montrachet in his copy of Paul de Cassagnac’s
French Wines (1930) or in a slim brochure entitled The Wines of France which
37
See Rigaux, Burgundy Grands Crus; Anthony Hanson, Burgundy (London: Faber, 1995);
Remington Norman, The Great Domaines of Burgundy (London: Kyle-Cathie Ltd, 1996); and
Jancis Robinson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Wine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
38
CPP, 236.
39
Ferdinand E. A. Gasc, Dictionary of the French and English Languages (New York: Holt, 1876),
168. For ‘demoiselles’, see also L, 851.
40
See Norman, The Great Domaines, 211.
lies tucked inside his copy of a book called Racial Proverbs.41 The brochure’s
cover features a painting depicting dining tables, serving girls (demoiselles?),
chefs and chateaux, whilst the back comprises an artist’s ‘vinous map’ of
France marking Burgundy and the Moselle region of ‘Certain Phenomena
of Sound’. The map is inaccurate, particularly with Burgundy’s sub-regions,
but together these depictions constitute a ‘bourgeois fantasy’ of France.
Bernard Ragner, the brochure’s author, was editor of the Chicago Tribune’s
European edition from 1925 to 1929, and, writing of Burgundy’s Grands
Crus, mentions ‘Montrachet’, observing ‘each name [is] a glorious reality,
also a significant symbol’. Ragner also notes how the Côte d’Or region and
its wines have been prey to occupying forces: ‘Caesar’s legions drank them,
and appreciated them; so did the American Expeditionary Forces when
camped upon these fertile hills of gold.’ 42
Ragner’s comments cannot be dated exactly. But in choosing
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ for a title Stevens perhaps implied that, in the
harsh climate of war, one must, as Candide concludes, cultivate a garden
(‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin’).43 As Voltaire’s tale shows, life only comes to
have lasting value when Candide and his companions follow the example
of the cultivated Turk whose labour protects him and his family from
the alarming political developments of Constantinople.44 Stevens cer-
tainly associated Voltaire with freedom of action and expression. Writing
to Barbara Church about Partisan Review backer Allan Dowling’s social-
ist politics – note how that magazine surfaces again – Stevens speculated
on the emergent Cold War ideologies placing ‘freedom’ at a beguiling
premium: ‘The total freedom that now endangers us has never existed
before, notwithstanding Voltaire, and so on.’ 45
Stevens’ allusion follows Dr Pangloss’ words to Candide:
There is a chain of events in this best of all possible worlds; for if you had not
been turned out of a beautiful mansion at the point of a jackboot for the love of
Lady Cunégonde, and if you had not been involved in the Inquisition, and had
not wandered over America on foot […] you would not be here eating candied
fruit and pistachio nuts.46
41
Paul de Cassagnac, French Wines trans. Guy Knowles (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930);
Bernard Ragner, The Wines of France (publication unknown) as found inside Stevens’
copy of Selwyn Gurney Champion, Racial Proverbs: A Selection of the World’s Proverbs
(London: Routledge, 1938).
42
Ragner, The Wines of France, unpaginated.
43
See Voltaire, Candide trans. Shane Weller (New York: Dover, 1993), 166.
44
Voltaire, Candide; or Optimism trans. John Butt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947), 142 ff.
45
L, 620.
46
Voltaire, Candide trans. Butt, 144.
Candide partially acknowledges Pangloss’ argument, but ventures, ‘but
we must go and work in the garden’. The relationship between honest
endeavour and ‘this best of all possible worlds’ marks an acceptance of
‘things as they are’, an argument Stevens partially acknowledges in
his ‘notwithstanding Voltaire and so on’. But, although the jardin of
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ only echoes Candide, Pangloss’ words eerily evoke
occupied France, where evictions from mansions ‘at the point of a jack-
boot’ were common. That said, the above translation dates from 1947, so
it is unsurprising its translator rendered Candide in an idiom attractive to
a post-war readership: a tale meditating upon warfare, misery, depravity
and unmerited fortune(s).
That Voltaire’s tale does respond to contemporary interpretation, how-
ever, follows the spirit of Stevens’ echo. ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ under-
stands the privilege of having the freedom to eat ‘candied fruit and
pistachio nuts’, appreciating how that pleasure is partly informed by the
labour preceding and succeeding the relative leisure of consumption (a
point Chapter 7 discusses with regard to Stevens’ bourgeois abstractions).
As the poem suggests, we may say ‘amen to our accustomed cell’ – accept-
ing a Panglossian ‘chain of events’ – while also desiring a world of ‘respon-
sive fact’ in dialogue with the freedom of our imaginations, the freedom
Voltaire also signifies for Stevens.47
Whatever ‘Voltaire’ suggests, Stevens’ ‘Jardin’ does echo occupied
France. Maintaining France’s vineyards in war-time was a matter of
national pride, and the practice of bricking up cellars to conceal presti-
gious bottles from the Nazis commonplace, especially in Burgundy.48
Admittedly, Stevens’ poem, unlike ‘Certain Phenomena of Sound’, lacks
a garden. The ‘persona’ who conceives a ‘Terra Paradise’ finds that fireside
meditation ironically deflated: ‘I affirm and then at midnight the great cat /
Leaps quickly from the fireside and is gone’ – a resignation similar, if less
plaintive, to Yeats’ ‘Lines Written in Dejection’: ‘When have I last looked
on […] the dark leopards of the moon?’49 Stevens’ idealist ‘I’ finds no space
in this poem. However, the human delight in cultivating gardens clearly
captures ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’, as jardin proves nonetheless evocative.
Stevens’ inversion of ‘Le Montrachet’ also slackens the article ‘Le’,
rather than affirming the Montrachet distinct from its related vineyards.
47
CPP, 235, 237.
48
See Don and Petie Kladstrup, Wine and War: the French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s
Greatest Treasure (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001).
49
Yeats, The Poems, 195; CPP, 237.
In ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ that article applies equally to ‘Jardin’, the gar-
den in which Montrachet might be absorbed (unless the phrase signifies
‘Le Jardin de Montrachet’, where the garden is subset to Le Montrachet).
Perhaps Stevens’ hyphenation involves two-way travel between garden
and vineyard, neither subsuming the other but becoming parts of a larger,
metaphorical whole. Certainly, the cachet of ‘Montrachet’ persists, as if
Stevens were harnessing its etymology: acquiring his own ‘shaving’ from
the ‘mountain’ and transplanting it home, grafting that space on to his
imaginative roots or projecting those roots on to Le Montrachet.
The Collected Poetry and Prose should, therefore, retain ‘Montrachet-Le-
Jardin’ (as it appears in Partisan Review) rather than adopt ‘Montrachet-
le-Jardin’. Kermode and Richardson note: ‘The present volume prints the
text of the first printing of the Knopf edition [of Parts of a World]’ and
that printing does have ‘Montrachet-le-Jardin’ in its contents with the
poem’s title in the main text appearing in block capitals.50 Nevertheless,
the article ‘Le’ should remain capitalized because of the poem’s osten-
sible relationship with Le Montrachet (unless one argues ‘Montrachet-le-
Jardin’ deliberately attenuates the cultural dominance of the French site).
More problematic is the editors’ gloss: ‘Montrachet-le-Jardin] A white
wine’.51 No wine of this name exists and it is highly unlikely Stevens
ever found one. The poet did, however, cultivate an interest in wine and
owned two significant gastronomic titles: the aforementioned French
Wines and Atherton Fleming’s Gourmet’s Book of Food and Drink (1933).52
French Wines is more relevant here. But one can imagine Stevens relishing
Fleming’s text, which features numerous international dishes including
recipes for curried lobster and mango chutney (although ‘lobster Bombay’
seems to have been Stevens’ creation).53
French Wines addresses ‘the gourmet who is seeking theoretical and
practical information’, ‘the Frenchman who loves the treasures of his
country’ and ‘the foreigner who wants to understand all that is France’.54
Cassagnac discusses the gourmet and connoisseur which doubtless
appealed to the poet of ‘Connoisseur of Chaos’, another vinous piece
from Parts of a World (‘a law of inherent opposites, / Of essential unity, is
as pleasant as port’):
50
CPP, 972. I am grateful to Jonathan Strange for confirming this.
51
Ibid., 1001.
52
Moynihan, ‘Checklist: Second Purchase’, 83, 86.
53
Atherton Fleming, Gourmet’s Book of Food and Drink (London: John Lane, 1933), 103, 106. See
CPP, 347.
54
Cassagnac, French Wines, 8.
The real connaisseur uses without misusing and remains moderate in his pleas-
ures – a moderation all the more praiseworthy because of the occasional temp-
tation to overstep it: his love of wine is based on the pure aesthetic appreciation
of its perfection.55
Cassagnac’s connoisseurship extends to literature, venturing analogies
between wine and poetry:
Take, for example, Margaux 1900. A magnificent bottle of wine without a fault.
But it fails to sweep us […] to those giddy heights to which […] that same
Margaux, but an 1875, lifts the admiration of the connaisseur. An exact parallel
is the difference between a work of art executed classically and a masterpiece;
or a poem, the prosody of whose verses is perfect, and an inspired poem, Abbé
Delille and Alfred de Musset.56
If Stevens lacked firsthand experience of Château Margaux, Cassagnac’s
writing probably captured his imagination, particularly through vicari-
ous wayfaring: ‘Jump into your car and start from Paris for the south,
pottering along the road. As soon as you reach Olivet you’ll find the vine-
yards of the Loire’.57 This narrative quality would have attracted Stevens
as much as a letter or objet d’art from Thomas McGreevy, Leonard van
Geyzel, Ebba Dalin, or Anatole or Paule Vidal. Although obviously not
‘personally’ addressed to Stevens, Cassagnac’s writing would have piqued
the poet’s interest: ‘You stopped to lunch, tea, and dinner at good inns
or at friends’ houses: you got out of your car to admire and examine the
vineyards: you asked for information on […] the methods of culture and
vinification’.58
Cassagnac also reveals how early twentieth-century Burgundy took
shape, mentions ‘Montrachet’ frequently and explains Burgundy’s double-
barrelled names (‘There is no doubt that Gevrey would be unknown
if it hadn’t tacked on Chambertin’).59 He describes the subdivision of
Burgundy’s vineyards and discusses the problem of poorly made, even
adulterated wines, appropriating prestigious names as misleading indices
of ‘quality’.60 When Cassagnac was translated, Burgundies were not, as
they often are today, domaine-bottled, which enabled négociants, and even
foreign merchants, to blend wines at their discretion. In short, there was
no guarantee a bottle labelled ‘Le Montrachet’ contained any wine from
that vineyard. Before the implementation of the mid-1930s Appellation
Contrôlée system, what was an authentic Burgundy was anybody’s guess.
CPP, 195; Cassagnac, French Wines, 6. 56 Cassagnac, French Wines, 27.
55
57
Ibid., 14. 58 Ibid., 14–15. 59 Ibid., 141, 143, 150.
60
See Cassagnac, French Wines, 142–52.
Stevens’ title speculates, therefore, on the legitimacy and authenticity of
names, not least in its deft allusion to Cymbeline.
It could be objected that whilst Stevens owned French Wines he rarely
consulted it, let alone became acquainted with Burgundy. But I am not
arguing that Stevens relied on Cassagnac in composing ‘Montrachet-Le-
Jardin’. Moreover, Stevens’ writing amply demonstrates his appreciation of
wine, Burgundy especially. Cassagnac’s work also chimes with Mauron’s
Aesthetics and Psychology, a work likewise blending gastro-aesthetic con-
cerns. Take canto v of ‘It Must Give Pleasure’:
We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango
Chutney. Then the Canon Aspirin declaimed
Of his sister, in what a sensible ecstasy
She lived in her house. She had two daughters, one
Of four, and one of seven, whom she dressed
The way a painter of pauvred color paints.
But still she painted them, appropriate to
Their poverty […]
(CPP, 347)
Meursault is another famous Burgundian village not far from Puligny

and Chassagne-Montrachet. As gastronomic token, the wine reflects the
contrast between leisured consumption and the tougher search for what
‘gives pleasure’, not least for the Canon Aspirin’s sister (does the Canon
require aspirin following overindulgence?). The canto focuses the rela-
tionship between aesthetic and gustatory pleasures. Indeed, for Stevens,
Cassagnac and Mauron, gastronomy and literature form parts of a larger
aesthetic whole. Significantly, it is having eaten that the Canon medi-
tates upon his sister’s poverty, which, in turn, prompts further artistic
speculation: ‘The Canon Aspirin, having said these things, / Reflected,
humming an outline of a fugue / Of praise, a conjugation done by
choirs’.61 For Stevens, material conditions have a stake in imaginative
freedom and vice versa, as his comments on Voltaire suggest.
Stevens’ correspondence also refers to Burgundy. Following a trip to
New York, he wrote:
Since I had a car I brought home a load of mangoes, fresh apricots, the outsized
cherries that I like, a little Chablis and a little Meursault […] This last always
seems the coldest thing in the world on a hot day in the garden where I like to
have lunch occasionally if the neighbors are away as they often are.62
CPP, 347.
61 62
L, 682.
Stevens’ passion for consuming Meursault in an undisturbed garden space
suggests how the title ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ proved inspiring (nor was
this an isolated incident).63 The freedom to enjoy, or imagine enjoying,
Chablis specifically was emblematic for Stevens.64 He even worried about
‘the mania of Marxism’, affirming: ‘[w]eather or no weather, people still
lunch on the terraces of Paris and drink Chablis’.65 Indeed, Stevens’ know-
ledge of Burgundy was sufficiently advanced that when Nelly de Vogüé,
daughter of the Comte de Vogüé (owner of the eponymous domaine in
Chambolle-Musigny), came to America to establish a literary magazine in
the early 1950s, he wrote to Barbara Church about the matter, mentioning
to José Rodríguez Feo that he associated ‘the name of de Vogüé either with
the Revue des Deux Mondes or with a moderately good Burgundy’.66
Meditation upon wine and especially love, as the epigraph to
‘Notes’ reveals in abstract form, preoccupied Stevens in early 1942.67
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’, composed a few months earlier, opens with its
own apostrophe:
What more is there to love than I have loved?
And if there be nothing more, O bright, O bright,
The chick, the chidder-barn and grassy chives
And great moon, cricket-impresario,
And, hoy, the impopulous purple-plated past,
Hoy, hoy, the blue bulls kneeling down to rest.
Chome! clicks the clock, if there be nothing more.
(CPP, 234)
The poem ironically gestures to the creation (or discovery) of something

‘to love’, but teeters on naming its beloved, just as it seemingly shies from
directly naming Bâtard-Montrachet or Les Demoiselles. ‘Montrachet-Le-
Jardin’ thus contrasts significantly with ‘Notes’ (especially its epigraph).
The rhetorical question opening ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ both is desirous
and feigns world-weariness: asking, literally, ‘Is there more for me to love
than I have loved?’ and resolving, ironically, ‘Can there really be more to
love than I have loved?’ Stevens’ giddy ‘Hoy, hoy’ and ironic ‘O bright, O
bright’ perhaps outweigh the literal question, and there is mock-finality in
‘Chome! clicks the clock’: time is up or passing. By contrast, ‘Notes’ feels
the presence of a beloved and names that love, even if its object remains
an abstract ‘supreme fiction’. ‘Notes’ is also the poem heralding the largest
63
See ibid., 512. 64 See ibid., 684. 65 Ibid., 687.
66
See WAS, 3768 and L, 741.
67
L, 239. See Ragg, ‘Love, Wine, Desire’, 194.
glut of Stevensian names: a nomenclature for the poet’s mid-career trum-
peting of abstraction.
Certainly, ‘Notes’ pivots on a tension between naming and resisting
nomination:
But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.
There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.
(CPP, 329–30)
The word ‘flourisher’ echoes ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’, Stevens using the

word only twice in the Collected Poems.68 However, ‘Montrachet-Le-
Jardin’ considers ‘something’ to love which proves even harder to locate
than a ‘supreme fiction’, a ‘something more’ that is unnameable:
But if, but if there be something more to love,
Something in now a senseless syllable,
A shadow in the mind, a flourisher
Of sounds resembling sounds, efflorisant,
Approaching the feelings or come down from them,
These other shadows, not in the mind, players
Of aphonies, tuned in from zero and
Beyond, futura’s fuddle-fiddling lumps,
But if there be something more to love, amen,
Amen to the feelings about familiar things,
The blessed regal dropped in daggers’ dew,
Amen to thought, our singular skeleton,
Salt-flicker, amen to our accustomed cell,
The moonlight in the cell, words on the wall.
(CPP, 234–5)
Stevens’ anaphora (‘But if, but if’) – contrasting with ‘O bright, O bright’ –
accentuates a significant synaesthesia. The poem favours something in a
‘senseless syllable’, an abstract ‘shadow in the mind’, recalling Stevens’
extensive play on the centrality of mind in ‘Extracts from Addresses to the
Academy of Fine Ideas’.69 But that shadow, ‘a flourisher’, has a sonorous
base (‘Of sounds resembling sounds’). Moreover, the paronomastic ‘efflo-
risant’ (resembling ‘flourisher’) offers another visual dimension, following
See www.wallacestevens.com/concordance/WSdb.cgi.
68
See CPP, 232.
69
the sonorous ‘shadow’, because ‘efflorisant’ is a French-sounding adjec-
tive aping the English ‘effloresce’: to burst into flower (the English being
‘efflorescent’).
‘Efflorisant’ also evokes the ‘[s]alt-flicker’ of Stevens’ ‘singular skeleton’ –
the figure for ‘thought’ the poem explores – as ‘efflorescence’, chemically
speaking, denotes the crystallization of salts. Those spatial lines where
Stevens’ ‘sounds’ are ‘[a]pproaching the feelings or come down from them’
mimic emotion becoming crystallized. The OED defines ‘effloresce’ in
markedly spatial language: ‘(Chem., of crystalline substance) turn to fine
powder on exposure to air, (of salts) come to the surface and there crystal-
lize, (of ground or wall) become covered with salt particles.’ Stevens adds,
therefore, a saline dimension to the crystalline pronouncements of Parts
of a World and ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, among other 1940s
poems (observe the frequency of ‘crystal’, ‘diamond’ and ‘glass’ during
this period).70
‘But if there be something more to love’: the anaphora is punctu-
ated only by Stevens’ ‘amen’, a competing anaphora designed to assuage
those doubts about ‘other shadows’ arising in stanza five. The poem is
performative, grammatically silencing the clause beginning ‘These other
shadows, not in the mind, players / Of aphonies’. Stevens displays his
early penchant for ‘dramatic’ unresolved subordinate clauses (from ‘The
Man with the Blue Guitar’).71 This is ironic because ‘aphony’ is precisely
a loss or lack of voice, as if Stevens’ poem were giving voice to a voiceless
threat that must itself be silenced. The poem suggests a crystallization of
feeling where the unwieldy nuisance of ‘futura’s fuddle-fiddling lumps’ is
prevented from interrupting that incantatory ‘amen’.
The relationship between ‘amen’ and ‘futura’s fuddle-fiddling lumps’
appears textual. Futura is a sans-serif typeface similar to Arial or Century
Gothic (both deriving from Futura). Sans-serif type lacks the curls and
squiggles that make body text easy to read and is, therefore, especially
suitable for titles or headlines. These cold, futuristic ‘lumps’ – abso-
lute blocks ‘tuned in from zero and / Beyond’ – assume little weight as
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ lauds more ‘familiar things’. But Stevens remains
playful because one such familiarity is the mock-tragic: the quasi-Shake-
spearean ‘blessed regal dropped in daggers’ dew’.
Nevertheless, the poem also marks an acceptance of our mortal coil
(‘amen to our accustomed cell’), albeit tempered by ‘thought’, the ‘singular
70
See www.wallacestevens.com/concordance/WSdb.cgi. See CPP, 135–6.
71
skeleton’ who bolsters the fragile skeleton within. Stevens’ making a typo-
graphical allusion is unusual, but not surprising given his attention to his
Alcestis and Cummington books. The unwieldy ‘futura’ also suggests the
tension described in Chapter 3 between palpable physicality and abstrac-
tion. Those ‘fuddle-fiddling lumps’ are unlikely objects of love. Certainly,
they lack the inspiration of Stevens’ ‘words on the wall’ which transform
the confined ‘prisoner’ of stanza eight who, for all his confinement, is
delivered by ‘thought’, by imaginative meditation.
But ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ turns the prisoner’s cell – his literal cham-
ber and body – into a site where an impalpable ‘murmuring’ becomes
physical, becomes ‘a throat’, or speaking organ:
To-night, night’s undeciphered murmuring
Comes close to the prisoner’s ear, becomes a throat
The hand can touch, neither green bronze nor marble,
The hero’s throat in which the words are spoken,
From which the chant comes close upon the ear,
Out of the hero’s being, the deliverer
Delivering the prisoner by his words,
So that the skeleton in the moonlight sings,
Sings of an heroic world beyond the cell,
No, not believing, but to make the cell
A hero’s world in which he is the hero.
Man must become the hero of his world.
(CPP, 235)
These lines continue a debate in Stevens’ early 1940s poetry between being
and belief, between the ‘actual’ and the ‘rhetorical’ spirit actuating belief.
‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War’ resolves: ‘The hero / Acts
in reality, adds nothing / To what he does […] It is a part of his concep-
tion, / That he be not conceived, being real’.72 But a rhetoric of belief eas-
ily substitutes for the hero’s ‘conception’ which only betrays the distance
between conception and ‘reality’ – ‘belief’ also being a strong component
of ‘Extracts from Addresses’.73
The ‘repeated sayings’ from ‘Extracts’ contrast, however, with the eco-
nomic repetitions of ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’, which dispatch a ‘rhetoric’ of
belief: ‘No, not believing, but to make the cell / A hero’s world’. Thus the
poem immediately following ‘Extracts from Addresses’ in Parts of a World
converts the impalpable ‘night’s undeciphered murmuring’ into something
72
Ibid., 249. 73
See ibid., 232–3; Ragg, ‘Love, Wine, Desire’, 198–9.
concrete and compellingly abstract. That ‘murmuring’ becomes ‘a throat’,
the basis of the ‘hero’s throat’ through which Stevens’ ‘words on the wall’
are matched by ‘the words [that] are spoken’. The speaking ‘hero’s throat’
realizes ‘the chant’ that emerges ‘Out of the hero’s being’, a departure
delivering the poem’s prisoner not to final judgement or execution but to
a novel, imaginative locale. Now the ‘accustomed cell’ grows less familiar,
becoming instead a place of creative transformation: no longer a pejora-
tive ‘nothing more’.
Such abstraction champions desirous figures who prove hard to locate.
The ‘salty skeleton’ continues his crystalline dance whilst a floating third
person appears: ‘He hears the earliest poems of the world / In which man
is the hero. He hears the words, / Before the speaker’s youngest breath is
taken!’74 This ambiguous ‘he’ and possessive ‘his’ emanate from the line
‘Delivering the prisoner by his words’, which suggests the hero’s words
‘deliver’ the inmate, but which also implies the prisoner delivers himself
through his own ‘words’. In ‘to make the cell / A hero’s world in which
he is the hero’ Stevens’ pronoun cannily refers to the hero who becomes
his world and to the ‘skeleton’ who sings ‘of an heroic world’. This tension
persists even after Stevens’ aphoristic statement: ‘Man must become the
hero of his world’.
Such ambiguity feeds our uncertainty as to who ‘hears the earliest
poems of the world’ (the only uncomplicated use of ‘he’ occurs in ‘The
salty skeleton must dance because / He must’). Just as ‘Montrachet-Le-
Jardin’ ambiguously alludes to a garden space appropriating the pres-
tige of a Burgundian vineyard – and just as it features its own beguiling
flowers (‘Licentious violet and lascive rose’) but no real garden – the
reader struggles to locate Stevens’ abstract figures, whether the ‘hero’,
‘salty skeleton’, ‘speaker’ or the ‘prisoner’ (who is hardly confined to
a cell, at least not of walls). Note the French ‘lascive’, the French for
‘lascivious’, which implies playfulness (Stevens’ dictionary translates
‘lascive’ as ‘lascivious, lewd’).75 With its evocation of a ‘Midsummer
love’ – where one is disorientated by ‘night creatures’ who echo
‘rhetorics more than our own’ (as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) –
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ concerns unnameable and un-locatable desire,
the abstract meditation on a love that discovers neither a habitation
nor a name.
Shakespeare appears, in fact, from the ‘breath’ of Stevens’ speaker:
CPP, 235.
74
Gasc, Dictionary of the French and English Languages, 333.
75
Fear never the brute clouds nor winter-stop
And let the water-belly of ocean roar,
Nor feel the x malisons of other men,
Since in the hero-land to which we go,
A little nearer by each multitude,
To which we come as into bezeled plain,
The poison in the blood will have been purged,
An inner miracle and sun-sacrament,
One of the major miracles, that fall
As apples fall, without astronomy,
One of the sacraments between two breaths,
Magical only for the change they make.
(CPP, 235–6)
Stevens’ abstract ‘hero-land’ cultivates a space intact from earthly trouble,

a frontier beyond life: a ‘bezeled plain’. A ‘bezel’ is a sloped edge, specific-
ally the ‘oblique face of [a] cut gem’ from the old French besel (in Stevens’
ironic simile a ‘plain’ plane that cannot be plainly seen). The ‘hero-land
to which we go’ is not as forbidding as that final frontier from whose
bourn no traveller returns. But Stevens has more than Hamlet in mind
in desiring a land where the ‘poison in the blood will have been purged’.
The poem tropes the sacraments paid to Innogen as she is laid to rest by
Belarius, Guiderius and Arviragus in Cymbeline Act 4 Scene 2.
The song the mourners sing, like the skeleton’s song in ‘Montrachet-Le-
Jardin’, is of ‘an heroic world beyond the cell’. Guiderius begins:
Fear no more the heat o’th’ sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages.
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Arviragus adds:
Fear no more the frown o’th’ great,
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke.
Care no more to clothe and eat,
To thee the reed is as the oak.
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this and come to dust.
(CW, 4.2.259–70: 1154)
Clearly, the imperative ‘Fear’ links texts, as does Stevens’ modification of

