Category: Wallace Stevens

Although not necessarily typical or representative of the poems in “Ideas of Order,” “Meditation Celestial and Terrestrial” and “Re-statement of Romance” are my favorite poems in this section of Collected Poetry and Prose. They are both fine examples of Stevens “elegant style,” but unlike some of his poems they focus less on “art” then on other “truths.”

“Meditation Celestial and Terrestrial” captures the dramatic effect the seasons can have on our attitudes:

MEDITATION CELESTIAL AND TERRESTRIAL

The wild warblers are warbling in the jungle
Of life and spring of the lustruous inundations,
Flood on flood, of our returning sun.

Day after day, throughout the winter,
We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason
In a world of wind and frost,

And by will, unshaken and florid
In mornings of angular ice,
That passed beyond us trhough the narrow sky.

But what are radiant reason and radiant will
To warblings early in the hilarious trees
Of summer, the drunken mother?

Personally, I find it hard to resist phrases like “wild warblers are warbling,” “lustruous inundations,” and “radiant reasoning.” More than that, though, the poem suggests the real reason that most of us are unable to live lives of “radiant reason.” It is those moments of passion, those moments when we are under the influence of “the drunken mother,” that we completely forget all the cold, hard logic that are the result of the tougher moments in life. You know, those “rational” moments when you declare, rightly so, that “I’ll never fall in love again” or “I’ll buy my next car more wisely,” only to have your plans blown away by the next “love of your life” or by the reddest red Corvette you’ve ever driven.

“Re-statement of Romance” attempts to remove the “ideals” of sentimentalism from a relationship and focus, instead, on the feelings of the two people involved in the relationship:

RE-STATEMENT OF ROMANCE

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

It may just be my unsentimental viewpoint, but this seems to me like a great “love poem.” Relationships based on sentimental ideas of “romance” are doomed to failure because any relationship must be based on what the people are, based on what the people are able to give to each other, not idealized notions of what love is. Only when lovers can be “true each to its separate self” can a relationship truly succeed, and to think otherwise is to invite personal disaster.

While this poem may not deal with Stevens’ attempts to place “art” at the heart of mankind, it does deal with another of his major themes, the desire to debunk the “romantic” myths that surround us and to come to a “truer” understanding of human nature.

Although Harmonium, Wallace Stevens’ first book of poetry contains the much more famous and enigmatic “Anecdote of the Jar,” my favorite poem in this section of Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose is “The Paltry Nude Starts On A Spring Voyage,” an elegant poem which uses
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus as a contrast to the very different nude portrayed in his poem.

THE PALTRY NUDE STARTS ON A SPRING VOYAGE

But not on a shell, she starts,
Archaic, for the sea.
But on the first-found weed
She scuds the glitters,
Noiselessly, like one more wave.

She too is discontent
And would have purple stuff upon her arms,
Tired of the salty harbors,
Eager for the brine and bellowing
Of the high interiors of the sea.

Wind speeds her,
Blowing upon her hands
And watery back.
She touches the clouds, where she goes
In the circle of her traverse of the sea.

Yet this is meagre play
In the scurry and water-shine,
As her heels foam—
Not as when the goldener nude
Of a later day

Will go, like the center of sea-green pomp,
In an intenser calm,
Scullion of fate,
Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,
Upon her irretrievable way.

The ironically humorous phrase in the title, “paltry nude” sets the tone for the rest of this poem. Modern nudes certainly can’t hold up to the sumptious, voluptous nudes of the golden days of the past, can they? I guess that must say something about our modern view of ourselves.

Even the opening line reminds me of “oyster on the half shell” rather than Botticelli’s idealized Venus. That’s not to say, though, that Steven’s lines don’t convey their own beauty, particularly in phrases like “She scuds the glitters,/ Noiselessly, like one more wave.” This is a “real” nude, described (almost) realistically. At least the sea itself is described realistically, though it would, indeed, be a paltry nude that could withstand the rigors of “the brine and bellowing/ Of the high interiors of the sea.”

The real “point,” if one wishes to push a point, which Stevens doesn’t seem in much of a hurry to do, is made in the last two stanzas where this modern nude is compared to Botticelli’s elegant Venus. Of course, Stevens is right when he, in accord with modern tastes, points out that Venus seems to be the “center of sea-green pomp,” and “pomp” probably had as even more negative connotation in the 30’s when this poem was published than it would have today.

Of course, the politically incorrect “Across the spick torrent” raises even more questions about what Stevens is trying to say, though it certainly sounds like a disparaging comment.

Not uncharacteristically, the poem leaves us uncertain of Stevens’ attitude toward his subject, though certainly questioning our own views of art and beauty more than before we read the poem.

The mind sometimes strays from its chosen path. The part of this entry in PASSIONATE PURPLE (my first choice of RED was simply unbearable to read) is a slightly irrelevant RANT that may even detract from the argument I’ve been trying to develop here. SKIP IT if you’e tired of rants. I include it merely because writing it down made me feel good. So I decided to leave it in, rather than excise it.

