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  • "Suppose This Was the Root of Everything":Stevens and the Imperative to Suppose
  • Jeffrey Blevins

Just after the New Year in 1909, Wallace Stevens sent a letter to his wife-to-be, Elsie Moll, that began with a jocular "O Muse":

Here begins the year 1909. And a voice cried in the Wilderness, saying:

O Muse:

Sweet is the memory of Geranium-at-the-Window-ville— sweetest of all when thought of here in Blind-at-the-Window-town, and on such a torpid night, with its muggy rain.

(L 115)

The invocation is singular in Stevens' published and unpublished writings, which rarely employed epic conventions, jocularly or not. His letters and essays demonstrate a studied disinterest for epic poetry; indeed, it was only a few years before this letter to Moll that he had scrawled in his journal, "Homer's only a little story" (L 87). Stevens' "O Muse," though, accomplishes what Georg Lukács claims it should for any epic: loosening "the bonds that tie men and objects to the ground" (57). The bonds in this case are tied to the "Wilderness" of the present, just after the New Year in 1909: the weary details of "torpid night" and "muggy rain." The trope of Stevens' transport out of this "Here" is the sweet recollection of the other window that emerges from the speech act "O Muse," immediately conjuring memories of his time with Moll. Stevens never repeats this call to a muse in his poems, perhaps out of embarrassment for the "constantly imitated" custom that, as Shaftesbury noted in an earlier modernity, "sits so gracefully with an Antient" but "shou'd be so spiritless and aukard in a Modern" (Cooper 7-8).

One is more likely to find Stevens musing than calling upon a muse, as in "Montrachet-le-Jardin," when "the earliest poems of the world / In which man is the hero" deliver not their traditional muse, but rather an "auroral creature musing in the mind" (CPP 235, 237). In "To the One of [End Page 70] Fictive Music," the subject of which Stevens himself identifies in a letter ("It is a muse" [L 297]), musing is the segue between the sought-for fictive music's original obscurity and its potential clarity:

That music is intensest which proclaimsThe near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom,And of all vigils musing the obscure,That apprehends the most which sees and names. . . .

(CPP 71)

Lukács, in kind with Stevens' musing music, emphasizes a muse's musicality as the principle of epic expression: "A pre-stabilised harmony decrees that epic verse should sing of the blessedly existent totality of life" (58). Thus the imperative ...epe (sing!) begins Homer's Odyssey. Stevens is less interested in the musicality behind this imperative "sing!" than he is in the poetic possibilities that musing offers, whether typified as a kind of "fictive music" or conceived more expansively as a way of attuning to what Lukács calls "the blessedly existent totality of life."

What is the difference between a poem that muses and one that invokes a muse?1 To continue with Lukács' language, the difference revolves around the stability and harmony of a poem's presentations. The muse authorizes and empowers the poet to provide a descriptively entrenched accounting of a story that can be taken as divinely approved. Take, for example, the beginning of Paradise Lost:

Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret topOf Oreb or of Sinai didst inspireThat shepherd who first taught the chosen seed,In the beginning, how the heav'ns and earthRose out of chaos. . . .

(Milton 3-4)

"That," "who," "how": the speaker's request—that the muse sing—generates a lineage of events springing narratively from a series of fact-oriented requests. There is a "pre-stabilised harmony" in such a presentation, relying on the twin conceits of history and myth-empowered voice to endow a telling with authority. When Homer, Milton, et al. invoke a muse, they are committing to the authority that muse imbues; Stevens' musing only goes so far as to adumbrate the potential of such a commitment. This adumbration rejects the copulatively enforced statements of...

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