“For him the moon was always in Scandinavia”: Stevens in the Swedish University Classroom

I. Stevens in Sweden

IN ONE OF HIS LETTERS to the Irish modernist Thomas MacGreevy from October 1952, Wallace Stevens spoke of a “note” he had received from Sweden “with a little picture showing the ground covered with snow before the leaves had fallen” (L 763). The note was sent a few weeks earlier by Ebba Dalin, a Swedish professor of American literature and publisher of Swedish translations of Stevens’s poetry (Filreis 211). Dalin enclosed her note with a newspaper clipping that showed a photograph of a snowy Swedish landscape in the midst of autumn, and “a man walking across country with his dog” (L 763). “I have wished you were here,” Dalin told Stevens, to inscribe in a poem the strange “sensations” brought by the untimely arrival of winter in Sweden in early October (qtd. in Filreis 237). Although Stevens never traveled to capture its frosty landscape, the little picture inspired one of his late poems, “The Green Plant,” which depicts a similar instance of seasonal disruption: the “barbarous green” of the plant sprouting unexpectedly amidst the brown, red, and yellow colors of autumn (CPP 431). From his early collection of poetry, Harmonium, to his last, The Rock, the climatic and geographical features of Scandinavia repeatedly appear as metaphorical figures for Stevens’s poetic imagination, which tirelessly seeks to transcend reality.¹ But as Professor Dalin seems to have recognized, to read Stevens’s “poems of winter” in Sweden is to read them for their extrinsic and referential as well as figurative and abstract meanings, particularly because of the stark immediacy of their imagery to readers and students in the North.

As James Ransom noted in his essay published about two decades ago in Teaching Wallace Stevens, to reflect on Stevens and pedagogy is to be mindfully aware of the particular setting and the “scene” in which the teaching takes place (74). Most significantly, the practice of teaching is dependent on the collective disposition and background of the students and instructors participating in the process. In this essay, we will reflect on our experiences of reading Stevens in the Swedish classroom at Stockholm University with undergraduate and master’s students by offering an exploration of the challenges and rewards, as well as the strategies, it entails. Some of these challenges and rewards will surely be familiar to our colleagues teaching Stevens in diverse cultural and geographical settings, while others might be more specific to the Swedish context.

Generally, we have found that all of our students had been exposed to poetry analysis at some basic level in high school or in their undergraduate studies elsewhere, but very few of them had taken a course specifically on poetry or any particular poet by the time they had come up even to the master’s level. This general unfamiliarity with poetry, and a distinct anxiety among students when discussing the genre, was the driving force in creating a course dedicated to poetry and poetic theory when our master’s program was initiated. In this course, Stevens’s poetry is frequently taught.

As for the demographic particulars of our classroom community, most of our students at the undergraduate level have Swedish cultural roots, whereas our master’s students are drawn from much wider international backgrounds. For instance, in the poetry course at the MA level, it is often the case that a large number of students come from places as diverse as Syria, China, Chile, the US, and other parts of Europe. In such transnational classroom settings, English is most students’ second or, sometimes, third language. To be sure, the majority of our students have strong English language skills. Nonetheless, the syntactic intricacy, intellectual density, cultural specificities, and shifting rhetoric of Stevens’s poems certainly pose a great challenge even to the most experienced and motivated students. Stevens’s well-known difficulty is redoubled for second-language readers. Students are definitely more at home with short poems by William Carlos Williams or W. H. Auden, which we often teach alongside Stevens.

Stevens himself reflects on...