Thinking Versus Imagination

Thought is false happiness,” goes the opening of Wallace Stevens’s “Crude Foyer”:

Thought is false happiness: the idea That merely by thinking one can, Or may, penetrate, not may, But can, that one is sure to be able—

That there lies at the end of thought A foyer of the spirit in a landscape Of the mind . . .

Then he proceeds to elaborate on why thought is “false happiness,” namely because

     . . . we know that we use Only the eye as faculty, that the mind Is the eye, and that this landscape of the mind

Is a landscape only of the eyes; and that We are ignorant men incapable Of the least, minor, vital metaphor, content, At last, there, when it turns out to be here.

Thinking is apparently—inevitably—false because grounded in the literal, as opposed to, presumably, the truer happiness of the figurative, a country whose weather is that of “vital metaphor.” Thinking versus imagination. Imagination as thinking when the latter refuses groundedness, that is, when it resists the limits of the empirical world and allows for a world in which “mere” belief is enough to affirm a thing as actual—more specifically, to affirm the metaphorical as actual. And yet, despite the bleak assertions of “Crude Foyer,” and in contradiction to that poem’s equation of eye and mind, Stevens elsewhere seems to believe that the mind is not only capable of moving beyond the visual, but that the mind is always astir, restless, driven by its impatience with the literal to the truer realm of imagination. As it turns out, “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never,” as Stevens says in “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”:

After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun. If the rejected things, the things denied, Slid over the western cataract, yet one, One only, one thing that was firm, even No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech Of the self that must sustain itself on speech, One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing! Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart, Green in the body, out of a petty phrase, Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed: The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps, The aureole above the humming house . . .

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

As I understand it, it’s not just that the mind can never be satisfied, but that the future depends on this lack of satisfaction, satisfaction here being an acceptance of closure, in the form of “no” as rejection, denial. It’s the existence of the single thing that survives closure that makes all the difference. And notice what happens to this thing: it has only to survive, and it becomes the catalyst for metaphor—first becoming itself a metaphor (“douce campagna of that thing,” “honey in the heart”), and then transforming the metaphorical into actuality, merely by being believed in—these at least seem, to me, to be metaphors, conjured out of nowhere, the form on the pillow, the aureole, the humming house, a list that has no end, the ellipsis suggests.

I don’t have any firm theories about Stevens’s poems, but I have noticed often enough how the expansion of sentence length (along with, frequently, an accompanying increase in syntactic complexity and an intensification of repetition) seems to enact the resistance I’m speaking of, even as it enacts imagination as its own particular form of resistance within the presence of possible closure. “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” begins, for example, with a two-line sentence. Two half-line sentences follow. The next sentence, though, takes up seven lines, and is a sentence marked by heavy repetition: “thing/things” appears four times, as does the word “one”; “no” appears twice, “speech” does, as well—and in exactly the same line position—“self” is echoed in “itself.” Unlike the poem’s first three lines, which had...