‘no more’ to ‘never’. But ‘Fear never’ sounds more defiant than resigned,
more a call to arms than ‘Fear no more’, the diction of last rites. However,
Stevens’ phrase reads not only as imaginative defiance, but as ballast: a
protection against quotidian pressure, just as Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway con-
jures the same ‘Fear no more’ couplet as a means of buoying herself before
her party.76 Cymbeline and ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ both aim to defend
themselves from a winter of discontent, however much Stevens’ ‘winter-
stop’ remains an ambiguous ‘threat’.
But the allusion to Cymbeline is more significant for its dramatic
import. Innogen’s ‘burial’ is neither a burial nor is Innogen ‘buried’
alone. To Guiderius and company, Innogen is the boy Fidele, but neither
Fidele nor Innogen is actually dead (Innogen merely having taken the
drug Pisanio suggested would conquer sickness).77 The other figure buried
with Fidele is Cloten, who, though he is known by those present to be
Cloten, is wearing the clothes of Innogen’s love Posthumous (Cloten, sore
at the denial of Innogen’s hand, having plotted to murder Posthumous
wearing Posthumous’ attire, before raping Innogen).78 After the company
deliver their ‘obsequies’, Innogen, waking from her induced sleep, mis-
takes Cloten’s body for that of Posthumous. It is only because Cloten is
decapitated that she does not realize her mistake.
Cymbeline thus trades in mistaken identities and misplaced desire.
Stevens’ allusion to the burial scene is ironic because ‘Montrachet-
Le-Jardin’ also trades in mobile desire, elusive identities and assumed
names: not least in appropriating ‘Le Montrachet’, which, historically,
has proven attractive and lucrative. For the desire to produce inauthen-
tic wines bearing prestigious names is no different from Cloten’s ploy to
promote himself as Posthumous. The name ‘Fidele’ obviously suggests
‘fidelity’, and, throughout Cymbeline, the assumed name is played on for
connotations of truth/faith.79 But it is a false name. Belief, and by exten-
sion faith, is something ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ also critiques, at least any
belief that fails to create an imaginatively responsive world.
Stevens’ poem creates its ‘hero-land’ largely without the ‘I’ who ‘starts’
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ and resurfaces only in its close. One must have faith,
then, in the imagination to create a heroic world without the figure who
nominally ‘makes’ that world. The ‘I’ of ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ does not,
therefore, share the robust qualities Stevens’ idealist ‘I’ displays. It does not
reappear until stanza twenty-four, whilst the floating ‘he’ of stanza fourteen
76
Virginia Woolf, Four Great Novels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 141.
77
See CW, 4.2.38: 1152. 78 Ibid., 3.5.34–6: 1150.
79
See ibid., 4.2.382–3: 1155.
proves no surrogate. In Cymbeline, Fidele–Innogen’s song is likewise mis-
placed. Having originally performed a version of the song at the funeral of
Euriphile, Arviragus instructs Guiderius: ‘let us […] sing him to th’ ground /
As once our mother; use like note and words, / Save that “Euriphile” must
be “Fidele”’. Not only is the song improvised from Euriphile’s sacraments,
it is barely even sung. Guiderius replies: ‘I cannot sing. I’ll weep, and word
it with thee, / For notes of sorrow out of tune are worse / Than priests and
fanes that lie’.80 ‘Fear no more’ becomes, then, a spoken song. The text that
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ tropes is, therefore, more of a poem than a song,
something not immediately clear from Stevens’ allusion.
Both texts also rail against quotidian ‘reality’. ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’
withstands ‘the x malisons of other men’, a ‘malison’ being a curse, deriv-
ing from the Old French maleison (perhaps also mal son, ‘bad sound’).
Stevens could easily have consulted the word in his own dictionary where
he would have discovered ‘malsonnant’ (‘ill-sounding; offensive’) and
‘malsain’ (‘unhealthy; sickly’), with the English–French section listing
‘malison’ as ‘malédiction’.81 Implicit is a resistance not only to the particu-
lar cursing of other men, but to their malediction, the sum of evil speech
(from maledicere). For it is the ‘x malisons’ of men that are threatening
rather than the malisons of ‘x’ numbers of men. Diction that is ‘mal’,
therefore, is comparable to or exceeds the actual threats of ‘other men’ (as
with the ‘dark italics’ of ‘Esthétique du Mal’).82 Both texts thereby desire
release from harmful speech: ‘Fear not slander, censure rash […] No exor-
cisor harm thee, / Nor no witchcraft charm thee’.83
But both texts also confront nominally less serious threats. Cymbeline’s
song is consoling: ‘Thou thy worldly task hast done, / Home art gone and
ta’en thy wages.’ Stevens, by contrast, imagines a garden for ‘hero land’,
or at least an abstract, Edenic space where miracles ‘fall / As apples fall’:
‘A little while of Terra Paradise / I dreamed.’ Thus the tone of Cymbeline’s
song, with its injunctions to ‘care no more to clothe and eat’, is trans-
formed from consolation in death to consolation in a living, imagina-
tive world: an earthly paradise. Although ‘death’s element’ intrudes on
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’, Cymbeline’s consolations help reconstruct the
miraculous, imaginative space Stevens’ poem desires. Writing to Robert
Frost a few months after ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ was published, Stevens
uncharacteristically imagined inviting Frost to his house, claiming: ‘How
80
Ibid., 4.2.237–43: 1154.
81
Gasc, Dictionary of the French and English Languages, 351, 894.
82
CPP, 287. 83 CW, 4.2.273–8: 1154.
nice it would be to sit in the garden and imagine that we were living in a
world in which everything was as it ought to be.’ 84 ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’
adapts the funereal connotations of Shakespeare’s play to achieve precisely
such an imagined state. Stevens would never welcome Frost either; as if
the mere conception of such tranquillity would stimulate each poet alike
as an abstract delight (as with the ‘Chair of Poetry’ Stevens discussed with
Henry Church).85
Cymbeline also comments covertly on ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’. Having
met Fidele, the company discusses the ‘grief’ the boy endures in prolepti-
cally ironic comments given Fidele’s impending ‘death’:
arviragus How angel-like he sings!
guiderius But his neat cookery!
belarius He cut our roots in characters,
And sauced our broths as Juno had been sick
And he her dieter.
[…]
guiderius I do note
That grief and patience, rooted in him both,
Mingle their spurs together.
arviragus Grow patience,
And let the stinking elder, grief, untwine
His perishing root with the increasing vine.
(CW, 4.2.49–62: 1152)
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ reads:
But to speak simply of good is like to love,
To equate the root-man and the super-man,
The root-man swarming, tortured by his mass,
The super-man friseured, possessing and possessed.
(CPP, 236)
Stevens’ ‘root-man’ naturally chimes with Le Montrachet and those

‘Bastard chateaux’. But the root and vine metaphorically struggling in
Fidele also inadvertently comment upon Stevens’ ‘root-man’ and ‘super-
man’. For with the ‘x malisons of other men’ to endure, all speech, any
constructed paradise on terra firma, involves the battles of root-men and
super-men.86
This struggle involves ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ in a dialectic mirror-
ing the physical/abstract tension informing the poem overall. An earthy
imagination battles with an unworldly one, but both are implicitly
84
L, 422–3. 85
See ibid., 376ff. CPP, 236.
86
critiqued. The ‘super-man’ is ‘friseured’, making him sound ‘coiffeured’
(friser meaning ‘to curl’) and prone to ‘frissons’ of indulgence, both pos-
sessing and self-possessed (a poseur). But ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ also cri-
tiques the desire to capitulate to an earthier, ‘Antaen’ imagination, one
erroneously conceiving poetry as an ivory tower enterprise:
A little while of Terra Paradise
I dreamed, of autumn rivers, silvas green,
Of sanctimonious mountains high in snow,
But in that dream a heavy difference
Kept waking and a mournful sense sought out,
In vain, life’s season or death’s element.
Bastard chateaux and smoky demoiselles,
No more. I can build towers of my own,
There to behold, there to proclaim, the grace
And free requiting of responsive fact,
To project the naked man in a state of fact,
As acutest virtue and ascetic trove.
(CPP, 236–7)
Here paronomasia flourishes again. The earlier ‘sacraments between two

breaths’ become the orations of ‘lean sacristans’, only to confront the
‘sanctimonious mountains’ of Terra Paradise. These mountains are hardly
monts rachets, but stand aloof ‘high in snow’.
But if a sanctimonious imagination proves insufficient – and reminds
one of the ‘heavy difference’ between idealized aesthetics and the real-
ities of ‘life’s season or death’s element’ – neither can Stevens’ speaker
find solace in his Antaen ‘root-man’, who is hardly Antaen because he is
unable to derive strength from the ground (or at least from his own roots).
He is ‘swarming, tortured by his mass’, a further ambiguous use of ‘his’
indicating the ‘root-man’ is either overwhelmed by his own bulk or, like
the struggling vine, is forced to compete with surrounding masses. Thus
two caricatures of the imagination appear here: the impossibly idealized,
pejoratively abstract ‘Terra Paradise’ and the ironically deracinated world
of Stevens’ ‘root-man’.
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ thus favours its own tower-building: the con-
struction of a robust abstract space neither aspiring to the height of ‘sanc-
timonious mountains’ nor capitulating to ‘heavy difference[s]’. ‘Bastard
chateaux and smoky demoiselles, / No more. I can build towers of my
own’: these lines accentuate a desire to transcend the clichés of fantasized
struggle, such as re-appropriating the properties of illegitimate usurpers or
saving those mysterious damsels in distress, the ‘smoky demoiselles’. The
poem’s bourgeois limits thus disincline its figures to embrace the precar-
ious world of Candide’s adventures; although it is precisely the domestic
and horticultural aspects of ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ that recall Candide’s
need to cultivate his garden.
A ‘demoiselle’, as noted, is an unmarried bourgeois woman, perhaps
of Burgundian descent (always a more agricultural and mercantile region
than aristocratic Bordeaux). Whether or not Stevens knew of Chevalier-
Montrachet’s ‘Les Demoiselles’ or about the Viollot ‘demoiselles’,
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ imagines a world where desire is shaped, even
transcended, by abstraction. Thus, fantastical clichés become pejoratively
‘common’ for Stevens, whereas the nominally ‘commonplace’ or ‘bour-
geois’ is where the real capacity for imaginative change lies. Note how
Stevens’ ‘No more’ now echoes Cymbeline’s ‘Fear no more’. Just as ‘Fear
never the brute clouds’ transforms Cymbeline’s more consolatory ‘Fear
no more the heat o’th’ sun’, ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ adapts Shakespeare’s
vocabulary to erect its own protective walls: ‘Bastard chateaux […] No
more. I can build towers of my own’. The best form of attack is strategic
defence, and what better castle to erect than one’s own milieu, even one’s
own home.
This stance recalls Stevens’ earlier response, in introducing Williams’
Collected Poems to the ‘Ivory Tower’ rhetoric of 1930s literary criticism.
There Stevens suggested the ‘romantic poet’ ‘happens to be one who still
dwells in an ivory tower, but who insists that life there would be intoler-
able except for the fact that one has, from the top, such an exceptional
view of the public dump and the advertising signs of Snider’s Catsup,
Ivory Soap and Chevrolet Cars’.87 In the same month ‘Montrachet-Le-
Jardin’ appeared, Stevens wrote: ‘One of these days I should like to do
something for the Ivory Tower. There are a lot of exceedingly stupid people
saying things about the Ivory Tower who ought to be made to regret it.’ 88
Stevens’ frustration indicates how, by 1942, this was still a debatable issue,
save that its point of reference moved from the Depression to ‘war lit-
erature’. In 1939 Cleanth Brooks provocatively suggested the public, not
poets, inhabited an ivory tower. Certainly, the ‘Brooks–MacLeish thesis’
would neither have been a ‘thesis’ nor a debate were it not for the impli-
cation that the irresponsible basis of ‘coterie literature’ was precisely that
its exemplars believed they could retain their ivory towers. Stevens’ com-
ment on Williams, by contrast, shows one can enjoy ivory towers along
Ibid., 770. See Chapter 1 (p. 51).

87 88
L, 403.
with ‘Ivory Soap’, and implies the person who really knows ‘the public
dump’ is the ‘hermit’ who has an ‘exceptional view’ of it.
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ desires, then, an abstract space beyond the
tussles of ‘superman’ v. ‘root-man’, ivory tower v. ‘Bastard chateaux’, ‘sanc-
timonious mountains’ v. the earthier ‘sacraments’ of ‘two breaths’ (obla-
tions perhaps, but ones lacking the false piety ‘sanctimonious’ implies).
Hence the poem’s wish to conceive an abstract ‘naked man’. As Cymbeline
demonstrates, assuming garments and disguises signifies what one wants
to be, become or evade. However, in a stripping bare that anticipates the
‘first idea’ of ‘Notes’, Stevens’ poem conceives a ‘naked man’ stripped of
all trappings. Ironically, the skeleton ‘proposes’ the naked man:
The skeleton said it is a question of
The naked man, the naked man as last
And tallest hero and plus gaudiest vir.
(CPP, 236)
This ‘naked man’ is an abstraction who nevertheless exists ‘in a state of

fact’, the word ‘fact’ resonating throughout the end of ‘Montrachet-Le-
Jardin’. He is impossibly superlative: the ‘tallest’ hero, the ‘plus gaudiest
vir’, someone of ‘acutest virtue’ and ‘ascetic’, excessively abstinent. But
‘the naked man’ still lives by ‘responsive fact’. That the poem lists various
abstractions as ‘items’ marks a similar tension. For, even though the poem
‘itemizes’ its abstract figures, there is always an abstract resistance to the
particular. This tension enables ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ to pivot on the
paradoxical ‘facts’ of desire – say, the wish to conceive an entirely ‘naked’
figure – which can never become commonplace ‘facts’. Stevens’ ‘naked
man’ has no such matter and, like his other abstract figures, remains
importantly insubstantial.
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ itself remains significantly frustrated:
And yet what good were yesterday’s devotions?
I affirm and then at midnight the great cat
Leaps quickly from the fireside and is gone.
(CPP, 237)
The poem thus ironizes the ‘items’ standing at its close. They are too
‘absolute’ to be reached:
Item: The cocks crow and the birds cry and
The sun expands, like a repetition on
One string, an absolute, not varying
Toward an inaccessible, pure sound.
Item: The wind is never rounding O
And, imageless, it is itself the most,
Mouthing its constant smatter throughout space.
Item: The green fish pensive in green reeds
Is an absolute. Item: The cataracts
As facts fall like rejuvenating rain,
Fall down through nakedness to nakedness,
To the auroral creature musing in the mind.
(CPP, 237)
Each item – ‘cocks’, ‘wind’, ‘green fish’, ‘cataracts’ – is preceded by a

capitalized definite article, as if ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ attempts to fix
its facts/items as quasi-legal exhibits. One thinks, to venture another
bawdy French tale, of the ‘items’ marking the institution of the paradisal
Abbey of Thélème in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (Chapter 52).
But ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ subtly dislocates our sense of the relations
between these figures. The poem resurrects its interest in sounds without
words. Its ‘absolute’ of ‘a repetition on / One string’ – an image recalling
‘Blue Guitar’ canto iv – travels toward ‘an inaccessible, pure sound’. Even
the ‘imageless’ wind can only mouth itself ‘throughout space’, unidentifi-
able save for its ‘smatter’.
Stevens’ final ‘item’, however, is neither an object nor requires a capital-
ized definite article:
Item: Breathe, breathe upon the centre of
The breath life’s latest, thousand senses.
But let this one sense be the single main.
(CPP, 237)
The imperative ‘breathe’ recalls the floating ‘He’ of stanza fourteen who,
hearing the ‘earliest poems of the world’, also ‘hears the words, / Before
the speaker’s youngest breath is taken!’89 Stevens implies that capturing
‘The breath life’s latest’ – assaulting the present with a ‘thousand senses’ –
is the most valuable ‘absolute’ we can have. Like ‘Esthétique du Mal’, the
poem implicitly critiques the tendency in Parts of a World and ‘Notes’ to
idolize centrality or singularity. Rather than favour a single man, be it
‘major man’ or Stevens’ other hero-figures, the poem recommends ‘the
single main’, the plethora of life’s latest and ‘the major miracles’ falling
our way.90
But ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ cannot accept so ‘nameable’ a proposition
as ‘the single main’, and, despite its title, resists naming the spaces closest
89
CPP, 235. 90
Ibid., 236.
to its heart. The possibility of fabricating a rival Le Montrachet dissolves as
we depart from the ‘garden scene’ and find ourselves in a palpably domes-
tic fireside interior. ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ thus domesticates its desires,
be they for love or wine, and tailors its imaginative grandeur within bour-
geois limits, even if (and because of the fact that) those limits are defined
by the desire to ‘build towers’ of one’s own. That this poem’s first person
is only a shadow of Stevens’ idealist ‘I’ perhaps indicates how the poet was
already feeling around for other modes of abstract address.
If, by 1942, therefore, Stevens began realizing the advantages of abstrac-
tion, by the mid-1940s he would largely dispatch the idiom advertising
his interest in ‘the abstract’. The next chapter considers how Stevens dis-
pensed with this idiom as he absorbed abstraction. Rather than replace
his 1942 vocabulary with another seductive terminology, Stevens discov-
ers a robust abstract poetry without recourse to a specialist idiom. During
1935–45 – from the ‘new romantic’ to a ‘supreme fiction’ – Stevens’ need
of an overt idiom was coterminous with reconciling his poetry to a chan-
ging world. The ‘un-locatable’ ‘I’ emerging from the abstract locale of
‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ would become the idealist figure rep-
resentative of the poet’s own abstract imagination. But it was important
this ‘I’, for all its interest in painting and fine wine, should not easily elide
with Stevens himself. Achieving a ‘mastery of reality’, as Stevens later rec-
ognized, would involve distancing oneself from elaborate figuration, par-
ticularly the ‘figure[s] of capable imagination’ the poet sought in the early
1940s.91
L, 459.
91
C H APTER 6
The pure good of theory:

a new abstract emphasis
6.1 ‘M ajor m a n’ r e v i s e d: ‘Pa i s a n t Ch ron ic l e’

(1945) a n d ‘De s c r i p t ion W i t hou t Pl ac e’ (1945)
Here we are all in the fever of contemporary life, with everything fundamental
turned upside down and in course of re-examination. That alone and without
reference to the profound misery in Europe, should exact from the right people
the best they have.1
The year 1945 was pivotal in Stevens’ poetic development. Following Parts
of a World and ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ the poet experienced a
re-examination of his own. Those texts had featured an icy world replete
with heroic figures and other nominally ‘cold’, crystalline entities. Stevens’
embrace of abstraction engaged a new vocabulary characterized by poetic
symbols, the nomenclature of his early 1940s aesthetic. Largely advertised
by ‘Notes’, ‘major man’, ‘the first idea’, a ‘supreme fiction’, the ‘death of
the gods’, the ‘fluent mundo’, even ‘the abstract’ itself became the terms of
a specialist idiom. The impulse toward such rhetoric emanated from Ideas
of Order, as Stevens desired to overhaul ‘pure poetry’ in a modern age.2
But the highpoint for creating an abstract language built into the fabric of
an increasingly abstract poetic was 1942, and although Stevens continued
to write abstractly he would have less use for an explicit vocabulary, as the
mature poetry of his final decade indicates.
Stevens carefully jettisons his 1942 idiom in poems written dur-
ing 1943–45. Whilst the later poetry refers to such terms as ‘reality’ and
‘imagination’, the need for stylized abstract figures occupied Stevens less.
The poet transcended the literary idealism enabling his early 1940s verse
L, 482–3.
1
Harmonium’s nominal ‘pure poetry’ has prompted comparison with Mallarmé ever since Hi
2
Simons raised the issue (L, 391) – see Simons’ posthumously published ‘Wallace Stevens and
Mallarmé’ Modern Philology 43 (1946), 235–59 and L, 473. However, Stevens’ abstract manoeuvres
differ from Mallarmé’s (see Chapters 3 and 4).
166
The pure good of theory 167
to achieve a poetry of ‘perception’ – by turns ‘cool’ and ‘warm’ in abstrac-
tion – owing much to idealism but little to an explicit idiom. Whilst the
later verse is ripe for phenomenological (especially Heideggerian) read-
ing, I suggest Stevens’ transcending of a conceptual rhetoric created the
room for the very abstract aesthetic which attracts phenomenologists: an
account uncovered in Stevens criticism.3 Moreover, as Chapter 7 argues, it
is in Stevens’ grasping toward the ‘ordinary’ that his bourgeois abstraction
forms: a paradoxical aesthetic where the quotidian ‘normal’ is made less
familiar and more palpable through abstract meditation.
Nonetheless, Stevens did not effortlessly drop his 1942 vocabulary, neatly
dispensing with crystalline meditations on poetry, heroism and the imagin-
ation. ‘Esthétique du Mal’ may proclaim ‘We are not / At the centre of a
diamond’, but it would take Stevens more than that poem to modify his
refracting ‘mundo’.4 A linguistic residue from ‘Notes’ and Parts naturally
occupies the post-1942 verse, accentuating where Stevens shapes new poetry
from old concerns. The decline of the idealist ‘I’ is illustrative. Other early
1940s motifs, particularly Stevens’ treatment of ‘sound’, are also transformed
in the mid-1940s verse. In other words, themes that do not characterize
Stevens’ early 1940s work, but exist within it, develop in his middle period,
and it is to these less well-known areas that this chapter partially turns.
Stevens transcended his ‘figure[s] of capable imagination’ by address-
ing more ‘singular’ themes, writing poems and lectures on ‘description’,
‘resemblance’ and ‘analogy’.5 Brogan’s and Schaum’s ‘poetics of resist-
ance’ argument borrows Stevens’ emphasis on ‘description’ to defend the
poet from the charge of being removed from his ‘actual world’. I have
challenged elsewhere the claim that Stevens is more politically engaged
as a poet post-1945.6 Rather, the Stevens who embraces ‘description’ –
and other aesthetic concepts – demonstrates a new-found confidence in
abstraction. Thus, whilst a political reading of this confidence is possible,
I cannot accept the argument that a) all language is ‘political’, therefore
b) Stevens’ fascination with description is politically informed. Certainly,
Stevens revised his isolationism following US entry to the war.7 But this
3
See Thomas J. Hines, The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parallels with Husserl
and Heidegger (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1976), 213–73; Krzysztof Ziarek,
Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness: Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, Celan (Albany,
NY: New York State University Press, 1994), 103–32; Bové, Destructive Poetics, 208–15.
4
CPP, 283.
5
Ibid., 226. See CPP, 296–302, 686–91, 707–23.
6
Ragg, ‘Good-bye Major Man’, 97–105.
7
See Filreis, Actual World, 7–9; Jacqueline Brogan, ‘Stevens in History and Not in History: The
Poet and the Second World War’ WSJ 13.2 (1989), 172.
realignment did not yield verse more amenable to political themes. By
the mid-to-late 1940s Stevens could allow aesthetic concepts themselves
to inspire his work – be they ‘description’, ‘metaphor’ or ‘the ultimate
poem’ – rather than rely on an advertised rhetoric of ‘abstraction’.8
Stevens’ interest in ‘description’ is, therefore, part of a more complex
response in which a self-confident abstract aesthetic presses back on the
pressure of reality by recasting ‘reality’ at large. The turn to ‘description’
informs Stevens’ enigmatic treatment of other ‘commonplace’ words –
‘different’, ‘beyond’, ‘distance’, ‘speech’, ‘sound’, ‘centre’ – which exist
in the early 1940s work, but do not accrue full abstract currency until
Transport to Summer. In ‘Chocorua to Its Neighbor’ (1943), ‘The Creations
of Sound’ and ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ (both 1944) Stevens
attaches special importance to the words ‘beyond’, ‘speech’, ‘different’.9
‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ even defends the notion of ‘nourish[ing]’
oneself on ‘a few words’.10 But these are, importantly, not the terms of a
specialist idiom.
What makes Stevens’ later work attractive to phenomenologists is not
only its capacity to evoke ‘being in the world’, but its ability to convey
experience in language. Without the symbolic overtones of ‘major man’,
‘the first idea’, or even a ‘supreme fiction’, Stevens allows greater room
for his readers to embrace abstraction. ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ even
critiques the ‘desire to believe in a metaphor’.11 Although that poem iron-
ically and self-consciously succumbs to metaphor, Stevens questions the
‘literariness’ of his early 1940s writing throughout the mid-1940s and
later verse. Either nominally ‘bald’ aesthetic concepts (‘description’,
‘metaphor’, ‘resemblance’) become imaginative catalysts or the simplest
words (‘beyond’, ‘different’) take on new status as the catalysts of Stevens’
abstract writing.
Stevens justified this shift in emphasis as follows:
From the imaginative period of the Notes I turned to the ideas of Credences of
Summer. At the moment I am at work on a thing called An Ordinary Evening
In New Haven […] [M]y interest is to try to get as close to the ordinary, the
common-place and the ugly as it is possible for a poet to get. It is not a ques-
tion of grim reality but of plain reality. The object is of course to purge oneself
of anything false […] This is not in any sense a turning away from the ideas of
Credences of Summer: it is a development of those ideas.12
8
See CPP, 310, 369–70, 381. 9
See ibid., 263–8, 271–4, 274–5.
10
Ibid., 273. 11 Ibid., 291. L, 636–7.
12
Stevens’ early 1940s verse is replete with ‘ideas’. But the poet refers to
a poetic change where the luxurious configurations of ‘Notes’ differ
in degree from his later aesthetic, one content without supportive fig-
ures or characters in a poetic drama. Rather than invite an ‘ephebe’
to ponder ‘the first idea’ Stevens seeks novel ways to purge himself of
‘anything false’.13 He does not experience a ‘turning away’ from previ-
ous ideas but the development of what was only incubating in his 1942
imagination.
In 1945 José Rodríguez Feo asked Stevens to explain what he meant by
the phrase ‘major men’. Although Stevens observed the ‘major men’ of
‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ meant ‘merely the pick of young men’ –
implying they had little in common with his idealized ‘major man’ – he
interpreted Feo’s request by explaining a symbolic ‘major man’:
The major men […] are neither exponents of humanism nor Nietzschean shad-
ows. I confess that I don’t want to limit myself as to my objective, so that in
notes toward a supreme fiction and elsewhere I have at least trifled with the
idea of some arbitrary object of belief: some artificial subject for poetry, a source
of poetry. The major men are part of the entourage of that artificial object.14
Stevens characteristically evades tying down his poetic figures. ‘The major
men’ are only ‘part of the entourage’ that comprises his ‘object of belief’: a
source of poetry. Stevens would later downplay some of the major play-
ers in his own entourage precisely to define an object of belief. A much-
quoted biographical note reads:
The author’s work suggests the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized as
a fiction, in which men could propose to themselves a fulfilment. In the cre-
ation of any such fiction, poetry would have a vital significance. There are many
poems relating to the interactions between reality and the imagination, which
are to be regarded as marginal to this central theme.15
Not only are ‘reality’ and ‘the imagination’ marginal here, a ‘supreme
fiction’ (Stevens’ ‘central theme’) is, remarkably, no longer poetry itself.
In 1942 Stevens wrote: ‘in the long run, poetry would be the supreme
fiction’.16 But by 1954, when Stevens compiled the above, the creation of
such a ‘fiction’ could involve poetry but would not comprise poetry alone.
Stevens was himself aware that his early 1940s figures were part of a pro-
ject – achieving a centre, defining a source – which had itself changed. If
he came closer to ‘reality’ in his later career it was through dispatching his
personal entourage of attendant symbols and terms. The ‘supreme fiction’,
See CPP, 329ff.

13 14
L, 489, 485. Ibid., 820.
15 16
Ibid., 430.
if a viable object, need not be literary at all. It would remain a poetic idea
without need of the advertisements of ‘Notes’ or Parts.
Stevens became aware of this aesthetic shift as early as 1945. When he
wrote ‘A Word with José Rodríguez Feo’ (1945), Stevens also composed
‘Paisant Chronicle’ ‘for’ Feo:
In the other poem [‘Paisant Chronicle’] I have defined major men for you. I real-
ize that the definition is evasive, but in dealing with fictive figures evasiveness
at least supports the fiction […] [W]e have to fix abstract objectives and then
to conceal the abstract figures in actual appearance. A hero won’t do, but we
like him much better when he doesn’t look it and, of course, it is only when he
doesn’t look it that we can believe him.17
Stevens’ ‘definition’, however, says more about his 1945 concerns than
about the ‘major man’ of ‘Notes’. ‘Paisant Chronicle’ paints a hero-figure
of convincing ‘appearance’, one who is credible precisely because ‘he
doesn’t look’ the part; an abstract figure who re-connects readers with
the world paradoxically through being ‘conceal[ed]’ in actuality, or what
Stevens playfully calls ‘actual appearance’. But the poem also marks the
distance between this mediated abstract figure and the ‘major man’ of
‘Notes’, who is only rendered ‘actual’ by the rather awkward introduction
of ‘the MacCullough’ as Everyman.18
‘Paisant Chronicle’ begins by questioning ‘the major men’:
What are the major men? All men are brave.
All men endure. The great captain is the choice
Of chance. Finally, the most solemn burial
Is a paisant chronicle.
(CPP, 293)
That opening question suggests there is no need to construct an ideal

‘major man’ because all men are major for themselves. By asking ‘what’
and not ‘who’ the ‘major men’ are Stevens also implies they are danger-
ously abstracted, without credible reality. ‘Paisant Chronicle’ is not inter-
ested in arriving at a definition and makes Stevens’ comment to Feo ironic,
as if defining the ‘major men’ meant consigning them to a poetic past –
perhaps something Stevens, by 1945, desired. Moreover, the poem aims
to wrest a totally abstracted theme from its icy sphere and invest it with
palpable ‘reality’. Its concern is, as Hegel argues for the abstract artwork,
17
See Wallace Stevens, ‘New Poems’: ‘The Pure Good of Theory’, ‘A Word with José Rodríguez
Feo’, ‘Paisant Chronicle’, ‘Flyer’s Fall’ Voices 121 (1945): 25–9; L, 489.
18
CPP, 334.
to mediate its abstract inspiration with the garb of ‘actual appearance’: to
make ‘the major men’ palpable men.
If the ‘major men’ are ‘different’, then, the ‘fictive man’ they comprise
finds salvation only by becoming the commonplace hero seated at a café
table: the classic milieu for Stevensian meditation.19 Although Stevens
discredits the ‘major men’ as ethereal abstractions, he rescues the ‘fictive
man’ they represent, suggesting the creation of a novel ‘fictive’ figure, one
whose abstract character is concealed in ‘actual appearance’:
The major men –
That is different. They are characters beyond
Reality, composed thereof. They are
The fictive man created out of men.
They are men but artificial men. They are
Nothing in which it is not possible
To believe, more than the casual hero
[…]
The baroque poet may see him as still a man
As Virgil, abstract. But see him for yourself,
The fictive man. He may be seated in
A café. There may be a dish of country cheese
And a pineapple on the table. It must be so.
(CPP, 294)
If the ‘major men’ are ‘nothing in which it is not possible / To believe’

their value as an ‘object of belief’ is minimal. They are so abstract they
lack identity; so protean any value can be ascribed to them. Together they
comprise ‘the fictive man’ but one made from ‘artificial’ figures. The ‘arti-
ficial’ of ‘Paisant Chronicle’ seems pejorative, whereas in Stevens’ letter to
Feo ‘an artificial object of belief’ is affirmative (where ‘artificial’ signifies
possessing an artificer). This collective ‘fictive man’ is an ‘easy projection’
because the imagination can invest any value in the cipher ‘major men’.
To be ‘as still a man / As Virgil, abstract’ is to have lost mobility (Stevens
plays on ‘still’ as in ‘unchanged’ and ‘immobile’). Whatever the perspec-
tive, the ‘fictive man’ risks becoming as meaningless as any other charac-
ter ‘beyond reality’.
Stevens’ tone, however, turns from censure to affirmation: a movement
mimicking the shift in imagination he encounters during 1942–45. The
‘fictive man’ is rehabilitated not as the figure dreamt by a ‘baroque poet’
but one constructed by the reader: ‘[S]ee him for yourself, / The fictive
19
See the ‘cool café’ of ‘Esthétique du Mal’ and the ‘crisp café’ of ‘Forces, the Will & the Weather’,
CPP, 277, 210.
man. He may be seated in / A café. There may be a dish of country cheese /
And a pineapple on the table. It must be so’. The use of ‘may’ invites
the creation of a personal ‘fictive man’ from potential appearances. The
tongue-in-cheek ‘It must be so’ is hardly peremptory. Stevens concedes
the reader is a vital creator in providing his ‘fictive man’ meaning.
In writing ‘Paisant Chronicle’ Stevens began, therefore, to refine his
own abstract aesthetic. It was not that Parts of a World and ‘Notes’ had
issued a crystalline world removed from ‘reality’. Both those works have
too much range and tension to suggest Stevens was doomed to irreverent
solipsism. Rather, Stevens had doubts not about abstraction but about the
priority of an abstract idiom. ‘Notes’ itself understood how every abstrac-
tion must be ‘blooded’ to achieve resonance.20 In Hegelian terms, ‘the
abstract’ becomes mediated to attain ‘self-consciousness’; just as, con-
versely, the artist removes himself from his work in order to communicate
that work to a wider audience. Stevens’ difficulty in ‘It Must Be Abstract’
was that he required more than an evocative vocabulary or the invoca-
tion of ‘the MacCullough’ to attract an empathetic readership. Canto
viii ponders if ‘the MacCullough’ ‘might take habit’, achieve a form in
which, as an abstraction, he could be ‘blooded’. But he remains a ‘beau
linguist’.21 Stevens would remember this phrase in the close of ‘Repetitions
of a Young Captain’, a poem troubled by a ‘beau language without a drop
of blood’.22
Whilst ‘Notes’ is hardly inhuman, Stevens felt it lacked the blood
and bones his later verse would possess. He even pondered about adding
another section, something omitted from his 1942 masterpiece: ‘It Must
Be Human’.23 ‘Paisant Chronicle’, by contrast, re-invests the human. If it
defines ‘major men’ it is not ultimately to critique the 1942 ‘major man’
as bloodless abstraction. Stevens implies that ‘major man’, or even his ‘fic-
tive man’, only has significance if he belongs to an affirmative abstract
imagination. For Stevens, this imagination takes precedence and not the
vocabulary upon which his 1942 aesthetic depends.
‘Description Without Place’ also covertly critiques Stevens’ earlier need
for an abstract idiom. Written not long after ‘Paisant Chronicle’, the
poem implicitly dispatches ‘major man’. Stevens criticism has not given
this manoeuvre due attention, perhaps because ‘Description Without
Place’ principally attracts scholars for its pragmatist and poststructur-
alist conviction that ‘it is a world of words to the end of it’.24 Brogan
See CPP, 333.

