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  • “An Unalterable Vibration” or “An Altering Speech for Altering Things”: Stevens, Auden, and Symbolist Poetics
  • Lisa Goldfarb

I

A READER WHO embarks on a comparative study of Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden is likely to first note the sharp differences between them. Stevens’ poetry everywhere reflects his primary concern with places real and imagined: from the tropical environment of the Florida Keys to the starker geography of New England, he situates his solitary speaker, who unfurls the emotional terrain of his poems inseparably from the landscape that for Auden is “but a background to a torso” (ACP 100).1 Although Auden’s poetic landscapes reflect his own worldly travels—from Berlin, China, and Iceland, to Manhattan, Italy, and Austria—they remain, for the most part, backdrops to the social drama that Auden stages in his poems. Stevens’ and Auden’s relationship to place is only one of the contrasts that is immediately evident. The same hypothetical reader could easily build the case that Stevens and Auden are utterly opposed: Stevens is the aesthetic poet, more focused on the poetic process in the modern world than on representing the contingencies of history; Auden is the civic poet, concerned with articulating the contours of the just city. Stevens is heir to Emerson and Whitman and embraces the French symbolists, while Auden’s models include Hardy, Eliot, and Goethe, and, in contrast to Stevens, he boldly declares his distance from French symbolist poetics.

To open a more productive comparative conversation of Stevens’ and Auden’s poetics, I would like to turn, in fact, to their respective responses to the French symbolists. My main reason for doing so is that both poets, at important junctures in their writings, relate their definitions and discussions of poetry to symbolist poetics. Indeed, it is a measure of the reach and influence of French symbolist poetics to see how both Stevens and Auden refer to the symbolists to define the poetic principles they hold most dear. To describe and defend his idea of how the poet resists the “pressure of reality” (CPP 650) in his attempts to create “a momentary [End Page 167] existence on an exquisite plane” (CPP 786), Stevens turns to the symbolists and their aesthetic ideas. By contrast, when Auden asserts “Poetry is not magic” (DH 27), it is against the symbolists and their influence that he argues. To consider, however, Stevens’ and Auden’s seemingly opposite responses to French symbolist poetry a matter of either predisposition on Stevens’ part or of “conscious bias” on Auden’s (DH 8) is to bypass a more nuanced consideration of this key distinction between them, and it is this view that I aim to present in the following pages.2 My investigation will consist of four parts: I focus the first two (the current and the following) on how their respective views of the symbolist tradition, as expressed in their prose, help to bring the distinctions between their poetics into sharper view. It is particularly striking that of all the French symbolists and postsymbolists, Paul Valéry is the figure that both admire and frequently reference, and I speculate in Part III on Valéry’s allure for both. In Part IV, I discuss two poems, Stevens’ “Add This to Rhetoric” and Auden’s “Their Lonely Betters,” to draw together theory and practice, and to demonstrate how both poets pursue a central Valéryan theme—the relation between creation in nature and art—in their work.

Scholars who have addressed Stevens’ and Auden’s respective relationships to French symbolist poetry confirm the divergence in the poets’ views. From the early days to the present, Stevens’ critics have consistently acknowledged his love of French and high regard for the French symbolists. Anna Balakian, Michel Benamou, and Robert Rehder, among many others, have contributed to our understanding of Stevens’ penchant for French poetry of the symbolist era. Although they measure the significance of Stevens’ affinity with the symbolist mode variously—Balakian maintains that for Stevens “symbolist” is “one of several manners possible to assume in writing poetry, rather than a total commitment” (171), while Rehder argues that “it cannot be located because it is everywhere” (110)—most acknowledge that...

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