Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire

by Helen Vendler

In this graceful book, Helen Vendler brings her remarkable skills to bear on a number of Stevens’s short poems. She shows us that this most intellectual of poets is in fact the most personal of poets; that his words are not devoted to epistemological questions alone but are also “words chosen out of desire.”

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Nonfiction

94 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in English and American Literature in 1960. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Vendler taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University.



Vendler has written books on Yeats, Herbert, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Heaney, and, most recently, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (2010); Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries’ (2010); and The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2015). She also reviews contemporary poetry for the New Republic, London Review of Books, and other journals. She has held fellowships from, among others, the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, and National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Modern Language Association, of which she was president in 1980.

Reviews

[Eliza · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vendler definitely does a good job explaining Stevens poems; that being said, I thought Stevens poems were boring and confusing, making this a dull read.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

It changed my perception of Stevens from an aloof obscurantist into a poet of melancholic desire. It's a short book which reveals his harshness, desire, secrecies and perfection of magnitude. He could be harsh with himself, he desired even as a septuagenarian, his secrecies were: using "he" or "she" instead of "I"; burying the emotional heart of a poem in the middle instead of stating it in the beginning or end; placing the context of the poem in his own work as well as his predecessors (particularly Keats); misleading titles; and his allusiveness. The final chapter covers Stevens' handling of the orders of magnitude between body, mind, garments, environment and nature. It illustrates how he reimagined the differences of magnitude between these elements in successive poems, culminating in The River of Rivers in Connecticut (which I happen to cross twice daily on my commute.) Included are some quotes from Stevens' Opus Posthumous, which prompted me to want to check that out, too.

My vote for favorite Vendler sentence in this book is on page 58: "If there is no medium of verbal solubility, perhaps one can only imagine two immiscible liquids with a metonymic impermeability." It seems that every book I've read of hers is usually very clearly written, but has one trademark sentence like that in it. I love it!

[Louisa Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully writte; her writing is, I think, even more redolent than some of the poems she writes about. When she talks about Stevens being a poet of winter I actually wish it were February. And that I didn't live in Texas.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It is that variety and that renewal, that refusal to become obsolete, that strikes us as we see the style and form of the short poems changing...in order to accomodate the new facts of age and death, the new perceptions of experience. Stevens' fortitude in resisting with new invention each successive washing away by magnitude is finally what we fall silent before, to 'hear what he says,/ The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale" (Puella Parvula)." (Vendler, 79)

Consisting of four chapters (and an introduction), this rendering of the Hodges Lectures, by esteemed critic Helen Vendler, should be seen, if there is any justice in the world of letters generally and poetry specifically, as essential material for anyone concerned with the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Firstly, the style of Mrs. Vendler's criticism is truly sublime, treating each poem's significance and significators with pure intelligence worthy of the subject matter. Additionally, the poems chosen (including "Anecdote of the Jar," "The Comedian as the letter 'C'," and "The Virgin Carrying a Lantern") are ideal for an overview of Stevens' career, with its somewhat easy division between beginning, middle, and late periods. To add on, luckily, and as befits her position as a key interpreter of Stevens' oeuvre, Vendler eludes easy themes supposedly present in the poems, like 'imagination vs. reality,' and instead gives insightful glimpses that avoid easy dichotomies that denigrate the magnificence of Steven's accomplishment. Like the poems themselves (often over with too soon), this sleek volume is lovely, intellectual, and weighty, all at once. A great piece this is!

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetry of Wallace Stevens has always challenged me, understanding just a bit beyond my grasp. The esteemed Helen Vendler focuses her discussion on Stevens' short poems, hopefully, convincing the reader Stevens was not austere but a poet of deep feelings, a poet who dealt with the emotional issues that confront us all in our lifetime. Despite her firm beliefs that Stevens has been misunderstood, there is a gentleness in her approach, her interpretations. I appreciated the close study of a smaller collection of his poems and her advice in the "Introduction" to "imagine oneself writing the poem - to write it out as if it were an utterance of one's own."

[Jean Manuel]

Oh, that this lashing wind was something more
Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter . . .
The rain is pouring down. It is July.
There is lightning and the thickest thunder.
It is a spectacle. Scene 10 becomes 11,
In Series X, Act IV, et cetera.
People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old,
The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,
Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.
And Ludwig Richter, turbulent Schlemihl,
Has lost the whole in which he was contained,
Knows desire without an object of desire,
All mind and violence and nothing felt.
He knows he has nothing more to think about,
Like the wind that lashes everything at once.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

The master of poetry criticism...a tender but feminist analysis of brilliant old Wallace. I wouldn't be able to fully understand Wallace Stevens without this book.

[Justin Goodman · Rating 2 out of 5]

in this book Vendler combines an uncompelling but sufficiently argued thesis with a comparative analysis to Romantic poetry, speckled with attention to how desire manifests in Stevens work. Her core argument is good: Stevens is a deep-feeling poet in the Romantic tradition whose dry and obscure voice is meant to convey the central tension between restraint and desire - imagine the heightened intensity a Western, marked by its slowness, reticence, into the climactic showdown. Vendler frames the essay agonistically, however. It is meant to prove Stevens had feelings contrary to the popular opinion, and as such the book is heavy under this anxious need to remind the reader that there's an underlying "brutality" to his writing.

The excess of the word "brutality" acts as a synecdoche. In part because it reflects Vendler's fetishization of the suffering artist, as when she states that it reflects an anger in Stevens that "led to a great amplitude of human vision" because he couldn't abandon "either of his two incomparable truths – the truth of desire and the truth of the failure of desire." Setting aside qualifying suffering, interpreting art as a linear reflection of the interior reduces both art and artist to imagined biographies of sentiments. And since Vendler never causally invokes Stevens biography, instead interpreting his feelings through his poetry, Vendler is merely proving her suppositions by her suppositions. Contra this, her readings of "The Anecdote of the Jar" in Chapter 3 as a reaction to Keats "Ode To A Grecian Urn" is fantastic and has, to me, a sturdy base to support it.

