"Pure Rhetoric of a Language Without Words": Stevens's Musical Creation of Belief in "Credences of Summer"

From his earliest to his later poems, Stevens longs for respite from the ever-moving world and to feel at one with the world about him. In "The Man Whose Pharynx was Bad," his speaker decries time's motion and wishes that summer would come to rest "lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressed / Through days like oceans in obsidian"¹ (stanza iii, lines 3-4). In "This Solitude of Cataracts," he longs "to feel the same way over and over," for "the river to go on flowing the same way" (ll. 8-9). To feel even a momentary release from the flux would be "enough," cries the speaker of "The Ultimate Poem is Abstract": "It would be enough / If we were ever, just once, at the middle, fixed / In this Beautiful World of Ours and not as now, / Helplessly at the edge" (ll. 16-19).

While in many poems Stevens expresses despair at the relentless change of the world, in "Credences of Summer" he creates a poem which, more than any other, expresses a relief from the universal flux. In each of its ten cantos, Stevens expresses one way that we can perceive a permanence, a wholeness in summer. Stevens's "credences" do not, however, at the poem's end, comprise a unified system of belief, nor do they provide us with a still picture of summer. Although he offers us a vibrant summer world—complete with greenery, roses, hay, birds and their accompanying hymns, silences and birdsongs—and confidently urges us to believe in summer's wholeness, Stevens's voice is not uniform. While some cantos express an exhilarating, even an empowering belief in our ability to attain wholeness within the natural world, others admit more doubt and even question, at times, whether such permanence is possible.

Stevens's unevenness of tone in "Credences of Summer" has, in large part, sparked the critical controversy that has surrounded the poem. In contrast to those critics who argue that Stevens's shifting tone represents a tenuous hold on his celebration of the present, I would argue that his changing tones are, rather, illustrative of a larger musical and rhetorical design in the poem which enables Stevens to urge us successfully to "believe ... beyond belief" in summer's lasting presence ("Flyer's Fall," p. 6).

Many critics question whether Stevens sustains throughout its development the confident tones with which he opens the poem, as well as whether the uneasy relation between Stevens's variable voice and what Harold Bloom calls "the rival eloquence of mere nature" ultimately mutes Stevens's summer celebration.² Critics such as Frank Kermode,³ Thomas Hines,⁴ Adelaide Kirby Morris,⁵ and Joseph Riddel⁶ take Stevens's marked and elevated tones as their focal point and find in "Credences of Summer," if not "Stevens' consummate hymn to the paradise of living . . ." in Morris's terms,⁷ then, as Riddel writes, "a moment of apogee and not apology in the poet's emotional weather."⁸ At the other end of the critical spectrum, Helen Vendler concentrates on the questioning undertones that persist throughout the poem and elucidates the darker poem beneath its jubilant surface.⁹ While Harold Bloom insists that "Credences" is "more cheerful than Vendler allows," he, too, maintains that it "would like to have been rather more celebratory than finally it was."¹⁰

In what remains one of the best pieces on "Credences of Summer," Isabel MacCaffrey argues that Stevens's aim in the poem is not only, as Vendler writes, "To fix his attention on the present ... in the present,"¹¹ but to affirm the power of the imagination as it faces "The 'silence of summer,' a stasis where there can be no speech."¹² MacCaffrey neither proclaims nor qualifies the poem's celebration but, rather, explores the "special kind...