"Dead Opposites" or "Reconciled among the Stars"?: Stevens and Eliot

MOST CRITICS have agreed that Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot had little affinity as poets, and this probably reflects a conclusion they reached themselves. In 1950, Stevens corrected William Van O'Connor's supposition that he knew Eliot slightly, insisting that they'd never met nor corresponded and protesting, "After all, Eliot and I are dead opposites and I have been doing about everything that he would not be likely to do" (L 677). O'Connor had misread an Eliot-themed issue of The Harvard Advocate (December 1938), attributing to him Allen Tate's contribution; Stevens actually wrote a rather more qualified "Homage to T. S. Eliot," noting that "His prodigious reputation is a great difficulty," and consequently asserting the need to read Eliot "out of the pew, so to speak" (CPP 801). In 1940, ruminating on the possibility of establishing a "Chair of Poetry" with his new acquaintance Henry Church (its potential funder) and envisaging the level of eminence necessary to its holder, Stevens thought of Eliot again, but was dismissive: "It is possible that a man like T. S. Eliot illustrates the character, except that I regard him as a negative rather than a positive force" (CPP 806–07). His covering letter to Church had argued that the post required "a scholar, or, perhaps better, a man with an extremely aggressive mind" (L 376): possibly Eliot might have been aggressive enough, but evidently not in the right way. For his part, Eliot noticed Stevens a good deal less than Stevens noticed Eliot, and when in 1955 Faber and Faber published The Collected Poems, Eliot had heralded the event by a statement in The Trinity Review (1954) that was hardly fulsome in its praise—despite his claim to be an "admirer"—and, in its assessment of Stevens's current standing, perhaps even had an air of speaking de haut en bas. "[H]is reputation is beginning to spread," noted the Nobel laureate, whose own reputation had been judged "prodigious" sixteen years previously, while also revealing that the idea of his firm's publishing Stevens had actually originated with "one of my fellow directors" (qtd. in Ehrenpreis 212).

Stevens, then, had a certain investment in asserting his difference from Eliot, and Eliot seems not to have bothered greatly about Stevens. If the latter was not personally acquainted with Eliot, he did have friendly relations (of his kind) with Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. In fact, the nature of Stevens's objection to Eliot's unquestioned reputation, and his perception of its negative consequences, was later replicated in something he wrote about Frost in a letter to Church's widow, Barbara. In this, he noted having declined an invitation to attend a celebration to mark Frost's eightieth birthday; he recalled having been confronted by Frost's bust in the rare book library at Harvard "some years ago," and went on to comment, "His work is full (or said to be full) of humanity. I suppose I shall never be eighty no matter how old I become" (L 825). Stevens's attitude in each case was driven by his feeling that a certain type of public approbation—Eliot's "complete acceptance" or Frost's being "greatly admired by many people" (CPP 801, L 825)—was an impediment that he himself, intending never to be installed as an eighty-year-old smiling public man, had avoided. He distrusted what he saw as Frost's heart-on-sleeve "humanity" as much as he distrusted Eliot's churchiness, which required taking him "out of the pew" as a necessary response; for the unexamined poem was not worth reading.

We might see this as little more than ill-disguised professional envy of two poets much more in the limelight than he was himself. But there is a consistent logic in Stevens's attitude, which I feel was defined less by envy than by his sense that a certain kind of "success" entailed a damaging falsification of the work, because it polluted poetic motive and, ensuingly, poetic reception. He would not want readers to confuse what he...