The Poetic Imperative

One of the poetry collections that held great importance for me when I started to write was Stevens’s Harmonium. I was attracted to the marvelous surplus in Stevens’s poems and to the aerial imagination, the seeming war between sense and the evocative, the feeling I had when I read, for instance, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” that next time I’d comprehend—not that the language concealed or that the poet was being deliberately secretive, but that something not quite sayable was coming into being. Whether or not I did my part as reader well enough, the lines, even if they did not declare themselves, offered a new revelation of reality. Nothing seemed more magical, and I knew I would read these poems my whole life.

The plural acts of imagination that gave Stevens the sixteen lines of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”—imagination for Stevens being the faculty that finds reality and fixes it—certainly includes a willingness to make a plain thing strange. Few, I think, would associate an “emperor of ice-cream” with a funeral or find the dead woman’s toenails an appropriate detail for the sad occasion. Throughout Stevens’s poems, one finds puns, foreign phrases, slang, odd place names (“Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” “Metaphors of a Magnifico,” “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters,” “Dichtung and Wahrheit,” “simpering Byzantines”), incongruous titles (“The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade,” “Tea at the Palace of Hoon”), and sheer alliterative celebrations that recast and vivify reality:

I sang a canto in a canton, Cunning-coo, O, cuckoo cock, In a canton of Belshazzar To Belshazzar, putrid rock, Pillar of a putrid people, Underneath a willow there I stood and sang and filled the air.

(from “Country Words”)

For Stevens the world (corporeal) and mind (the poet’s sense of the world) are together and in flux, reality unpossessed until imagination intervenes. Like the man with a blue guitar who is enjoined to “Play, you must, / a tune beyond us, yet ourselves, // A tune upon the blue guitar / Of things exactly as they are,” the individual poet, “any man of imagination,” Stevens notes, is enjoined to write his variations of reality, “the incessant conjunction of things as they are and things imagined.” The individual poet doesn’t write about these things, but in images, so that the words may become the thing itself, with “ liquid cats” that “moved in the grass without a sound” (“The Man with the Blue Guitar”) and “something on a table that he sees, / The root of a form as of this fruit, a fund, / The angel at the center of this rind, // This husk of Cuba, tufted emerald” (“Someone Puts a Pineapple Together”). Once I’ve read these metaphors, liquid cats and a pineapple as “This husk of Cuba” exist as fully as any prior sense I had of guitar sound and pineapples.

The imperative I just mentioned in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is notable in “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” not only for the incongruity of commanding that a “roller of big cigars” be called to a funeral to make ice-cream, but also because its seeming singularity is derivative. The Jacobean playwright John Webster begins his “dirge” from the seventeenth-century play The White Devil precisely the same way:

Call for the Robin-Redbreast

CALL for the robin redbreast and the wren, Since o’er shady groves they hover, And with leaves and flowers do cover The friendless bodies of unburied men. Call unto his funeral dole The ant, the field-mouse and the mole, To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm, And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm; But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.

A comparison of the Webster poem with Stevens’s reveals more than the single congruity.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are...