Valuing Stevens’s Acts of Imagination

I AM NOT very inventive as a teacher, in part because I fear that my students will remember my cleverness or the ways the class handled the clever assignment. I want them to remember the poet’s words in the poet’s order. And I want to emphasize in my teaching how we can conceptualize why those words in that order might matter for the quality of our lives. Many poets require a kind of teaching that concentrates on fleshing out dramatic particulars and how the language frames significance for them: this was certainly the dominant mode in the age of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. The modernists and their heirs emphasize instead questions about how reading can frame the choices that allow the constructive act to take on exemplary significance. The juxtapositions and sound patterns of “The Waste Land” model versions of construction that run from the briefest of lyrics (like “In a Station of the Metro”) to Marianne Moore’s syllabics to the elaborate play between prose and poetry in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All. Wallace Stevens provides an interesting variant of this modernist orientation because he cultivates the same kind of self-consciousness about how the constructive act transforms the site of reading, but he often builds that site to hold the lush sonorities and imaginative reach characteristic of the best romantic poetry. So the teaching of Stevens has to clarify how romantic self-consciousness establishes sites of feeling that at the same time demand a very different kind of ascetic intelligence affording the capacity to treasure who readers can become if they knowingly participate in the poet’s act of the imagination. Reading has to see how the pressure of reality can coexist with the power to make alternative worlds where delight becomes something much more than aesthetic pleasure.

In another context, I would argue that if one does not teach the basic demand writers’ imaginations make on the reader’s senses of the world, one is likely to turn out aesthetes or ideologues who can describe the poem but not grasp why it might be moving as an act of imagination. But now we can focus simply on how we get students to see and respond to Stevens’s characteristic qualities that arguably carry through his career despite considerable variations. The best way to do that is probably to close-read a poem of his on poetics, since that is most likely to reflect not only a specific act of caring but also a mode of consciousness that projects his sense of the purposiveness driving many of his poems. Here the questions we ask in order to appreciate what the poet is doing can call attention to a distribution of the senses as well as modes of feeling and thinking that can help orient us toward what the poet considers distinctive in much of his or her work. For Stevens, that poem almost has to be “Of Modern Poetry,” because the poem articulates strategies that elicit the kind of self-consciousness at the heart of his work. If students can fully appreciate this poem, they will be in a position to see the fundamental dynamics by which Stevens tries to claim for poetry a significant role in shaping how we value our experiences. We will understand how we can treat poetry as an aspect of our piecing the world together not with our hands but with our hearts and minds.

Here are the poem’s first four intensely concise sentences, soon to build a contrast with the lushness by which the imagination comes to suffuse experience:

The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script.      Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

(CPP 218)

Two anomalies generate my first set of questions. Why does the first sentence not have a main verb? And why is there so much enjambment, perhaps in contrast to the definitive final sentence in this passage? We might also ask...