Planets on Tables: Still Life and War in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

We are preoccupied with events, even when we do not observe them closely. We have a sense of upheaval. We feel threatened. We look from an uncertain present toward a more uncertain future. One feels the desire to collect oneself against all this in poetry as well as in politics. . . . Resistance is the opposite of escape. The poet who wishes to contemplate the good in the midst of confusion is like the mystic who wishes to contemplate God in the midst of evil. There can be no thought of escape. Both the poet and the mystic may establish themselves on herrings and apples. The painter may establish himself on a guitar, a copy of Figaro and a dish of melons. These are fortifyings, although irrational ones. The only possible resistance to the pressure of the contemporaneous is a matter of herrings and apples or, to be less definite, the contemporaneous itself. In poetry, to that extent, the subject is not the contemporaneous, because that is only the nominal subject, but the poetry of the contemporaneous. Resistance to the pressure of ominous and destructive circumstance consists of its conversion, so far as possible, into a different, an explicable, an amenable circumstance.¹

Toward the end of his career Wallace Stevens had been thinking of George Santayana, that old philosopher in a hospital in Rome, editing his manuscripts even on his deathbed; and perhaps he recalled his teacher's definition of the poet's art, "the art of intensifying emotions by assembling the scattered objects that naturally arouse [him]."² That process of assembly, suggesting an analogy with still life, is a labor Stevens describes throughout his work, and at times he would draw explicitly on the art of still life to stimulate and represent his art.

Yet Stevens presents a curious case in the story of modernist obsessions with objects. While he proclaims his desire for "the thing itself," he offers few metonymies and almost no sensory description.³ In the late poem "Local Objects" we are offered no samples of those things "more precious than the most precious objects of home" (CPP, 473). We know only that the retrospective speaker understood that he "was a spirit without a foyer" and that these objects are of "a world without a foyer." Perhaps this is why he does not describe them; though objects can through metaphor be transported to the room of the spirit, there is no common room in language between authentic spirit and the actual world. Yet these "few things / For which a fresh name always occurred," (never, then, merely denotative objects) are "the objects of insight" and thus, through the ambiguity in "of," issuing from world and from spirit. As such they create an image of "that serene he had always been approaching / As toward an absolute foyer beyond romance," where spirit and world might meet (CPP, 474).

The late, retrospective "Local Objects" employs a language of domestic tranquility that we might well associate with the art of still life. As in still life, the objects seem to be there "of their own accord, / Because he desired" (ibid). But in the earlier "Man Carrying Thing" the activity is intense and exposed, far from the environment of still life (CPP, 306). The work obeys its opening dictum that "the poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully." The thing is obscure and the effort relentless. Man carrying thing is man making metaphor—poetry as transport or at least transportation. (The poem was published in the volume called Transport to Summer.) In carrying something from here to there, in relating the "uncertain" parts of reality, man pursues the revelation of "the obvious whole." But the drama of the poem is in the "snow storm of secondary things" (man-handled, partial, and obscure) we must endure before the dawn of this "bright obvious."

That storm of secondary things dominates the volume Parts of a World...