"Something in Us Like the Catbird's Song": Wallace Stevens and Richard Wilbur on the Truth of Poetry

Hence, all our talk of invisible things is metaphorical, figurative, poetic…. But this does not mean that what we say is untrue and incorrect. On the contrary, real poetry is truth, for it is based on the resemblance, similarity, and kinship that exist between different groups of phenomena. All language, all metaphors and similes, all symbolism are based on and presuppose this penetration of the visible by the invisible world. If speaking figuratively were untrue, all our thought and knowledge would be an illusion and speech itself impossible.¹

For Richard Wilbur, human language and, in particular, the use of metaphor

          is something in us like the catbird's songFrom neighbor bushes in the grey of morningThat, harsh or sweet, and of its own accord,Proclaims its many kin. It is a chantOf the first springs, and it is tributaryTo the great lies told with the eyes half-shutThat have the truth in view.²

In these lines, from the poem "Lying," Wilbur directly addresses an ancient problem associated with poetic invention, the question of truth. The traditional form of this problem has to do with whether an invented form ought to be considered a lie; this expression of the problem presupposes a standard of truth against which to measure the lie. For Wilbur, however, writing in the twentieth century, the problem involves more: it involves the question of whether there is any such thing as truth. On his way to understanding the catbird's song, Wilbur negotiates a construction of metaphor as epistemological affirmation.

When he opens the poem "Lying" with the image of a grackle, he echoes and answers, either by chance or by choice, features of the epistemological skepticism of Wallace Stevens's "The Man on the Dump." The title character and setting of Stevens's poem suggest a response to the story of Job, comparable with Archibald MacLeish's J. B. and Robert Frost's Masque of Reason in its interrogation of divine order. According to Job 2:8, after Job had been afflicted, "he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes," that is, on the dump (Authorized Version). Whereas Stevens alludes to the opening frame of the book of Job, emphasizing the apparent meaninglessness of Job's experiences, Wilbur in his poem alludes to the closing chapters of Job, where God speaks to Job and catalogs the manifold and mysterious character of creation, beyond Job's ability to articulate (Job 42:3), but evidence, nevertheless, of a richly integrated meaningfulness deriving from divine fecundity and oversight.³ What matters in this context is that, for Wilbur, the reality that meaning sometimes fails, and even the fact of suffering in the world are not grounds for denying meaning wholesale.⁴

Wallace Stevens, on the other hand, in "The Man on the Dump," as elsewhere, brings to expression a more Nietzschean world,⁵ which David M. LaGuardia aptly describes as "a universe relieved of wholeness."⁶ Friedrich Nietzsche envisions this disintegrated universe in a posthumously published fragment, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," focusing on the implications of epistemological disintegration for traditional assumptions concerning the meaningfulness of language.⁷ His skepticism about the category "truth," in particular, has relevance for the works of both poets, who overtly interrogate the status of truth from within the western tradition combining classical and Christian thought. To the claim explicit in Nietzsche and at least implicit in Stevens that we human beings invent everything, Wilbur replies, "In the strict sense, of course, / We invent nothing, merely bearing witness / To what each morning brings again to light" ("Lying," ll. 16–18).⁸ It would be interesting to know whether Wilbur had either Nietzsche or Stevens in mind while writing "Lying," but whether or not he actually did is irrelevant to my purpose here, which is to illuminate both poems by bringing them into dialogue with this epistemological tradition. The shape I find in (or give to...