Second, most explicitly in chapter 1, the desire which Stevens' "brutality" reflects is the conflation of the sexual and the erotic. A conflation which Audre Lorde explicitly critiqued The Uses of the Erotic just two years prior to this book's publication. Not that sexuality isn't a vital part of life for some people, possibly Stevens, but Vendler not only doesn't support this deferral to sexuality by documented evidence of Stevens sexual desires - but the sexual aspect of desire vanishes by Chapter 4 when discussing "The River of Rivers in Connecticut." Without clarity on this singular issue, the book becomes jumbled.

That said, despite these criticisms, I think Vendler has two succinct descriptions that capture the peculiar Pandoran lockbox that is Stevens' poetry. I'll leave them here without further comment:

Stevens’ poems are often second-order reflections on the stormings of first-order sensation.

His art exhibits a Roman strictness, exhibiting a “lineament,” a “character” of the earth. It delineates; it characterizes. It does not, in the Keatsian manner, enact; rather, it offers a map with zones and poles of experienced marked out on the fluid continuum of perception and desire. It shares with Wordsworth a Latin stoicism; it recollects the savagery and fierceness of desire, yet it recollects them in austere inquiry.

[Arend · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four dense, analytical, and passionate essays that had my dictionary cracked open for the first time in years. A beautiful intertwining of biography, imagination, and love of language it shows the development of a poet and his ongoing concerns, struggles, and obsessions.

A friend introduced me to “The Emperor of Ice Cream” a month ago, and it blew my mind. I had never read Stevens, but now I needed to know more. This book helped me uncover even more and gave me a greater context for an amazing piece of poetry.

[Iulia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal. I’m in awe of what Vendler does here. It helps that Wallace Stevens is one of my favourite poets, but even without that - Vendler’s immense capacity for close reading, her insights and erudition are mind-blowing. Could not recommend this enough.

[Arun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense intro to Stevens. Came here via a blog post about alternate readings of "The Emperor of Ice-Cream".

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Commentary which impoverishes poems is a disservice to them." (53) This is the de facto mode of much criticism: the words are there (words on top of other words) but they have been smuggled in the compound through the stealth cliches of ego, money, and institutions. It is contraband without a moral advantage, and very easy to cheat insidiously while still appearing smart.

Vendler's writing on Stevens's poetry, which she positions as a long reclamation project from a legion of misunderstanders, exists in a curious space: a space called wisdom. On one hand, she is perhaps an ultimate "close reader," mapping out word choice and order, basing her arguments on Stevens's multiple precisions. In her 2015 book The Ocean, The Bird, and The Scholar, she writes: "The presumption of commentary, from the first classical commentaries down to our own day, is that literary works are complex enough in thought and style to solicit detailed intellectual and critical reflection; the presumption of aesthetic criticism is that artworks have not been seen accurately until the intrinsic relations governing the structural and formal shapes they assume are perceived and accounted for...Form is content as deployed. Content is form as imagined."

At the same time, she is simultaneously a champion of two of Stevens's dicta that emphasize the mysterious, the confusing, the mystical, and the enigmatic nature of poetry. She's ruthlessly wary of how the poetry can actually mean something about making your soul better. The first, "One should read poetry with one's nerves," may already be familiar; the second, "A poem must resist the intelligence almost completely," is a similar axiom, but dares reflection. I'm currently infatuated with it.

Vendler's writing here is a performance of scholarship and the enigmatica of poetry; one reaches for the Buddhist "wise mind" to describe her balancing act between rational and emotional.

This is to say nothing of the many glorious, hard-won moments throughout the book, where individual poems are often printed in full. My favorite is her deciphering of "Stevens's characteristic secrecies." It's a spy job, a formal debriefing, and a more delicious leaking of classified information on a poetry that is both weirdly reticent and supergenerous, impossible and dead simple, en fuego and deep-freezed at the same time.

[John Pappas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vendler's central thesis is a bit obvious -- that Stevens is no mere obfuscant and that lurking beneath his abstract and alien poetry is a beating heart, trenchant humor, a sense of topos and a real desire for connection with the world, not just gamesmanship about or around it. The strength of this text (a distillation of four lectures she gave at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1982) is in her preternatural explicatory powers. Her notes on "The Emperor of Ice Cream" alone are phenomenal. This particular volume doesn't showcase those strengths as firmly as her latest volume on Dickinson, however, where she works through Dickinson's canon poem by poem. Still, Vendler's text will help many readers connect to a Stevens that may seem too distant, too abstract or simply unaccessible. Although she doesn't state it directly, she also implicitly contextualizes and places Stevens in a lineage that stretches through the language poets, to Ashbery and other post-modern poets.

[Kylo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh. So disappointing. This is tired biographical criticism with a smidge of overly light psychoanalytic criticism mixed with a poor reading of philosophy (although a long reading of BritLit). As HV admits, it could be considered reductive, but more often I found it boring.

I had to put it down before it turned me off of Stevens, *but* it doesn't quite descend to 1-star purgatory: I got some redeeming value because it pointed me to some Stevens poetry I hadn't read before.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This slim book was marvelous and enriching. It helps humanize Wallace Stevens. Of course his poems can still mean anything you want them to but I think most Wallace Stevens fans will appreciate Vendler's readings. "The Snow Man" has long been one of my favorite Stevens poems, and now I appreciate it from another point of view.

[Calvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Handt read it in years, but still remains one of my favorite works on Stevens.