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Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived
a double life. Professionally he was a lawyer and a businessman who worked
his way up to the vice-presidency of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co.
in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a dedicated executive who kept going to his
office five years beyond the retiring age. Outside office hours and without
the knowledge of his business associates, he wrote poetry and worked his way
up to the position of one of major poets of the English language in the twentieth
century. His life was devoted to the making of money and poetry, never mixing
one activity with the other. Yet, he saw a connection between the two. Money
afforded him the means of sensuous experience that is one of the basic elements
of his poetry. The man who can afford to buy pictures, he would say, is a
better judge of pictures than the man who can only talk about them. He was
proud of his career in insurance: "It gives a man character as a poet,"
he said, "to have daily contact with a job." Possibly, he meant
that daily contact with the gross and harsh reality was necessary to a poet,
especially to a poet of his kind whose main topic was the relationship between
reality and poetry, nature and imagination. In any case, his poetry is often
an attempt to purify living of its grossness and to arrive at the contemplation
of a platonic perfect image.
Steven's life was regular and disciplined. He was a stay-at-home type traveling
hardly any farther than Florida and Boston from his Hartford residence, never
seeing Europe whose language used liberally in his poetry. It is through art,
literature, and philosophy that he knew the essence of the European tradition.
He was a keen amateur of painting and music, and became familiar with their
techniques; he read abundantly the French symbolist poets; philosophic ideas
inspired his greatest poems and have contributed to his reputation as a philosophical
poet.
In fact, Stevens drew as much from the art of painting,
from music, and from the symbolist movement in literature as from philosophy.
But the twentieth-century reader often turns to literature in order to find
an interpretation of life, a set of ideas capable of shaping his life. Stevens'
poetry, often didactic, offer a fair amount of such ideas. The selections
analyzed in this issue of Study Guides contain some of Stevens' best known
notions.
For Stevens there are two kinds of reality-the objective and the subjective.
Objective reality is perceived by the five senses. Subjective reality is the
inner world of man dominated by the imagination. The function of the imagination
is to put order in the confused data of the senses, perceive relations between
them, and give them meaning. The interaction between external reality and
imagination creates emotions.
The reality known by the senses and the reality created by the imagination
are equally real. But the common error of man is to believe that the products
of imagination have an external reality independent of the imagination. This
is an illusion, and the greatest illusion, in Stevens' mind is the mistaken
belief that the supernatural has an external reality; in face, it is an imaginative
projection of man's desire for the absolute. There is no known external reality
besides the one given by the senses. At the center of universe there is "nothingness,"
a vacuum that man is very tempted to fill with gods and an eternal objective
reality.
There is an essential difference between Stevens' approach to reality and
that of other major poets of this century. T. S. Eliot, for instance, takes
the reality known by the senses as a symbol of the supernatural or spiritual
reality; the role of the imagination is to perceive this analogy. For Stevens,
on the contrary, imagination must be careful not to assume this role but limit
itself to the perception of analogies between sense perceptions only. The
delights of poetry are essentially the delights in seeing resemblances between
various forms of sensuous being and in creating order out of the confusion
of this life. Stevens' philosophy is essentially hedonistic; that is, it gives
primary importance to the enjoyment of the sense and of the emotions.
In order to achieve this enjoyment man must stand naked in the middle of reality;
that is, he must divest himself of everything that can interfere between his
sense perceptions and the free play of his imagination on them. He must not
let tradition, religious belief, preconceived notions, and history or the
literary past influence his direct perceptions. Freshness of experience is
all.
Stevens' philosophy precludes a dramatic poetry of quest like that of Frost
and Eliot. His is essentially a poetry of statement, an act of faith in the
"nothingness" at the core of reality. He extols the capacity of
the senses, the emotions, and the imagination to satisfy all of man's needs.
One may suspect that there are more things in heaven and in earth than are
dreamed of in Stevens' philosophy, but his ideas, whether right or wrong,
resulted in the creation of poems of great beauty. Many of those who cannot
stand his ideas and even despise him for them, will remember his best lines
for their sensuous beauty. The elements that seduce us are Stevens' intensity
of sense perceptions, his ability to evoke them in his diction sand rhythm;
his passion for order and his care in structuring his poems perfectly; his
delicate sense of humor and of self-irony pervading most of his poetry. Even
in his poetry of positive affirmation, the reader feels that Stevens keeps
a doubt in reserve.
Stevens' use of other arts to create poetry is more satisfying than his use
of philosophy. "Peter Quince at the Clavier," is an attempt at translating
into musical terms, the sensuous feelings and the emotions of the characters
involved. The words themselves are music. "Sunday Morning" opens
with a word picture comparable to a colorful painting by Matisse of a middle-aged
lady at her breakfast table. "Anecdote of the Jar" is a symbolist
poem illustrating the order of art in the midst of the confusion of life,
and their mutual influence. "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" and "The
Snow Man" are more discursive and use imagery to illustrate the basic
statement of the "nothingness" at the core of things-man, nothing
himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is .
Through art, Stevens succeeded in purifying the grossness of actual living
into "ideal" forms of experience, forms that do not, as in Plato,
exist outside of man but are the products of his creative imagination.
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