 On Wednesday I would like you to come having read one of Stephen's's longer poems. It's not too long, but it's a little longer. The Roars of Autumn, which is a wonderful poem. It's not exactly timely at this moment, but please come having thought about it. As you read it, think about images that you find in the poem of stars, of the theater, of images of mother and father. The poem is full of both. A friend asked me the other side, are there any happy poets? Well, and of course, no, there really aren't, or at least not any that are any good, right? No, that's not true. In fact, as I think about the syllabus, Williams is a happy poet. He calls himself the happy genius of his household in that dance roost where he's talking about running around the house naked. Marianne Moore, I think in many ways, is a happy poet. But no poet is so happy as Wallace Stevens. And Stevens is happy in the sense that he is a comic poet. And that doesn't mean that you're going to laugh a lot at Wallace Stevens, though you might sometimes. And he can be silly, though that's perhaps not his strongest vein. Stevens is a comic poet in the sense, in the generic sense, of a poet in whom and for whom and with whom the world always comes right. The world is right and good. It is a regenerative, exhilarating, endlessly consoling and meaningful place to dwell. And Stevens is really, as I read him every year, I like him more and more. He becomes more and more important. Stevens gives us really a comprehensive view of the world, in which poetry and imagination have central roles to play. Imagination, that's an important word in Stevens. It's a word he takes right out of British romanticism and the long tradition of romantic poetry. And Stevens is, though in complex ways, like Hart Crane and a defiantly romantic, modern poet. Stevens's poetry, like Moores, like Crane's, to some extent like Frost, is always, in a sense, meta-poetry. That is, well, he shares with these poets, as with certain others on our paper, the sense that poetry has to always involve an investigation into its own rules, how it works, what it does, what it's capable of, what its potential uses are, and that all these are, in a sense, open and available to redefinition at a fundamental level. He says there's a sort of wonderful set of adages or epigrams or statements at the back of your book, which come from Stevens's Dajia. One of those statements is, all poetry is experimental poetry. And there's a sense in any Stevens poem that Stevens is going to, is experimenting and is going in some new direction, not just at the beginning of the poem but throughout the poem. That's how it proceeds. You could compare this idea to Williams' interest in newness and a sense of life as always subversive of life preceding. It's a related idea for Stevens. In his poem of modern poetry, which is a little essay on the subject of what is modern poetry, Stevens says, it has to construct a new stage. And it not only has to construct that new stage, it has to be on it too. And there's a way in which they're both creating a new space in which to speak, and they're speaking from there. These two things are going on at once. Stevens also says, in that set of adagio, there are wonderful provocative ones throughout. A poem is a pheasant for one. He also says poetry is a means of redemption. He meant it. For Stevens, poetry stands in the place that religion once did. Other poets that we've read this semester look to poetry to serve different functions of religion, I think. For Eliot, he is concerned with ritual and community in ways in which poetry might establish these, constitute these. More is the most, well, with Eliot, the most serious Christian, is concerned with poetry as a model for ethical action, as a kind of guide for conduct in the world. And poetry models for her what she calls love, or hope, or striving, or doing hard things. For Stevens, poetry takes over another dimension of religious experience. Poetry takes over Christianity's traditional concern with redemption, and with redemption, with questions about the afterlife, paradise, the transcendental. How can culture imagine the transcendental in a non- transcendental world? How can it imagine the physical in a non-metaphysical world? How can we have heaven if we don't have God? These are all questions in Stevens' poetry. He answers them in ways that put him on Hart Crane's side of the debate with Eliot. In the wasteland, the decay of sacred authority, this is a crisis of community, of meaning. Language has sort of lost its meaning. For Crane, this condition, rather than a crisis, is an opportunity, an opportunity for poetry to lend a myth to God. Eliot is disturbed to see God as something constructed, something linguistic, something we might lend a myth to, and only lend it in the sense that we're going to have to bring it back. For Crane, for Stevens, God always was a myth, a metaphor, and metaphors can and need to be exchanged and renewed all the time. In this Crane and Stevens are very close together. Let's look at an early poem of Wallace Stevens, an early grand poem called Sunday Morning. The first one in your Stevens selection is on page 237. Sunday Morning was published in Poetry Magazine in 1915, which is to say it's contemporary with proofrock, roughly contemporary with Marianne Moore's aggrave, both poems that appeared in poetry, too. Let's read this first stanza. Complacencies of the peignoir and late coffee in oranges in