Books: The Necessary Riddle

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF WALLACE STEVENS (287 pp.)—Edited by Ashley Brown and Robert S. Haller—Lippincott ($5).

Poetry, the late Wallace Stevens was fond of saying, is the one reality in an otherwise wholly imaginary world. Shortly before his death in 1955, he wrote a poetic summation of the poetic experience that serves well as an epitaph:

His self and the sun were one And his poems, although makings of his self, Were no less makings of the sun. It was not important that they survive. What mattered was that they should bear Some lineament or character, Some affluence, if only half-perceived, In the poverty of their words, Of the planet of which they were a part.

Stevens’ poetry is almost untouched by social criticism, and he was perhaps too much of a poet of well-being to exert a full influence on a younger, more desperate generation. Instead, he was obsessed by the idea of order in the universe—perhaps because he was vice president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. He cherished imagination not as escape from reality but as the “necessary angel” whose shaping grace can enable man to perceive the true nature of things and fulfill his need to make order of chaos. Religion, Stevens felt, had abdicated its metaphysical chair; in Christianity he found only “residual pieties.” In the absence of belief in a divine scheme, “the mind turns to its own creations and examines them for the support that they give.”

In one of his best poems, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Stevens wrote of watching a girl on the beach amidst “the meaningless plungings of water and the wind”:

Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang, and, singing, made.

In other words, man alone gives meaning to the life around him. This is not simple idealism. An enigma remains. And that is the necessary riddle of each man’s mind, the confusion of his words, the haze of his vision. In a late period, when Stevens abandoned the luxurious language of his early work for the “grandly plain” style he sought to teach by, Stevens wrote:

You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun with an ignorant eye And see it clearly or the idea of it.

As his language turned more sober and more exact, his vision faded; there is no poem in the final five volumes of his work that states the workings of the metaphysical-symbolic eye so well as “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” a poem from his first collection:

Icicles fitted the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause.

But the enigma remains, and it is to the task of “reading it” that the editors of The Achievement of Wallace Stevens have collected 19 critical essays written over the four decades of Stevens’ life as a poet. As a primer of Stevens, as it is also supposed to be, the collection provides only a finicky mosaic, and most of the essays concern Harmonium, a collection of Stevens’ work only up to 1923.

Poet Marianne Moore’s essay is, predictably, the best of the lot. But it is the nature of Stevens’ work that phrases from his poems describe it better than any the critics can invent. Poetry, he said, “must almost resist intelligence.” Only Randall Jarrell knows when he’s licked: “Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around,” he writes in perhaps the book’s most apt judgment. Characteristic of Stevens’ artful use of assonance and word-echoes to make a little something out of nothing much, is a stanza from “The Ordinary Women”:

Then from their poverty they rose, From dry catarrhs, and to guitars They flitted Through the palace walls.

Stevens is not a great poet in the sense that Eliot and Yeats are great poets, because his work lacks attention to poetry’s first domain—the land that lies, in the words of Critic G. S. Fraser, between “aesthetic perception and philosophical reflection on it.” Reading “The Snow Man.” many a reader has felt a sense of identification with

. . . the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Like the snow man, much of Stevens’ poetry melts in the memory and is gone. But it leaves behind an intriguing account of Stevens’ preoccupation with the quiet struggle between imagination and fading reality, shimmering in the facets of his kaleidoscopic eye.