Stevens and Race: “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery” Revisited

WHEN EARLY READERS of Wallace Stevens in the mid-1960s mused over the critical neglect of “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery,” they did not discuss that the relative silence might have owed something to its offensive title, nor to the investment in blackness this title—with its ugly slur—suggested. When critics did regard the poem, both the racial epithet and the poem’s broader investment in race were passed over in silence. Even Stevens himself was mum about “Like Decorations.” Although happy to offer commentary on his poems—especially the longer works—to a raft of puzzled interlocutors, he did not deign to extend this one the same treatment. Largely quoted without identification throughout his letters, the poem was only named explicitly—fittingly enough—when he explained the title in a letter to Morton Dauwen Zabel: “The title refers to the litter that one usually finds in a nigger cemetery and is a phrase used by Judge Powell last winter in Key West” (L 272). Even here, Stevens’s account takes for granted his employing a term that would have been considered incendiary even in the mid-1930s when Ideas of Order was published—a word “scrupulously avoided by white people who had now become acutely aware of its extreme offensiveness,” as Stanley Burnshaw disdainfully noted later in life (28)—in part by reiterating the offensive designation without real comment.

Indeed, Stevens’s offhand and purely descriptive gloss makes clear that the poem’s donnée had been chosen for conforming to stock notions of Southern black life. This choice on Stevens’s part—as readers like Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Rachel Blau DuPlessis have noted—fits into a larger pattern of “employing nonwhites as local color” (Nielsen 62) and trafficking in Africanist tropes that ventriloquize black speakers, when the poems imagine them at all (DuPlessis 116). These investigations have heralded an increasing attention to Stevens’s vexed relationship to race, filling in the lacunae from both Stevens’s remarks and the exegeses of his earlier readers. If, as Rachel Galvin has pointedly observed, there is no mention of race in the 2007 Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens (Serio), and no mention of Stevens in the 2011 Modernism and Race (Platt), her own searching essays on the subject have appeared in Wallace Stevens in Context (MacLeod) and Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens (Eeckhout and Goldfarb)—both published in 2017. This is not to say that the subject is now somehow closed: “a broad, comparative study of Stevens’s relationship to race has yet to be written,” with “Most scholarship focus[ing] exclusively on the treatment of blacks” (Galvin, “Race” 288). Even Stevens’s relationship to blackness merits further study. The classroom offers another front to extend this difficult, but I think necessary, line of inquiry. During a period of intense racial polarization in the United States, when debates around identity and disenfranchisement have grown particularly charged on college campuses, the classroom may, in fact, be an ideal place to engage with how Stevens writes about race and, crucially, has been rewritten by race. The odd modernist out, Stevens has the most to tell us about twentieth-century American poetry and race, and we should listen.

To begin the discussion of “Like Decorations” in class, time would be spent on Stevens’s own gloss of the poem and that of Arthur Powell, who inspired the title and to whom the poem is dedicated. For Stevens, the items represented a “litter” (L 272); for Powell, an “olio” (Brazeau 101)—both remarks suggesting a formal analogue between the poem’s typically oblique metaphysical speculations and, in Powell’s words, “the custom of negroes to decorate graves with broken pieces of glass, old pots, broken pieces of furniture, dolls heads, and what not” (100–01). This reading that Stevens and Powell offer—the cemetery as a metaphor for the space of the poem—is one, I would explain, we do not have to take at face value.

Instead, one could use the lens of Wai Chee Dimock’s influential concept of “resonance” that asks us to...