Stevens’s Poetics of Variation as a Guide for Teaching

TEACHING WALLACE STEVENS is a notoriously difficult undertaking, and the essays in John Serio and B. J. Leggett’s 1994 volume devoted to the topic confirm this view: “Teach Wallace Stevens? The prospect still strikes terror into my heart,” Milton Bates declares (17). Jacqueline Vaught Brogan echoes the sentiment as she reflects on her experience introducing Stevens to undergraduates, for while “We can teach Yeats,” and “Stein, for that matter,” she concedes, “I still believe it’s impossible to teach Wallace Stevens” (51).

Close to twenty-five years later, as I embark on the same challenge to write about my own teaching experience, I begin with questions: Is it still impossible to teach Stevens? Are there ways that teaching Stevens has changed? Are there teaching environments particularly conducive to address “the relentless sense of sheer play in his poetry” (Brogan 52) and the difficulty of arriving at clear interpretations of any given poem? To try to determine definitive answers to these questions is of course futile, for such expectations cut against what Stevens asks of his readers, and, indeed, practices in his poems. “[T]he truth was not the respect of one, / But always of many things,” Stevens intones in “Someone Puts a Pineapple Together” (CPP 695). Just as the poet “constantly requires a new relation” (CPP 914), so does the teacher of Stevens’s poetry. The more I have learned to grasp Stevens’s own variational approach to poetry, the more effective and satisfying my teaching of the poet has become.

My approach to the teaching of Stevens has taken shape in the context of NYU’s Gallatin School, an unusual school with an innovative program where students forge their own interdisciplinary concentrations (in lieu of majors) with faculty advisers. The key point here is that the courses that I teach are not based in a particular department, but rather are part of the “interdisciplinary course” component of Gallatin’s curriculum, which is the academic heart of the School. I teach Stevens, to varying degrees, in three of my theme-based interdisciplinary seminars: “The Music of Poetry and the Poetry of Music,” “Modern Poetry and the Actual World,” and “Modern Poetry and the Senses.” In a seven-week course, “Wallace Stevens and the Twentieth Century,” I have been able to focus most intensively on Stevens.

Most important for this discussion is the fact that students in my classes can range from Gallatin first-years to seniors, students with no experience reading poems, some with a little experience, and others with a great deal of background in poetry. Students in the English or Comparative Literature department at NYU can find their way into my classes, especially those who would like to study modern lyric poetry, and Stevens, in particular. The range of students is wide and is at once what is best and most challenging about these classes, for I have often found that the students with the least experience can have the deepest insights into the poems, as they come to class without preconceptions or expectations, and learn how to read lyric poetry through reading Stevens. It is also crucial to note that while my classes draw students for whom the study of literature forms a significant part of their concentrations, their range of disciplinary interests is equally wide: students focusing on music, philosophy, history, and the arts, more broadly, often take these classes. But there is no distinct pattern: I can also have economics and politics students, as well as those in business.

Stevens’s lifelong penchant for variations has helped me to understand that there is not one way of teaching Stevens. Depending on what kind of course I am teaching and the composition of the class, my approach to Stevens will differ. “The Music of Poetry and the Poetry of Music,” for example, gives me the opportunity to teach students at least half of whom are trained in music and the other half (roughly) in literature and poetry. In “Modern Poetry and the Actual World,” a fair number of students of history, politics, and even environmental studies will join with students...