Teaching Stevens in Israel: The Spiral of the Seasons

IN MAY OF 1967, when the Egyptian President Abdel Nasser evicted the United Nations observers from the Israeli-Egyptian border in Sinai and moved his own army in to take their place, I was teaching a course on Wallace Stevens at Tel Aviv University. The Israeli government had called up all the army reserves, so although most of my students were women, who weren’t especially needed by the army at that point, their fathers, brothers, husbands, and male friends would all have been posted to the borders. I drove down to campus the day of the call-up, expecting nobody to be there. The classroom was full, however, and I don’t think it was just for the sake of distraction. It had something to do with Stevens’s power and intensely human concerns.

An emphasis on these concerns suited the circumstances of my teaching in those years. My Israeli students knew English reasonably well, but knew American culture mostly from the movies. They were majoring in English in preparation for careers in various outreach agencies or the Foreign Office, or they intended to be English teachers in the schools, which at that time taught English from fifth through twelfth grade. University students were required to take two majors—no “general education” nonsense—so for some, English was just a second choice faute de mieux. All had finished their regular army service, and many were married and had part-time jobs: the university, a commuter campus, was not the center of their world and there was little if any campus life. Supplemental enrichment activities were out of the question for these students: they had no time to spend on campus when they weren’t in class. The Internet had not yet arrived, and the library’s American literature collection was poor, for the university was only a few years old. So we had to deal with the poems themselves, as the New Critics would have said.

Two other characteristics of my Israeli students bear mention: they were secular Jews, for whom Stevens’s early rejection of formal religion was no problem, and very few of them were interested in abstract philosophical questions. Their lives were so bound up with public events, with war and peace and Israel’s situation in the world, let alone with their own finances and relationships, that questions about the nature of reality or truth failed to fascinate them. Recall that this was before the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza: people worried, with cause, about the continued existence of the State, and at news time one could walk down any street and hear from any open window every radio tuned to the official broadcast. It seemed to me that introducing Stevens through the lens of imagination’s struggle with and against reality would be a mistake, important as this theme is for a full understanding of the oeuvre.

My basic approach was to focus on Stevens’s central metaphor of the seasons. While I developed this approach in the context of teaching Stevens in Israel at a specific historical juncture, my approach of teaching Stevens through the central metaphor of the seasons is more broadly applicable to an American setting with a similarly unphilosophical student body. It may also be helpful to college teachers who love poetry but do not have time to absorb the vast criticism of Stevens.

Simply put, Stevens uses imagery of the changing seasons to talk about the course of human life and, more particularly, about our competing needs for permanence and change in both life and art. This pattern is very familiar to scholars of Stevens—so much so that they perhaps forget how illuminating it can be for the novice. Naturally, when I taught this course, I did not have the benefit of George Lensing’s detailed and comprehensive Wallace Stevens and the Seasons (2001). At the time I was teaching in Israel, this seasonal approach to his work was first suggested to me by a seminal essay by Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, “Metamorphosis in Wallace Stevens” (1952).¹ The essay establishes...