the air, in the green freedom of a cockatoo upon a rug, all these things mingle to dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe, that old catastrophe being the crucifixion, as it calm darkens among them, or if it's not the crucifixion that's the fall. The pungent oranges and bright green wings seem things in some procession of the dead, winding across wide water without sound. The day is like wide water without sound, stilled for the passing of her over the seas to silent Palestine, dominion of the blood and sepulcher. This is a poem about not going to church, about doing something else with Sunday Morning. It announces, or it takes for granted, really a great change in culture, a change in the cultural order where Sunday Morning is no longer spent, or need not necessarily always be spent at church. Stevens is writing about, in some ways, the end of the Christian era. Of course it's gone on, but in a different form from what it had been known as. You could think about how unlike this poem is, how little this poem is like a poem on a similar theme in Yeats, such as The Second Coming, where the end of Christianity is an apocalyptic event and there's some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem. Instead, in Stevens the power of the past, the Christian era, simply dissipates, dissolves in the circumstances that he's describing. What is a peignoir? I think Stevens likes the French word. This is a dressing gown. We have a female figure here presented to us in a space of domestic bourgeois luxury, comfort, complacency even, with coffee and oranges and a cockatoo. Whether that cockatoo is actually a bird or a design in the rug, critics have disagreed. You can make that bird what you like. This female presence that we're introduced to is a figure for the poet, an unnamed she that the poem will be about. She, embodying poetic sensibility, poetic thinking and poetic impulses, seems to place poetry in this space of domestic comfort, seems to identify poetry with the feminine, with a female perspective, and with consumption, with fine imported goods, as you will find elsewhere in Stevens, identifies a life of ease with the imagination. Stevens' poetry, like Yeats' in certain ways, though in very different terms, or even like Elliott's, presents us with a number of very powerful female figures with whom the poet identifies his own creativity. This is an important one. There's an aspect of Stevens that's gendered as feminine, you could say. It's that aspect of Stevens that identifies with poetry as a space apart from the masculine world of work. We contrast this with Frost, who Stevens identifies poetry with subjective freedom, a space apart from objective necessity, what Frost is always responding to. Stevens maintains a complex attitude, however, with identification of poetry with aspects of culture that are gendered as female. There's a macho strain in Stevens, too, often a hyperbolic and somewhat comic one in which Stevens is identifying with giants, big men, and I'll talk more about that in two lectures from now. In this poem, I think, well, possibly warding off the anxiety of identifying poetry so clearly and strongly with the female, Stevens includes in Stanzas 7 on 239, 240, a kind of parodic celebration of masculinity, supple and turbulent, a ring of men shall chant an orgy on a summer moor in their boisterous devotion to the sun, not as a god but as a god might be naked among them like a savage source, and so on. This is another vein of Stevens' imagination, and it's here in this poem in, again, almost hyperbolic form. If Stevens is anxious about identifying poetry with the feminine, I think that's because in a sense, as Stevens sets things up here at this early point in his career, all poets are women poets on Sunday morning. Poetry can only be written on Sunday morning or on the weekend or after hours at the end of the workday. These are the spaces in which, in his life, poetry exists, but more generally these are the sort of cultural spaces that the times that Stevens identifies poetry with. Here, in this poem, Stevens is, in a sense, brooding on the bourgeois image of the earthly paradise, that is, what it's like to have a nice home and some free time in it. It's a poem that Stevens wrote in his twenties, in the earliest phase of his career. Like Eliot, like Frost, Stevens went to Harvard, all these modern poets went to Harvard. He was, from early on, divided in his ambitions between poetry and the law, a securely masculine pursuit. Stevens tried journalism briefly in New York and legal practice before, eventually, he entered the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in our state, where he remained for the rest of his life, becoming a national authority on surety bonds and leading an extraordinary divided life, a life in which poetry was identified with leisure and repose. There's a kind of cyberritic quality to Stevens' imagination. He luxuriates in another one of those adagias. He says, a poem is a café, and so it is, in Stevens' case. Poetry represents a kind of release from objective disciplines, including the nineteenth-century Protestant injunctions to refuse private pleasures, to save for future life, perhaps a life beyond life and after life. This is the, quote, puritanism that Crane projects to early in his career and fights against. And Stevens, too, is here in a more cautious way, struggling against it. On 238, in the second stanza of this poem, he says, Why