20 21
Ibid., 334. 22
Ibid., 274. See L, 863–4.
23 24
CPP, 301.
and Schaum focus on ‘description’ in order to exonerate Stevens of the
guilty aestheticism of which Perloff accuses him.25 As noted, in their view,
Stevens’ interest in ‘description’ signifies a poet with new priorities, post-
‘Notes’, to meet the ‘actual world’ head on, a position similar to Filreis’
argument concerning Stevens’ ‘agreement with reality’ in ‘The Figure of
the Youth as Virile Poet’.26
But, whilst Stevens can be exonerated of aloofness, ‘Description
Without Place’ is better read as an exercise in heaving off an old vocabu-
lary rather than as evidence for wanting to subvert received political dis-
course. Where Stevens aimed to rehabilitate a modified ‘pure poetry’ in
the mid-1930s, by 1945 he abandoned ‘pure poetry’ itself, a clear departure
from Mallarmé: ‘[N]o one proposes to practice pure poetry. I think the
feeling today very definitely is for an abundant poetry, concerned with
everything and everybody.’ 27 ‘[A]bundant poetry’ depends largely, for
Stevens, on the poet’s descriptive powers. As he remarked to Feo, then
founding the Cuban magazine Orígenes:
[T]he power of literature is that in describing the world it creates what it
describes. Those things that are not described do not exist, so that in putting
together a review like origenes you are really putting together a world. You are
describing a world and by describing it you are creating it.28
Stevens’ programme for ‘Description Without Place’ chimes with this
position:
I am going to read a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard […] I am about
to settle down to my subject: description without place […] It seems to me
[…] an interesting idea: […] that we live in the description of a place and not in
the place itself, and in every vital sense we do.29
‘Description Without Place’ would re-create Stevens’ poetic world not as
a specifically named place, like the crystalline ‘mundo’, but as a descrip-
tive terrain without explicit, abstract figures: no ‘major man’, ‘supreme
fiction’ or ‘first idea’.30 I have noted elsewhere that ‘Description Without
Place’ even ironizes a ‘major manner’: a covert reference, perhaps, to the
rhetorical flourishes that enabled ‘major man’.31 As already suggested,
25
See Ragg, ‘Good-bye Major Man’, 97–105; Brogan, ‘Wallace Stevens: Poems Against His
Climate’, ‘Stevens in History and Not in History’ and ‘Wrestling with those “Rotted Names”’,
19–39; Schaum, ‘Lyric Resistance’, 191–205.
26
See Filreis, ‘An Interview with Stanley Burnshaw’, 28, and Chapter 4.
27
L, 495. 28 Ibid., 495. 29 Ibid., 494.
30
Interestingly, Mallarmé also resists nomination: ‘To name an object is largely to destroy poetic
enjoyment […] The ideal is to suggest the object’, ‘The Evolution of Literature’, 1561.
31
CPP, 297. See Ragg, ‘Good-bye Major Man’.
‘Notes’ is a nominating poem; despite its alleged provisionality, it can-
not resist creating a symbolic nomenclature. As if to resist the ‘mundo’,
‘Description Without Place’ baldly illustrates its preference for description
over naming. As such, the poem enacts in microcosm what the Stevens
corpus from 1945 onwards achieves at large: the dismantling of the famil-
iar ‘names’ of the earlier poetry.
But it is in texts like ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ and ‘Three
Academic Pieces’ that Stevens more effectively allowed aesthetic concepts
to inspire his abstract imagination. ‘Repetitions’, especially, follows the
imaginative process Stevens spells out in ‘Three Academic Pieces’ as both
texts question the role of ‘rhetoric’ in poetic speech, even as Stevens draws
on his most rhetorically resourceful strategies in poem and lecture alike.
After turning to these pivotal works, the chapter closes by reading ‘The
Pure Good of Theory’ as an example of the pragmatic impetus the mature
Stevens came to derive from an abstract aesthetic.
6.2 W r i t i ng ‘be yon d’: ‘R e pe t i t ions of a You ng

C a p ta i n’ (194 4) a n d ‘Th r e e Ac a de m ic Pi e c e s’ (1947)
In 1943 Stevens observed:
The abstract does not exist, but it is certainly as immanent: that is to say, the
fictive abstract is as immanent in the mind of the poet, as the idea of God
is immanent in the mind of the theologian. The poem is a struggle with the
inaccessibility of the abstract.32
Stevens’ letters and the early lectures of The Necessary Angel often attempt
to make immanent ideas palpable. By ‘Three Academic Pieces’, however,
instead of painting a ‘virile youth’ or ‘possible poet’, Stevens discovered a
more direct means of illustrating the virtues of abstraction: addressing the
relatively ‘bare’ subject of ‘resemblance’. Stevens defends what seems a pejora-
tively abstract subject with the claim: ‘Poetry is a satisfying of the desire for
resemblance […] it touches the sense of reality, it enhances the sense of real-
ity, heightens it, intensifies it.’ 33 This leads to an idealist defence:
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the
text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of
reality […] The eye does not beget in resemblance. It sees. But the mind begets
in resemblance as the painter begets in representation […] as the painter makes
his world within a world[.]34
L, 434.
32 33
CPP, 690. Ibid., 689.
34
The ‘world within a world’ becomes a further defence for the imagination
that creates ‘a reality of its own’. Stevens adds: ‘[A] sense of reality keen
enough to be in excess of the normal sense of reality creates a reality of its
own. Here what matters is that the intensification of the sense of reality
creates a resemblance: that reality of its own is a reality.’ 35
That a ‘resemblance’ exists between a created ‘reality of its own’ and
quotidian ‘reality’ accentuates the crux of Stevensian abstraction. The
imagination conceives ‘reality’ in order to re-establish fresh contact with
the world (‘it enhances the sense of reality, heightens it, intensifies it’).
‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ imagines a departing soldier locked in
a perpetual present to illustrate such an enhanced ‘reality’. Stevens ech-
oes the poem in his 1947 lecture, not least given its insistence that ‘[t]he
gigantic has a reality of its own’:
Constantly,
At the railway station, a soldier steps away,
Sees a familiar building drenched in cloud
And goes to an external world, having
Nothing of place. There is no change of place
Nor of time. The departing soldier is as he is,
Yet in that form will not return. But does
He find another? The giant of sense remains
A giant without a body. If, as giant,
He shares a gigantic life, it is because
The gigantic has a reality of its own.
(CPP, 272–3)
The reader ‘creates’ this soldier ‘constantly’. Stevens draws a distinc-

tion between a figurative ‘external world’ – ‘external’ because it has
‘nothing of place’ like the descriptive terrain of ‘Description Without
Place’ – and the ‘external world’ of the decimated theatre at the poem’s
opening:
A tempest cracked on the theatre. Quickly,
The wind beat in the roof and half the walls.
The ruin stood still in an external world.
(CPP, 271)
But the ‘external world’ where the soldier exists defies the distinction
between figurative and literal realms. For, if the soldier occupies some-
thing which ‘has a reality of its own’, his world cannot easily be discredited
Ibid., 691.
35
as ‘unreal’. If it is ‘external’, it is because it resembles the ‘actual world’ in
which soldiers step away.
Miraculously, Stevens’ soldier changes shape in an abstract state, even
if he experiences no discernible change in space and time: ‘There is no
change of place / Nor of time. The departing soldier is as he is, / Yet in
that form will not return’. The playful ‘But does he find another?’ teases
us into considering how the abstract soldier can change if he is ‘constantly’
involved in the same repetitive stepping away. If the soldier is to find
another form it is through the reader’s and poet’s capability to project the
change. But in order to understand the full resonance of Stevens’ ques-
tion we must return to ‘Three Academic Pieces’ which, although written
three years after this poem, deftly adumbrates the qualities and limits of
abstract conception.
‘Three Academic Pieces’ claims the imagination’s limits are defined by
‘resemblance’: ‘The imagination is able to manipulate nature as by cre-
ating three legs and five arms but it is not able to create a totally new
nature as, for instance, a new element with creatures indigenous thereto,
their costumes and cuisines.’ 36 To accentuate the impossibility of cre-
ating ‘a totally new nature’ Stevens might have written ‘a new element
without creatures indigenous thereto, their costumes and cuisines’. But
what allows an abstract imagination special power is the deployment of
‘metaphor’ to unleash multiple levels of resemblance. In ‘Repetitions’ the
soldier becomes a metaphor for the very imaginative process the poem
illustrates. The difficulty in envisaging the soldier resembles the difficulty
with which one imagines an abstract idea intensifying ‘reality’. If, for
Stevens, a poem ‘is a struggle with the inaccessibility of the abstract’ then
‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ depicts this struggle in the soldier who
must ‘constantly step away’.
Such re-conception is what ‘Repetitions’ means by approaching ‘a real-
ity beyond’. This ‘beyond’ also obsesses ‘Three Academic Pieces’:
In reality, there is a level of resemblance, which is […] nature. In metaphor, there
is no such level. If there were it would be the level of resemblance of the imagin-
ation, which has no level. If, to our surprise, we should meet a monsieur who
told us that he was from another world, and if he had […] all the indicia of div-
inity […] we should recognize him as above the level of nature but not as above
the level of the imagination […] [I]f […] we should meet one of these morons
whose remarks are […] a part of the folk-lore of the world of the radio […] we
should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of
36
Ibid., 688.
the imagination. It is not, however, a question of above or below but simply of
beyond. Level is an abbreviated form of level of resemblance. The statement that
the imagination has no level of resemblance is not to be taken as a statement that
the imagination itself has no limits.37
‘Beyond’ does not, then, signify ‘outside human experience’. An abstract
imagination gestures to things ‘beyond’ the ‘normal sense of reality’ –
neither ‘above’ nor ‘below’ the level of nature (or imagination) – but
which, through metaphorical ‘resemblance’, recall our own constructions
of reality. The abstract ‘may not exist’ but is immanent. The only sense in
which it is ‘beyond’ is that it requires a mind capable of abstract creation
to conceive it.
This becomes clearer when ‘Three Academic Pieces’ constructs a ‘par-
ticular abstraction’. The lecture forms a special case in The Necessary Angel
because it ostensibly generates the poem ‘Someone Puts a Pineapple
Together’. Certainly, the creation of this ‘abstraction’, and the poem
inspired by it, form the most affirmative and defensive parts of Stevens’
lecture:
There is a gradus ad Metaphoram […] A poetic metaphor – that is to say, a meta-
phor poetic in a sense more specific than the sense in which poetry and meta-
phor are one – appears to be poetry at its source. It is. At least it is poetry at one
of its sources although not necessarily the most fecundating. But the steps to
this particular abstraction, the gradus ad Metaphoram in respect to the general
sense in which poetry and metaphor are one, are, like the ascent to any of the
abstractions that interest us importantly, an ascent through illusion which gath-
ers round us more closely and thickly […] the more we penetrate it.38
‘Gradus’ indicates a ‘step’ or ‘level’. It is the root of ‘grade’ and the adjec-
tive ‘gradual’ (OED). Stevens’ ‘gradus ad Metaphoram’ creates an abstrac-
tion designed to resemble what is meant by metaphor in the commonplace
sense where ‘poetry and metaphor are one’.
The ‘gradus ad Metaphoram’ also becomes a quasi-compound noun
intended as a metaphor for metaphor: the ultimate metaphor to which all
metaphors refer (metaphor at its most abstract). If metaphor, in its sense
of ‘transference’, can be defined as ‘a trope […] in which a word or phrase
is shifted from its normal uses to a context where it evokes new meanings’,
Stevens’ abstraction constitutes a metaphor for re-thinking the function
of metaphor itself.39 The following reading of ‘The Pure Good of Theory’
borrows Donald Davidson’s view of metaphor to show how Stevensian
37
Ibid., 687–8. 38 Ibid., 692–3.
39
Preminger et al., The New Princeton Encylopedia, 760.
abstraction does not create ‘new meanings’, but evokes them. What mat-
ters is how the imagination approaches its themes and re-constitutes its
world. Stevens’ ‘gradus ad Metaphoram’ even serves as an illustration of
‘the ascent to any of the abstractions that interest us importantly’. So, not
only is the ‘gradus ad Metaphoram’ a metaphor for metaphor: it is also a
metaphor for abstraction.
Paul Ricoeur argues that metaphor conditions ‘reality’, although, in
Coleridgean fashion, he suggests that the solution to the question of how
metaphors function is involved in the answer to what ‘reality’ comprises:
When we ask whether metaphorical language reaches reality, we presuppose that
we already know what reality is. But if we assume that metaphor redescribes
reality, we must then assume that this reality as redescribed is itself novel reality.
[…] [M]etaphorical language […] increase[s] our sense of reality by shattering
and increasing our language […] With metaphor we experience the metamor-
phosis of both language and reality.40
If abstraction helps devise new metaphors, one could extend Ricoeur’s
comments to an abstract aesthetic. The obsession with metamorphosis in
‘The Pure Good of Theory’ also coincides with Ricoeur. Stevens embraces
abstraction precisely to refresh ‘reality’: even if, and indeed because, one
risks shattering language and ‘reality’ (poetry, in this sense, really is a
destructive force).41 ‘Three Academic Pieces’ understands this risk where
abstraction is ideally ‘an ascent through illusion’, but where illusion itself
‘gathers round us more closely and thickly […] the more we penetrate it’.
In ‘Someone Puts a Pineapple Together’ an imagined third person ‘con-
templates / A wholly artificial nature’. This contemplation becomes part
of Stevens’ lecture, responding directly to the ‘gradus ad Metaphoram’:
O juventes, O filii, he contemplates
A wholly artificial nature, in which
The profusion of metaphor has been increased.
It is something on a table that he sees,
The root of a form, as of this fruit, a fund,
The angel at the center of this rind,
This husk of Cuba, tufted emerald,
Himself, may be, the irreducible X
At the bottom of imagined artifice,
Its inhabitant and elect expositor.
Paul Ricoeur, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work ed. Charles E. Reagon
40
and David Stewart (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1978), 132–3.

See CPP, 178.
41
It is as if there were three planets: the sun,
The moon and the imagination, or, say,
Day, night and man and his endless effigies.
If he sees an object on a table, much like
A jar of the shoots of an infant country, green
And bright, or like a venerable urn,
Which, from the ash within it, fortifies
A green that is the ash of what green is,
He sees it in this tangent of himself.
And in this tangent it becomes a thing
Of weight, on which the weightless rests[.]
(CPP, 693–4)
Stevens recalls here a number of his own poems whilst illustrating what
abstraction achieves. ‘The husk of Cuba’ echoes ‘Academic Discourse at
Havana’, which suggests the world should not ‘import a universal pith to
Cuba’. The ‘irreducible X’ echoes ‘Anecdote of Canna’ and the abstract
‘X’ from ‘The Creations of Sound’. The ‘jar’ containing ‘the shoots of an
infant country’ recalls ‘Anecdote of the Jar’.42
If the poet’s imagination disinters the ‘root of a form’, or the ‘angel
at the center of this rind’, it is through perceiving an object on a table,
which opens the universe, adding ‘the imagination’ to the run of familiar
planets. Abstraction ‘fortifies a green’ through conceiving ‘the ash of what
green is’. Imagining the destruction or transmutation of ‘green’ to ash –
the ‘green altar’ of Keats’s urn hovering here – abstraction re-conceives
that ash and, through it, what ‘green is’. Such capability is ‘of human
residence’, proceeding through self-directed sight: ‘If he sees an object on
a table […] He sees it in this tangent of himself’. Imaginative re-concep-
tion fortifies because it confers ‘weight’ and rigging for the ‘weightless’.
Stevens’ image indicates how one abstraction supports another, where
insubstantial ‘ephemeras’ are imaginatively substantiated.
The ‘beyond’ comes down, then, to the imaginative projection reflect-
ing back on our own mental creations. As with Blake’s ‘The Human
Abstract’, what defines the extent of our idea(s) of a ‘beyond’ is the range
and scope of the imagination itself.43 ‘Three Academic Pieces’ revels in
abstraction as concept, whilst ‘Someone Puts a Pineapple Together’ illus-
trates how abstract conception behaves. That ‘someone’ could be anyone.
42
Ibid., 116, 44, 274–5, 60–1.
43
See William Blake, Blake: The Complete Poems ed. W. H. Stevenson (London: Longman, 1989),
111, 216. Kermode suggests: ‘Blake’s “minute particulars” are of the essence of his [Stevens’]
“abstract”’, Wallace Stevens, 102.
‘This is everybody’s world’, the poem claims, because in re-conceiving
‘reality’ everyone utilizes abstraction to form ‘that which is distilled’.44
Every conception derives from the distillate of inherited ideas; but abstrac-
tion enables re-distillation of new senses and impressions.
Like ‘Three Academic Pieces’, ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ aims
to move beyond ‘rhetoric’, to create an abstract aesthetic without literary
embellishment. However much the ‘gigantic’ has ‘a reality of its own’, the
poem’s abstract leanings force the speaker toward dispatching ‘rhetoric’
for other forms of idealist mediation. Rather than persuasive oratory, ‘a
few words’ provide the imaginative sustenance required:
On a few words of what is real in the world
I nourish myself. I defend myself against
Whatever remains. Of what is real I say,
Is it the old, the roseate parent or
The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else
The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
A few words, a memorandum voluble
Of the giant sense, the enormous harnesses
And writhing wheels of this world’s business,
The drivers in the wind-blows cracking whips,
The pulling into the sky and the setting there
Of the expanses that are mountainous rock and sea;
And beyond the days, beyond the slow-foot litters
Of the nights, the actual, universal strength,
Without a word of rhetoric – there it is.
(CPP, 273)
Several qualities suggest a mid-1940s Stevens poem here. First, the

speaking ‘I’ is no longer an idealist ‘I’. This ‘I’ refers to itself – ‘I nour-
ish myself’ – and possesses a voice traceable to a persona: the captain
who speaks. Second, the poem conceives a ‘universal strength’. Achieving
a ‘centre’ or ‘universal’ is a quality of many Stevens poems, but when
couched in this variety of ‘beyond’ we are experiencing an immediate
post-‘Notes’ poem. It is ‘beyond the days, beyond the slow-foot litters /
Of the nights’ that the poem approaches ‘the actual’. That approach is
possible only without ‘rhetoric’ (‘Without a word of rhetoric – there it is’).
However, the persuasive poise of ‘there it is’ reminds us how Stevens’ own
‘rhetoric’ goads pursuit of the ‘actual’.
CPP, 696.
44
‘Three Academic Pieces’ ponders how ‘hypotheses relating to poetry,
although they may appear to be very distant illuminations, could be
the fires of fate, if rhetoric ever meant anything’.45 As ‘The Pure Good
of Theory’ reveals, an abstract aesthetic vies with rhetorical excess, how-
ever much that aesthetic utilizes stock poetic effects. ‘Repetitions’ shows
similar self-awareness when it locates an ‘orator’ in its close. But, first, I
want briefly to illustrate the distance between Stevens’ negotiation of ‘the
real’ in the early 1940s and the more self-confident abstraction inform-
ing ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ by comparing the remainder of the
poem with the earlier ‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War’.
Like ‘Repetitions’, ‘Examination of the Hero’ desires a centre. Even
the ‘fury’ of war must discover ‘its noble centre’. But Stevens’ earlier
poem too keenly satirizes the aesthetes, or ‘ghosts’, who merely ‘dally /
With life’s salt upon their lips’, savouring a taste they dare not consume.
Such ‘imaginative’ figures ‘secrete within them / Too many references’.
Stevens aims to check the solipsism which prefers ‘reference’ or ‘concep-
tion’ over ‘reality’. The poem essentially critiques the power of abstrac-
tion where ‘reality’ is wilfully shaped and re-moulded, the dangerous
habit Wordsworth observes in Coleridge.46 But, more stridently than
Wordsworth, this earlier poem seemingly assaults the imagination’s asso-
ciative powers: ‘Destroy all references’.47
By 1944, however, ‘reference’ and that ambivalent verb ‘secrete’ – which
connotes concealment and the separation of substances – play different roles
in ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’. The ‘real’ is defined by the ‘universe’
itself and whatever ‘reference’ an idealist imagination lends to ‘reality’:
A few words of what is real or may be
Or of glistening reference to what is real,
The universe that supplements the manqué,
The soldier seeking his point between the two,
The organic consolation, the complete
Society of the spirit when it is
Alone, the half-arc hanging in mid-air
Composed, appropriate to the incomplete,
Supported by a half-arc in mid-earth.
Millions of instances of which I am one.
(CPP, 273)
45
Ibid., 692.
46
See Wordsworth, The Prelude Book Sixth, lines 297–317: 200, 202 (discussed in Chapter 3
above).
47
CPP, 245, 249.
‘Repetitions’ recognizes that ‘what is real’ is contingent on concep-
tion. Because it welcomes what ‘may be’, it is more accommodating
than ‘Examination of the Hero’ toward a ‘reference to what is real’. But
‘Repetitions’ deftly balances the two-way transference abstraction entails
by affirming the ‘universe that supplements the manqué’. The ‘manqué’
is that which ‘might have been but is not’: whatever has ‘missed being’
(OED). The ‘universe’ supplies what is missing, constituting the base
from which ‘reality’ is mentally projected (as ‘Three Academic Pieces’
argues, there is a ‘level of nature’ from which the imagination draws). The
‘millions of instances of which I am one’ are strong contenders for the
instance that ‘I’ becomes. In a ‘complete / Society of the spirit’ the mind
achieves an ‘organic consolation’, content that both the ‘universe’ and its
conceptions harmonize. This ‘organic consolation’ is more tempered than
the thirst after the ‘organic centre’ ‘Examination of the Hero’ craves.48
The conclusion of ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ also marks the
distance between Stevens’ 1942 stance and his mid-1940s confidence in
abstraction. Like ‘Three Academic Pieces’, ‘Repetitions’ explores the same
mistrust of ‘rhetoric’ observed earlier in the poem. Stevens casts his mind
back again to ‘Examination of the Hero’, but discovers a more positive
sense for ‘secrete’:
And if it be theatre for theatre,
The powdered personals against the giants’ rage,
Blue and its deep inversions in the moon
Against gold whipped reddened in big-shadowed black,
Her vague ‘Secrete me from reality,’
His ‘That reality secrete itself,’
The choice is made. Green is the orator
Of our passionate height. He wears a tufted green,
And tosses green for those for whom green speaks.
Secrete us in reality. It is there
My orator. Let this giantness fall down
And come to nothing. Let the rainy arcs
And pathetic magnificences dry in the sky.
Secrete us in reality. Discover
A civil nakedness in which to be,
In which to bear with the exactest force
The precisions of fate, nothing fobbed off, nor changed
In a beau language without a drop of blood.
(CPP, 274)
Ibid., 249.
48
The poem’s ‘choice’ is canny, involving no decision between ‘Her vague
“Secrete me from reality”’ and ‘His “That reality secrete itself”’. Stevens
chooses neither alternative but proffers ‘Secrete us in reality’, a brilliant
ambiguity because the phrase has no agent. ‘Secrete us’ might be an
imperative for an unknown figure. But, equally, ‘secrete us’ could be self-
referential: ‘let us secrete ourselves’.
‘Repetitions’ ironically echoes ‘Notes’ with its ‘choice between’ and a
‘choice of’:
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice
Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.
(CPP, 348)
‘Repetitions’, by contrast, moves beyond a dialectic where a ‘choice of’

is preferable to a ‘choice between’. The ‘powdered personals’ (a thespian
force not dissimilar from the aesthetes of ‘Examination of the Hero’) are
not chosen in preference for ‘the giants’ rage’ or vice versa. The colour
‘blue’ and the ‘deep inversions in the moon’ are not chosen over the ‘gold
whipped’ and ‘reddened in big-shadowed black’. ‘Repetitions’ chooses
another phrase and another colour: green.
‘Green’ is emblematic of the very quality Stevens illustrates in ‘Someone
Puts a Pineapple Together’, where abstraction ‘fortifies / A green that is
the ash of what green is’. In ‘Repetitions’ ‘green’ becomes ‘the orator /
Of our passionate height’. No sooner than this ‘green’ is conceived, it is
appropriated: ‘He wears a tufted green’. In diction anticipating ‘Someone
Puts a Pineapple Together’, the figure ‘tosses green for those for whom
green speaks’. The poem is mimetic, transforming an immediate abstrac-
tion into a mediated entity: a ‘he’ with his own attire. If Stevens’ reader
goes the distance in conceiving this ‘Green’, he or she becomes one ‘for
whom green speaks’.
‘The Noble Rider’ had previously observed how the poet addresses
himself ‘to a gallery of one’s own, if there are enough of one’s own to
fill a gallery’.49 The unapologetic need to address an ‘élite’ persists in
‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ with ‘those for whom green speaks’.
Such an ‘élite’ is not negatively exclusive. What ‘The Noble Rider’ argues
is that the poem requires the audience who can achieve the work for
Ibid., 661.
49
itself and poet alike. For Blanchot, a ‘work’ only achieves ‘being’ when it
‘becomes the intimacy between someone who writes it and someone who
reads it’.50 For Hegel the writer ‘impart[s] perfection to his work only by
emptying himself of his particularity, depersonalizing himself and rising
to the abstraction of pure action’. As Hegel suggests, ‘[t]he work by itself
is not […] actually an inspired work; it is a whole only together with its
genesis’.51
‘The Noble Rider’ likewise argues: ‘[T]hat elite, if it responds […]
will thereafter do for the poet what he cannot do for himself, that is to
say, receive his poetry’.52 If, in 1942, Stevens attaches more agency to the
poet, by the mid-1940s he prefers to choose between neither poet nor
audience, offering instead the allure of abstraction itself. For ‘The Noble
Rider’, the poet ‘fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become
the light in the minds of others’.53 But Stevens’ mid-1940s poetry opens
wider, inviting ‘the minds of others’ into a more reciprocal process where
poems stand or fall on their receptiveness to abstract creation, for reader
and poet alike.
Such ‘opening up’ is clear in ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’, with its
desire for ‘nothing fobbed off, nor changed / In a beau language with-
out a drop of blood’. The ‘beau linguist’ of ‘Notes’ is pointedly resisted.54
Certainly, if Stevens writes ‘Secrete us in reality. It is there / My ora-
tor’, this is deft poetic rhetoric: an ironic inversion of section v where ‘the
actual’ is summoned ‘[w]ithout a word of rhetoric – there it is’. Stevens’
reader is persuaded that what ‘is there’ really exists because of the anaph-
ora ‘Secrete us in reality’. But the deliberate lack of punctuation between
‘It is there’ and ‘My orator’ also suggests such evocation is itself the ‘ora-
tor’. Saying ‘it is there’ is the source of whatever rhetoric ‘Repetitions’
practises. Had Stevens written ‘It is there, / My orator’ the comma might
suggest an apostrophized ‘external’ orator. But ‘Repetitions of a Young
Captain’ shares with ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ the conviction that a
single word – ‘reality’, ‘there’ – can inspire the imagination to abstract
meditation. This stance reflects the broader sweep of Stevens’ career in
which a specialized idiom is largely jettisoned post-1945 as a more confi-
dent abstraction orchestrates the poet’s work. But let us turn to ‘The Pure
Good of Theory’ to see the pragmatic benefits of such conceptual think-
ing as a source of poetic inspiration.
50
Blanchot, ‘The Essential Solitude’, 23.
51
52
CPP, 661. 53 Ibid., 660–1. 54 Ibid., 334.
6.3 Pr ag m at ic a b s t r ac t ion v . m e ta phor : ‘Th e Pu r e

G o od of Th e or y ’ (1945) a n d m a c b e t h
‘The Pure Good of Theory’ was published as part of a group entitled ‘New
Poems’ in a Voices issue devoted to Stevens.55 The new poems appeared
alongside selections from Stevens’ earlier works including Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction.56 The most recent poems were presumably submitted as
representative of Stevens’ early 1945 poetry. What distinguishes ‘The Pure
Good of Theory’ from the other 1945 poems, however, is the confidence
with which Stevens forges a maturing abstract aesthetic. The poem has
none of the retrospection of ‘Paisant Chronicle’ (‘Paisant’ also appearing
in the Voices issue), and, despite its title’s emphasis on ‘theory’, does not
follow ‘Description Without Place’ in trumpeting an aesthetic concept.
Unlike ‘Paisant Chronicle’ and ‘Description Without Place’, ‘The Pure
Good of Theory’ also resists self-consciously referring to Stevens’ early
1940s poems. It has no interest, for example, in questioning the dated
‘major man’.57 In 1946 the poet would highlight his desire to discover,
as one title quips, ‘A Completely New Set of Objects’.58 But in early 1945
Stevens was already experimenting, if not with new themes, then with
a maturing aesthetic – one that had absorbed abstraction rather than
merely announcing the arrival of ‘the abstract’.
‘The Pure Good of Theory’ also transforms items of Stevens’ early
1940s fascination – sound, distance, speech, hearing, oratory, music, the
‘beyond’ – into tokens informing the texture and theatrical density of
the poem. This breaks new ground, as Stevens discovered he no longer
required the master-vocabulary of ‘Notes’. Without constituting a sur-
rogate idiom, such ‘terms’ take on a subtler function in a poetry suspi-
cious of domineering or ‘literary’ rubrics. Where in ‘Notes’ Stevensian
terms achieve metaphysical or ontological imperatives, ‘The Pure Good of
Theory’ questions privileging any one vocabulary, however abstract (even
querying ‘the desire to believe in a metaphor’).59 Stevens’ imagining of an
abstract ‘poetry’ enables the poet to scrutinize the workings of metaphor
itself. ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ not only embodies the positive claims
this study makes for abstraction, it testifies to the pragmatic benefits of an
abstract aesthetic which Stevens only fully realized in his final decade.
‘The Pure Good of Theory’ pivots on a battle between abstraction and
metaphor, a contest informed by deft allusion to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The
Stevens, ‘New Poems’ Voices.

