Six Poets: Wallace Stevens

Since the 19th century, has anyone made a good living writing poetry? Thomas Hardy, who was one of the most prolific poets of his time, had to make a living writing novels. Robert Graves once told an interviewer that he only earned enough money from his poetry to "keep me in cigarettes."

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a double life. How does one reconcile the fact that, while he quietly created a growing body of some of the most critically acclaimed poetry of his time, his day job was a lawyer for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company? Frank Kermode found "vulgarity" in this question, but I find it fascinating. "Stevens did not find that he must choose between the careers of insurance lawyer and poet. The fork in the road where he took the wrong turning is a critic's invention, and there is no point in dawdling there." But even Kermode recognized that Stevens erected a very high and impregnable wall between the two pursuits. It was as if he took up his career as insurance lawyer to satisfy someone else's requirements of him and of his life, but he saved his true self for his poetry. But we have no way of knowing this. Who knows but that Wallace Stevens was at his best behind his insurance desk. We are too used to the Marxist alienated worker who is truly alive only in his off hours. It's tempting to think of Stevens as the one true alienated man, whose life was divided perfectly into two compartments, neither of which had any effect on nor ever touched the other. But we should resist such a temptation, since only one part of Stevens's life matters to us. His poetry has lasted until now, continues to surprise us and delight us.

But Stevens is spread a little thinly, I think, over more than four decades as a dedicated poet. There are differences in temperament, in intensity, and in focus. Consequently, most of his work contributes to the greater body of work rather than standing out as exemplars. As formidable as that body of work is, it is difficult to locate a single poem, or even a handful of poems, that define Stevens. Some of them are beautifully expressed ideas. "Sunday Morning," an early poem, is his most famous, but it can hardly be said to be representative of his poetry. As much as I admire his last poems, including those in The Rock, they lack some of the qualities and the ambitions found in his earlier poems. For instance, concerning his atheism, I find "Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit" more beautiful and more moving than "Sunday Morning." I find in its insistence that, if we must, we should afford god a separateness from us, like light, that has no kinship with us, something like Cézanne's modest approaches to the seen world - not to supplant it with his love but to respect it so deeply and completely that all that remains of our work is a clear and honest image of the world and not what is imposed on it by our love or our intelligence.

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost

Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.


Unfortunately, as fine as he occasionally is, Stevens is the victim of some intense overpraise, and what is best characterized as critical logorrhea: 'It’s hard to think of a more vivid illustration of T. S. Eliot’s principle of the separation between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” [For the life of me, I can't think of a more inapposite description of Stevens. The man who suffers, after all, lived a luxe life in Hartford.] For most of his life, Stevens was an elaborately defended introvert in a three-piece suit, working as a Hartford insurance executive. He came slowly to a mastery of language, form, and style that revealed a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism.'(1) Harold Bloom, who is given to gushing over writers he likes, has had his gush on Stevens.

Like all great poets, Stevens wrote a high number of mightily banal poems. Like most modernist poets, calling him a "stylist" is treacherous at the very least. His best poems cohere under the intense strain of a centrifugal formlessness. It's difficult to explain precisely how, but they cohere. His best poems succeed at being poetry through the cumulative effect of metaphoric invention, not through individual lines or words. In 1951 he was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for The Auroras of Autumn. But there are no two American poets, Stevens and Frost, who are more dissimilar. According to legend, during one of their arguments, Stevens told Frost, "The trouble with you Robert, is that you write about subjects." And Frost responded, "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac." It's obvious why there is so much more academic writing about Stevens than about Frost. On the Poetry Foundation website's introduction to Stevens, the last paragraph concludes that "In the years since his death Stevens's reputation has remained formidable. The obscurity and abstraction of his poetry has proven particularly appealing among students and academicians and has consequently generated extensive criticism." Clearly, something has gone wrong with a poem that requires the intervention of interpreters (like Helen Vendler) between the poet and the reader. An industry has sprung up that tries to convince squeamish readers that George Herbert, for example, is "obscure" and requires extensive interpretation. It is bullshit. It is one of the reasons why readers have turned away from poetry. Any reasonably intelligent reader should have no great trouble finding his own way to the heart of George Herbert and even of Wallace Stevens. If he cannot, it's the poet's, not the reader's, fault.

Stevens has written many memorable poems that are hard to quote from memory. But, like almost every other great poet, he is marvelously, succinctly  clear. I have quoted some of his poems before, like "The World As Meditation," and "Seventy Years Later." They are both from his last, astonishing collection, The Rock. The truth is that after page upon page of pure rhetoric, the reader of Stevens's poetry longs for - and eventually finds - something of substance. When he was a student at Harvard in 1897-1900, Stevens was introduced to the American philosopher George Santayana, with whom he exchanged poems and corresponded throughout their lives. When he learned in 1950-51 that Santayana had taken up his final residence in a charitable institution for the aged in Rome, he was moved to write "To an Old Philosopher in Rome."


On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement
Of men growing small in the distances of space,
Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,
Unintelligible absolution and an end --

The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.
It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.

How easily the blown banners change to wings . . .
Things dark on the horizons of perception,
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,

The human end in the spirit's greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown. The newsboys' muttering
Becomes another murmuring; the smell
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled . . .

The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,
And these beneath the shadow of a shape

In a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,
A light on the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that of which

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.
Be orator but with an accurate tongue
And without eloquence, O, half-asleep,
Of the pity that is the memorial of this room,

So that we feel, in this illumined large,
The veritable small, so that each of us
Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice
In yours, master and commiserable man,
Intent on your particles of nether-do,

Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive
Yet living in two worlds, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,
Impatient for the grandeur that you need

In so much misery; and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,
As in the last drop of the deepest blood,
As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,

Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.
It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.

And you - it is you that speak it, without speech,
The loftiest syllables among loftiest things,
The one invulnerable man among
Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like,
Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained-vaults.

The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered.
The life of the city never lets go, nor do you
Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.
Its domes are the architecture of your bed.
The bells keep on repeating solemn names

In choruses and choirs of choruses,
Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery
Of silence, that any solitude of sense
Should give you more than their peculiar chords
And reverberations clinging to whisper still.

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immensest theatre, the pillared porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room,

Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.

Isn't it extraordinary that, in this poem written past his 70th year, Stevens, who was for so long such a personal - i.e., self-referential - poet, was moved to write in tribute of an old friend?


(1) Peter Schjeldahl, "Insurance Man: The Life and Art of Wallace Stevens," The New Yorker, May 2, 2016.