Private Amusement or Public Salvation?The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume IX, Number I, Spring, 1978 Private Amusement or Public Salvation? The Poetry of Wallace Stevens Susan B.Weston. Wallace Stevens, An Introduction to His Poetry. \ew York:Columbia University Press, 1977. 151+ xix pp. Lucy Beckett.Wallace Stevens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (974,rptd. 1977.222 pp. Robert Jan Scott Books inPrint now lists eighteen books titled WallaceStevens. The two under consideration here claim that his poems reward us for remarkably different reasons. Read them, Susan Weston says, and we "find the world robed in the imagination's sequined harmonies" and "ourselves, robing and disrobing the world." Lucy Beckett hopes that the example of Stevens' progress toward some absolute will help to save "the modern world" from the chaotic barbarism left by the collapse of religion. Both books uncritically repeat Stevens' own assumptions about his language. Both saythat Stevens' words rearrange "reality," making it more satisfying, asiftheworld has only the order that words give it; Weston then contradicts that byadding that while creating verbal fictions is "the essential gift of the human mind; believing them is its curse." But we must believe something in order to make decisions and act purposefully, and the results test whatever mental maps we have of the world in which we live as dependent parts; perhaps because we make so many mistakes, an even approximately accurate 11orldview can prove immensely rewarding-a practical test Beckett and Weston both ignore. Stevens' poems suggest that he preferred to map 1maginary worlds, or bits of one, in his poems, to disparage the world we actually inhabit or to distract himself from it. Becketand Weston see that preference as the virtue which makes his Bctions "supreme"; apparently his winter and summer, north and south, sun and moon(words we thought we understood) remain his private code for his 120 Robert Ian emotional states. His advocates underestimate both the difficulties sc individual a use of language creates for the reader, and the possibilitytha: Stevens had his doubts about the fictions he so often presented ironicalli as if he noticed their absurdity but had invented them to amuse or comfo~ himself by feeling superior to them. For example, his poem "Theory" defin;1' a theory his poems generally seem written to ignore, "I am what is arounu me," with an amusingly irreverent and practical example: Women understand this. One is not duchess A hundred yards from a carriage. Our situation limits and defines us, and we invent explanations anddbtractions accordingly, but Weston misses the point of what she quotes, anc leaves it unconnected with Stevens' life and times, as if she also did notwantti admit that the universe exists beyond our words, and has the finalword, or rather, silence. ln "Sunday Morning" Stevens admits that death disturbs us provoking our fictions, but from that moment on his poems seem attemptstc distract himself from that discovery, until the cancer found in his lastsummer , left him too weak to write. If so, this explains why he wrote more andmore a: he grew older-a fact both Beckett and Weston leave unexplained. Stevens said he saw "reality" as only what his fictions made of it. Westor says "his highly wrought connotations cover up-'embroider'-blanknes( apparently without noticing that "highly wrought" may describe Stmn;; emotions as well as his poems, and that "embroider" makes his poemsseer" mere verbal bric-a-brac meant to distract him from the world, and describe it. Besides, we need not see the world as blank, and the blanknes, may seem a part of Stevens' self-protective reaction. As Weston and Becker admit, his poems have almost no public subjects, and as buyers of used cal'\ sometimes discover, what gets left unmentioned may matter most.Fact, compel our lives, and interest. As his life ended, Stevens may havereali2ec that: his Opus Posthumous includes "Eventually an imaginary world i., entirely without interest," which Weston quotes as if she did not understandi: In archly describing themselves describing themselves, concentrating mo~ and more on less and less, Stevens' poems seem attempts at self-hypnos1:· They assume that words have magical powers, an assumption which car prove more paralyzing and obsessive than a comfort, as in Louis...