55
Edelstein, Wallace Stevens, 219.
56
See CPP, 293. 58 Ibid., 307.

57
Ibid., 291.
59
poem eventually reconciles metaphor to abstraction, a strategy that rescues
Stevens from conceiving an inhumanly abstracted verse. In substantiating
these arguments, I touch on debates surrounding ‘metaphor’ and refine the
relationship between creating metaphors and thinking abstractly.
‘All the Preludes to Felicity’ plays with various metaphors for time. A
‘prelude’ literally comes before ‘play’ (from ludere ‘to play’) as a musical or
literary introduction, especially ‘the introductory part of a poem’ (OED).
Perhaps Stevens also alludes to The Prelude, with its ‘spots of time’.60
Stevens’ poem introduces the mind’s tendency to think metaphorically
and to call on metaphor to protect itself from time:
It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.
Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
It is someone walking rapidly in the street.
The reader by the window has finished his book
And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.
(CPP, 289)
Because the mind ‘knows it is destroyed by time’, Stevens implies meta-

phor (‘Time is a horse’) creates the self-protective illusion that the mind
can conquer, or at least be reconciled to, time: ‘The mind sits listening
and hears it pass.’ Likewise, where time becomes ‘someone walking rap-
idly in the street’, the metaphor enables Stevens’ ‘reader’ to appreciate ‘the
lateness of the sounds’.
This focuses the ameliorating effect of metaphor. ‘Felicity’ not only
indicates a happy state or ‘thing causing happiness’, but denotes a ‘happy
faculty of expression’ or ‘well-chosen phrase’ (OED). Even if ‘time’ is ‘a
horse / Without a rider on a road at night’ – which connotes unruly deter-
mination – the mind conceives time’s progress through metaphor because
felicitous expressions are palliative. The mind cannot be cured of the real-
ization that it will be destroyed by time. But its ability to represent time
metaphorically diverts agency therapeutically back to the mind itself,
enabling a form of intellectual resilience.
Palliative metaphor is, however, abandoned for abstract conception.
A ‘capable being’ is proposed and created as a figure more capable than
metaphor in defending the mind from time:
60
See Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805 version, Book Eleventh, lines 257ff: 428.
Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind:
A retardation of its battering,
A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like
A shadow in mid-earth… If we propose
A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,
And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,
A form, then, protected from the battering, may
Mature: A capable being may replace
Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.
(CPP, 290)
Stevens’ metaphors – the ‘horse grotesquely taut’, the ephemeral ‘walker

like / A shadow in mid-earth’ – are themselves suspended in an ellip-
sis which implies metaphor’s limitations. That is, the horse remains ‘taut’
and the walker as insubstantial as a ‘shadow’ because the mind realizes
metaphors cannot themselves ward off the ‘battering’ of time.
Stevens’ ‘platonic person’ is abstract.61 He is impossibly ‘free from time’
but constitutes a more useful preserve for the imaginative mind. Note how
agency is given to the ‘we’ who propose the figure, who must ‘imagine
for him the speech he cannot speak’. Rather than promulgate traditional
metaphors for time, ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ re-invests the mind with
abstract creative power. This ‘capable being’ may ‘replace / Dark horse
and walker walking rapidly’ both on the level of replacing these figures in
the poem and on the abstract scale of withstanding time itself.
Nevertheless, ‘All the Preludes to Felicity’ remains true to the playful-
ness of its title. The novel felicity of replacing metaphor with an abstract
‘capable being’ is scrutinized as the desire to conceive by metaphor proves
insurmountable. Time becomes a comical Chronos (‘Old Father Time’ or
Death as ‘hooded enemy’) who, with beguiling magic, reinstates meta-
phor as the natural point of reference:
Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,
The inimical music, the enchantered space
In which the enchanted preludes have their place.
(CPP, 290)
This is tongue-in-cheek. Unusual for this period is the rhyming coup-

let, reminiscent of a closing Shakespearean scene featuring a Puck or
Ariel. Three metaphors – ‘hooded enemy’, ‘inimical music’, ‘enchan-
tered space’ – affirm how metaphor is central to conceiving time. The
For a more ‘Platonic reading’, see Christoph Irmscher, ‘Theory as Mask in Wallace Stevens’ WSJ
61
16.2 (1992), 123–35.

stanza also displays the poem’s overall paronomasia – as in ‘enchantered’
and ‘enchanted’ – established earlier with ‘time’/‘mind’, ‘beats’/‘breast’,
‘breathing’/‘beating’. This trope – most evident in ‘metamorphosis’ and
‘metaphor’ – mimics the oscillation the poem itself effects between meta-
phor and abstraction, for in the rear of any abstract thought is the very
‘desire to believe in a metaphor’. Metaphor makes palpable what ‘pure’
abstraction cannot render. That metaphor metamorphoses is what the
poem’s paronomasia reflects.
Although Stevens’ horse disappears from ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ –
replaced by a ‘capable being’ – the poet would not forget the image in
‘Farewell Without a Guitar’ (1954). This short poem provides insight into
how ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ treats the possibilities and limits of meta-
phor. It too features a horse ‘without a rider’:
Spring’s bright paradise has come to this.
Now the thousand-leaved green falls to the ground.
Farewell, my days.
The thousand-leaved red
Comes to this thunder of light
As its autumnal terminal –
A Spanish storm,
A wide, still Aragonese,
In which the horse walks home without a rider,
Head down. The reflections and repetitions,
The blows and buffets of fresh senses
Of the rider that was,
Are a final construction,
Like glass and sun, of male reality
And of that other and her desire.
(CPP, 461–2)
This retrospective poem focuses the benefits of abstract meditation. The

horse becomes a metaphor for not possessing a metaphor. It represents
nothing of itself and without a rider is bereft of significance. An abstract
mind, however, looks through the horse to ‘the rider that was’ and con-
jures for itself ‘a final construction’. The riderless horse may be a cour-
ier without a message, but the mind conceiving what the rider represents
revels in the abstract power which delivers the ‘blows and buffets of fresh
senses’. Even an ‘autumnal terminal’ is no longer terminal when abstrac-
tion rekindles ‘reflections and repetitions’. The poem heralds, therefore,
an abstract imagination that, as with the soldier who ‘Constantly […]
steps away’ in ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’, can create a kind of per-
petual present, resistant to time and to the absence of metaphor.62
Stevens’ horse ‘without a rider’ also echoes ‘The Noble Rider’. Chapter
4 noted how in the opening of that lecture Plato’s ‘charioteer’ represents a
figure turned ‘antiquated and rustic’, seemingly irrelevant to contempor-
ary concerns.63 What follows is an early insight into Stevens’ mature sense
of abstraction:
Suppose we try, now, to construct the figure of […] a possible poet. He cannot
be a charioteer traversing vacant space, however ethereal. He must have lived all
of the last two thousand years, and longer […] He will have thought that Virgil,
Dante, Shakespeare, Milton placed themselves in remote lands and in remote
ages; that their men and women were the dead – and not the dead lying in the
earth, but the dead still living in their remote lands and in their remote ages […]
[H]is own measure as a poet […] is the measure of his power to abstract himself,
and to withdraw with him into his abstraction the reality on which the lovers
of truth insist. He must be able to abstract himself and also to abstract reality,
which he does by placing it in his imagination. He knows perfectly that he can-
not be too noble a rider, that he cannot rise up loftily in helmet and armor on a
horse of imposing bronze.64
Note the parity between Stevens’ ‘possible poet’ and the rider. Just as ‘The
Noble Rider’ concerns the abstract construction of a ‘possible poet’ as
modern rider, ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ shares with ‘Farewell Without
a Guitar’ the ability to create abstract figures substituting for antiquated,
deceased, or merely absent riders: a ‘platonic person’, a ‘capable being’.
That Stevens’ ‘possible poet’ lives forever and has contact with the dead
‘still living in their remote lands and in their remote ages’ also prefigures
how ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ confronts time; especially how abstract
thought is negatively and positively timeless. Shakespeare connotes an
abstract timelessness for Stevens in ‘The Noble Rider’ just as the subse-
quent allusion to Macbeth in ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ conjoins time
and abstract meditation.
‘The Pure Good of Theory’, like the ‘final construction’ of ‘Farewell
Without a Guitar’, aims for a ‘final need’ and ‘final access’.65 What should
be observed here is the resonance Stevens’ riderless horse attains in the
1945 poem and later work. The image in ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ stands
for time, but also anticipates ‘Farewell Without A Guitar’ in serving as a
metaphor for inadequate metaphor. ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ renders
its horse ‘grotesquely taut’, its significance stretched. But this metaphor
62
See CPP, 272. 63
Ibid., 643. 64
Ibid., 656–7. 65
Ibid., 292.
cannot do the job accredited to the ‘capable being’, whose presence not
only replaces the ‘horse’, it also decelerates the poem, mimetically rep-
resenting how such an abstract figure becomes a ‘retardation’ of time’s
battery. Stevens mimics delaying time by ‘breaking’ his own feigned
stress-pattern, a mock-tetrameter, with ‘A retardation of its battering’:
Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind:
A retardation of its battering,
A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like
A shadow in mid-earth… If we propose
A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,
Actually, the poem resists both metre and metaphor in conceiving an
abstract ‘capable being’. The ‘platonic person’ is not an impalpable idea,
but a practical stalling device: resisting both the march of time and the
movement of Stevens’ feigned metre.
The ‘platonic person’ also represents pragmatic abstraction. The point of
conceiving an idea (or ideal) is not realization exactly. Rather, such medi-
tation effects a change in current practice or initiates creation. Gustav
Bergmann conceives an ‘ideal language’ not because such a language can
be constructed but because it enables reflection on the language philoso-
phers use to discuss ‘problems’. Bergmann ascribes three conditions for
his ‘ideal language’: ‘(1) Every nonphilosophical descriptive proposition
can in principle be transcribed into it; (2) No unreconstructed philosoph-
ical one can; (3) All philosophical propositions can be reconstructed as
statements about its syntax […] and interpretation.’ 66 If these conditions
were fulfilled, it is arguable any proposition need be formulated in trad-
itional terms. This has the pragmatic effect of questioning how philoso-
phers formulate problems in practice.
As Rorty explains in The Linguistic Turn:
To see the importance of the suggestion that such a language might be con-
structed, one should note the implications of the first two conditions alone.
Suppose that there were a language in which we could say everything else
we wanted to say, but in which we could not express any philosophical the-
sis, nor ask any philosophical questions. This in itself would be sufficient to
show that a certain traditional view of philosophy was false – namely, the
view that common sense, and/or the sciences, present us with philosophical
problems[.]67
Gustav Bergmann, Meaning and Existence (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 43.
66
Richard M. Rorty, ‘Metaphilosophical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy’ in The Linguistic

67
Turn ed. Richard M. Rorty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, [1967], 1992), 6.
The operative ‘theory’ of Stevens’ poem is that abstract meditation enables
similar changes in practice/conception. Proposing a ‘platonic person’ effects
mental resilience to time: ‘A form, then, protected from the battering, may /
Mature’. By imagining ‘for him the speech he cannot speak’, Stevens’
‘we’ achieves a therapeutic, mental defence-mechanism. This is pragmatic
abstraction. As William James defended his 1906 portrait of philoso-
phy: ‘The picture I have given is indeed monstrously over-simplified and
rude. But like all abstractions, it will prove to have its use.’ 68
‘Description of a Platonic Person’ indirectly illustrates Rorty’s and
James’ points through its abstract ‘being’. As observed, when composing
‘Description Without Place’ – not long after ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ –
Stevens wrote to Feo: ‘[T]he power of literature is that in describing the
world it creates what it describes’.69 What distinguishes ‘The Pure Good
of Theory’ from ‘Description Without Place’, however, is that the former
really does harness descriptive power to create a world. ‘Description
Without Place’ may affirm its underlying premise that ‘we live in the
description of a place and not in the place itself’.70 But it is relatively inef-
fectual in describing figurative places, especially mental terrains. A ten-
sion, perhaps deliberate, persists in ‘Description Without Place’ between
insisting that description amounts to creation – even to ‘describing a
world’ – whilst also that that poem’s descriptive practices avoid evoking
places, literal or metaphorical.
Certainly, ‘Description of a Platonic Person’ creates an idealist blend of
place and description that neutralizes a distinction between the ‘real’ and
‘imaginary’:
Then came Brazil to nourish the emaciated
Romantic with dreams of her avoirdupois, green glade
Of serpents like z rivers simmering,
Green glade and holiday hotel and world
Of the future, in which the memory had gone
From everything, flying the flag of the nude,
The flag of the nude above the holiday hotel.
(CPP, 290)
Verdant Brazil and the colour green represent the ‘actual’ from which
an idealist mind projects ‘reality’. The world nourishes mental depiction,
otherwise the imagination attenuates to an ‘emaciated Romantic’. As for
68
William James, Pragmatism ed. Bruce Kuklick (Cambridge and Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1981), 19.
69
L, 495. 70 Ibid., 494.
Wordsworth and Coleridge, flights of fancy have no place in robust imagina-
tive thought. The ‘holiday hotel’ can only come to life if, as in ‘Arrival at the
Waldorf’, it is set against (or in) the ‘green and actual Guatemala’.71
The hold abstraction has, then, over re-creating an ‘actual world’ rests
upon idealist interaction between mind and environment.72 ‘Brazil’ and
‘green’ reality possess ‘avoirdupois’: a specific system of weights, but, more
generally, ‘bodily weight’ or ‘heaviness’ (OED). Abstraction paradoxically
supports mental phenomena by becoming a ‘thing / Of weight, on which
the weightless rests’.73 But what anchors Stevens’ figure in a pragmatic aes-
thetic is his sheer ordinariness. Playfully, Stevens’ ‘platonic person’ is made
real by re-enacting the process in which a ‘capable being’ is conceived.
Thus, the ‘platonic person’ is not Stevens’ ‘capable being’. ‘Description of a
Platonic Person’ mediates the ‘platonic person’ as a human figure who re-
enacts the job of imagining a ‘capable being’. Like Joyce’s Bloom or HCE,
or the ‘fictive man’ at his café table in ‘Paisant Chronicle’, it is vital this
person be ordinary, a part of what the later Stevens calls the ‘normal’ as
the poet approaches a ‘mastery of reality’ or ‘mastery of life’.74
This ‘real’ figure certainly appears quotidian:
But there was one invalid in that green glade
And beneath that handkerchief drapeau, severe,
Signal, a character out of solitude,
Who was what people had been and still were,
Who lay in bed on the west wall of the sea,
Ill of a question like a malady,
Ill of a constant question in his thought,
Unhappy about the sense of happiness.
Was it that – a sense and beyond intelligence?
Could the future rest on a sense and be beyond
Intelligence? On what does the present rest?
71
CPP, 219.
72
L, 292. Admittedly, pragmatism diverges from extreme idealism. Pragmatists acknowledge the
independent existence of the physical world, which nominally queries the pragmatist argument
that ‘reality’ depends upon choices of vocabulary. However, as Rorty argues, ‘[t]he pragmatist
meets this point by differentiating himself from the idealist. He agrees that there is such a thing
as brute physical resistance […] But he sees no way of transferring this nonlinguistic brutal-
ity to facts, to the truth of sentences […] [C]ausation is not under a description but explan-
ation is’, Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Vol. i (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 81. This is similar to John Dewey’s point that one ‘cannot compare exist-
ence and meaning; they are disparate […] There is no common measure of physical existence and
conscious experience because the latter is the only measure there is for the former’, Philosophy
and Civilization (New York: Putnam’s, 1931), 6.
73
CPP, 694.
74
See ibid., 294, 397ff., 443–4; L, 459, 521; see also L, 518–19 and Chapter 7.
This platonic person discovered a soul in the world
And studied it in his holiday hotel.
He was a Jew from Europe or might have been.
(CPP, 290–1)
This ‘platonic person’ is not the metaphysical ‘walker’ ‘like / A shadow

in mid-earth’. His discovery of a ‘soul in the world’ implies the creation
of another ‘capable being’, partaking of the same abstraction the poem
initially proposes for reader and poet alike. Crucially, the ‘platonic per-
son’ protects Stevens’ poem from meaningless abstraction, anchoring its
‘he’ palpably, for abstraction also has the negative power of conceiving
a ‘world / Of the future, in which the memory had gone / From every-
thing’, where the ‘green glade’, ‘holiday hotel’ and ‘flag of the nude’ signify
an alarmingly perpetual present. This disturbing prospect is dissimilar
from the soldier who constantly steps away in ‘Repetitions of a Young
Captain’, if superficially analogous. ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ fears an
excessive abstraction which misleadingly claims to have destroyed time
rather than realizing the advantages Proust’s Marcel discovers in becom-
ing an ‘extra-temporal’ being: where unconscious memories are moment-
arily abstracted to retrieve time lost.75
The ‘platonic person’ ‘was what people had been and still were’. Not
only is he placed in a palpable locale – lying ‘in bed on the west wall of
the sea’ – he also conceives time contemporaneously. In 1945 the phrase
‘He was a Jew from Europe or might have been’ had astonishing reson-
ance. The ambiguity of ‘or might have been’ opens the door for abstract
creation – he could be a Jew, Hindu or any other figure – but also refers
the reader to refugees real or denied for whom the past, present and future
are or ‘might have been’ of pressing concern: ‘On what does the present
rest?’
Stevens emphasizes abstraction’s power to obliterate the past by shap-
ing these tokens of the present into quasi-proper nouns: Green Glade,
Holiday Hotel. Through their anaphora and often without definite art-
icles, ‘green glade’ and ‘holiday hotel’ tower over ‘Description of a Platonic
Person’. Even ‘the flag of the nude’, identified by its own definite articles,
flies over the poem as emblem of the desirous present and the pressure
abstraction wields in defending the mind from time. Although a ‘world
of the future’ is conceived, the pregnancy of the past is denied. If history
is, as Stephen Dedalus remarks, a nightmare from which we are trying
to awake, ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ imagines replacing that nightmare
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 179.
75
with abstracted ‘dreams’ where the future is reducible to comfortable
nouns: green glade, holiday hotel, flag of the nude.76
But Stevens’ poem also creates an intermediary between metaphor and
abstraction. The ‘platonic person’ is neither too connected with the world
to be dangerously abstract nor metaphorical exactly. Unlike ‘Brazil’ or the
‘emaciated Romantic’, the ‘platonic person’ cannot be read metaphoric-
ally, other than as a refracted metaphor for the very abstraction operative
in the poem. Instead, he embodies, or symbolizes, the abstract medita-
tion proposed in section i and re-enacted by the ‘platonic person’ himself
in section ii. What differentiates a symbol from a metaphor? The cruci-
fix symbolizes Christianity; it is only when Christians ‘bear the cross’
that the crucifix becomes metaphorical. Perhaps, then, it is more accurate
to describe the ‘platonic person’ as a symbolic rather than metaphorical
figure. The problem with this distinction, however, is that boundaries
between symbol and metaphor – or the literal and metaphorical – are
context-dependent. But I return to the difficulties of defining metaphor,
especially the roles of metaphor in poetry, later.
The ‘platonic person’ focuses the relationship between metaphor and
abstraction. Metaphor can ‘describe things that have no literal name’
or render ‘complex abstractions easy to understand through concrete
analogies’.77 ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ scrutinizes this dialectic where
inherited metaphors pressure the poet into cliché, but where abstract con-
ception enables new metaphors, encouraging the mind to conceive with-
out immediate reference to a predetermined or inherited context (even
although one originally abstracts from an existing context). In fact, with-
standing the pressure of the inherited – represented by the march of time
and the past in Stevens’ poem – quickens the poet’s attempt to re-construe
‘the real’ through rejuvenating metaphor.
Such a strategy is similar to the function of ‘the first idea’ in ‘Notes’: ‘If
you take the varnish and dirt of generations off a picture, you see it in its
first idea. If you think about the world without its varnish and dirt, you are
a thinker of the first idea.’ 78 As Coleridge insists: ‘The word, ’Iδεα, in its ori-
ginal sense […] represented the visual abstraction of a distant object, when
we see the whole without distinguishing the parts.’ 79 However, an idealist
mind returns the whole to the context of its parts, because abstract vision
enables reconstituting phenomena. This is how new metaphors are born.
76
See Joyce, Ulysses: The 1922 Text, 34.
77
Preminger et al., The New Princeton Encyclopedia, 761.
78
L, 426–7. 79 BL, I, Ch. 5, 97.
Section iii, ‘Fire-Monsters in the Milky Brain’, ironizes the mind’s
dependence on metaphor in conceiving ‘reality’:
Man, that is not born of woman but of air,
That comes here in the solar chariot,
Like rhetoric in a narration of the eye –
We knew one parent must have been divine,
Adam of beau regard, from fat Elysia,
Whose mind malformed this morning metaphor,
While all the leaves leaked gold. His mind made morning,
As he slept. He woke in a metaphor: this was
A metamorphosis of paradise,
Malformed, the world was paradise malformed…
(CPP, 291)
‘Man, that is not born of woman’ alludes to Macbeth’s weird sisters and
their conjuring of the Second Apparition (‘for none of woman born /
Shall harm Macbeth’).80 Macbeth is, of course, a literal interpreter, unable
to anticipate the figurative narrative of Macduff’s birth. But if ‘Fire-
Monsters’ manipulates the mind’s tendency to think in metaphor, what
might Stevens’ allusion to Macbeth’s literalism suggest?
‘Man, that is not born of woman but of air’ conjures an abstraction.
A man born of air can neither be literal nor, at least here, metaphorical.
Stevens’ next line ironizes the desire to render this abstraction understand-
able through metaphor: ‘That comes here in the solar chariot’. The ‘solar
chariot’ is an obvious metaphor for the sun, evoking Phoebus. But the
poem’s abstractions resist metaphor. Once the abstract man occupies his
‘solar chariot’, he is subjected to a belittling simile: ‘[l]ike rhetoric in a nar-
ration of the eye’. Stevens’ mid-1940s mistrust of ‘rhetoric’ surfaces here
again. Rhetoric ‘in a narration of the eye’ is superfluous, adding a ven-
eer to the story the eye conveys. Similarly, the ‘solar chariot’ reduces the
abstraction to a cliché: a hackneyed metaphor from canonical literature.
What the ironic allusion to Macbeth implies is that neither literal read-
ing nor clichéd metaphor provides abstract ideas with weight or substance.
If, like Macbeth, we read the man ‘of air’ literally, we dismiss the figure as
make-believe. If, like Macduff, we read the ‘man’ figuratively, the abstrac-
tion requires further metaphor to come alive; and risks only partially com-
ing alive if cliché (the ‘solar chariot’) steps into the breach. The Witches are
similarly incorporeal, like the Apparitions they conjure. Macbeth replies
CW, 4.1.96–7: 991.
80
to Banquo’s ‘Whither are they vanished?’: ‘Into the air, and what seemed
corporal / Melted as breath into the wind’.81 Likewise, Stevens’ man of ‘air’
requires appropriate metaphors to take form. That it is ‘Man, that is not
born of woman’ and not an identified abstract ‘man’ (such as the man of
‘Chocorua to Its Neighbor’) renders the figure importantly insubstantial.82
But the allusion to Macbeth opens other inter-textual avenues.
Shakespeare’s play and Stevens’ poem are both obsessed with time. Time
also occasions Stevens’ battle between abstraction and metaphor, the ‘cap-
able being’ becoming the ‘form’ that protects the mind from recalling its
finitude. Lady Macbeth goads Macbeth to seize the opportunity Duncan’s
visit has landed him: ‘To beguile the time, / Look like the time; bear wel-
come in your eye, / […] But be the serpent under’t’.83 Supposing inertia on
Macbeth’s side, Lady Macbeth also taunts her husband’s ‘timing’: ‘When
you durst do it, then you were a man […] Nor time nor place / Did then
adhere, and yet you would make both’.84 Having murdered Duncan,
Macbeth himself ambivalently comments, ‘Had I but died an hour before
this chance / I had lived a blessèd time’, and in the close of the play, hearing
of Lady Macbeth’s own demise, observes ‘She should have died hereafter /
There would have been a time for such a word’.85 Stevens’ poem echoes
Macbeth substantially, if surreptitiously. Macbeth’s metaphor for life from
the ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ speech – ‘Life’s but a walk-
ing shadow’ – is echoed in ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ by ‘the beating of
time’, which is conjured as a ‘walker like / A shadow in mid-earth’.86
Stevens probably did not consult Macbeth when he wrote this poem.
But he had absorbed enough of Shakespeare’s play for it to take hold
of his imagination, consciously or otherwise, during the poem’s cre-
ation (Shakespeare also hovers, of course, in ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ and
‘Description Without Place’). My concern here is how temporal percep-
tion actuates Stevens’ dissection of metaphor and abstraction. The ‘solar
chariot’ is a ‘morning metaphor’ in heralding the advent of day and, iron-
ically, in being a metaphor from the beginnings (or ‘morning’) of Western
literature. But for all the ‘metamorphosis’ metaphor effects – ‘He woke in
a metaphor’ – Stevens’ poem resists metaphor’s ‘malformations’. On the
one hand, the poem celebrates the world as ‘paradise malformed’, neither
lost nor regained. On the other, it resists certain metaphors as deriving
from ‘mind[s] malformed’. When ‘rhetoric’ interrupts a ‘narration of the
81
Ibid., 1.3.78–80: 978. 82 See CPP, 264. 83
CW, 1.5.62–5: 980.
84
Ibid., 1.7.49, 51–2: 981.
85
Ibid., 2.3.90–1: 984; 5.5.16–17: 997.
86
Ibid., 5.5.23: 997–8.
eye’, it is, as Macbeth himself asserts, a ‘tale / Told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’.87
But rejecting ineffective metaphor offers no viable alternative to ‘the
desire to believe in a metaphor’:
Now, closely the ear attends the varying
Of this precarious music, the change of key
Not quite detected at the moment of change
And, now, it attends the difficult difference.
To say the solar chariot is junk
Is not a variation but an end.
Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor
Is still to stick to the contents of the mind
And the desire to believe in a metaphor.
It is to stick to the nicer knowledge of
Belief, that what it believes in is not true.
(CPP, 291)
Music – and, thereby, time – becomes an ironic metaphor for the poem’s
attempt to discover a sonorous ‘moment’. Stevens does not simply dispute
hackneyed metaphor – ‘the solar chariot is junk’ – but the Pyrrhic vic-
tory of rejecting outworn metaphor, resulting in a fatal ‘end’ to imagina-
tive thought rather than fecund ‘variation’. Simultaneously, the fanciful
embrace of metaphor (‘to speak of the whole world as metaphor’) is simi-
larly self-defeating, as if ‘to stick to the contents of the mind’, its ‘nicer
knowledge of / Belief’, represents evasion from truth.
Note also how this ‘precarious music’ is susceptible to the timing of
Stevens’ grasp of sound and rhythm. Following the elliptical dots in ‘the
world was paradise malformed…’ Stevens’ ‘Now’ comprises a staccato
attack which then describes what the poem itself effects:
Malformed, the world was paradise malformed…
Now, closely the ear attends the varying
Of this precarious music, the change of key
Not quite detected at the moment of change
And, now, it attends the difficult difference.
(CPP, 291)
That ‘Now’ is itself a ‘change of key / Not quite detected at the moment
of change’ because the reader cannot be sure, following the ellipsis, if
the ‘Now’ is a new theme or, musically and thematically speaking, the
Ibid., 5.5.25–27: 998.
87
continuation of another ‘variation’. Where the poem reiterates ‘And, now,
it [the ear] attends’ the reader senses a musical strategy, preparing for the
‘difficult difference’ concerning the ‘solar chariot’ and metaphor at large.
But ‘Fire-Monsters’ is not only mimetic, it is doubly self-reflexive. First,
the poem’s ‘precarious music’ is a metaphor for the dangers of metaphor-
building. Second, it is also part of the poem’s own handling of metaphor.
The discussion of the ‘solar chariot’ has a forebodingly abrupt sound: ‘To
say the solar chariot is junk / Is not a variation but an end.’ In other
words, not only does music serve as a metaphor for the problems of met-
aphor-creation; the poem takes that metaphor and visits its own ‘precar-
ious music’ on ‘The Pure Good of Theory’.
Sonorous play defines the poem’s final contest between metaphor and
abstraction. Stevens achieves a marriage of sound, theme and technique
that his other 1940s poems – ones equally interested in ‘sound’ – rarely
acquire. Sound establishes the bridge between abstraction and metaphor
that ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ cannot ultimately evade. Tellingly, the
poem’s sub-titles mark this battle. ‘Fire-Monsters in the Milky Brain’, how-
ever enigmatic, is a title rife with metaphor. But the poem’s concluding
section is simply ‘Dry Birds Are Fluttering in Blue Leaves’. Despite Stevens’
colour symbolism, it is almost possible to read this title as a literal state-
ment, or at least as an abstraction without metaphor. Appropriately, Section
iv ‘argues’ that abstraction is involved in every rendering of ‘reality’:
It is never the thing but the version of the thing:
The fragrance of the woman not her self,
Her self in her manner not the solid block,
The day in its color not perpending time,
Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord,
The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.
(CPP, 292)
Every ‘version’ of a thing rests on abstracting some part of an ‘actual’ phe-

