What the Poet Meant . . . Teaching Stevens to Portuguese Students

We live in a constellation . . .

—Wallace Stevens, “July Mountain”

JACQUELINE VAUGHT BROGAN believes (her word) that it is “impossible to teach Wallace Stevens” (“Introducing” 51; her emphasis).¹ Curiously enough, her profession of faith appears in a very interesting essay on successfully introducing Stevens to undergraduates by using a “matrix” that can be easily “adapt[ed]” to graduate courses (51). As I understand it, her matrix includes admitting to her students right from the start that there are “entire lines” or even “entire poems” by Stevens that she does not understand (52). I totally sympathize with Brogan, although I always like to think that what Stevens said of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”—“the point of that poem is not its meaning” (L 500)—applies to any strong poem in any language.² At any rate, to realize my joys and sorrows as a teacher of Stevens in Portugal, I need to add to Brogan’s stated “impossibility” my own belief that you cannot teach poetry at all in the conventional sense of ascribing meaning. It is also important to bear in mind that most students resist studying poetry, if for nothing else because they also believe that poetry is not learnable. Our efforts, the students’ and mine, to deal with great poetry in a foreign language must also be made part of the picture. It is not that the English competence of my students at the University of Coimbra was not good enough if you think of language as a means of communication.³ But the ever-changing subtleties of English and its multilayered nuances on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere, captured only by non-native speakers, if at all, after many years of contact and research, have, understandably, been a constant challenge. How could the teacher not feel at times like a “nincompated pedagogue” (CPP 22)?

Precisely because of its difficulty, or rather, because of its radical deviation from language-as-communication that tends to render it obscure, Stevens’s poetry is ideal to engage in a discussion of what lyric poetry can say. My worst nightmare in my long teaching career was to receive term papers explaining to me in elaborate and often quite creative paraphrases “what the poet meant,” or, translating the Portuguese phrase literally, “what the poet wanted to say.” (Why didn’t the poet say so, then? was always my question.) This is not to say that I would snobbishly dismiss paraphrase altogether, quite the opposite; I find Milton Bates’s ingenious pedagogy about deconstructing the emperor’s clothes quite useful and have often resorted to it myself (see Bates). But a point I would make very clear right at the start was that the poem is written in poetry. The paraphrase is no longer the poem.

My first seminar session on Stevens would always start with a brief contextualized description of his work as an American modernist poet, with examples from different periods.⁴ Such a brief introduction would reassure students of something objective, concrete, and indeed learnable: literary history and (American) historical, social, and cultural context. It would be followed by a theoretical reflection on what poetry is and what it can say. At this point, I would shock my students by roundly stating that lyric poetry does not say anything but itself, and that is exactly how it says the world. I would also tell them about the usefulness of the supposedly useless and quote Lear: “O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beasts” (King Lear 2.4.263–66). We would then discuss an essay written by a Portuguese philosopher and poet (Vítor Matos e Sá) to preface one of his collections of poems. “In itself,” he writes (and I translate), “poetry does not say anything explicitly. What renders it poetry and not philosophy or science is to be discovered only in what it says implicitly. . . . The symbolic language of poetry is . . . a deforming language” (9, 13). In other words, poetic language...