Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self

by Milton J. Bates

Book by Milton J. Bates

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

335 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1985

Reviews

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starts off as a biography of the poet, before shifting to an overview of his oeuvre in its various stages, and the ideas behind it as shown in his letters, public talks, and other works. Stevens is a difficult poet and this book is not always much clearer, but it helps get a grip of the essentials.

I'd summarise is as saying that Stevens:

- Was preoccupied by and writing about the deepest philosophical and cultural concerns of his day
- Was opposed on principle to saying things clearly: poetry is not philosophy, and has different goals
- Often engaged in playful and surrealist games, which don't have any coded meanings

Connecting specific lines to specific points here is more complicated; Bates presents his views, but the critics will keep arguing.

After college, Stevens spent a few years living in New York and mixing with the bohemia, before famously moving to Hartford, CT to work in insurance. His early poetry shows the influence of the literary movements then dominant in Europe: Decadence, Symbolism, Imagism. (In Symbolist poetry the subject is a metaphor; Imagism describes the image itself.) He likes unusual and exotic words, and French quotations. In the early poems, "pure poetry" is Stevens' goal, the sound of the words and their sensation more important than the meaning, which is played down. There are some recurring characters (such as Crispin, who features at length in The Comedian as the Letter C) and metaphors (the sun and moon, and summer as happy ignorance). Stevens has his own symbolic language, but made clear that he did not wish readers to analyse his poems too much, or try decode their meaning.

Bates claims that Stevens became close with George Santayana while attending Harvard College. Contra William James who argued (in The Varieties of Religious Experience) that unprovable beliefs are useful (they help make life fuller and richer, whether or not they are true), Santayana thought of these beliefs as a fiction that is willingly taken on for this reason. In A High-Toned Old Christian Woman, Stevens extends this idea:

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven.

Poetry and religion are aspects of the same supreme fiction, the structure we build in order to imagine something greater than ourselves. (His later collection Transport to Summer ends with a poem called Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.) We can imagine our way out of our ugly, disenchanted modern world.

Notes contains another recurring Stevens character, the Major Man. It is hard to ignore the similarities to Nietzsche's Übermensch (overman). Nietzsche's influence during Stevens' intellectually formative years was immense; this was before the possible connection to Nazism (embraced by his sister) somewhat disgraced him. Nietzsche's similarly saw God as a human fiction, designed in the image of man, a God who became all too human and sympathetic until finally being killed for humanity's sins. There are other more useful fictions which better express our sense of strength and mastery (a more modish word would be agency). A Nietzschean aphorism: "Art is with us that we may not perish through truth". Imagination can be more useful than the search for truth.

Later in life Stevens became interested in genealogy, hiring some researchers to look into his family's Dutch and Scottish roots. In his later poetry (The Auroras of Autumn, The Rock) he is interested in peasants, in native soil and simplicity. (Of conservative temperament - although his poetry never went near politics - he was described as "a Republican in the mold of Robert Taft".) One of his favourite of his contemporaries was the Southern Agrarian John Crowe Ransom. (He described T.S. Eliot as his "dead opposite".) Although he lived in Connecticut and wrote some poems about Hartford and New Haven, his deepest links were to Reading and the surrounding landscape: the Schuylkill River, the Susquehanna Valley. The act of contemplating how to describe the feeling of one's native landscape already makes one an outsider again; but an insider-outsider, one who is able to be both.

Intriguingly, Bates claims that the chaplain at the hospital where he died claims he converted to Catholicism before dying, having long wished to, but it wasn't recorded because the (Catholic) hospital did not wish to give the impression of missionising. (His daughter Holly disputes this story.)

As Ransom summarized him, Stevens was "arguing on behalf of a secular culture based on Nobility". He sought a stable context of ideas and meaning within the intellectual ruins of the twentieth century. Backward-looking, he valorised simple faith and peasant life, yet was also a dandy and a surrealist. He tried to understand imagination and language as the original force, the Omnium, groping for a path to God, yet falling back on the creed of Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour (one of my favourites)

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one

[justin, the geezer]

part biography, part literary criticism, but an entirely cerebral look at an equally cerebral poet. wallace stevens was an enigma to me before reading this (and still remains partly so) but as i read parts of his Collected Poems alongside this, there’s an affinity i feel and a resonance to his work that wasn’t there before. what was most confounding about stevens’ work (their evasiveness) has stopped being an obstacle and instead remains as a marvel, a monument to his pure poetry. for this elucidation alone, i feel good about recommending it.