Wallace Stevens in Context ed. by Glen MacLeod (review)

There was a time when the title of this volume might have seemed a contradiction. Stevens’s poems were often read without context, for their internal tensions and paradoxes, their stylistic and rhetorical range, their artistic development, their struggle with strong precursors. Of course, this orientation, which bracketed out circumstance and milieu, was never wholly dominant, and as academic interest shifted to new historicism and cultural studies, we have discovered that “context” is not periphery. Poems are, after all, “makings of the sun”; they bear the “lineament or character” of “the planet of which they were part” (CPP 450). This rich and well-ordered collection of essays distills work done in recent years to read Stevens’s poetry in connection with its time and place, its affiliations, and its motivations. The best essays here also bring news. Stevens in Context presents not an essential but a kaleidoscopic poet, one who lived and worked in a remarkable variety of environments, physical, social, and intellectual, and made poems alert to these contingencies.

Some of the contexts presented here are topics in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens, published a decade ago—e.g., feminism, romanticism, philosophy, religion, the visual arts. This seems inevitable since both series are intended for broad audiences (students, teachers, and general readers) looking for a comprehensive introduction, but the authors bring a new documentary thrust to these perennial concerns. Perhaps inevitably, the seasoned student of Stevens’s work will think of contexts not covered here. What about “Stevens in America” or at least “Stevens and American Poetry”? But the range is impressive. There are thirty-six entries, organized into six subcategories: “Places,” “Natural Contexts,” “Literary Contexts,” “Other Arts,” “Intellectual Contexts,” and finally, grouped together, “Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts”—more angles than I can possibly address in a short review. This most elusive of poets is made clear and brought near in these shifting frameworks—“Yet not . . . / Too near,” as the respect for poetry’s “strange unlike,” never reducible to context, remains (CPP 71).

“Places” makes an apt beginning since for Stevens “life is an affair of places” (CPP 901). The section launches the volume in a biographical and chronological mode, mapping the poet’s various homes and their impact on his intellectual and personal development, and on his imagination. But people in fact loom large in each of these chapters, from Old John Zeller (his Pennsylvania Dutch forebear) and Elsie Moll (his Reading sweetheart and eventual wife) to Walter Arensberg in Cambridge and New York, and the White Russian refugee in the Hartford town dump. Reality is “the base” even for Stevens’s most abstract figures (CPP 917), and this volume enhances our pleasure by uncovering those traces. John Serio brings these often obscure figures to life especially well in his chapter on Hartford. “So you’re home again, Redwood Roamer, and ready / To feast . . . Slice the mango, Naaman, and dress it // With white wine, sugar and lime juice,” writes Stevens in “Certain Phenomena of Sound” (CPP 256). Redwood Roamer is “Addison Posey, a vice president [at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company] who had recently moved to the California redwood country,” and Naaman (Corn), it turns out, was “a company chauffeur” (33). The second part of this section on “Places” deals less with real habitats than with imagined ones—Florida, France, the Orient—though in each case there are personal or professional associations that prompt the images. Juliette Utard reveals Stevens as an imaginary flâneur, enabled through his remote contacts with the Vidals and the Churches. “Words, like books, were ‘nomads exquisite’ to Stevens. As a transatlantic collector of things as of words, he preferred a miscellany, and relished an element of surprise” (53). In a chapter on “The Orient,” Edward Ragg argues that Stevens’s experience, especially of Chinese and Japanese art, through books, museums, gallery shows, and correspondences, “influenced Stevens’s transition to modernism” (58). These essays show us how attention to context doesn’t just supplement but enhances our reading of the poems and...