should she give her bounty to the dead? Why should she give her spirit, her imaginative investments, her hopes, to the dead? Here, suggesting both the dead Jesus and also a future life beyond life that Christianity would look towards. Stevens is imagining Earth itself as where bounty is given and where it should be bestowed. It's where we are, and he'll go on and describe it in this stanza. What is divinity if it can come only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun in pungent fruit and bright green wings or else in any bomb or beauty of the earth things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? No, divinity can't be off somewhere else, it can't be beyond life. Divinity must live within herself. And what form does it take there? Passions of rain or moods in falling snow, grievings and loneliness or unsubdued elations when the forest blooms, gusty emotions on wet roads at autumn nights, all pleasures and all pains, remembering the bow of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul. Here, divinity must live within the person in her subjectivity, a subjectivity that's modeled on and represented as a version of the sensual encounter with the seasons, which are themselves revolving and balanced and cyclical, the bow of summer and the winter branch. To say that paradise must be here on earth is also to say that it must include death and dying, a world of change, a world that's always, in a sense, passing out of existence. And Stevens says in Stanzas 6, Stanzas 5, but in contentment, he says with her, I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss. Death is the mother of beauty, hence from her alone shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires. Paradise, if it is to exist on earth, must include death in it. And as the poem moves towards its close, that's what Stevens imagines for us. It's also a scene that he leaves us with, in the eighth stanza. It's a scene of a world of plenty, a beautiful world, but also a world which, for these reasons, includes death in it. Let's look at that. It returns to the opening lines of the poem and then the poem pans out to give a view of the landscape and the world around us. She hears, upon that water without sound, a voice that cries, the tomb in Palestine is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus where he lay. The tomb is empty. Jesus is not a presence for us. And now Stevens moves for the first time in the poem out of that third person she to speak in the first person plural. We live in an old chaos of the sun or old dependency of day and night, or island solitude, unsponsored, free of that wide water inescapable. We live in an old chaos of the sun. We live in a world that is material. It exists as a set of rocks blasted across the universe, that the sun structures and radiates. Even as Stevens makes this declaration, characteristic of him is the resistance to residing in any one formulation. He'll say one thing and then he'll say another, or, and notice this pattern here where he in fact gives two oars, old dependency of day and night. That's another way of imaging our world where day and night, these essential contraries, these essential natural forms are dependent on each other, are constituting each other continuously. We are dependent on them. They are dependent on each other. We exist or perhaps in island solitude. Here the world, the globe, this natural space, this earthly paradise is an island and a solitary one, one without God out there in what a condition Stevens will call unsponsored and therefore free. We are dependent on that of that wide water inescapable where that wide water that was first introduced to us in the first stanzas of the poem becomes a kind of image for a silence in the world, which is the silence of a lack of, I think, divine language. From these generalizations Stevens then moves to these mountains, deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail whistle about us their spontaneous cries, sweet berries ripen in the wilderness, and in the isolation of the sky at evening, casual flocks of pigeons make ambiguous undulations as they sink downward to darkness on extended wings. Stevens' approach, finally, is not to generalize about the world but to describe it, to not tell us how things should be or might be or were, but rather how they are, how they are now and at this moment. Stevens evokes the world in a state of fullness, of ripeness, those berries are ripening, deer walking on the mountains. That present tense that he's using evokes action that is ongoing, is present, and yet all these sensual satisfactions that he evokes are colored by evening. Pleasure here is shadowed by death, not unhappily, but it is the color of the environment, of the evening. The birds, they make a downward movement, and yet their wings are extended. Their undulations are ambiguous in that sense, much as the dependency of day and night is itself ambiguous. You could contrast those birds with heart cranes ascending seagull at the beginning of the bridge. This is a different image. Stevens is here trying to image for us a non-transcendental secular vision of the world. Let's look ahead to another poem, Poems of Our Climate on 240, excuse me, 252. Another poem exploring the idea of paradise. Stevens means here, in that title, the poems of our climate, he means America, our culture, our environment, our situation. It's a poem that you might read alongside a poem like England by