Wallace Stevens is apparently one of those poets you either love or hate. When I was a grad student and one of my college professors stated unequivocally that Wallace Stevens was the “greatest American poet ever,” I immediately dismissed the professor as a f _ _ _ _ _ _g idiot and promptly withdrew from the class. (There are persistent rumors that INTP’s can be rather opinionated, but personally I tend to dismiss those rumors as mere jealousy on the part of those incapable of becoming INTP’s.)

Though Wallace Steven is to me nothing more than a provocative minor poet, he was (or is, for all I know, or care) the darling of literary critics who pushed style over content, arguing that “style is all” and, with a suggestion I found particularly irritating, argued that poets like Thomas Hardy are hopelessly dated because they lack style. I won’t rehash this debate but will note that personally I think the argument is pure bullshit.

(Let me back away a minute here and introduce you to my favorite poetry anthology, Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry, simply the best collection of poems I’ve ever read, accompanied by insight that seems “right on,” perhaps, of course, because it mirrors my own ideas so closely.)

Commenting on some of Stevens’ early poems, Untermeyer says, “Such poems have much for the eye, something for the ear, but they are too fantastic and dandified for common understanding.” Summarizing, Untermeyer states, “Some commentators maintained that Stevens was obsessed with nuances, superficial shades of color, infinitesimal gradations. Others declared that Stevens had added a new dimension to American poetry.” According to Stevens, “Poetry is the subject of the poem.” And on that note, we can begin to see why, unfortunately, poetry, like much of modern art, has become the province of a “literary elite,” a rather small group, rather than the province of the people.

Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar,” is a poem that at first exposure made me irate. Upon later reflection, though, it puzzled me rather than just irritating me. To me, at least, it raises the whole question of “objective correlatives to a new level:”

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose upon it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

As a lover of wilderness, I first found the idea that a simple jar could transform the wilderness as preposterous and offensive. Encountering it later in a different context and forced to cover it “objectively” in a classroom, I had to stand back and look at it from some different perspectives.

Still, that’s a rather large claim for a simple, bare, gray jar, isn’t it? And round it “was.” Before the jar, we would have to assume, “wasn’t.” Wasn’t there? Didn’t exist? Was … nothing? And why was it “nothing,” non-existent? Because the jar wasn’t?

In what sense was the wilderness slovenly? Was it merely “untidy”? Or was there something truly offensive about it? Was it offensive because it was “untidy” or because it couldn’t be controlled and contained? Was Stevens merely another Bushy, non-conserving, conservative who feared or despised what could not be shaped and controlled? Or did he truly have a unique insight into man’s relationship with nature?

There is something strangely appealing in the image of this jar sitting in the middle of a wilderness, the “wilderness rose upon it.” The jar is a focal point, as it were, that somehow unifies and gives meaning to the wilderness. Perhaps it merely reminds me of “formal gardens,” with their formal patterns, which I find both appealing and repulsive. Here the jar takes the place of the traditional central fountain. These formal gardens, though they seem symbolic of man’s desire to control nature, also suggest our need for, and admiration, of nature’s beauty.

The simplicity of the jar, though, also suggests Japanese gardens where “lanterns” or simple figures of Buddha often serve as a focal point for a garden that attempts to mimic nature. Although the gardens attempt to capture the essence of nature, they are also quite “formal” in the sense that they follow certain “rules.” Though I generally dislike “formal gardens,” I absolutely adore well-done Japanese gardens. I’m not quite sure why, but I suspect that’s precisely what I am trying to explore in this essay.

The key to the poem, of course, lies in the line “It took dominion everywhere.” It, the jar, a symbol of man’s oldest artwork, the earthen jug that first simply carried life-giving water, later becoming the dominant artwork of many civilizations, the ceremonial fount of holy water, the urn of ancestral remains, as a symbol of Art, gives meaning to the wilderness, indeed, controls our very understanding of “wilderness.”

And there’s our dilemma. Is it true that there really are no “objective correlatives,” that culture so dominates our existence that nothing makes sense outside that context? Do objective correlatives become objective correlatives through cultural associations? Can an object, outside a cultural context, have any “meaning”?

Is the joy I find in hiking mountain wildernesses merely the result of the culture I’ve been raised in and not the result of some primitive identification with my surroundings? Or, is it a means of escaping a culture that I find increasingly oppressive and a means of rediscovering true meaning in my life?

:: MT and AT&T Broadband ::

I finally heard back from my ISP and, just as I expected, I am unable to run MT on their servers because they don’t support CGI’s.

If I’m going to make the switchover I’m going to have to pay for a separate server. I must admit that I’d really like to construct a site like Jeff Ward’s site where the blog is just one part of the site, but money will probably be the deciding factor. I’m sure as heck not going to start working in order to produce such a page.