Mr. and Mrs. Stevens and Other Essays (review)

Mark Ford is the author of three collections of poetry, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, and a Professor of English at University College London. This intriguing volume assembles several previously published but here revised pieces, drawn from Ford's reviews of poetry or of recent critical works concerning a wide range of American, English, and Irish authors. Ford offers a highly readable and often insightful group of essays drawing on diverse voices from Gerard Manley Hopkins—who lends Ford the title of his 2001 volume Soft Sift (from "The Wreck of the Deutschland")—to W. B. Yeats, Paul Muldoon, Edward Thomas, Ted Hughes, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler, Donald Justice, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Bob Dylan (here in critical discussion with Emerson), as well as Wallace Stevens.

Of principal interest to lovers of Stevens' work are the essays "Mr. and Mrs. Stevens," which derives from a review of J. Donald Blount's The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie, and "Nicholas Moore, Wallace Stevens and the Fortune Press," which first appeared in a collection of essays Bart Eeckhout and I edited in 2008, Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic. Ford begins "Mr. and Mrs. Stevens" with a comment Henry Church made to Stevens in a letter of 1943, noting, "I am convinced that Mrs. Stevens has had an important part to play in the poetry of Wallace Stevens" (53). However, as Ford notes, with reference to Stevens' early poems of courtship—the "Book of Verses" of 1908 and "The Little June Book" of 1909—"Although certain lines and images from both are carried over into Harmonium, neither sequence suggests that their author, by this time in his early thirties, was destined to metamorphose into one of the major poets of the twentieth century" (53).

As Ford knows, this is well-trodden critical ground. However, he tentatively suggests that it "seems to have taken the disappointment of marriage itself, which he had fondly imagined as likely to 'exceed all faery,' to convert Stevens from a dabbler in nineties-ish colours and textures and whimsicalities, into the author of 'Sunday Morning,' 'The Emperor of Ice-Cream,' and 'Peter Quince at the Clavier'" (53). Drawing on Blount's valuable collection, Ford deftly adumbrates the story of Stevens' aesthetic projection of Elsie in both poetic and epistolary terms—the two often being indistinguishable in the letters themselves—observing, with respect to Stevens' early journal entries, the "almost Dickensian nature of the fantasy on which their relationship was based" (56).

When the realities of living together became all too apparent—Elsie was especially miserable in New York and famously ill-disposed to the new coterie of artistic acquaintances Stevens made, not least those of the Arensberg circle—Stevens retreated, in part, into a poetic world that was also abstracted in a positive sense: a poetic realm in which the poet could find imaginative freedom but also dramatize, not always obliquely, some of the tensions manifest in an already strained relationship. Ford observes: "What one only subliminally senses in the love-letters on which he then embarks is the pressure of sexuality, and the threat it poses to the gauzy trappings of romance and vistas of domestic bliss, although this obtrudes itself in poem after poem in Harmonium" (56). Ford is thinking in particular of "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" and "Peter Quince at the Clavier"—to which we could easily add "Depression Before Spring" as an even more overt instance of sexual desire unsatisfied. Consider those mating signals that find no responsive call—"But ki-ki-ri-ki / Brings no rou-cou, / No rou-cou-cou"—lines that are unambiguously qualified in the poem's close by the absence of just the sort of idealized female figure Elsie had previously represented: "But no queen comes / In slipper green" (CPP 50).

Ford also observes Elsie's destruction of the majority of the letters from the early part of their courtship...