Marianne Moore. He also means the poems of our time, or our moment, and our time or our moment for Stevens is defined as a climate, as a kind of environment, rather than some other kind of arching way of understanding or defining the present moment. It's not, as the poem unfolds, a question about nature so much as about culture. Stevens will here explore one of his recurrent impulses, that is to renew poetry by simplifying terms, by getting down to some essentials, some primary elements. If Stevens is a sensualist, he's also a kind of ascetic. He can be both, and as an even find, I suppose, a kind of sensual asceticism. And this poem exemplifies that 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. We still don't have a main verb yet. Pink and white carnations, one desire so much more than that. The day itself is simplified, a bowl of white, a cold porcelain, low and round, with nothing more than the carnations there. This is Stevens exploring another version of secularity, of the secular. Giving us a poetry, it seems, as he starts, not of ideas but of things, as Williams might approve. It is a world of white. You can understand the impulse here as a version of the reduction to nakedness or the reduction to primary terms that imagism seeks to accomplish. And these are, in a sense, precisely images that Williams is presenting to us almost as a kind of still life there, that clear water in a brilliant bowl, and the pink and white carnations where that word carnation from the Latin, meaning flesh, evokes the colors of the body and of blood and of flesh. And yet those qualities are here held in a kind of suspension that contains them and treats them coolly and arranges them. And it's unsatisfying to Stevens. The moment he has created this still life, he starts to want to get rid of it. He says, say even that this complete simplicity that I've just produced here, stripped one, in fact, of the heat of the flesh, stripped one of all one's torments, concealed the evilly compounded vital eye, 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 coolly sense. And again, this is characteristic of Stevens' imagination. If he said one thing, he will now try something else. He will now turn his strategy in another direction. He continues here affirming powers of mind. 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. The never resting mind always wants more, even as it wants to get down to primary terms. It then wants more again. Paradise is the imperfect. The imperfect meaning, again Stevens is always playing on Latin, I think. The imperfect is the incompleted, the not finished, the ongoing. And two, there's tinges in that word imperfect of corruption, of fallenness, of flaws, as Stevens will go on to say. The imperfect is something that's not cold, but it's hot as people are hot. It's hot with desire. It's the heat, a heat of desire that shows itself, as Stevens says, in flawed words and stubborn sounds. Stevens affirms the never resting mind, but above all he affirms a kind of continuing impulse and demand to speak, to find flawed words and stubborn sounds. Over the course of the poem, Stevens moves from a still world to a world in action, and he moves from a world that is verbal to a world that is verbal, that's linguistic. Here, Ann Elsewhere and Stevens' language is the privileged medium of human desire and aspiration. It's what gives us delight, his word here. It gives us pleasure, and in this sense it remains, which does, on the side of leisure and of play, rather than of discipline and work. In yet, also note the implications of those adjectives. Flawed implies craft, some kind of making, I think, and stubborn. Stubborn suggests perseverance, discipline, perhaps surprisingly, a kind of continuing will to, well, not to rest and to go on speaking. These values that emerge in this poem are, well, they're recurrent in Stevens. You'll find him exploring them, celebrating them elsewhere. Let's go forward to the poem called The Man on the Dump, on 254, for another poem, again, exploring and affirming certain capacities of language. This is Stevens at play in the landscape of the world. This is the landscape of the wasteland, if you like. Stevens, in a letter, explains that on his way to work he walked to work from West Hartford to downtown, and he would observe, during the Depression, a man on the dump and composed this poem, directed by him. Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up. The sun is a corbea of flowers. The moon blanched. Of course, she's blanched. She's the white moon. Places there, a bouquet, ho-ho. The dump is full of images, just like the wasteland. Days pass like papers from a press. The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun and so the moon both come, and the janitor's poems of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, the cat in the paper bag, the corset, the box from Estonia, the tiger chest for tea. If Stevens celebrates desire, celebrates consumption and sensual pleasure, as he does, well, that makes a certain amount of garbage. That makes a certain amount of waste. If you are constantly seeking new ways of phrasing and understanding the world, you're going to have to be getting rid of the ones you just had, the ones that you were just using. The dump is an image of this, which Stevens confronts here with a certain kind of irritation, playful, but not so far, I think, from despair. The dump is a place of old poetry. Of course, Stevens' own