A Student's Journey with Stevens

WHEN I FIRST ENCOUNTERED the name Wallace Stevens on a college syllabus, it seemed bland, like one of the gray suits Stevens wore—a name that could easily disappear into the blank sameness of 1920s insurance company lawyerdom. Little did I suspect that it belonged to a poet who would become a vital presence in my thinking about poetry for the next forty years and beyond. Who was Stevens to me in my teens and early twenties? To recover glimpses of my youthful experience of Stevens, I recently dug through old files, yellowing for decades in the attic. I wanted to reconnect with my earliest encounters with Stevens—whether fumbling or revelatory—in an effort to understand why he became important to me. My hope was that a memoir of one student's journey with Stevens, more personal than the criticism I usually write, might help explain how this businessman-poet—"a hardcore white guy," to borrow a friend's phrase—could have captivated an intellectually driven young Anglo-Iranian American who was trying to figure out who he was and what he wanted to do with his life, what poetry was and why it mattered. Not that my early experience of Stevens was mine alone. Aspects of it might resonate with that of other young literati in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and if so, shed light on a generational experience. And it might suggest why we sometimes fall in love with a body of poetry despite its strangeness and cultural difference.

My initial encounter with Stevens's name was in the fall of my first year as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, when I enrolled in Twentieth-Century American Literature, taught by a smart young assistant professor, David Wyatt. Mysteriously rueful, but scattering epigrams like intellectual firecrackers, Mr. Wyatt had caught the Stevens bug as an undergraduate at Yale, where Harold Bloom had been a looming presence (Wyatt). In the purple, uneven ink of the mimeographed syllabus, Stevens's name appeared next to four sessions: "THE DEATH OF GOD," "DISCOVERY OF PLACE," "VIOLENCE WITHIN AND WITHOUT," and "LEAVING THE ROOM." I'd never heard of Stevens, but he occupied more real estate on the syllabus than nearly all the other writers, most of them already familiar as Big Names: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, and William Carlos Williams, with only Robert Frost also consuming two entire weeks. Back in those days, a white bread syllabus—all white, all male—was still routine. I'd enrolled in the class on a lark. A career in the US Foreign Service seemed to me a likely future. Stuck in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, where the local public university was much cheaper than fancy out-of-state private schools, I longed to escape and rove the world as a diplomat, advancing peace and intercultural understanding. Foreign travel could open up entirely different ways of seeing the world, as when I lived as a kid for a year in Beirut, another in Tehran, or during European and "Middle Eastern" travel with my family as a teenager. Stevens himself never even made it out of North America. Even so, he opened up astonishing new ways of perceiving and thinking about the world, one poem after another. I learned in part from him that it's possible to have a fulfilling life as an "introspective voyager" (CPP 23). Happily, I've also had chances to live abroad and travel literally around the world (twice). But poetry's imaginative dislocations and extravagant defamiliarizations have been my most sustaining form of transport.

After reading "The Snow Man" with Mr. Wyatt, not in the poem's ice-glittering January but on a radiant fall day, I stumbled onto the tree-studded UVA Lawn and experimented with canceling any projective consciousness, extinguishing myself in the whirl of the multicolored falling leaves. I strained to listen to their sound without imputing any misery to them. (It was after a later lecture on William Carlos Williams that, "No ideas but in things!" and "The Red Wheelbarrow" ringing in my ears, I gazed...