The “Predicate of Substance”

The poet,” writes Sir Philip Sidney, “nothing affirmeth.” And no poet ever conformed more religiously to this secular injunction than Wallace Stevens. Critics have noted for decades his predilection for the subjunctive and interrogative moods, the floating infinitives and participial phrases, the dizzying array of “ifs” and “as ifs,” the elaborated syntactical dependencies designed to baffle the most assiduous reader. The poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lies. And yet, one feels the need for something more.

In a letter of August 1942, Stevens wrote to Harvey Breit about a visit he had just made to the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in Kingston, New York, “one of the most beautiful churches that I know of,” he wrote, “improved by the fact that it has a pleasant janitor with a red nose.” Stevens was especially impressed when the janitor supplied him with a little pamphlet written by one of the church’s most distinguished parishioners, one Justice Gilbert Hasbrouck, and goes so far as to transcribe its opening lines, which are as follows:

Indeed when Spinoza’s great logic went searching for God it found Him in a predicate of substance . . .

Stevens comments: “Now, if a lawyer as eminent as Judge Hasbrouck went to church because it made it possible for him to touch, to see, etc., the very predicate of substance, do you think he was anything except a poet?”

In the eighth canto of “The Auroras of Autumn,” published some six years later by John Crowe Ransom in the Kenyon Review, Stevens seems to recall that little pamphlet in the Reformed Dutch Church:

There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place. Or if there is no time, If it is not a thing of time, nor of place,

Existing in the idea of it, alone, In the sense against calamity, it is not Less real. For the oldest and coldest philosopher,

There is or may be a time of innocence As pure principle. Its nature is its end, That it should be, and yet not be, a thing

That pinches the pity of the pitiful man, Like a book at evening beautiful but untrue, Like a book on rising beautiful and true.

It is like a thing of ether that exists Almost a predicate.

I find innocence to be a rather shocking invocation in a poem so saturated with epistemological doubt—this is its first appearance in the poem, but it will recur obsessively in this and the following canto, seven times altogether. We may tend to assume that Stevens, being Stevens, accorded to the concept no simple powers of anchoring stability, and this assumption is buttressed by an earlier appearance of the term in “Esthetique du Mal”: “That he might suffer or that / He might die was the innocence of living, if life / Itself was innocent.” A very big if, for Wallace Stevens. But he recognized a structural necessity for the concept—“not less real”—and in “Auroras of Autumn,” it is oppositionally entangled with the figure of the serpent, who begins as a constellation in the northern sky, one easiest to discern in the autumn of the year, unless it is occluded by the gaudier aurora borealis, also at the height of visibility, in Hartford, in the autumn months. Milton describes the serpent on the grassy herb—just before it is entered by the spirit of Satan—as “not nocent yet.” Nocent: present participle of nocēre, to hurt or injure. Thus, in the common understanding of the matter, to be innocent is to be harmless, not yet capable of doing harm. But also, as the myth makes clear, innocence is a state of not-yet-being-harmed oneself, since the capacity for evil is itself a kind of suffered harm, albeit, in the myth, a self-inflicted suffering.

The myths we inherit pass through many hands before they come to us, and are forever altered when those hands are capable ones: I’m convinced that Stevens had Milton in mind when he composed this poem. The forbidding father “leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly / Than...