nomenon in order to conceive it: the ‘fragrance of the woman not her
self’, day as embodied in its ‘color’ (not as a sign of ‘time’), time in the
‘blows and buffets’, as ‘Farewell Without a Guitar’ would say, of ‘its wea-
ther’. Stevens envisages an infinite regress where every phenomenon is ren-
dered by some quality attributable to it by resemblance and association.
Consistent with an idealist construction of ‘reality’, ‘weather’ is a matter of
words and words themselves are distinguished through ‘sounds of sound’.
But Stevens does more than illustrate a ‘variation’ on Kant. Conceiving
the ‘day in its color not perpending time’ creates an abstraction without
time’s reduction of this imaginative projection to a finite context. Stevens
seemingly draws here on Aesthetics and Psychology and Mauron’s insistence
that art arrests present perception.88 Mauron also argues that abstraction
resides ‘in the domain of the senses’.89 Stevens makes a similar affirm-
ation. To ‘perpend’ is to ponder, and, etymologically speaking, pondering
involves weight (from ponderare, ‘to weigh’). As with section ii’s ‘avoirdu-
pois’, abstraction rubs off the burden of unnecessary thought to construct
the imaginative haven where the ephemeral, or ethereal, gains sub-
stance: ‘it becomes a thing / Of weight, on which the weightless rests’.90
However, like section ii, the point of this power is its effect on the ‘actual’.
Abstraction should not, for Stevens, create another world adjacent or par-
allel to time, the weather, the fragrance of women and so on. Rather, it
gives weight on a perceptual level to the ‘actual’.
No sooner than abstraction re-surfaces, however, metaphor re-exerts
its hold on Stevens’ poem. I argued earlier that metaphors help abstrac-
tions become mediated. What is comical about ‘Dry Birds’, however, is
that the metaphors inundating the poem’s close do not render abstract
ideas concrete. ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ closes with a sonorous explo-
sion in which metaphor is heaped on metaphor, but where, as the poem
quips, everything ‘remains the same’. It is as though Stevens’ poem were
inscribing its own ‘ferocious alphabets’ simply to demonstrate the beguil-
ing properties of metaphor itself:
These devastations are the divertissements
Of a destroying spiritual that digs-a-dog,
Whines in its hole for puppies to come see,
Springs outward, being large, and, in the dust,
Being small, inscribes ferocious alphabets,
Flies like a bat expanding as it flies,
Until its wings bear off night’s middle witch;
And yet remains the same, the beast of light,
Groaning in half-exploited gutturals
The need of its element, the final need
Of final access to its element –
Of access like the page of a wiggy book,
Touched suddenly by the universal flare
For a moment, a moment in which we read and repeat
The eloquences of light’s faculties.
(CPP, 292)
See Mauron, Aesthetics and Psychology, 31.

88
Ibid., 19. 90 CPP, 694.

89
These are devastations indeed. In this alliterative and assonantal jumble
each metaphor becomes its own divertissement: a ‘divertissement’ is a
short ballet between musical acts, hence a diversion or interlude (OED).
The poem continues the musical metaphor for the problems of metaphor-
building with a diverting if ‘destroying spiritual’ (implying African-
American song).
These last five stanzas comprise, in fact, one introspective sentence,
which for all its expansive imagery – springing ‘outward’, the bat
‘expanding as it flies’ – draws the reader into a Charybdis of metaphor.
Syntactically, Stevens’ ‘devastations’ are the ‘divertissements’ that com-
prise the ‘spiritual’ which, combined with the poem’s paronomasia, is itself
metamorphosed repeatedly – becoming dog-like (‘digs-a-dog’), flying
‘like a bat’ – only to create other flagrantly metaphorical figures: ‘night’s
middle witch’, ‘the beast of light’. But in this saturation of metaphor it
is intoxicatingly hard to envisage the abstraction or idea each metaphor
might have embodied or resembled.
Does the end of ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ represent, as Macbeth
says of life, ‘a tale […] full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’?
Hardly. Stevens deliberately pushes metaphor to its limits. He prolepti-
cally gestures to what ‘Three Academic Pieces’ describes as the ‘gradus ad
Metaphoram’: where every ‘resemblance’ approaches an ultimate abstrac-
tion, the metaphor of metaphors, or what ‘The Pure Good’ calls a ‘final
access’.91 The poem implies that in the rear of metaphor-building is the
desire for an abstract telos. Just as no abstraction can attain vivacity with-
out metaphor’s aid, the desire for metaphor is part of what Stevens calls
‘the final need’, the attempt to create an ultimate abstraction, be it God,
Truth or Reality. For the philosophical pragmatist – and in Stevens’ prag-
matist phases – this is an intriguing, even nonsensical desire. Stevens’
simile for that ‘final access’ (‘Of access like the page of a wiggy book’)
implies a fusty, fustian philosophical enterprise worthy of parody, like
the perfect page from the book of a venerable ‘beard’ (Stevens mocks
‘beards’ in ‘Extracts from Addresses’ as well as ‘wigs’ specifically in ‘Banal
Sojourn’, there as earwigs and possibly legal ‘wigs’).92
I noted earlier how classical rhetoric associates metaphor with ‘trans-
ference’. Early twentieth-century accounts of the trope argued that meta-
phor not only transfers points of resemblance between things, it creates
new meanings.93 More recently, Davidson’s contrary insistence that
Ibid., 693. 92 Ibid., 229, 49.

91
See Preminger et al., The New Princeton Encyclopedia, 761.

93
metaphorical meaning differs in no important regard from literal mean-
ing has accrued currency among literary critics. Davidson’s 1978 ‘What
Metaphors Mean’ has attracted wide attention, as have other essays cham-
pioned by contemporary Davidsonians such as Reed Way Dasenbrock.94
A relatively recent article concerning Stevens, Davidson and metaphor
borrows Davidson’s view of metaphor to read Stevens and interprets
Davidson’s departure from the so-called ‘fusion’ theorists.95 ‘The Pure
Good of Theory’, unsurprisingly, can accommodate Davidson’s view of
metaphor and views contra Davidson, for example Nelson Goodman’s
arguments for the trope. I want to focus on this divergence of view because
it assists in understanding the close of Stevens’ poem and its treatment of
metaphor and abstraction.
Davidson argues: ‘metaphors mean what the words, in their most lit-
eral interpretation mean, and nothing more’. He challenges the idea that
‘a metaphor has, in addition to its literal sense or meaning, another sense
or meaning’.96 Davidson’s interest lies not in reducing the magic metaphor
entails, but in critiquing the notion that metaphor possesses additional
‘content to be captured’. Rather, metaphor’s job is to make readers/listen-
ers pay attention to its own powers: ‘[A]ll the while we are in fact focusing
on what metaphor makes us notice’. For Davidson, ‘there is no limit to
what a metaphor calls to our attention’.97
Goodman, by contrast, dispatches what he calls ‘the confusing word
“meaning”’ and, contra Davidson, asserts that words and sentences vary
in literal and metaphorical ‘application’: ‘Metaphor […] involves with-
drawing a term or rather a schema of terms from an initial literal appli-
cation and applying it in a new way to effect a new sorting either of the
same or of a different realm.’ 98 In making this claim, however, Goodman
does not depart all that drastically from Davidson; unless, of course, the
tentative notion of effecting a ‘new sorting’ of ‘a different realm’ suggests
a different arena of meaning in which metaphor operates.
Goodman clearly departs from Davidson, however, by disputing
the idea that metaphor can be understood through literal paraphrase.
Davidson acknowledges that metaphors are hard to paraphrase, but not
94
Donald Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’ Critical Inquiry 5 (1978); Reed Way Dasenbrock,
Truth and Consequences: Intentions, Conventions and the New Thematics (University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).
95
Clive Stroud-Drinkwater, ‘Stevens after Davidson on Metaphor’ Philosophy & Literature 26.2
(2002), 346–53.
96
Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 32.
97
Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 46.
98
Nelson Goodman, ‘Metaphor as Moonlighting’ Critical Inquiry 6 (1979), 125, 128.
because they comprise different meanings from their literal signification.
Goodman responds:
The acknowledged difficulty and even impossibility of finding a literal paraphrase
for most metaphors is offered by Davidson as evidence that there is nothing to
be paraphrased […] But paraphrase of many literal sentences also is exceedingly
difficult, and indeed we may seriously question whether any sentence can be
translated exactly into other words in the same or any other language.99
For Goodman, the problem with paraphrasing metaphors is not that there
is nothing to be paraphrased beyond literal meaning, but that ‘the meta-
phorical application of terms has the effect […] of drawing significant
boundaries that cut across ruts worn by habit, of picking out new relevant
kinds for which we have no simple and familiar literal descriptions’.100
This is tantamount to claiming that metaphorical significance differs in
kind from literal significance.
Neither Davidson nor Goodman excludes literature from his arguments
concerning metaphor. This is not, then, a philosophical dispute pertaining
to ‘normal’ forms of discourse, because for these philosophers there is no
normal discourse. The Davidsonian position that ‘[t]here is no such thing
as a language’ where ‘a language’ is meant to be a transparently shared
medium must be considered when discussing ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’
meaning, for these very terms are equivocal for language users.101
Why, then, shoe-horn Davidson and Goodman into a discussion of
Stevens’ use of metaphor in ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ if arguments
concerning the nature of the trope cannot themselves be resolved? The
point is that Stevens’ poem anticipates and demonstrates the problem
with retaining a concept of metaphor dependent on either consistency
or difference between literal and metaphorical meaning. As the 1946
poem ‘Pieces’ insists, ‘There is a sense in sounds beyond their meaning’.102
Specifically, what the close of Stevens’ poem demonstrates is that the ‘final
need’ for an abstract ‘final access’ relates to metaphor-building because, as
Davidson argues, one of metaphor’s effects is inculcating the desire to
capture a ‘hidden meaning’.
Thus, if we pursue covert meaning – trying to give extra currency to
Stevens’ ‘beast of light’, ‘middle witch’, ‘divertissements’, ‘expanding’ bat
and scurrying ‘puppies’ – we notice not another realm of significance but
99
Ibid., 126. 100 Ibid., 126–7.
101
Donald Davidson, ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’ in Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives
on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson ed. Ernest LePore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 446.
102
CPP, 307.
the activity of metaphor itself. Metaphor is heaped on metaphor, and in
this downward spiral the reader learns the poet cannot help but harness
the trope to evoke a ‘universal flare’. The phrase precisely illustrates the
relation between abstraction – the conceptual attainment of an unattain-
able ‘universal’ – and metaphor, represented by the luminous connota-
tions of ‘flare’. It is simply impossible to wrest metaphor and abstraction
apart, just as Stevens’ ‘universal flare’ cannot be unpacked into a literal or
abstract meaning distinct from its metaphorical significance.
No literal rendering of the end of ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ can do
justice to the poem, but not merely because metaphors are hard to para-
phrase. There are simply too many cross-fertilizing metaphors in the
poem’s last sentence to construe its senses definitively. Davidson would
have relished Stevens’ ‘and yet remains the same’. On the Davidsonian
view, whatever is ‘said’ in a poem does not change because of prolifer-
ating metaphor. Instead, the closing metaphors of ‘The Pure Good
of Theory’ are signs, as ‘The Motive for Metaphor’ has it, for ‘Desiring
the exhilarations of changes’; rather than constituting earth-shattering
changes themselves.103 But what ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ also shows
is that, as Goodman argues, there are some uses of metaphor that render
the test of paraphrase irrelevant, for it is debatable whether there is a lit-
eral content to Stevens’ final sentence which needs to be coaxed from the
poem’s spiralling metaphors. Stevens’ poem is demonstrative and its ‘the-
ory’ is not reducible to a straightforward thesis. The 1947 poem ‘Bouquet
of Roses in Sunlight’ will even claim that ‘sense exceeds all metaphor’.104
What ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ ultimately achieves is the reconcili-
ation of metaphor to abstraction, a strategy that rescues Stevens from an
inhuman ‘abstract’. The ‘final access’ is, after all, based on a ‘final need ’.
Inherited metaphors pressure the poet into cliché, but abstraction issues
the creation of new, invigorating metaphors because, as suggested, it
encourages conception without immediate reference to a predetermined
or inherited context (even although one originally abstracts from an exist-
ing context). Thus, the close of the poem wittily proffers the glut of meta-
phors that Stevens, at his most abstract, can muster.
But I want in the concluding chapter to rein in the various expressions
of abstraction we find in Stevens’ work as we turn to the final decade and
the poet’s intriguingly bourgeois meditations on an abstract imagination.
Ibid., 257, emphasis added.

103 104
Ibid., 370.
C H APTER 7
Bourgeois abstraction: poetry, painting and

the idea of mastery in late Stevens
What is terribly lacking from life today is the well developed indi-
vidual, the master of life, or the man who by his mere appearance
convinces you that a mastery of life is possible.1
the classic hero
And the bourgeois, are different, much.
The classic changed. There have been many.
And there are many bourgeois heroes.2
Peter [Lee] lives a good deal out of books. Recently I got a letter
from him in which he described the square in Fribourg opposite
the post office as full of country people selling butter and vege-
tables, chickens and eggs […] [H]e described the town itself as full
of school girls not only from this country but from various parts
of Europe, not to speak of Egypt. He wound up with the explan-
ation: Il faut tenter vivre […] I came across this very expression in
something connected with Mallarmé. – I suppose, therefore, that
the butter and vegetables and chickens and eggs were all artificial
and that the school girls, especially the dark-eyed jewels from Cairo,
were just wax stuffed with sawdust.3
7.1 M a s t e r y of l i f e : at hom e w i t h Wa l l ac e S t e v e ns

Stevens’ final decade witnessed a number of achievements as the poet’s
reputation finally grew. With Transport to Summer, The Auroras of Autumn,
The Necessary Angel, two Selected Poems and the long-resisted Collected
Poems, Stevens experienced greater magazine publication, increased
academic criticism and a raft of honorary degrees and awards. Stevens’
reputation as a major poet was hardly secure at the time of his death,
but his maturation as an artist, especially his delving into abstraction,
L, 518.
1 2
CPP, 246. Ibid., 872.
3
204
Bourgeois abstraction 205
was undeniable. Such subtleties would take years to appreciate; many
remain challenging to this day. For example, in ‘late Stevens’ the ‘cool
abstraction’ of poems from The Auroras of Autumn – say, ‘The Owl in
the Sarcophagus’ – differs from the ‘warm abstraction’ of certain poems
from The Rock – say, ‘A Quiet Normal Life’. Similarly, in ‘last Stevens’
the coolly abstract ‘Of Mere Being’ differs from apparently ‘warmer’ texts
such as ‘Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination’ (or ‘First
Warmth’ and ‘As You Leave the Room’).4 However, even Stevens’ most
impenetrable work tends toward human abstractions of desire. Mastery
of life – rather than mastery of poetry or the imagination – becomes
his enduring theme. As with his despair at Peter Lee’s ‘literariness’, the
world of Mallarméan ‘pure poetry’, for the older Stevens, was a literary
dead-end. Although Stevens himself was charged with promulgating arti-
fice (a world of ‘wax stuffed with sawdust’), and although his verse relied
upon Mallarmé’s example (the quintessential poet of the ‘Idea’), Stevens’
mature aesthetic shifted as he absorbed his theoretical speculations con-
cerning abstraction and came to rely more on abstract meditation itself as
catalyst.5
Simultaneously, Stevens drew his poetry toward the ‘normal’, ‘central’
and ‘ordinary’ – even as he aestheticized these domains, encouraging
readers to speculate on their extraordinary qualities. When Stevens read
Mauron, he underlined the following:
It seems to me that the perfect artist would admit into his work all inward voices,
until the moment when he ceased to listen and began to yield to their prompt-
ings. For at that very moment he would have forgotten his art and become a
commonplace human being.6
Little did Stevens know this idea of the ‘commonplace’ might serve the
maturing artist because of his penchant for abstraction. ‘Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction’ insisted ‘[t]he major abstraction is the commonal’, but
that poem had not discovered how to make abstraction seem in touch with
common things.7 In his last decade, however, Stevens refined his abstract
aesthetic in order to reflect (on) commonality. His middle to late phases,
as Longenbach notes, suggest that ‘the sublimity of the humdrum is an
4
See Introduction.
5
Longenbach argues that Stevens’ abstract aesthetic ‘was achieved under the stress of the Second
World War, but when the stress slackened, the aesthetic was strong enough to perpetuate itself
on its own terms’. In my view Stevens’ rhetorical figures (his literal ‘terms’) were expendable and
non-reiterable. Longenbach rightly adds that Stevens aimed not to ‘build a world from poetry’
but ‘to build poetry a place in the world’ (Wallace Stevens, 280).
6
Mauron, Aesthetics and Psychology, Stevens’ copy, 64.
7
CPP, 336.
achievement’.8 Stevens’ developing tastes in painting, his enlarging cor-
respondence and the later Necessary Angel essays testify to this emphatic
change.
In 1946, almost four years after creating his crystalline ‘mundo’,
Stevens wrote: ‘For myself, the inaccessible jewel is the normal and all
of life, in poetry, is the difficult pursuit of just that.’ 9 By 1949 Stevens
noted a comment from Edward Sackville-West which clearly illuminates
a change of objective: ‘the later proliferations of romantic and symbol-
ist theory have tended to obscure one of the most valuable functions of
poetry: the illumination of the usual’.10 Stevens’ pursuit of the ‘normal’
or ‘usual’ led him to evade the merely ‘literary’, as he became increasingly
disenchanted with literary circles and literary renown. Stevens refused to
give an address at Dylan Thomas’ US memorial, kept out of the Pound
and Bollingen Prize controversy (despite Tate’s cajoling) and refused to
sanction either his views of other writers publicly or the use of their views
of his own work for promotional materials (even Ransom was cautioned
for describing Stevens’ work in terms of ‘nobility’).11 Writing to Tate about
Jean Wahl’s review of Ransom’s 1945 Selected Poems, Stevens remarked: ‘I
am going through a period in which I am inexpressibly sick of all sorts
of fault-finding, and if Wahl has been finding fault with Ransom, I don’t
want to know anything about it.’ 12
The mid-1940s embrace of the ‘normal’ informs Stevens’ view that an
‘abundant poetry’ should replace a Mallarméan ‘pure poetry’.13 In 1944
Stevens wrote of ‘The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician’ that
it was composed when he ‘felt strongly that poems were things in them-
selves’.14 An abstract imagination, by contrast, aims to rejuvenate the ‘nor-
mal’ in a poetry gesturing toward ‘things’ at large. Literature as an end
in itself is irrelevant here. When composing ‘Description Without Place’
Stevens insisted: ‘Reality is the great fond, and it is because it is that the
purely literary amounts to so little’ (adding later: ‘Intellectual isolation
loses value in an existence of books’).15
8
Longenbach also links Cavell’s notion of being ‘in quest of the ordinary’ with the ‘humdrum’
quality of late Stevens (Wallace Stevens, 264).
9
L, 521.
10
11
See L, 802. Tate compiled a letter to be signed by ‘100 writers’, including Stevens, disapprov-
ing of the Saturday Review of Literature’s attack on Pound, ‘modern poetry and criticism’, 18
October 1949, WAS, 2382. Stevens wrote to Tate: ‘1. I know nothing about this; 2. care less; 3. do
not believe that the Saturday Review or Benet or Hillyer […] could possibly harm the cause of
letters; 4. prefer to keep out of this; and 5. intend to do just that’, 20 October 1949, WAS, 2404.
For ‘nobility’, see 7 October 1954, WAS, 1542, and L, 880.
12
L, 511. 13 Ibid., 495. 14 See CPP, 49; L, 463. 15 L, 505, 513.
Certainly, Stevens was no Philip Larkin, Tony Harrison or Peter
Reading: he was unlikely to take verse-writing to task when poetry
remained his ‘piety’.16 But like these poets he was aware that literary
self-consciousness blocks poetic expression. Fear of the ‘literary’ caused
Stevens to distance himself from Tate and the New Critics (not to men-
tion Eliot and Pound). In 1944 Stevens observed of Tate:
He wrote the other day calling attention to a group of his poems in the kenyon
review. After reading these, I wonder whether there is enough of the peasant in
Tate: Il faut être paysan d’ être poète […] [H]is pride is a little like Pierre duPont’s
[sic] pride in his espaliers. Not that I prefer the wild, old bush, but I like sap
and lots of it and, somehow, this Kenyon group seems to me like poetry written
under glass[.]17
Stevens implies poems should be neither museum pieces nor artificial
‘hothouse’ creations. Poetry’s ‘sap’ should ooze naturally, even as the poet
becomes wary of ‘the wild, old bush’. Stevens likewise observed of Jules
Renard:
Renard constantly says things that interest me immensely. They are, however, on
the literary level on which it seems possible to say such things for a lifetime and
yet be forgotten on the way home from the funeral. The writer is never recog-
nized as one of the masters of our lives, although he gives them their daily color
and form.18
By 1945, becoming a master of life was Stevens’ implied aim. Given his
milieu as a Connecticut surety bond lawyer – whose greatest ‘sins’ were
hasty trips to New York – it is unsurprising the thirst for abstraction
would take a ‘bourgeois’ form in his late work.
This new direction is glimpsed in 1943. Writing about Van Gogh,
Stevens explained:
The word for all this is maniement: I don’t mean a mania of manner, but […] the
total subjection of reality to the artist. It may be only too true that Van Gogh
had fortuitous assistance in the mastery of reality. But he mastered it […] And
that is so often what one wants to do in poetry: to seize the whole mass of every-
thing and squeeze it, and make it one’s own.19
‘Description Without Place’ would critique Nietzsche’s ‘mania of man-
ner’, a solipsistic idealism in Stevens’ eyes. Nietzsche constructs ‘an
innate grandiose’ responsible for ‘gildering the swarm-like manias’.20 The
philosopher’s idealism, despite its anti-metaphysical allure, is portrayed
through a mind too self-contained:
16
Ibid., 473. 17
Ibid., 460–1. Ibid., 510.
18 19
Ibid., 459. CPP, 299.
20
Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool
Of these discolorations, mastering
The moving and the moving of their forms
[…]
His revery was the deepness of the pool,
The very pool, his thoughts the colored forms,
The eccentric souvenirs of human shapes,
Wrapped in their seemings, crowd on curious crowd,
In a kind of total affluence, all first,
All final, colors subjected in revery
To an innate grandiose, an innate light,
The sun of Nietzsche gildering the pool,
Yes: gildering the swarm-like manias
In perpetual revolution, round and round…
(CPP, 299)
‘Maniement’ means ‘handling’. Stevens suggests Van Gogh’s deft brush-

