Traveling with Stevens

Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.This arrival in the wild country of the soul. . . .

—Wallace Stevens, “Arrival at the Waldorf”

When I Travel, I like to immerse myself in the literature of the country I am visiting. I like to “learn the speech of the place” (CPP 218). Borges for Buenos Aires; Proust for Paris. But I often bring along as well The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. An odd choice, it might seem, unless I’m heading to Florida. Among poets in English, there are famous travelers—Wordsworth in the Lake District, the Alps; Auden in Berlin, Iceland, China; Bishop in Paris, Nova Scotia, Brazil. Stevens seems a poet more for the fireside. And I admit I bring Stevens along partly as the familiar friend.

Stevens, as the title of one of his late poems suggests, brings the planet to the table. But he doesn’t sit still. The word “planet” means wanderer in Greek and there is a great deal of planetary “turning” and mental traveling even in his domestic spaces. Every serious reader of Stevens knows him as a mind-wanderer. I’m not going to trace that digressive, excursive quality of his thought here, but rather look at some of the images, metaphors, and myths that Stevens draws on to present the life of the “never-resting mind” (CPP 179).

Stevens did, early in his career, attempt something that might be called travel writing. His allegorical narrative “The Comedian as the Letter C” presents an introspective voyager. The poem is a Columbiad, not an Odyssey, as its hero sets out from Old Europe to discover the New World, and makes his way north, arriving in the Carolinas, where he forms a colony and settles into a “Nice Shady Home” (CPP 32). Stevens would generally eschew narrative forms for meditative ones, but the feeling of travel, of errancy, remains. We travel with him, uncertain of our destination, open to surprise and discovery, always looking for home, but often going in circles.

The names of far-off places delight us in Stevens’ poems. Some of them sound far-off but are really American: Pascagoula, Oley, Swatara, Haddam. Others take us overseas—to Naples, Calcutta, or the Jasmine Islands. But his virtual worlds, his descriptions without place, have come in for criticism. Sensitive about orientalism, colonialism, and other forms of appropriation of the historical real into the imaginary, some readers are troubled by the projection of his fantasy onto the Americas, Ceylon, Africa, even Florida. He wrote letters to remote correspondents in which he ordered exotica (“the box / From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea” [CPP 185]) and collected souvenirs of the world instead of experiences of the world. Stevens called himself a poet of places not of people, but is he a poet of places, some have asked, or of postcards? And it is true that as Stevens rattles off place names—from Uruguay to Norway—they exist more as words or ideas than as locations. No, he is not a documentary poet of place.

For Stevens, the “wild country of the soul” is more unsettling than any foreign land (CPP 219). The term “home” occurs 31 times in Stevens’ poetry, but usually to tell us he is not there. Nostalgia is one response. “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” sighs that the earth is not our home: “we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves / And hard it is in spite of blazoned days” (CPP 332). Yet Stevens’ homeless poems accustom us to this condition, even make us rejoice in it as a prompt to creative seeming. Stevens is “On the Road Home” (CPP 186); he is a soldier “writing letters home” (CPP 277); he may “Recognize his unique and solitary home” while looking down from “The poem that took the place of a mountain” (CPP 435). Creativity and homelessness are linked for him.

But it’s a mistake to transfer the sense of travel in Stevens entirely to the geography of the mind, for he is always returning to “the real” as his base. And he is deeply American in...