poetry doesn't want to end up like this, or maybe it does, since Stevens is able to find in the dump a certain kind of regenerative power. The freshness of night, any poet knows, has been fresh a long time. The freshness of morning, the blowing of day. One says that it puffs as Cornelius Nepoth reads. It puffs more than, less than, puffs like this or that. Maybe it's just all air, these poems. Stevens is talking about the problem of cliché. He's talking about the way in which any formulation dies, becomes frozen, becomes bouquet you must throw out. This is a condition in the wasteland that Eliot profoundly mistrusts. Stevens, on the other hand, sees in it a potential for a vision of the self that is consoling and is powerful. Stevens generates, as the poem goes on, an image of the poet as a man on the dump, one who beats an old tin can and makes stubborn sounds, which are, if you like, sounds of his own stubbornness. Stevens is willing, as Eliot is not, to make belief be a personal thing, to be something that each of us constructs out of our own will and our own powers of speech. As the poem develops, Stevens goes through a kind of gesture of throwing things out, a kind of reduction to primary terms that is like the poems of the poet as around line 21 or so. He says, now in the time of spring, azaleas, trilliums, myrtle, verbenums, daffodils, blue flocks, you know all the names. Between that disgust and this, and I think there is disgust in the poem, between the things that are on the dump, azaleas and so on, and those that will be azaleas and so on, one feels the purifying change, one rejects the trash, and as one rejects the trash, as one gets down to some kind of primary whiteness, some kind of fresh seeing of the world, we then start to see the moon in perhaps different terms, not merely as blanche, you know, some old lady from poems from the past, but perhaps in some new terms. Stevens says, that's the moment when the moon creeps up to the bubbling of bassoons. That's the time one looks at the elephant colorings of tires. Even this ugliness is interesting. Everything is shed. When the moon comes up, then as the moon, because all its images are in the dump, you have to see it freshly, and you see, because you're seeing freshly now, as a man, not like an image of a man. You see the moon rise in the empty sky. One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pale, one beats and beats for that which one believes. That's what one wants to get near. Could it after all be merely oneself that you want to get near, that you need to get near? Stevens is willing to say yes, whereas Eliot is, as I say, frightened of this prospect. Merely oneself as superior as the ear to a crow's voice. Did the nightingale torture the ear, pack the heart and scratch the mind, and does the ear solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace? Is it a philosopher's honeymoon one finds on the dump? Is it to sit among the mattresses of the dead, bottles, pots, shoes, and grass, and murmur, Baptist Eve? Is it to hear the bladder bubbles and say, invisible priest, is it to eject, to pull the day to pieces and cry, stanza my stone? Where was it one first heard of the truth? The The. It's a wonderful poem that's on the verge of nonsense, that's on the verge of a kind of personal language that, as I say, is an apocalyptic thing to hear a source of energy and power and play for Stevens. Stevens is not afraid of nonsense, he's not afraid of idiosyncrasy of expression. He is willing to play with words. Linguistic play puts Stevens in touch with a kind of primal poetic resource. Stevens understands truth as something that is linguistic, it's something constructed in and through language. It is, therefore, perishable. It is also, for the same reason, renewable. Look at that last line. Where was it one first heard of the truth? The The, if you prefer. That last sentence fragment, The The, is it, what is that? Is that an answer or a clarification to the question? Where was it one first heard of the truth? Now, where did this idea of truth come from to begin with? Where did you get that idea? Why do you want it? Because it is something that you have heard about. It is something that has been spoken. It has come to us as language has framed it. The The, the definite article. It's the definite article that makes the truth the truth. Otherwise, it would be merely only what? A truth. That is, to indicate and declare truth in its singularity, to give it this status. That is a linguistic act. The truth is the function, as Stevens understands it, of a certain linguistic capacity. In this case, a verbal formula which takes priority ultimately over any specific content or doctrine, any truth. In that sense, the truth lies in the The. The The is here representative of the human capacity for declaration, for statement, a specifically verbal and linguistic power. The truth that it represents is not in any sense a final term, a last word, a doctrine, a particular content of any kind. Instead, it points to a way of thinking, a medium of thought, a medium of thought and desire, a process which is a process of naming, or as Stevens would also call it of modern poetry, an act of finding. This is what language does in Stevens. It creates the world, it finds the world, it constructs the world through such elementary terms as the definite article. Well, we'll hear more about the implications of this perspective on experience next time and following.