work conveys mastery of reality. For there is a difference between hand-
ling ‘reality’ such that it is controlled by the artist (‘the total subjection
of reality to the artist’) and, for Stevens’ Nietzsche, perceiving ‘reality’ as
nothing more than one’s own mind at work: a ‘revery’, ‘first’ and ‘final’.
Those ‘swarm-like manias’ also recall the ‘Schwärmerei’ of ‘Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction’, save that ‘Description Without Place’ is wary
of the ‘innate grandiose’ in which Nietzsche goes ‘round and round’.21
‘Schwärmerei’ in ‘Notes’ connotes enthusiasm and the desire to attain
‘a kind of Swiss perfection’.22 But the ‘swarm-like manias’ Stevens
attributes to Nietzsche connote the fanaticism Coleridge associates with
‘Schwärmerei’, as he discusses poets who lack ‘imaginative power’:
Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature […] they head and inflame by co-
acervation; or like bees they become restless and irritable through the increased
temperature of collected multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism
[…] is derived from the swarming of bees, namely, Schwärmen, Schwärmerey.23
Nietzsche fails, then, to attain ‘a kind of Swiss perfection’, despite residing
‘in Basel’. His ‘Schwärmerei’ are more disturbing, connoting the ‘swarm-
like manias’ Coleridge detects in unimaginative poets. Such ‘mania’
Stevens felt an increasing need to avoid as his own poetry aimed to realize
the serenity or mastery of reality the poet admired in Van Gogh.
21
Ibid., 334. 22
Ibid., 334. BL, I, Ch 2, 30.
23
With regard to Stevens and painting, this book has focused primarily
on Picasso and Cézanne. Stevens overcame his initial distaste for abstrac-
tion partly through ‘accepting’ Picasso, which led to an about-turn where
Cézanne became the more exemplary artist. By the late 1930s Stevens
was already tiring with Modernist art’s ‘intellectual’ dimensions, and
especially with Picasso. Cézanne provided him with an older model for
abstraction. Stevens’ inspirations drew, consciously or otherwise, from
the British Romantics – as well as Emerson and Whitman – through
Cézanne and Van Gogh, uniting abstraction and idealism. Such a leg-
acy helped Stevens understand how to avoid becoming, as Furst wrote
of Picasso, ‘an over-intellectual designer who moves one to thought, but
not to feeling’, even although abstraction would prove a risky strategy for
some readers in this respect.24
As Chapter 4 revealed, Stevens endorsed Furst’s view whilst embracing
Cézanne. But, in reality, the poet’s dismissal of Picasso, intensifying post-
1945, involves protesting too much. Stevens had engaged with Picasso
partly because he worried over the relationship between poetry and the
‘actual world’ of the Depression. As ‘Owl’s Clover’ exemplifies, Stevens
initially feared abstraction because of the charge of evading ‘reality’.
However, his scrutiny of Picasso in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ was
pivotal since that poem enabled him to dramatize his fear of and fascin-
ation with abstraction. Although he never experimented extensively with
a pared-down poetry mimetic of ‘abstract art’, Stevens was drawn to that
art’s representational issues: from the 1913 Armory Show to the institu-
tionalization of Modernist artworks during the 1940s and 50s. Focillon’s
The Life of Forms in Art also clearly helped Stevens consolidate his sense of
abstract power.
But this picture is simplistic. Undeniably, Stevens’ initial embrace
of abstraction united mind, world and poetry, paradoxically to evade
‘intellectualism’ or manifesto-movements. But Stevensian abstraction
only becomes clearly delineated in the poet’s final decade as his sense of
painting developed. The period 1945–55 arguably witnesses Stevens’ most
remarkable poetry, coinciding with an increase in correspondence and
picture-purchasing. During this time Stevens also became convinced he
would never travel outside the USA again. Apart from the occasional trip
to New York, his world grew literally smaller as it became imaginatively
larger, as Stevens’ domestic situation indicates.
24
One aim of this concluding chapter, then, is to suggest how Stevens’
changing tastes in painting – as he responded to Modernism – affected his
final decade. Focusing on the art criticism of Stevens’ personal library –
as well as his voluminous correspondence – the chapter charts the shades
of abstraction to which Stevens was drawn. Discussion then turns to
Stevens’ domestic space, where art, literature, gastronomy and the pleas-
ures of private meditation unite through bourgeois abstraction.25 This
imaginative defence-mechanism scorns the pejorative ‘bourgeois’ whilst
lauding a fecund domestic space: one neither luxurious nor impoverished
or even, for that matter, house-proud. Rather than provide exhaustive
close-readings, my aim is to portray Stevens’ final decade through refer-
ence to this study’s collective reflections on abstraction.
Stevens’ earliest exposure to the relations between poetry and painting
was probably through Lessing’s The Laocoön.26 Lessing argues that artists
are concerned with ‘personified abstractions’, suggesting painting is lim-
ited to ‘represent[ing] the visible as invisible, or the invisible as visible’.27
However, the poet may ‘raise this degree of illusion in us by the representa-
tion of other than visible objects’.28 Given Stevens’ own mid-career convic-
tion that robust poetry should make things ‘a little hard / To see’, Lessing’s
arguments may have been formative.29 Stevens also owned titles on the
Dutch Masters, Impressionists, Expressionists, Primitives and Modernists
as well as closer-to-home figures such as Maine painter Russell Cheney or
imported Surrealist Yves Tanguy (who lived in Woodbury, Connecticut
from 1939 to 1955).30 The study of Tanguy was by James Thrall Soby;
Stevens acquiring the majority of Soby’s moma publications.31 The poet’s
25
Sharpe notes the ‘domesticated vision’ of ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, arguing that
‘Stevens was not the helpless victim of his rocking-chair’ for all his disinclination to travel
(Sharpe, Wallace Stevens, 179, 178).
26
See Stevens’ copy of Lessing, The Laocoön.
27
Lessing, The Laocoön, 59, 81.
28
Ibid., 88. 29 CPP, 275.
30
Russell Cheney, Russell Cheney 1881–1945: A Record of His Work (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1947); Eugene Delacroix, The Journal of Eugene Delacroix trans. Walter Pach
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1938); Klee, Dokumente und Bilder aus den Jahren 1896–1930; Agnes
Mongan, ed., One Hundred Master Drawings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949);
Walter Pach, The Masters of Modern Art (New York: Huebsch, 1924); Daniel Catton Rich, Henri
Rousseau (New York: MOMA, 1942); James Thrall Soby, Yves Tanguy (New York: MOMA, 1955);
Wilhelm Uhde, Five Primitive Masters trans. Ralph Thompson (New York: Quadrangle, 1949);
Vincent Van Gogh, Letters to Emile Bernard trans. Douglas Lord (London: Cresset, 1938).
31
Stevens also owned Soby’s Salvador Dali (1941), Georges Rouault: Paintings and Prints (1945),
Contemporary Painters (1948) and, with Alfred J. Barr, Twentieth-Century Italian Art (1949). Soby
even considered writing about Stevens, but found him hard to engage personally (Brazeau, Parts
of a World, 117).
mournful 1949 complaint about ‘professional modernism’ no doubt derives
from reading such art criticism and, of course, frequenting galleries.32
Revealingly, Charles Henri Ford had written earlier on the relationship
between Soby and Stevens in Hartford. Although a quirky ‘interview’,
Ford witnessed Stevens’ domestic art collection, reporting the poet’s more
loaded statements:
[He] show[ed] me […] the kind of things he liked… Paintings here and there
by obscure Frenchmen, mostly impressionist in style… You see? he said…
‘Soby would probably be contemptuous of these paintings.’… Yes, I said, recall-
ing Soby’s beautiful Chiricos and Tchelitchews… ‘You could probably dupli-
cate Soby’s collection fifteen times,’ said Stevens… I wondered, thinking of the
uniqueness of each picture, not of the names… Did Mr. Stevens mean to imply
that he himself was more independent in his choice of painters, more original?33
Certainly Stevens eventually developed strongly independent views of his
own paintings. That Ford thinks ‘of the uniqueness of each picture, not of
the names’ also shows Stevens’ influence, the implication being that much
other ‘Modernist’ painting, by 1940, was commodified and all but canon-
ized. Stevens was, by contrast, seeking the so-called lesser talents who might
be silently changing the course of painting. What the poet did not reveal
was that these ‘minor figures’ – Tal-Coat, Dufy, Gromaire, Cavaillès –
enabled him to transform his private, abstract meditations into poetry.
Some critics are surprised that Stevens did not acquire more overtly
Modernist works, suggesting his ‘bourgeois’ tastes clashed with a passion
for Klee, as well as being discontinuous with the painterly dimensions
of his own writing.34 To some extent, Stevens could not acquire Picasso,
Matisse, Kandinsky or Klee even if he had wanted: firstly, because of
the expenditure and, secondly, because these artists’ works were largely
unavailable (the poet did own a Braque, but that was an exception). What
really characterized Stevens’ purchases was his desire to make an aesthetic
virtue of necessity: ‘what I want is something exquisite and at the same
time something for which I should not be obliged to pay as if I were a
wealthy merchant’.35 Such ‘modest’ paintings represented opportunities to
project his own imagination domestically rather than in a museum space
32
L, 647.
33
Charles Henri Ford, ‘Verlaine in Hartford: Has the Mystery Man of Modern Poetry Really
Another Self?’ View 1.1 (1940), 6.
34
James Johnson Sweeney thought Stevens’ art collection was ‘bourgeois’ and that it betrayed
‘playing it safe’. Bernard Heringman lamented Stevens’ ‘established bourgeois taste’ (Brazeau,
Parts of a World, 228, 201). These views underestimate the subtlety of Stevens’ imaginative
responses to his own pictures.
35
L, 577.
(despite visits to the Wadsworth Athenaeum); and, as with Tal-Coat and
‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’, such meditation initiated poems. Stevens
cherished, therefore, cheerful, charming, even paysan work: not unsophis-
ticated, but not stylized either and certainly not indebted to any particu-
lar school of art, Modernist or otherwise. He relished the ‘second-rate’.36
Admittedly, Stevens was not alone in mourning derivative ‘abstraction-
ists’. The early American interest in European abstract painting – as in
A. E. Gallatin’s ‘The Evolution of Abstract Art’ (Museum of Living Art,
New York, 1933) and Alfred H. Barr’s ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ (MOMA,
1936) – was by the early 1940s on the wane. Indeed, by the Second World
War, the American Abstract Artists Association essentially folded, hav-
ing already spread their abstract message following formation in 1937. If
Duchamp and Picabia challenged American tastes after the Armory Show
and if Surrealism challenged regionalist and social realist 1930s American
art, by the mid-1940s New York had absorbed abstract painting (albeit
before the advent of Abstract Expressionism).37 Nevertheless, Stevens’
tastes in French painting were relatively idiosyncratic, and he never lost
faith in his favourite contemporary abstractionists: Klee, Mondrian and
Kandinsky.
But how did Stevens discuss abstraction, painting and poetry in his
final decade? In 1948 the poet wrote to Feo:
I think that all this abstract painting […] going on nowadays is just so much
frustration and evasion. Eventually it will lead to a new reality. When a thing has
been blurred by the obscurity of metaphysics and eventually emerges from that
blur, it has all the characteristics of a brilliantly clear day after a month of mist
and rain. No-one can predict what that new reality is going to be because it will
be developed in the mind and spirit and by the hand of a single artist or group of
artists strong enough to conceive of what they want and to produce it.38
Superficially, abstract painting does not speak to ‘metaphysics’. But Stevens
knew Klee, Kandinsky and Mondrian variously insisted that abstraction
enabled access to spiritual domains. Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art
(1912) absorbed German idealism, Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810) and
Theosophy. Mondrian, also a Theosophist, desired access to the ‘spir-
itual realm’ in painting, observing: ‘Cubism did not accept the logical
36
Ibid., 728. Stevens refers here to ‘second-rate cheese’ and ‘second-rate wine’, but his gastronomic
imagination is of a piece with a ‘bourgeois’ desire for the paysan; hence his liking for Primitive
painting, Henri Rousseau especially.
37
See Moszynka, Abstract Art, 141–3; and David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism (London: Thames
& Hudson, 1990).
38
L, 593.
consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction
towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality’.39 Klee, like Stevens,
was more mystified by abstraction, feeling that ‘reality’ often held sway
regardless in his work.40 As Klee observed in one of his Bauhaus note-
books: ‘It is interesting to observe how real the object remains in spite
of all abstractions […] It is possible that a picture will move far away
from Nature and yet finds its way back to reality.’ 41 Klee also resisted
autotelic abstraction: ‘We construct and keep on constructing, yet intu-
ition is still a good thing.’ 42 Stevens was certainly impressed by Klee’s
desire to uncover ‘the secret places’, as ‘The Relations Between Poetry and
Painting’ demonstrates.43
Stevens’ letter to Feo, then, sees hackneyed abstract painting to be
‘frustration’ or worse ‘evasion’ from reality, as if the ‘metaphysics’ of
abstraction had, in minor examples, substituted for genuine revelation.
As the poet observed to Thomas McGreevy, ‘It is easy to like Klee and
Kandinsky. What is difficult is to like the many minor figures who do
not communicate any theory that validates what they do and, in conse-
quence, impress one as being without validity.’ 44 Stevens would contrast
Jean Arp with Klee and Mondrian thus:
[Arp’s] imagination lacks strength. His feelings are incapable of violence […]
[T]he human spirit need not fear him […] He was a friend of Klee’s and he knew
Mondrian. He goes along with Klee’s prismatic and Alpine snowdrops […] But
he does not go along with Mondrian. It is nonsense to speak of his integrity as
an abstractionist in the same breath with which one speaks of Mondrian. Arp
is a minor stylist, however agreeable. But for Mondrian the abstract was the
abstract.45
Stevens displays some machismo in desiring the bedrock of ‘real-
ity’, encouraging the ‘human spirit’ to fear creation. But note that, for
Stevens, Arp’s problem is not that he relies too much on the ‘human
39
Eeckhout compellingly analyses Mondrian’s influence on Stevens. Mondrian’s aim was to see
through nature, to ‘abstract everything until I arrive at the foundation (always still an exterior
foundation)’. In effect, Stevens was attracted to Mondrian’s desire to realize ‘reality’ without the
intrusion of human sentiment and to Klee and Kandinsky as exemplars of an idealist abstraction
in which mind and world interact (Eeckhout, Wallace Stevens, 176, 179 n. 40). See also MacLeod,
Wallace Stevens and Modern Art, 114–21.
40
See Hajo Düchtung, Paul Klee: Painting Music (Munich: Prestel, 1997), 25.
41
Moszynska, Abstract Art, 100. Moszynska argues that the Bauhaus represented a ‘dichotomy’
between ‘the mathematical precision’ of the Constructivists and ‘the more intuitive, subjective
and expressionist attitude of Klee and Kandinsky’ (98). Although Stevens was clearly entranced
by Mondrian’s ‘cool’ grids and lines, he was equally comfortable with Klee’s and Kandinsky’s
‘warm’ abstractions.
42
Ibid., 98. 43 CPP, 750. 44 L, 763. 45 Ibid., 628.
spirit’, but that he lacks the capacity to perform creative ‘violence’. Stevens
observed elsewhere: ‘Abstract sculptors, like abstract painters, should be
totally abstract, not half so. Arp is only half so […] His forms will never
constitute a “visionary language.” Unlike the things of Brancusi they
never intimidate one with their possibilities.’46 If Stevens sought vibrant
minor figures, clearly not every candidate would do. Perhaps conveni-
ently, Stevens does not ponder how ‘abstract’ the poet ‘should be’, even
although the notion of intimidating with possibilities effectively describes
Stevens’ most abstract poems.
When it came to the painters Stevens collected, the poet experienced
pleasure and frustration in assimilating his purchases. Late Stevens wit-
nesses not just a poet who revels in abstraction, but one who derives
‘ideas’ for abstract poetry from paintings. As Filreis argues, Stevens trans-
formed the largely representational French paintings he collected into
abstract poems rather than identify with the American abstract painting
then gathering pace.47 A French still-life bought on the report of Paule
Vidal was something Stevens relished ‘in the abstract’, but once it arrived
in Connecticut its physical reality Stevens would abstract again, not
merely to review the same painting with fresh eyes, but as a stimulus to
poetry. In the well-documented case of the Tal-Coat that ‘became’ ‘Angel
Surrounded by Paysans’, Stevens oscillated between disappointment (‘Tal
Coat is supposed to be a man of violence but one soon becomes accus-
tomed to the present picture’) and curiosity: ‘This man [Tal-Coat] puts
up a great deal of resistance to the effort to penetrate him […] A violent
still life sounds like a queer thing. Yet I suppose the thing is violent.’ 48
The creative violence with which Stevens repeatedly renewed his home-
world finds its source in precisely this kind of abstract effort: to make Tal-
Coat into the painter who will almost satisfy Stevens’ incessant longing
for vibrant ‘reality’.
Significantly, Stevens judged figures like Tal-Coat in the same breath
as his beloved Klee. The barrier of a worn-out ‘metaphysical’ aesthetic
became a frequent theme:
Cogniat says that Tal Coat is one of the few young painters from whom it seems
possible to expect a new reality. A painter […] [of] abstract painting is likely to
pick up a certain amount of the metaphysical vision of the day […] I don’t object
46
Ibid., 629.
47
Alan Filreis, ‘“Beyond the Rhetorician’s Touch”: Stevens’ Painterly Abstractions’ American
Literary History 4.2 (1992), 230–63.
48
L, 649, 652. The letter has ‘Tal Coat’, but the painter’s surname is usually hyphenated.
to painting that is modern in sense. To illustrate: I have the greatest liking for
Klee. No-one is more interested in modern painting if it really is modern […]
if it really is the work of a man of intelligence sincerely seeking to satisfy the
needs of his sensibility. But the so-called metaphysical vision has been intoler-
ably exploited by men without intelligence.49
Stevens relishes bringing a nominally ‘second-rate’ painter like Tal-Coat
to the table alongside Klee. If this required abstract embellishment –
transforming the charming into the fecund – Stevens willingly exerted the
effort, especially if the ‘pay-off’ was a poem such as ‘Angel Surrounded by
Paysans’. But this craving is subtler still. Stevens was drawn to artists who
seemed ‘ordinary’ but had painstakingly achieved the semblance of sim-
plicity. Speaking of another portrait in his collection, Stevens observed,
without apparent criticism: ‘The picture occupies me when I lean back to
rest from reading. Why is the artist, Jean Cavaillès, a nobody and why is
the picture commonplace?’50
As Stevens pondered Tal-Coat, Cavaillès, Dufy, Dubuffet, Brianchon
and others, his suspicions of professionalized modernism deepened:
‘Somehow modern art is coming to seem much less modern than used
to be the case. One feels that a good many people are practicing modern-
ism and therefore that it no longer remains valid’, observing in another
letter: ‘I rather resent professional modernism the way one resents an
excessively fashionable woman.’51 Clearly, when Stevens began publishing
poetry, ‘Modernism’ was anything but professionalized. But by the late
1940s, if not before, the poet distanced himself from the ‘mass’ absorption
of abstract art, at least as it was expressed in museum collections.
For example, after a frustrated visit to moma, Stevens reported:
Is all this really hard thinking, really high feeling or is it a lot of nobodies run-
ning after a few somebodies? I enjoyed quite as much the window in a fruit shop
that I know of which was filled with the most extraordinary things: beauteous
plums, peaches like Swedish blondes, pears that made you think of Rubens and
the first grapes pungent through the glass. But on the whole New York was a
lemon.52
Stevens’ aesthetic pleasures constitute gastronomic, painterly and literary
complexes. That New York is ‘a lemon’ (a dud or disappointment) wittily
contrasts with Stevens’ salivation at other fruits, as he constructs his own
‘still life’: the ‘beauteous plums’, the ‘peaches like Swedish blondes’, the
pears reminiscent of Rubens and those first-season grapes almost smelt
Ibid., 595.
49
Ibid., 836.
50
Ibid., 630, 647.
51
Ibid., 647.
52
‘through the glass’ (their pungency synaesthetically visualized). This is
verbal painting, a prelude to a poem. Note too how the nominally ‘ordin-
ary’ ‘window in a fruit shop’ is laden with ‘extraordinary things’, forbidden
fruits (‘Swedish blondes’?), unlike the uncomfortable confines of MOMA
where run-of-the-mill ‘nobodies’ chase genuine ‘somebodies’ in quest of
the extraordinary. Re-creating the scene of Stevens’ voyeurism, the poet
harnesses abstraction to touch the exquisite curves of ‘the ordinary’.
Likewise, what Stevens appreciated in Tal-Coat’s still life is the absence
of obvious collage (collage being a hallmark of ‘professional modernism’):
My Tal Coat occupies me […] It is a still life in which the objects are a reddish
brown Venetian glass dish, containing a sprig of green, on a table, on which
there are various water bottles, a terrine of lettuce, a glass of dark red wine and
a napkin. Note the absence of mandolins, oranges, apples, copies of Le Journal
and similar fashionable commodities […] It contradicts all of one’s expectations
of a still life.53
The fruits listed here are ‘off-limits’ as topoi of traditional still life. But
the omission of mandolins and ‘copies of Le Journal’ alludes to early
Cubist representations of stringed instruments and newspaper collage.
Admittedly, although Tal-Coat indirectly fuelled Stevens’ dislike for
derivative Modernism, the painter did not escape the poet’s disappoint-
ments. As much as Stevens aestheticized his domestic space, the last
thing he wanted was a ‘domesticated’ painting, even one generating a
poem: ‘Now that I have had the new picture at home […] it seems almost
domesticated […] I have even given it a title of my own: Angel Surrounded
By Peasants […] This title alone tames it as a lump of sugar might tame a
lion’.54
Tal-Coat, however, like the lion after his sugar lump, survived scrutiny.
Stevens admitted to Paule Vidal:
[Tal-Coat represents] an effort to attain a certain reality purely by way of the
artist’s own vitality […] He is virile and he has the naturalness of a man who
means to be something more than a follower.55
‘Virility’ and ‘vitality’ were qualities Stevens also appreciated in Raoul
Dufy (whom he collected), who was neither factional nor an ‘experimen-
talist’: ‘More and more, one wants the voices of one’s contemporaries –
today’s music, painting, poetry, thinking. […] When I was able to sit in
a room full of the paintings of Raoul Dufy […] my chief pleasure was in
the companionship of Dufy himself, without any factitious chic’.56
53
Ibid., 654. 54
Ibid., 649–50. Ibid., 656.
55
Ibid., 659.
56
As noted, Stevens resisted delineating abstraction too strongly in his
own work or in discussing ‘the poet’. One letter, however, almost sees
him differentiating between the force of abstraction for poet and painter
respectively. Writing to Barbara Church in 1948, Stevens claimed:
[T]he momentum toward abstraction exerts a greater force on the poet than on
the painter. I imagine that the tendency of all thinking is toward the abstract
and perhaps I am merely saying that the abstractions of the poet are abstracter
than the abstractions of the painter. Anyhow, that does not have to be settled
this morning.57
Stevens’ humorous dissatisfaction with this hypothesis – and the irony
that such an idea could be ‘settled this morning’ – is subtly defensive.
Even if Stevens had elaborated the theory that the poet’s abstractions are
‘abstracter’ than the painter’s, we should not forget the performance of
which Stevens’ daily, impromptu letters are composed. Bringing other
artists to task strategically enabled Stevens to scrutinize abstraction with-
out dissecting his own poetic practice. Note how the above letter describes
‘the momentum toward abstraction’ and ‘thinking’ rather than discussing
realized poems. Speaking of Auberjonois – whom Stevens met and whose
son inspired ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ – the poet asked Barbara
Church about Auberjonois Sr’s apartment: ‘Was it the “appauvrissement”
of a theorist grown abstract with age, or was it the abundance […] of
Giorgione, delighted with a posture, a piece of cloth, a tree. How much of
human nature gets into all these things!’58 Stevens was projecting his own
concern at being ‘a theorist grown abstract with age’ onto Auberjonois
hoping the painter still exhibited the domestic abundance that would
convince Stevens of his own ‘human nature’.
Of Dufy Stevens wrote: ‘the artist will always come through as one of
the masters of his particular time’, observing ‘a human self-confidence,
as if one had known from the beginning the eventual denouement of
knowledge, so long postponed and so incredible’.59 Stevens was referring
to Dufy’s La Fée Électricité, a massive mural, as well as the painter’s over-
all career. With regard to Marcel Gromaire, Stevens also projected the
happy notion of the genuine artist’s work finding fulfilment, regardless of
public taste: ‘These […] are the pictures of a determined man, somewhat
possessed, predestined’.60 Gromaire, Dufy, Tal-Coat and Cavaillès col-
lectively represented a ‘master of life’ as ‘master of art’ for the Stevens who
envisaged himself becoming an equally masterful poet. But in order to
Ibid., 601–2.
57
Ibid., 607–8.
58 59
CPP, 868, 871. 60
Ibid., 827.
appreciate Stevens’ manipulation of these more ‘minor’ figures, we must
examine the nuanced domesticity of his ‘bourgeois’ abstraction.
Stevens’ ‘bourgeois’ tendencies are revealed in his love of the ‘primi-
tive’ Henri Rousseau. Stevens may have been acquainted with Rousseau
from as early as 1904, and later most likely absorbed Rousseau through
Uhde’s Five Primitive Masters (1949) and Rich’s Henri Rousseau (1942).61
The ‘Primitives’ were, appealingly, not really a group at all. As Uhde
writes: ‘its members remained total strangers to one another […] [t]hey
had no group experimental “purpose,” no group “program”.’ All were
‘self-taught, poor and obscure’ and only formed ‘a “group” in the sense
that the early Christian saints […] formed a spiritual brotherhood.’ These
painters were ‘primitives’ through achieving ‘an air of unsophisticated
artlessness or clumsiness’ (which chimes with Stevens’ love of ‘the ordin-
ary’). ‘They had no education to speak of, no opportunities, no cultural
stimulus, no funds’: precisely the artists that garner ‘bourgeois’ recogni-
tion for being ‘exotic’, untamed.62
Intriguingly, Uhde paints the Primitives in inadvertently ‘Stevensian’
terms, seemingly recalling ‘Prelude to Objects’ with its Cézanne-inspired
notion that one ‘has not / To go to the Louvre to behold’ oneself:
Occasional visits to the Louvre, if they made them, had little effect on their
careers; the masterpieces of art […] spoke another language. […] [T]heir lives
wore a humdrum pattern and ran in humdrum channels. The business of earn-
ing enough for mere bread and wine came first, and luxury […] consisted of
cheap magazines or picture postcards […] [which] were one source of the art of
Rousseau and Vivin.63
Stevens likewise lived off picture postcards for inspiration, even as he had
actual paintings to devour. Although his professional career amply pro-
vided ‘bread and wine’, Stevens’ deep attachment to the ‘channels’ of the
‘humdrum’ is unmistakable.
But was Stevens in danger of romanticizing Rousseau? The frequent
references to ‘bread and wine’ in his own poetry suggest metaphorical
and actual concerns. Moreover, if Stevens absorbed Rich’s study, he would
have read how the ‘primitive’ tag was a pejoratively ‘bourgeois’ notion
which seriously underestimated Rousseau’s significance:
For half a century […] [Rousseau’s art] has been obscured by an insistent and
almost exclusive belief in its primitivism. Because the artist was self-taught […]
61
See L, 71. Stevens also possibly saw Rousseau’s work at Walter Arensberg’s apartment (see
MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Modern Art, 13).
62
Uhde, Five Primitive Masters, 11–13. 63 Ibid., 13.
Rousseau was first scorned, then loved for his ‘naïveté.’ His enthusiasts allowed
him no sources or development. He was simply a ‘primitive’ […] and automatic-
ally produced ‘marvelous’ and ‘angelic’ works in a vacuum.64
Rousseau himself remarked: ‘I have been told that my work is not of this
century. As you will understand, I cannot now change my manner which
I have acquired as the result of obstinate toil.’ 65 But Rousseau was taken
seriously by Picasso, Braque and Delaunay before MOMA exhibited any
of the painter’s work, Picasso and Braque even organizing a regular event
known as the ‘Banquet Rousseau’ at Picasso’s Rue Ravignan studio, with
Rousseau himself attending.66
If such homage was socially ironic, the early Modernist painters cer-
tainly appreciated Rousseau’s work, as Delaunay’s ‘The City of Paris’
(1910–12) illustrates (alluding explicitly to Rousseau’s ‘Myself, Portrait-
Landscape’). What matters is the two-fold attraction Rousseau held
for these early Modernist painters and Stevens alike. On the one hand,
Rousseau was paradoxically ‘exotic’: a self-taught painter, living the
alleged ‘contradiction’ between customs official work (he was known as
‘Le Douanier’) and the imaginative strength of his art. On the other,
Rousseau’s painting was a caricature of ‘exoticism’, replete not just with
jungle scenes but also strangely ‘bourgeois’ portraits of Parisian fam-
ilies. Nominally ‘simple’ scenes like those in ‘Portrait of a Lady’ (1895–7),
‘The Wedding’ (1904–5), ‘The Football Players’ or ‘Old Junier’s Cart’
(both 1908) involve unusual juxtapositions, particularly in the scale of
Rousseau’s figures. ‘Myself, Portrait-Landscape’ (1890) is a special case
that can be read allegorically both in terms of the artist’s sense of himself
and as a display of patriotism.67
Few commentators have discussed Stevens and Rousseau.68 But what
was Stevens’ sense of Rousseau and Primitivism? Writing of Bombois, the
poet observed:
Bombois […] is a [Henri] Rousseau who has never visited Mexico […] a Rousseau
without imagination. He is a contemporary primitive and I have no way of know-
ing as yet what relations a picture of this sort will form with the other pictures in
my very small collection. However, it is fresh, pleasant and without sophistica-
tion. The truth is that I have a taste for Braque and a purse for Bombois.69
64
Rich, Henri Rousseau, 13. 65 Ibid., quoted on title page.
66
Nancy Ireson, Interpreting Henri Rousseau (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 72.
67
See ibid., 25–7.
68
Marianne Moore astutely allied Stevens’ exoticism with Rousseau’s early work in ‘Well Moused,
Lion’ The Dial 76 (1924), 84–91 and ‘Unanimity and Fortitude’ Poetry 49.5 (1937), 271; rpt. Doyle,
Wallace Stevens, 49, 168.
69
L, 545.
Bombois is ‘a Rousseau who has never visited Mexico’. But Stevens knew
Rousseau had never travelled to Mexico either, despite the painter’s self-
deluding boasts about travel. What Stevens appreciates is how Rousseau
depicted far-away places and jungle scenes, just as Stevens himself was prone
to imaginative travelling. If Bombois lacks imaginative strength, however,
Stevens enjoys how his picture is ‘fresh, pleasant and without sophistica-
tion’, potential material for the poet’s abstractive gaze. The more quoted part
of this letter – ‘The truth is that I have a taste for Braque and a purse for
Bombois’ – should not be taken at face value. Stevens may have had ‘a purse
for Bombois’ but he seems less to have had ‘a taste for Braque’ and more a
taste for lesser-known artists who seemingly resisted Modernist trends.
Certainly, Stevens aestheticized the process of acquiring ‘a Primitive’.
In the same month that he printed ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’, Stevens
wrote to Paule Vidal wondering if she had ‘been paralyzed by’ his ‘request
for a Primitive and, again, for something exquisite but cheap’, report-
ing: ‘Only the other day I received a catalogue of an exhibition held last
year at Avignon. Of course I am not expecting the sort of Primitive that
you would find in Avignon.’70 Finding something ‘exquisite but cheap’
was not just a practical concern. Stevens did not desire any ‘Primitive’,
but something different from ‘the sort of Primitive that you would find in
Avignon’ (a ‘typical’ and no doubt costly Primitive). His desire for some-
thing on a par perhaps with Rousseau, but a portrait not already part of
an existing catalogue was bound to test Vidal’s powers.
What effects could such imaginative searching have had on Stevens’
poetry? It is tempting to think that Rousseau’s ‘Poet’s Bouquet’ (1890–5)
influenced Stevens’ ‘Bouquet’ or even ‘Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight’.71 But
the textual evidence is slight. With ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’ it is super-
ficially hard to detect traces of Rousseau or any of the other ‘Primitives’.
Of course, it is characteristic of Stevensian abstraction to refrain from
specific links – Stevens’ quoting from Yeats’ ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’
in ‘Page from a Tale’ is always a surprise to the committed reader of the
Collected Poems.72 However, ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’ III does evoke an
external but ‘domestic’ scene similar to Rousseau’s depictions of the bour-
geois excitement at domesticating the outdoors in ‘Carnival Evening’
(1886), ‘The Wedding’ (1904–5), ‘The Football Players’ (1908) or ‘Jardin du
Luxembourg’ (1909).
70
Ibid., 581.
71
See Stevens’ copy of Rich, Henri Rousseau, plate opposite 22.
72
CPP, 363.
Following the much-quoted idealization of ‘the existence of the poem’
known only ‘in lesser poems’, canto iii ventures:
What milk there is in such captivity,
What wheaten bread and oaten cake and kind,
Green guests and table in the woods and songs
At heart, within an instant’s motion, within
A space grown wide, the inevitable blue
Of secluded thunder, an illusion, as it was,
Oh as, always too heavy for the sense
To seize, the obscurest as, the distant was…
(CPP, 378)
What is ‘a primitive like an orb’ and does the poem chime with
‘Primitivism’? Even if Stevens’ poem is like a painterly ‘primitive’, there
remains an actual simile to tackle. An ‘orb’ is not just a ‘sphere’, ‘globe’ or
‘heavenly body’ but also an ‘eyeball’/‘eye’ (OED). If the poem is similar
to a ‘primitive’ painting, the comparison is also likened to ‘seeing in the
round’. We are invited to see something larger than the physical poem,
something possibly ‘too heavy for the sense / To seize’. Playing on simile,
‘the obscurest as’ is a forever fleeting and abstract past event, ‘the distant
was’. Like the ‘necessary angel’ who in the Tal-Coat-influenced ‘Angel
Surrounded by Paysans’ is ‘quickly, too quickly […] gone’ – only ‘[s]een
for a moment standing in the door’ – ‘the essential poem at the center of
things’ can only be approached through a refracted ‘primitive’ imagin-
ation, which itself resembles another perceptive or reflective agent: an orb,
an eye.73
Stevens enjoys transmuting domestic scenes to ‘the woods’. ‘It Must Give
Pleasure’ reports that ‘merely going round is a final good, / The way wine
comes at a table in a wood’.74 ‘Dinner Bell in the Woods’ (1954) reads:
He was facing phantasma when the bell rang.
The picnic of children came running then,
In a burst of shouts, under the trees
And through the air. The smaller ones
Came tinkling on the grass to the table
Where the fattest women belled the glass.
The point of it was the way he heard it,
In the green, outside the door of phantasma.
(CPP, 471)
73
Ibid., 423. Ibid., 350.
74
Rousseau’s French woodland portraits are overtly green, their figures cari-
catures not unlike Stevens’ ‘phantasma’. This late poem relishes placing
an everyday object of bourgeois pretension (the dinner bell) in an atyp-
ical context (the woods) as prelude to an aesthetic feast. The ‘picnic of
children’ makes up part of that metaphorical banquet, as do ‘the fattest
women’, whose rotund shapes ‘belled the glass’: the verb suggesting their
voluble shape, how their curves blend into a glass-like shape, as well as
re-conjuring the dinner bell itself. ‘The point of it was the way he heard
it’ seems to apply as much to the poem’s reader as to the figure who has
heard the bell and its summons. Accepting that ‘point’ liberates the figure
who can now stand ‘outside the door of phantasma’ – seemingly at liberty
to enter or otherwise – rather than merely ‘facing’ such phenomena.
This poem recalls a pivotal comment in Stevens’ earlier career. In 1940,
the poet confessed:
About the time when I […] began to feel around for a new romanticism, I might
naturally have been expected to start on a new cycle. Instead of doing so, I
began to feel that I was on the edge: that I wanted to get to the center: that I was
isolated, and I wanted to share the common life […] People say that I live in a
world of my own […] I have been interested in what might be described as an
attempt to achieve the normal, the central. So stated, this puts the thing out of
all proportion in respect to its relation to the context of life. Of course, I don’t
agree with the people who say that I live in a world of my own; I think that I am
perfectly normal, but I see that there is a center. For instance, a photograph of a
lot of fat men and women in the woods, drinking beer and singing Hi-li Hi-lo
convinces me that there is a normal that I ought to try to achieve.75
Stevens refers initially to the ‘new romantic’ of Ideas of Order. The goal
of ‘sharing the common life’ is not really a social aim, but an aesthetic
justification. Stevens’ penchant for abstraction, his obsession with privacy,
primed him not for ‘relentless contact’ – which implies being too involved,
even cauterized by excessive stimulation – but ‘an attempt to achieve the
normal’.76 Stevens tactically welcomed rather than resolved this dilemma,
relishing how this ‘attempt’ is already aesthetically removed from ‘normal-
ity’. The poet is mindful of being ‘out of all proportion’ with respect to the
nominal ‘center’ and ‘its relation to the context of life’. But, whether ‘its’
refers to the ‘center’ or to Stevens’ overall statement, the poet is inspired by
being at the distance which allows approach of this cherished ‘center’.
L, 352.
75
Vogue (1 October 1954) noted: ‘He [Stevens] dislikes publicity about either of his careers, and
76
vetoes any about his private life; once, a discouraged Hartford reporter wrote, “No one will ever
know what Mr. Stevens eats for breakfast”’, 127.
However, what is most captivating in this letter is its least quoted
part. Stevens’ idea of the ‘normal’ does not only comprise ‘a lot of fat
men and women in the woods, drinking beer and singing Hi-li Hi-lo’.
He conceives this scene as ‘a photograph’, as an abstract snapshot of the
‘good life’. The picnic scene and its festive spirit prove catching. But what
about ‘Hi-li Hi-lo’? ‘Hi lee, hi lo’ was published in 1923 with music by Ira
Schuster and lyrics by Eugene West.77 This song should not be confused
with ‘Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo’ (1953) – composed by Bronisław Kaper for the film
Lili – which post-dates Stevens’ letter. The 1923 song was known, alarm-
ingly, as a ‘Chop Suey a la Fox-ee Trot-ee’, the first line being ‘Into China
far away, came a little German band one day’. Certainly, Stevens’ attach-
ment to this festive, ‘domestic’, picnic image – ‘Hi-Li, Hi-Lo’ sounds
like a camping/drinking song – becomes an abstract photographic
‘negative’ to which the poet is drawn in ‘Dinner Bell in the Woods’ and
elsewhere.
But was Stevens, in Heaney’s words, really ‘a home-based man at home /
In the end with little’?78 The foreman who shuts the yard in ‘Quitting
Time’ probably is at home ‘with little’, whereas Stevens required aesthetic
stimulation from books, paintings and other artefacts from far-flung
corners of the globe. Nevertheless, Stevens does aestheticize a domestic
existence where ‘less is more’, his self-denials and acquisitions becoming
fecund flirtations with ascetic experience. If he domesticated what entered
his home, such objects had to be engagingly ‘bourgeois’: not kitsch or
sentimental objets d’art, but artefacts symbolically resisting ‘professional
modernism’ and constituting refreshing changes from the Mondrians,
Klees and Kandinskys Stevens valued outside Westerly Terrace.
Stevens also exhibited a violent desire to change his domestic sphere:
If I could afford it I should throw away everything I have, each autumn […] and
start all over with all the latest inventions: radiant heating ci-inclus, fresh walls,
new pictures – and possibly a goat. One would always like to bring home a goat
from New York, for the humanity of it.79
Stevens was wary too of the trappings of ‘bourgeois’ life. In 1949 the poet
applauded novelist, scholar and Nobel Prize winner Romain Rolland for
scorning his house-proud neighbours:
77
‘Hi lee, hi lo’ (New York: Leo Feist Inc., 1923), Kirk Collection ‘Popular Song Index’ Part 4
1923–9, Indiana State University Library (http://odin.indstate.edu/about/units/rbsc/kirk/ps1923.
html).
78
Seamus Heaney, ‘Quitting Time’ in District and Circle (London: Faber, 2006), 69.
79
L, 659.
Rolland, apparently, lived in an apartment where his wife, Clothilde, was no
more hostile to a little dust than we are at home but the neighbors seem to have
moved the chairs every Thursday and cleaned the windows every Friday, pol-
ished the kitchen floor every Saturday, did the laundry on Sunday, dusted on
Monday, etc. Rolland thought that this was the last word in being bourgeois.
How much more closely that sort of thing brings one to Paris than remarks
about the growth of interest in Socialism, the artificiality of Sarah Bernhardt,
the facility with which Duse was able to weep on the stage, the slightly ironic
sneer that D’Annunzio always wore.80
Stevens approves of the ‘little dust’ not merely in Rolland’s apartment but
also at Westerly Terrace. The neighbourly tension over ‘being bourgeois’
reveals Paris ‘more closely’ than Socialism, the dramatic ‘artificiality’ of
Bernhardt or Eleonora Duse or the visage of D’Annunzio combined.
Stevens appropriates a literary figure, Rolland, whom he enjoys as anything
but ‘literary’ – as if Rolland was another ‘master of life’, a hyperborean,
hardly house-proud figure who is also removed from the over-earnestness
literature can inculcate, whether through biographical artifice (the sneer
D’Annunzio impossibly ‘always wore’) or dramatic make-believe.
Stevens’ domestic space is also a site where gastronomic and aesthetic
concerns coincide.81 As Chapter 5 made clear, Stevens’ correspondence is
littered with gastronomic–aesthetic delights, particularly those enjoyed at
home, their frequency increasing in the final decade. For example, writ-
ing to Victor Hammer, Stevens commented of the Italian poet Pietro
Metastasio: ‘the idea that you might have been reading him in a railway
restaurant and at the same time eating a fresh Italian cream cheese and
wild strawberries made a man of him’.82 In the picture Stevens paints of
Hammer, Metastasio has no ‘reality’ without those strawberries and cream
cheese just as Stevens flexes his abstract imagination to bring both figures
to life. An economy of possible pleasures is kept ‘in the abstract’ (as with
the Chair of Poetry Stevens discussed with Henry Church) in which it is
imperative to maintain imaginative credit.83 Having claimed life was ‘pleas-
ant at home’, Stevens admitted to Barbara Church: ‘Yet one is always curi-
ous about the other side of the mountain, and it invigorates me, at least, to
go to New York intending to have a really swagger lunch somewhere even
though on the train I decide that there won’t be time for lunch.’ 84
80
Ibid., 657.
81
‘Cuisine Bourgeoise’ is a less domestic, alarming case of ‘cannibalism’. The poem bemoans ‘the
glares / Of this present, this science, this unrecognized, / This outpost, this douce, this dumb,
this dead, in which / We feast on human heads’, CPP, 209.
82
Ibid., 537. 83 See Chapter 3 (p. 92). 84 L, 769.
Such reflections did not only provide abstract credits and unspent
bonuses. Stevens often visualized his surroundings in gustatory terms,
even his own paintings. Writing of his Cavaillès, Stevens noted:
This picture grows on me […] [W]hat mattered was that it was necessary for
me to believe in it. In Havana taxicabs are blue, gold, red, yellow, etc. So, in
Cannes, small boats are of the green of the pistache, various shades of blue, and
docks are magenta and pink. It is as if one lived in a world of patisserie.85
Stevens explained his cravings to Wilson Taylor: ‘What I want more than
anything else in music, painting and poetry, in life and in belief is the
thrill that I experienced once in all the things that no longer thrill me at
all. I am like a man in a grocery store that is sick and tired of raisins and
oyster crackers and who nevertheless is overwhelmed by appetite.’ 86
The domestic side of that appetite emerges in ‘A Quiet Normal Life’:
His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not
In anything that he constructed, so frail,
So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught,
As, for example, a world in which, like snow,
He became an inhabitant, obedient
To gallant notions on the part of cold.
It was here. This was the setting and the time
Of year. Here in his house and in his room,
In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked[.]
(CPP, 443)
Although the house seemingly takes precedence over the imagination

