Stevens's Emerson: Kinds of Evidence

SCHOLARS GENERALLY AGREE that Wallace Stevens was deeply influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Rachel Malkin's words, "Stevens's Emersonianism is by now widely conceded" (224). We assume that Stevens was closely familiar with Emerson's poetry and essays. Dan O'Hara remarks, "It is well known that Stevens read Emerson at Harvard and after" (65). Richard Poirier asserts that Stevens undertook "an early and obviously intense reading of the essays" (Renewal 25). Harold Bloom simply states that "Stevens read Emerson early and fully" (Wallace Stevens 10).

And yet, as Patrick Redding shows in his essay for this special issue, there is little documentary evidence to support these assumptions. Stevens's two brief—and only—mentions of Emerson, in the Letters of Wallace Stevens, are insignificant.¹ The character Mr. Homburg of Concord in "Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly" may or may not refer to Emerson; in any case, Stevens's attitude toward this figure is deeply ambivalent (see Cook 288). More significant is the twelve-volume set of Emerson's Works that Stevens's mother gave him when he was a student at Harvard. We know that Stevens made notes and markings in a number of these books (Bates, "Stevens' Books" 51). Perhaps that factual evidence has seemed sufficient to certify that Stevens had broad knowledge of Emerson. But Redding points out that the large majority of pages in these volumes remain unmarked, and that the pages were even, in some places, uncut: Stevens "left untouched such canonical essays as 'Self-Reliance,' 'Circles,' and 'The Over-Soul.'" There is no record of his reading them at all. Starting from that recognition, Redding asks what conclusions we can draw if we limit our investigation to those passages from Emerson that Stevens actually marked or annotated. His approach uncovers a previously unremarked pattern in which Stevens works out his own attitude toward history in dialogue with Emerson.

Redding's essay is a salutary reminder that our sense of Emerson's central importance to Stevens derives less from verifiable facts than from circumstantial and intertextual evidence. Bearing in mind that proviso, however, I think that in the case of Emerson such evidence remains convincing. In the late nineteenth century, Emerson (1803–1882) was so well known and beloved in America that his essays and poems were a common feature of middle-class households. The young Wallace Stevens might well have read Emerson at home or in high school. We know that he studied Emerson at Harvard in the spring of 1900 as part of "English 5: Composition and Literature—Studies in Modern English Prose" (L 33). In any case, at the turn of the century, any literary Harvard student—and particularly an aspiring writer—would have been well versed in Emerson.

The most persuasive indication of Emerson's influence on Stevens is the frequency of Emersonian echoes in his prose and poetry. My own experience is probably similar to that of other readers of The Wallace Stevens Journal. For years, I taught a variety of Emerson's essays in a year-long American literature survey course. As a Stevensian, I was constantly struck by what seemed, anachronistically, echoes of Stevens in those essays. For one thing, in a general way, the experience of reading Emerson's "Nature" or "Self-Reliance" seems to me very similar to the experience of reading Stevens's essays in The Necessary Angel. In both cases, the prose style is dense and aphoristic, full of striking phrases and observations, but difficult to follow as a progressive argument. Reading Emerson's essays is also similar, in some ways, to reading Stevens's poetry. Milton Bates suggests that a note Stevens wrote in the margin of Emerson's "Compensation" might be applied to his own poetry: "Hirst, a member of English 5, said, in a lecture on this essay, that Emerson's sentences though apparently distinct and separate were like rays clustering about the single star of his thought" (Sur Plusieurs 12). The poet Susan Howe similarly finds that Stevens's later poems "all run together the way Emerson's essays do into a...