here, the poem suggests the poet’s imaginative activity is stimulated by
‘his house’, ‘his room’. ‘A Quiet Normal Life’ leaves no trace of the banal,
but equally resists the ‘transcendent’:
There was no fury in transcendent forms.
But his actual candle blazed with artifice.
(CPP, 444)
This teasing final line exemplifies the impossibility of separating the

mind’s artifice from the ‘actual’. But note the centrality of the domes-
tic space catalysing the poet’s imaginative appetite, transforming what
‘An Old Man Asleep’ playfully calls ‘your whole peculiar plot’ (‘plot’ as
ground and personal narrative).87
85
Ibid., 833. 86 Ibid., 604.
87
CPP, 427. For other late poems featuring domestic imagery, see CPP, 427–8, 432–6, 439, 443–4,
455, 459, 468–9, 473, 597–8.
We saw earlier how Stevens dismissed derivative or ‘professional mod-
ernism’ by contrasting the vibrant fruits in a New York shop window
with the unpromising exhibits at MOMA.88 A few months earlier, Stevens
complained to Feo:
What music have I heard that has not been the music of an orchestra of parrots
and what books have I read that were not written for money and how many men
of ardent spirit and star-scimitar mind have I met? Not a goddam one […] There
is no music because the only music tolerated is modern music. There is no paint-
ing because the only painting permitted is […] derived from Picasso and Matisse
[…] When I go into a fruit store nowadays and find there nothing but the fruits
du jour: apples, pears, oranges, I feel like throwing them at the Greek. I expect,
as you expect, sapodillas and South Shore bananas and pineapples a foot high
[…] Why should I answer questions from young philosophers when I receive
perfumed notes from Paris?89
That last remark warned Feo not to present Stevens with literary–
philosophical conundrums. Rather, Stevens craved details from Feo’s
Cuban life, ideally as colourful as the exotic fruits Stevens expected Feo to
‘expect’. Although commonplace ‘fruits du jour’ are rejected in this letter,
it was an importantly paradoxical part of the poet’s quest for normality
that his experience be ordinary and exotic, even exotically commonplace.
Stevens maintained that, for all his connoisseurship, ‘ordinariness’ was
essential to his imaginative health: ‘[a]n ordinary day […] does more
for me than an extraordinary day: the bread of life is better than any
souffle’.90
This tendency accounts for Stevens’ approval of the ‘second-rate’:
We did not ourselves go away this summer. One very affable friend […] wrote to
me suggesting that I spend the summer in Tuscany. I should like to sit in some
elderly neighbourhood, washing down second-rate cheese with second-rate wine
as much as anyone, and I think that I should go in for something a little more
tormenting than Tuscany.91
The ‘second-rate’ requires none of the reverence the ‘first-rate’ demands,
and provides none of the disappointment the ‘first-rate’ risks through not
living up to expectations (especially if one only imagines the attractions
of the ‘second-rate’). The paintings Stevens collected reflect this aesthetic
preference, and it is arguable the poet would have benefited imaginatively
from possessing ‘first-rate’ pieces. At least Stevens was able to engage in
bourgeois abstraction at home through the stimulants of his art collection
L, 629–30.
88 89
L, 622. 90
Ibid., 741. Ibid., 728.
91
and other domestic phenomena.92 This was, after all, the poet who, finally
capitulating to Knopf’s Collected Poems, wrote ‘it is good housekeeping
for me to do what I am doing’.93
But Stevens’ domestic and aesthetic ‘tranquillity’ was disturbed by
the growing, sometimes ambivalent, criticism of his writing during the
final decade.94 Just as Stevens claimed to read less, he was confronted by
doctoral dissertations and some of the first monographs on his work.95
Although ‘the significance of poetry’ was its enabling ‘a fresh conception
of the world’, it was poetry as meditation (not of the page) that attracted
the older Stevens.96 His reliance on a non-literary, habitual routine as an
inspirational source also relates to abstraction:
[T]he habitual […] has become, at my age, such a pleasure in itself that it is
coming to be […] a large part of the normality of the normal. And, I suppose,
that projecting this idea to its ultimate extension, the time will arrive when just
to be will take in everything without the least doing since even the least doing
is irrelevant to pure being […] You will already have observed the abstract state
of my mind. This is in part due to the fact that I have done little or no reading,
little or no writing or walking or thinking.97
An abstract state of mind is paradoxically the route toward ‘the central’,
even if such thinking might be ‘marginal’ or remote: ‘Conceding that the
normal, or, say, the central, involves all the fundamental problems of any
writer, the actual truth is that the marginal seems to get at them more
constantly and more effectively’.98
Certainly, Stevens knew his own abstractive powers could be de
stabilizing, remarking of his own writing: ‘what one ought to find is
normal life, insight into the commonplace, reconciliation with every-
day reality. The things that it makes me happy to do are things of this
sort. However, it is not possible to get away from one’s own nature.’99
Stevens realized his abstract tendencies could make ‘the commonplace’
seem unattainable, and yet the imaginative circle Stevensian abstraction
encourages was precisely his source of inspiration. However, Stevens’
resistance to ‘the literary’ intensified for fear that his mature, more
92
This process did not always achieve the desired results. In 1953 Stevens complained: ‘Bezombes
may be, after all, a very rich sauce poured on poor bones’ (L, 796).
93
Ibid., 832.
94
Robert Lowell resentfully suggested ‘perhaps Stevens is too much the leisured man of taste’
(155), which denies Stevens’ ‘leisured’ poetry any positive relation with the world. See Lowell,
‘Imagination and Reality’ in Wallace Stevens: A Critical Anthology ed. Irvin Ehrenpreis
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 154–7.
95
For Stevens’ disavowals of reading, see L, 549, 599, 667, 780.
96
Ibid., 590. 97 Ibid., 767. 98 Ibid., 566. 99 Ibid., 643.
‘abstract’ writing might be construed as literary evasion from ‘every-day
reality’. As he informed Richard Eberhart, ‘poetry is not a literary activ-
ity: it is a vital activity’.100 Although he frequently chided Feo or Peter
Lee for ‘literariness’, Stevens still feared being cast either as literary fop,
the dandy of Harmonium, or as an abstract theorist – more than a lit-
tle out of touch with post-war America.101 When C. Roland Wagner
and Bernard Heringman prepared their doctoral dissertations, Stevens
wrote defensively to Heringman: ‘As both you and Mr. Wagner must
realize, I have no wish to arrive at a conclusion. Sometimes I believe
most in the imagination for a long time and then, without reasoning
about it, turn to reality and believe in that and that alone. But both of
these things project themselves endlessly and I want them to do just
that.’ 102 ‘Good housekeeping’ might involve itemizing the achievements
of Stevens’ career in his Collected Poems, but it also involved protect-
ing the domestic space in which Stevens’ abstract imagination thrived,
where to project ideas ‘endlessly’ enabled inspiration rather than suc-
cumbing to the intrusions of academic critical inquiry.
7.2 C onc l us ion

What picture do we have, therefore, of Stevens’ total career? The final dec-
ade sees Stevens transcending his early 1940s abstract vocabulary as he dis-
covered a self-confident abstract aesthetic. ‘The Pure Good of Theory’ is
one of the most achieved early poems of Stevens’ late career, its battle with
abstraction and metaphor pragmatically enabling the poet to confront
‘sound’ and ‘rhetoric’. In 1935, following his early interrogation of ‘pure
poetry’, Stevens sought an abstract vocabulary, even although he defended
his ‘new romantic’, or ‘ideas of order’ motif, from the name ‘abstract’.
In ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ he interrogated the opportunities of
abstract verse, experimenting with the ‘un-locatable’ speaker who both
transcends the poem’s nominal dialogue between ‘imagination’ and ‘real-
ity’ and engages Stevens’ reader in conceiving the very poem in which this
‘I’ speaks.
By the early 1940s Stevens refined a new idiom replete with abstract
figures. But it is important that Stevens criticism does not overlook the
100
Ibid., 815.
101
‘[Y]ou are becoming so literary that you ought to understand that life fights back and that it
will get you even on the top floor of the Peacock Inn if you are not careful’, the ‘top floor of the
Peacock Inn’ being perhaps the highest level of pride at which a poet can reside, L, 575.
102
L, 710.
human element to Stevensian abstraction, whatever the surface ‘coldness’
of the early 1940s verse, especially if such verse is dismissed for didactic
reasons. Whether or not Stevens’ idealism can be illuminated through
Coleridge, Wordsworth or Hegel – or whether or not phenomeno-
logical writers such as Focillon, Blanchot or Merleau-Ponty cast light on
Stevens – Stevensian abstraction is a strategy for making the world richly
poetic. The poet’s creation of an idealist ‘I’ is perhaps the most refined
aspect of his realization of an early abstract poetic. It is a speaker the
Romantic poets could not have anticipated and its absence from critical
discussion remains surprising.
By the mid-1940s Stevens realized that no specialist vocabulary
was necessary to achieve a resourcefully abstract verse. As ‘The Green
Plant’ comments, ‘The effete vocabulary of summer / No longer says
anything’, perhaps a reference to Transport to Summer and its some-
what awkward inclusion of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ (the 1942
poem that really belongs with Parts of a World).103 From 1942 to the end
of his career Stevens experimented, in the absence of a ‘literary’ rhet-
oric, with the limits and insights of abstract meditation. The ‘ordinary’
and the ‘normal’ become tokens in realizing, as ‘The River of Rivers in
Connecticut’ remarks, a ‘local abstraction’.104 However, in Stevens the
local is never parochial or nativist even. Abstracting one’s environment
becomes a question of realizing poems that cannot ultimately be traced
to a location, time and place, even as they are influenced by the culture
and history of which they are a part. It is through this almost timeless
quality that Stevens invites readers into the difficult terrain of his verse.
Abstraction aims, therefore, to convey experience in distilled form. As
Marcel comments in The Way by Swann’s: ‘in all purely mental states,
every emotion is multiplied tenfold’.105 Abstraction can transform ideas
into ‘an actual part of Nature itself, worthy to be studied and explored’,
a process through which emotion, as ‘Three Academic Pieces’ suggests,
is intensified.106
This study has also focused on the under-explored gastronomic and
domestic components of Stevens’ imagination. Certainly, Stevens was
‘masterful’ in manipulating the complex interaction of aesthetic pleas-
ures in which his love of wine, food, painting, book-collecting and poetry
unite, particularly as those pleasures are held in abeyance or experienced
103
CPP, 431. 104 Ibid., 451.
105
Proust, The Way by Swann’s, 87.
106
Ibid., 88; see CPP, 690.
‘in the abstract’ through vicarious correspondence. ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’
is perhaps a special case. But the Stevens corpus is littered with evidence
for the profoundly catholic nature of the poet’s aesthetic tastes.
Finally, this concluding chapter has engaged with Stevens’ ‘primitive’
leanings, his desire for the ‘second-rate’ and the complexity of ‘cool’ and
‘warm’ abstraction in his total career. Whilst abstraction is not the bed-
rock of Stevens’ imagination – an inappropriate metaphor for so fluid a
concept – my hope is that this revisionist account anticipates a ‘twenty-
first-century’ Stevens whose impulses were neither unusual for his time
nor, therefore, incompatible with literary and artistic Modernism. The
historicism of the late 1980s and after taught us a lot about Stevens’ rela-
tionship with his ‘actual world’. My own reservation about that criticism
is the tendency to overstress the poetry’s relationship with that world
linearly. Stevens criticism must also resist over-reliance on Stevens’ own
metaphors and figures. If comparative work on Stevens can be ‘too gen-
eral to be serviceable’, it is at least usually immune from self-perpetuating
‘Stevensian’ circles.107
Without self-contradiction, I want to conclude with a comment of
Stevens’ own as he reviewed his overall career. It marks a fitting con-
clusion to this study because we see Stevens benefiting from the almost
abstract notion of what might have occurred if he had devoted himself
entirely to poetry:
If Beethoven could look back on what he had accomplished and say that it was
a collection of crumbs compared to what he had hoped to accomplish, where
should I ever find a figure of speech adequate to size up the little that I have done
compared to that which I had hoped to do. Of course, I have had a happy and
well-kept life. But I have not even begun to touch the spheres within spheres
that might have been possible if, instead of devoting the principal amount of my
time to making a living, I had devoted it to thought and poetry. Certainly it is
as true as it ever was that whatever means most to one should receive all of one’s
time and that has not been true in my case. But, then, if I had been more deter-
mined about it, I might now be looking back not with a mere sense of regret but
at some actual devastation […] I am now in the happy position of being able to
say that I don’t know what would have happened if I had had more time. This
is very much better than to have had all the time in the world and have found
oneself inadequate.108
This forever prospective imagination was not just a source of consolation
to the ageing Stevens. It is a definitive aspect of the imaginative tendencies
107
See CPP, 781. L, 669.
108
and reach of Stevens’ poetry, which revels in imaginative possibility,
conceives poetry ‘in the abstract’ and, of course, results in a poetry that
courts abstract concerns. Just as, for the Perloff of the twenty-first century
‘modernism remains unfinished’, I have no doubt critical engagement
with Stevens is in its infancy and that the question of abstraction will be
repeatedly posed.109
Marjorie Perloff, ‘Pound/Stevens: Whose Era? Revisited’ WSJ 26.2 (2002), 139.

109
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Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Vol. II (Cambridge:
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Santayana, George, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory
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‘Lyric Resistance: Views of the Political in the Poetics of Wallace Stevens and
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242 Bibliography
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Index
abstraction Stevens’ embracing of 4, 77, 87, 97, 182,

autotelic abstraction 213 184–5
and the bourgeois 5, 97, 107, 148, 162, 165, in Stevens’ later career 2–3, 99, 185, 209
167, 203, 231 Stevens’ modifying of 5, 11, 143, 165, 166,
‘cool’ and ‘warm’ abstraction 2, 5, 20, 24, 172, 174, 229
25, 167, 205, 213, 230 and textual speakers 4, 27, 55, 58, 60, 63,
and domesticity 5, 25, 146, 210, 216, 218, 66–76, 77, 86, 87, 90, 95, 97, 98, 109,
220, 221, 223, 225, 229 110, 111, 112, 114, 118, 119, 121, 126, 127,
expressions of 4, 25, 28, 210 131, 134, 135, 156, 229, See also idealist ‘I’
and gastronomy. See gastronomy and time 91, 102, 189–98
as generalization 18, 19, 23 and the visual 19, 26–7, 60, 76, 86, 94, 95–7
and the habitual 83, 94, 133, 227 Aestheticism 7
as human task 8, 26, 132, 179, 205, 229 Alcestis Press, The 31, 36, 49, 55, 56, 155
and idealism. See philosophy for ‘idealism’ Altieri, Charles 6, 23, 26–7, 28, 80, 134, 142
and inhumanity 8, 138, 203 Arensberg, Walter 218
and mediation 76, 94, 98, 134, 163, 170, 172, Ariadne 126, 127–9
174, 180, 183, 199 Armory Show, The 209, 212
and mental processes 5 Arnold, Matthew 80, 81
and metaphor 103, 176–8, 185–203 Arp, Jean 213–14
misunderstandings concerning 4, 9, 133 art and art-collecting. See painting
pejorative abstraction 7, 20, 25, 45, 49, 53, Auberjonois, René Victor 217
56, 57, 58, 67, 68, 69, 72, 74, 80, 82, 104, Auden, W. H. 7, 75–6
129, 138, 193 Avignon 220
and philosophy 3, 4, See also philosophy for
‘idealism’ Babbitt, Irving 37
and the physical 13, 26, 29, 51, 60, 73, 87, Bacon, Francis 95, 130, 138
93–6, 100, 102, 116, 132, 133, 134–5, 155, Barr, Alfred H. 210, 212
156, 160, 214, 221 Basel 208
and pleasure 29, 92 Bates, Milton J. 8
poet as abstract 3, 100, 101, 189 Baudelaire, Charles 2
pragmatic abstraction 185–203 Bauhaus, The 213
and pure poetry. See pure poetry Bayes, Nora 73
and the real 19, 23, 26 Beethoven, Ludwig van 230
as removal 1, 3, 52, 57, 58–9, 67, 213 Bell, Graham 116
senses of abstraction 21–3, 58–60, 99, 114 Benamou, Michel 15, 83, 94
as sensory 15, 17, 23, 29, 180, 199 Benét, William Rose 206
and the sensual 132–3 Béranger, Pierre Jean de 1–2
Stevens’ ambivalence concerning 2, 49, 54, Bergmann, Gustav 190
59, 60, 72, 74–5, 80 Bergonzi, Bernard 15, 18
in Stevens criticism 4, 6–29 Bernard, Émile 115–16, 118
244
Index 245
Bernhardt, Sarah 224 Conkling, Grace Hazard 32
Berryman, John 138 Cook, Eleanor 21–2
Bewley, Marius 18 Costello, Bonnie 94
Bezombes, Roger 227 Cotton Club, The 73
Bishop, Elizabeth 49 Crane, Hart 2
Blackmur, R. P. 14, 15–16, 139 Critchley, Simon 27–8
Blake, William 179 Croce, Benedetto 122
Blanchot, Maurice 4, 22, 29, 33, 60, 81, 84, Cummington Press, The 9, 49, 155
88–92, 93, 95, 99, 104, 184, 229 Cunningham, J. V. 14
Bloom, Harold 6, 11–12, 28, 192
Bogan, Louise 143 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 224
Bombois, Camille 219–20 Daedalus 128
Bornstein, George 37–8, 85 Dalin, Ebba 150
Botticelli, Sandro 103 dandyism 7, 228
Bové, Paul 12 Dante, Alighieri 122, 189
Brancusi, Constantin 214 Dasenbrock, Reed Way 201
Braque, Georges 115, 211, 219–20 Davidson, Donald 177, 200–3
Brianchon, Maurice 215 de Chirico, Giorgio 2, 16, 211
Brinnin, John Malcolm 15–16, 35 de Kooning, Willem 95
Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught 9, 112–13, 167, 172 Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugène 106
Brooks, Cleanth 45, 107, 110, 162 Delaunay, Robert 219
Brooks, Van Wyck 9, 143, 144, 162 Delille, Abbé 150
Burgundy. See gastronomy Depression, the 2, 7, 31, 49, 53, 55, 162, 209
Burke, Kenneth 19, 108 Derrida, Jacques 12, 13, 28
Burnshaw, Stanley 4, 56 Deutsch, Babette 14, 17, 18
Byron, George Gordon (Lord) 30 Dewey, John 49, 192
Dickinson, Emily 107, 108
Caesar, Julius 147 Dionysus 128
Cairo 204 Doggett, Frank 13, 23, 81
Cannes 225 Donoghue, Denis 6, 10, 23
Cassagnac, Paul de 146, 149–51 Douglas, Keith 91, 144
Cavaillès, Jean 211, 215, 217, 225 Dowling, Allan 147
Cavell, Stanley 206 Du Pont, Pierre 207
Cézanne, Paul 5, 16, 76, 95, 100, 106, 115–18, Dubuffet, Jean 215
119, 121, 125, 127, 209, 218 Duchamp, Marcel 212
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon 106 Dufy, Raoul 211, 215, 216, 217
Cheney, Russell 210 Duse, Eleonora 224
Chocorua 127
Chronos 187 Eberhart, Richard 13, 228
Church, Barbara 147, 152, 217, 224 Eeckhout, Bart 17, 27, 28, 97, 129, 130, 132–3,
Church, Henry 92–3, 136, 160, 224 138, 213
Cleghorn, Angus 9, 10, 130 Eliot, T. S. 7, 134, 207
Cogniat, Raymond 214 Ellmann, Richard 13
Cohen, Josh 90, 130 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 9, 11, 12, 80, 81, 209
Cold War, the 147 Eulalia, St 141–2
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 9, 13, 21, 41–3, 60,
76, 78–88, 91, 96, 97, 99, 111, 117, 120, Fatima 40, 41
123–4, 127, 133, 178, 181, 192, 194, 208, Feo, José Rodríguez 106, 107, 135, 136, 152,
229 169–70, 171, 173, 191, 212, 213,
Biographia Literaria 13, 80, 83–4, 85–7, 123 226, 228
‘Dejection: An Ode’ 80 Filreis, Alan 9, 10, 15, 22, 122, 123,
‘Frost at Midnight’ 43 126, 173, 214
‘Kubla Khan’ 41–4, 46 First World War, the 138, 147
commonality 6, 17, 21–2, 205–6 Fleming, Atherton 149
Communism 37 Fletcher, John Gould 31
246 Index
Focillon, Henri 4, 22, 24, 29, 60, 76, 81, 83, Goodman, Nelson 201–2, 203
88, 91, 97, 99, 101–7, 113, 117, 124, 125, Gottlieb, Adolph 22
209, 229 Gromaire, Marcel 211, 217
Fontainebleau 111
Fontaine-Gagnard, Domaine 146 Halliday, Mark 8
Ford, Charles Henri 211 Hammer, Victor 224
Foscolo, Ugo 122 Hardy, Thomas 76–7, 79, 115
Frankenburg, Lloyd 14, 16 Harrison, Tony 207
French Revolution, the 80 Hartford 211, 222
Freytag-Loringhofen, Baroness Elsa von 30 Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company,
Friar, Kimon 35, 44, 51 the 3, 40, 94
Fribourg 204 Hartley, David 85
Frost, Robert 14, 159, 160 Havana 31, 35, 40–1, 43–4, 45, 48, 50, 54, 69,
Frye, Northrop 6, 10 179, 225
Furst, Herbert 110–11, 209 Heaney, Seamus 223
Hecht, Anthony 13
Gagnard, Jean-Noël, Domaine 146 Hegel, G. W. F. 19, 81, 86, 93, 94, 97–101, 103,
Gagnard-Delagrange, Domaine 146 111, 117, 134, 170, 172, 184, 229
Gallatin, A. E. 212 Heidegger, Martin 12–13, 88, 90, 136, 167
gastronomy 5, 14, 41, 93, 119, 129, 134, 135, Heringman, Bernard 211, 228
136–65, 210, 212, 215, 224, 229 Hillyer, Robert 206
Bordeaux 162 historicism 7–10, 230
Burgundy Hopkins, Gerard Manley 26
Bâtard-Montrachet 145–6, 152 Howe, Irving 20
Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet 145 humanism 169
Chablis 136, 151, 152 Hume, David 85, 86
Chambolle-Musigny 145, 152 Hutchison, Percy 53
Chassagne-Montrachet 145–6, 151
Chevalier-Montrachet 145, 146, 162 idealist ‘I’ 5, 27, 53, 75, 81, 91, 97, 99, 109,
Côte d’Or 147 110–35, 139, 141–3, 158, 165, 167, 180, 229,
Côte de Beaune 145 See also philosophy for ‘idealism’
Criots-Bâtard-Montrachet 145 ideas 5, 15, 16, 21, 25, 26, 27, 29, 60, 61, 71,
Gevrey-Chambertin 145, 150 72, 76, 85, 86, 87, 92, 95, 99, 105, 129,
La Romanée 145 168–9, 214
Le Chambertin 145 Mallarméan poetry of the ‘Idea’ 2, 205
Le Corton 136 imagination 8, 10, 13, 14, 24, 38, 45, 46, 49, 51,
Le Montrachet 136, 145–7, 148–9, 150, 158, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60–1, 63, 65, 66, 68, 70,
160, 165 73, 74, 76–7, 78–9, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86–7,
Le Musigny 145 88, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96–7, 99, 101, 119,
Meursault 136, 140, 151, 152 120–2, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 132, 133–5,
Puligny-Montrachet 145, 146 137, 139, 140, 141, 150, 158, 160–1, 165,
Vosne-Romanée 145 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177,
café as Stevensian milieu 139, 171–2, 192 178–9, 181, 182, 184, 188–9, 191, 196, 203,
Champagne 136 205, 206, 211, 212, 213, 219, 221, 224,
Loire Valley 150 225, 228, 229, 230
Mosel 140 Imagism 52
Moselle 135, 140, 147 insurance v, 1, 7, 35, 40, 41, 134, 207
Rhine regions 93, 100, 134, 135 inter-textuality 24
Stevens’ passion for wine 93, 100, 119, 134, isolationism 10, 22, 91, 167
135, 136, 151–2, 212 Ivory Tower rhetoric 44–5, 51, 162
Tuscany 226
Geyzel, Leonard van 150 James, William 11, 80, 81, 191
Giorgione, Barbarelli da Castelfranco 217 Jameson, Fredric 21
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 212 Jarrell, Randall 14, 15, 18–19, 23, 25, 91, 144
Goldfarb, Lisa 29 Jenkins, Lee 7
Index 247
Johnson, Jeri 70 role of faith in 2
Joyce, James 70, 192, 194 Stevens’ aversion to ‘professional
modernism’ 2, 111, 211, 215, 216, 223,
Kandinsky, Wassily 211, 212–13, 223 226
Kant, Immanuel 19, 81, 86, 97, 98, 198 Mondrian, Piet 132, 212–13, 223
Kaper, Bronisław 223 Monroe, Harriet 32
Katahdin 127 Moore, Marianne 7, 36–8, 49, 134, 219
Keats, John 1, 81, 179 Morey, Albert, Domaine 146
Kermode, Frank 6, 20–1, 88, 138, 149, 179 Morey, Bernard, Domaine 146
Kierkegaard, Søren 89 Morey, Jean-Marc, Domaine 146
Kladstrup, Don 148 Morey, Marc et Fils, Domaine 146
Kladstrup, Petie 148 Morey-Coffinet, Michel, Domaine 146
Klee, Paul 16, 95, 138, 211, 212–13, 214–15, 223 Morse, Samuel French 14, 17–18, 41
Knopf, Alfred A. 31, 32, 105, 149, 227 Moszynska, Anna 213
Motherwell, Robert 113, 138
La Guardia, David M. 81 Museum of Living Art, the 212
Larkin, Philip 207 Museum of Modern Art, the (MOMA) 2, 210,
Latimer, Ronald Lane 30–1, 36, 49, 56, 74, 75, 92 212, 215–16, 219, 226
Le Havre 118 Musset, Alfred de 150
Lee, Peter 88, 204, 205, 228
Leggett, B. J. 10, 12, 13, 19, 21, 23–5, 85, 87, 101, Napoleon (Bonaparte) 145
105, 132 Napoleonic inheritance law 145
Lensing, George 35 nationalism 9, 91, 123, 143
Lentricchia, Frank 135 Naxos 128
Leonard, Robert Z. 73 New Criticism, the 9, 81, 107–9, 129, 134, 144,
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 97, 210 207
Levin, Jonathan 81 New York City i, 1, 9, 118, 134, 147, 151, 192,
Longenbach, James 22, 113, 144, 205, 206 207, 209, 212, 215, 223, 224, 226
Louvre, the 114–16, 117–18, 218 Nietzsche, Friedrich 11, 128, 169, 207–8
Lowell, Robert 227 Norworth, Jack 73
McGreevy, Thomas 150, 213 O’Connor, William Van 14, 16–17, 18

MacLeish, Archibald 9, 91, 143, 144, 162 O’Hara, Frank 1–3
MacLeod, Glen 58, 70, 71, 130 Objectivism 112–13
Mallarmé, Stéphane 1, 2, 33, 52, 83, 84, 88, 90,
113, 130, 133, 138, 166, 173, 204, 205 Pach, Walter 210
Margaux, Château 150 Pack, Robert 22
Martz, Louis M. 14, 16, 23 painting
Marxism 152 Abstract Expressionism 10, 22, 58, 95, 130, 212
Matisse, Henri 19, 111, 115, 211, 226 abstraction in 1, 26, 58, 71–2, 74, 95, 111, 116,
Mauron, Charles 29, 76, 124, 137–8, 139, 151, 117, 130, 138, 209, 212–18
199, 205 Art Concret 2
Mediterranean, the 131, 132 Art Informel 3
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 4, 19, 27, 29, 60, 76, Constructivism 213
78, 81, 88, 95–6, 98, 99, 115, 229 Cubism 19, 70, 115, 212, 216
Metastasio, Pietro 224 Dutch Masters, the 210
Miller, Henry 143 Expressionism 210
Miller, J. Hillis 6, 15, 24, 128 Impressionism 4, 210
Milton, John 189 Modernist painting 2, 4
Minos and the Minotaur 127–8 Primitivism 210, 218–22
Miró, Joan 16 regionalism 212
Modernism 3, 4, 5, 26, 80, 88, 108, 134, 143, social realism 22, 144, 212
209, 210, 211–12, 215, 216, 219, 220, 230, Stevens’ art collection 5, 209–12
See also painting Surrealism 70, 110, 138, 210, 212
little magazines 3, 30, 31–2 Tachisme 3
248 Index
Paris 96, 150, 152, 219, 224, 226 and abstraction 52–3
Pater, Walter 80 Mallarméan 2, 83, 205, 206
Patke, Rajeev 13 la poésie pure 1–2, 52
Pearce, Roy Harvey 15, 24 Stevens’ modernizing of 4
Perloff, Marjorie 5, 9, 173, 231
Personism 1–3 Rabelais, François 164
Peterson, Margaret 80, 84 Ragner, Bernard 147
Petrarch (Petrarca), Francesco 122 Ransom, John Crowe 105, 107–8, 143, 206
philosophy Raphael (Raphaello), Sanzio de Urbino 101
deconstruction 7 Raymond, Marcel 138
epistemology 23, 25, 27, 72, 75, 117 Reading, Peter 207
idealism 4, 13, 15, 19, 21, 23, 24, 76, 78–82, Rehder, Robert 41, 137
84, 86, 87–8, 94, 97, 99, 100, 101–2, 105, Renard, Jules 207
108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117–18, 121, Rhys, Ernest 84
123, 124, 126, 127, 129, 131–4, 135, 136, Rich, Daniel Catton 218–19
165, 166, 167, 174, 180, 181, 191–2, 194, Richards, I. A. 13, 21, 82–3, 85, 87
198, 207, 212, 213, 229 Richardson, Joan 12, 149
and abstraction 81–2, 84, 99, 209 Ricoeur, Paul 178
German Idealists 81, 88 Riddel, Joseph N. 15, 20, 24
metaphysics 2, 9, 12, 18, 27, 46, 82, 85, 126, Rolland, Romain 223–4
127, 132, 185, 193, 207, 212, 213, 214–15 Romanticism 7, 36, 37, 38, 78, 80–1, 84, 97,
nominalism 44, 45 107, 108, 125, 129, 134, 191, 194, 229
ontology 185 British Romantics 4, 7, 11, 30, 38, 80–1, 84,
phenomenology 4, 76, 81, 88, 111, 167, 168, 88, 108, 124, 209, 229
229 Rorty, Richard 12–13, 28, 79, 190–1, 192
and poetry. See poetry Rosenberg, Harold 138
pragmatism 11, 12, 131, 172, 192, 200 Rossini, Gioachino
subject and object 81, 86, 96, 97–9, 118 Semiramide and Semiramide 141–2
universalism 37, 44, 45 Rothko, Mark 22
Picabia, Francis 212 Rousseau, Henri 212, 218–22
Picasso, Pablo 4, 19, 70–2, 74, 95, 110–12, 115, Roy, Jean Le 53
117, 130, 209, 211, 219, 226 Rubens, Peter Paul 215
Plato 15, 119–21, 189
Poe, Edgar Allan 52, 53 Sanborn, Pitts 32
poetry Santayana, George 26, 83, 91, 136
and ‘literariness’ 52, 168, 185, 205, 206, 207, Sartre, Jean-Paul 95
224, 228, 229 Schaum, Melita 9, 167, 173
and nomination 6, 173, 174 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 88
and office life 3, 93, 94, 135, 204 Schlegel, Friedrich von 90
and philosophy 1, 3, 17, 20, 27–9, 126 Schulze, Robin G. 37–8
and politics 8, 9, 56, 123, 147, 167, 168 Schuster, Ira 223
and wine. See gastronomy Schwartz, Delmore 14, 15, 19, 41, 77
Poggioli, Renato 63, 68, 69, 71, 73 Second World War, the 7, 91, 130, 143, 205, 212
Poirier, Richard 9, 81 Pearl Harbor 22, 91, 143
Pollock, Jackson 95 Serge, Victor 143
Pontigny, Les Entretiens de 122 Shakespeare, William 19, 67, 144, 156, 160, 162,
popular songs 189, 196
‘Hi lee, hi lo’ 223 Cymbeline 144, 151, 156–60, 162, 163
‘Shine On Harvest Moon’ 73 Hamlet 157
‘Stormy Weather’ 73 King Lear 68
Pound, Ezra 7, 134, 206, 207 Macbeth 185, 189, 195–7, 200
Proust, Marcel 29, 76, 101, 104, 106, 116, 134, Shapiro, Karl 91, 144
193, 229 Sharpe, Tony 210
pure poetry 2, 4, 7, 31, 46, 47, 50, 55, 113, 120, Shelley, Percy Bysshe 81, 84, 108, 124, 125, 127,
166, 173, 228 133
Index 249
Simons, Hi 53, 92, 130, 166 supreme fiction 5–6, 10, 13, 16, 19, 22, 24,
Soby, James Thrall 144, 210–11 54, 57, 81, 82, 89, 91, 93–4, 97, 99, 100,
Socialism 147, 224 108, 113, 130, 134, 135, 153, 165, 166, 168,
Socrates 21, 120, 121 169–70, 173, 205, 208, 229
Stevens, Elsie (Kachel) 40 supreme fiction as abstract 93, 152
Stevens, Holly 14, 35 theory of poetry 92, 99
Stevens, Wallace the ultimate poem 5, 168
‘Stevensian’ as derived critical idiom 1, Stevens, Wallace (works of)
11–13, 218, 230 ‘A High-Toned Old Christian Woman’ 6, 56
Stevens, Wallace (figures and themes in) ‘A Postcard from the Volcano’ 50
the actual world 52, 59, 72, 78, 82, 87, 115, ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’ 220–1
167, 173, 176, 192, 209, 230 ‘A Quiet Normal Life’ 205, 225
agreement with reality 122, 123, 126, 173 ‘A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts’ 15
analogy 5, 167 ‘A Study of Two Pears’ 16
anecdote 30–4, 38, 39, 48, 50, 52, 56 ‘A Thought Revolved’ v, 72
‘Chair of Poetry’ 92, 99, 160, 224 ‘Academic Discourse at Havana’ 31, 35,
death of the gods 3, 10, 77, 82, 166 39–51, 54, 69, 179
decreation 24 ‘Adagia’ 82, 87
description 5, 167–8, 173 ‘An Old Man Asleep’ 225
the determining personality 100, 106, 116, ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ 96,
117, 118, 121, 127 168, 210
fiction 9, 11, 12, 21, 22, 23, 24, 52, 57, 84, ‘Anecdote of Canna’ 179
85, 87, 89, 90–1, 93, 105, 106, 107, 126, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ 32, 37, 179
169–72, 174, 192 ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’ 212, 214,
figure[s] of capable imagination 77, 165 215, 221
the first idea 10, 11, 12, 83, 97, 130, 163, 166, ‘Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is’ 139
168, 169, 173, 194 ‘Arrival at the Waldorf ’ 192
fluent mundo 10, 11, 84, 106, 166, 167, 173, ‘As at a Theatre’ 20
174, 206 ‘As You Leave the Room’ 25, 205
harmonious whole 10, 83, 105 ‘Bantams in Pine-Woods’ 52, 55
ideas of order 34, 35, 48, 49, 228 ‘Botanist on Alp (No. 1)’ 51
major man 6, 10, 13, 21, 22, 97, 164, 166, 168, ‘Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight’ 203, 220
170–2, 173, 185 ‘Canonica’ 112, 122, 129
mastery of life 135, 192, 204–5, 217 ‘Certain Phenomena of Sound’ 5, 119, 129,
mastery of reality 165, 192, 207–8 135, 136–43, 147, 148
metaphor 5, 168, 176, 186, 188, 200 ‘Chocorua to Its Neighbor’ 127, 168, 196
new romantic 10, 30, 31, 35–9, 46, Collected Poems 10, 15, 18, 49, 55, 56, 83, 153,
48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 85, 100, 101, 204, 220, 227, 228
165, 222, 228 Collected Poetry and Prose 149
the normal 17, 77, 167, 175, 192, 205–6, 222, ‘Connoisseur of Chaos’ 149
223, 226, 227, 229 ‘Credences of Summer’ 168
poetry as an unofficial view of being 125 ‘Cuisine Bourgeoise’ 224
possible poet 59, 101, 174, 189 ‘Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule,
poverty 51, 56, 136, 151 et les Unze Mille Vierges’ 34
pressure of reality 125 ‘Dance of the Macabre Mice’ 50
reality–imagination complex 10, 84, 121, ‘Depression Before Spring’ 38
122, 125 ‘Description Without Place’ 6, 9, 106, 122,
resemblance 5, 167, 168, 174–5, 176–7, 200 166, 172–4, 175, 185, 191, 196, 206, 207,
resistance 59, 159, 167, 227 208
rhetoric 60, 87, 155, 174, 180–3, 184, 195, ‘Dinner Bell in the Woods’ 221, 223
196, 228 ‘Discourse in a Cantina at Havana’ 35
the robust poet 121, 123, 127 ‘Domination of Black’ 52
the romantic 35–9 ‘Earthy Anecdote’ 32
sound 114, 121–2, 139–43, 164, 167, 168, 185, ‘Esthétique du Mal’ 143, 144, 159, 164, 167,
198, 228 171
250 Index
Stevens, Wallace (cont.) ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’ 52
‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War’ ‘Pieces’ 202
155, 181–3 ‘Prelude to Objects’ 114–19, 218
‘Explanation’ 52 ‘Reality Is an Activity of the Most August
‘Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Imagination’ 25, 205
Fine Ideas’ 93, 119, 153, 155, 200 ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ 168, 169,
‘Farewell to Florida’ 38, 39, 48, 51, 57 172, 174–84, 189, 193, 217
‘Farewell Without a Guitar’ 188–9, 198 ‘Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz’ 51
‘First Warmth’ 205 ‘Sailing after Lunch’ 36
‘Flyer’s Fall’ 170 ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’ 48
‘Forces, the Will & the Weather’ 171 Selected Poems 18, 204
‘From the Journal of Crispin’ 32–3 ‘Six Significant Landscapes’ 52
Harmonium 3, 4, 7, 10, 18, 20, 27, 30–5, ‘Snow and Stars’ 50
38–9, 46–54, 56–7, 83, 166, 228 ‘Someone Puts a Pineapple Together’ 177,
‘Holiday in Reality’ 129, 139 178, 179, 183
Ideas of Order 3–4, 30–1, 34–40, 47–54, ‘Song of Fixed Accord’ 38
55–7, 94, 100, 166, 222 ‘Sunday Morning’ 57
‘Imagination as Value’ 38 ‘Surety and Fidelity Claims’ 135
‘Invective Against Swans’ 52 ‘The Apostrophe to Vincentine’ 52
‘Landscape with Boat’ 83, 119, 129–33, 138 The Auroras of Autumn 18–19, 20, 25, 204,
‘Large Red Man Reading’ 19 205
‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ 32, 57, 144 ‘The Brave Man’ 50
‘Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery’ 54 ‘The Candle a Saint’ 58
‘Metaphors of a Magnifico’ 52 ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ 32–4, 38,
‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ 6, 45, 93, 107, 119, 39, 47, 56
135, 140, 143–65, 196, 230 ‘The Creations of Sound’ 19, 96, 122, 168,
‘Mozart, 1935’ 51, 55 179
‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing ‘The Curtains in the House of the
Itself ’ 25 Metaphysician’ 53, 206
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction 9, 14, 16, ‘The Doctor of Geneva’ 32, 52
49, 108, 185 ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’ 102,
‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ 5–6, 9, 117, 119, 122–9, 173
11, 16, 21, 22, 24, 54, 57, 81, 82, 83, 84, ‘The Green Plant’ 229
85, 87, 89, 97, 108, 113, 114, 115, 130, 140, ‘The Greenest Continent’ 111
152–3, 154, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168–9, 170, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ 47–8
172, 173, 174, 180, 183, 184, 185, 194, 205, ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’ 59–60,
208, 229 87
‘It Must Be Abstract’ 16, 61, 85, 87, 91, ‘The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad’ 52
108, 172 The Man with the Blue Guitar 4, 19, 20, 49,
‘It Must Be Human’ as proposed section 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 94, 96, 110, 119, 165
6, 172 ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ 56–8,
‘It Must Give Pleasure’ 151, 221 59, 60, 82, 86, 87, 90, 97, 98, 99, 110,
‘Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb’ 53 111, 115, 118, 119, 126, 131, 134, 154, 164,
‘Of Mere Being’ 20, 25, 205 209, 228, 231
‘Of Modern Poetry’ 37 ‘The Motive for Metaphor’ 203
‘Of the Surface of Things’ 52 The Necessary Angel 121, 125, 129, 174, 177,
Opus Posthumous 25 204, 206
Owl’s Clover 55, 58 ‘The News and the Weather’ 139
‘Owl’s Clover’ 55–9, 66, 69, 209 ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’
‘Page from a Tale’ 220 59, 82, 114, 119–22, 124, 126, 127, 183–4,
‘Paisant Chronicle’ 6, 166, 170–2, 185, 192 189
Parts of a World 17, 25, 54, 58, 82, 83, 84, 93, ‘The Novel’ 107
110, 112, 129, 143, 149, 154, 155, 164, 166, ‘The Old Woman and the Statue’ 56
167, 170, 172, 229 ‘The Ordinary Women’ 47
‘Pecksniffiana’ 32 ‘The Owl in the Sarcophagus’ 205
Index 251
‘The Planet on the Table’ 25 Vendler, Helen 6, 8, 10
‘The Poems of Our Climate’ 112–14, 115, 130 Venturi, Lionello 117
‘The Public Square’ 5 Vidal, Anatole 150
‘The Pure Good of Theory’ 6, 168, 170, 174, Vidal, Paule 88, 150, 214, 216, 220
177, 178, 181, 184, 185–203, 228 Villena, Rubén Martínez 48
‘The Relations Between Poetry and Painting’ Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène Emmanuel 83
2, 71, 138, 213 Viollot, ‘Mesdemoiselles’ 146
‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ 24, 229 Virgil 171
The Rock 18–19, 24–5, 205 Vivin, Louis 218
‘The Sail of Ulysses’ 25 Vogüé, Comte de 152
‘The Snow Man’ 12, 52, 56, 132 Vogüé, Comte de, Domaine 152
‘The Sun This March’ 50 Vogüé, Nelly de 152
‘Theory’ 52, 56 Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet] 147–8, 151
‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ Candide 147–8, 162
52, 56
‘This Solitude of Cataracts’ 19 Wadsworth Athenaeum, the 212
‘Three Academic Pieces’ 103, 174–82, 200, Wagner, C. Ronald 228
229 Wahl, Jean 122, 206
‘To the One of Fictive Music’ 52, 55 Walker, David 133
Transport to Summer 9, 15, 168, 204, 229 Warren, Robert Penn 107
‘Two Figures in Dense Violet Night’ 52 Waters, Ethel 73
‘Valley Candle’ 32 Weinstock, Herbert 105
Sweeney, James Johnson 211 West, Eugene 223
Symbolism 2, 7, 19, 52, 53, 55, 83, 84, 88, 206 Whicher, George Frisbee 107
Symons, Julian 72 Whiting, Anthony 80
Whitman, Walt 2, 209
Tal-Coat, Pierre 211, 212, 214–15, 216, 217, 221 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 94
Tanguy, Yves 210 Williams, William Carlos 2, 7, 15, 36, 51, 74,
Tate, Allen 9, 107–8, 143, 144, 206, 207 112, 134, 143, 162–3
Taylor, Wilson E. 225 Wilson, T. C. 37
Tchelitchew, Pavel 211 Winters, Yvor 110
Theosophy 212 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 27
Theseus 128 Woolf, Virginia 134, 158
Thomas, Dylan 206 Wordsworth, William 60, 78–82, 84–5, 87, 97,
Thomas, R. S. 18, 138 99, 111, 114, 117, 181, 192, 229
Tomlinson, Charles 26–7 The Prelude 78–80, 87, 181, 186
transcendence 3, 26, 36, 225
Trilling, Lionel 143 Yeats, William Butler 7, 8, 14, 80, 148, 220
Uhde, Wilhelm 218 Zervos, Christian 71, 74, 110, 111

Ziarek, Krzysztof 28
Valéry, Paul 21, 28–9, 59, 87, 90, 94, 134, 135, 138 Ziegfeld, Florenz 73
Van Gogh, Vincent 207–8, 209 Zigrosser, Carl 53
Vechten, Carl Van 32

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Edward Ragg’s study is the first to examine the role of abstraction

edwa r d r ag g is a poet and teaches at Tsinghua University,

Cambridge University Press

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the

ISBN-13 978-0-511-78951-9 eBook (NetLibrary)

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy

Introduction: ‘Stevensian’ and the question of abstraction

4 Abstract figures: the curious case of the idealist ‘I’ 110

5 Abstract appetites: food, wine and the idealist ‘I’ 136

6 The pure good of theory: a new abstract emphasis 166

7 Bourgeois abstraction: poetry, painting and the idea of mastery

I would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for

BL Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria ed. James Engell

abstraction championing spontaneous creation or the ‘unformed’ (‘Art Informel’/‘Tachisme’).

The abstract impulse: from anecdote to ‘new

In January 1935, answering Ronald Lane Latimer’s request for an inscribed

As poet-figure, Crispin demonstrates the need to convert the hearsay

CPP, 995. 14 Ibid., 989. 15 Ibid., 995.

This is ‘concluding fadedly’. Delegating completion of the poem to

Francisco: Cody’s Books, 1966).

Note ‘the gorgeous wheel’ Stevens’ term comprises. The pejorative

Just as Stevens met with an insurance contact in Havana, he also wears

The allusion to ‘Kubla Khan’ persists: those martial ‘gruff drums’ recall

Stevens’ ‘politic man’ is universalist. The poem implies a degree of bour-

Stevens to Kimon Friar, 2 September 1947, WAS, 694.

See CPP, 8.

CPP, 106. 58 Ibid., 82–5. See L, 241. 59 L, 335.

(London: Macmillan, 1996), 232.

CPP, 770. 70 Stevens to Friar, 2 September 1947, WAS, 694.

CPP, 97, 110, 107. 72 Ibid., 100.

The turn to abstraction: Owl’s Clover (1936)

How does it matter how I play

Fearing the ‘abstract’ as ‘evasion’, something removed from its context –

The man bent over his guitar,

Lacking grammatical resolution, Stevens demonstrates exactly what his

The audience’s desire not to hear of the ‘greatness of poetry’ is ironized

The audience speaks here through the guitarist’s preferred rhyme-order

Standing ‘remote’ leads to imaginative sterility, represented here by cold

Stevens’ simile of ‘reason in a storm’ evokes Lear’s hysterical dialogue

CW, 3.2.4: 959; 3.4.144: 961; 3.4.100: 961; and 3.4.145: 961.

Recalling the ‘sleepless’ figure of ‘Academic Discourse at Havana’ (who

Stevens ironizes here a poetry writ large, featuring excessive alliter-

As MacLeod shows, ‘Blue Guitar’ is highly context-suggestive.38 Yet, des-

This ‘profounder strength’ is observable in the speaker’s movement from one

BL, I, Ch. 12, 260.

Hardy, Selected Short Stories and Poems, 171.

CPP, 149. 59 Ibid., 226.

The ‘ in-visible’ abstract: Stevens’ idealism from

3.1 Rom a n t ic a da p tat ions: W or d s wor t h,

I still have had

See Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 261–6.

Merleau- Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 29–30.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 429.

3. 4 C oda : t h e N e w C r i t ic i s m a n d a b s t r ac t ion

Abstract figures: the curious case

By 1938, however, Stevens surmounted both Picasso and abstraction as

‘Pink and white carnations’ remain insufficient because Stevens can-

Wallace Stevens, ‘Canonica’ The Southern Review 4.2 (1938): 382–95.

This idealist confection of painting (‘each picture’), reflection (‘glass’,

4 .2 F rom ‘robus t poe t ’ to i de a l is t ‘I’: ‘Th e Nobl e

Ibid., 675. 71 Ibid., 679.

Shelley, 679; BL, II, Ch. 14, 16–17.

4 Abstract figures: the curious case of the idealist ‘I’ 110