Walking with Stevens

I HAVE OFTEN WONDERED why I first found Wallace Stevens's poetry and prose so compelling, and have revisited many times how I became involved with reading his work. It was when I was nineteen in my first undergraduate seminar on Modern British and American Poetry that we read Stevens alongside other canonical figures: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Frost are the ones I recall; I also remember there were no women on the reading list. My professor at the time played a tape (yes, an audio tape; it was 1975) of Stevens reading "The Idea of Order at Key West," and, while I loved the poem and was entranced by its musicality, I was unimpressed with Stevens's monotone. Unsure of what to write for a required paper, I took the rare step of visiting my prof's office, and he suggested that I do a close reading of "Credences of Summer." I didn't know why he made that suggestion, but after I read the poem once, I was hooked, and I have returned to it over and over, and to Stevens ever since. Maybe it was the idea of basking in a midsummer moment that gripped me—"lovers waiting in the soft dry grass" (CPP 322)—or, more likely, one of my favorite musical moments in the poem, when "The trumpet of morning blows in the clouds and through / The sky" (CPP 325); it also could have been the beautiful tripartite structure of each canto, with each successive stanza intensifying the one before. Whatever might have commanded my attention then, though, was not enough to explain why I have pursued the study of Stevens as intensely as I have. While I have never been a reader who searches for her personal counterpart in poets and writers, still, the differences are bold: I am a woman, a Jew, from a modest middle-class background. My struggling ancestors might have been among those in the urban parks in the early 1900s on the Lower East Side of New York whom the young Stevens might have wanted to avoid on his long, circuitous walks from Lower Manhattan to points north and west of the city.

I have spent a good deal of my scholarly life focusing on the music of Stevens's poetry, and I certainly see how my musical self—I have played the piano since I was eight and continue to study—found a sympathetic poet in Stevens. But one day when I was traveling from my home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx to NYU in Lower Manhattan to meet Bart Eeckhout, whom I had met in Oxford a few years earlier, I was struck by another similarity. I am always early for my trains (really, early for everything), and, as I stood on the train platform (the commuter train on Metro North, not the subway), gazing over the Hudson River at the Palisades, I found myself thinking how, about a century earlier, Stevens could have been walking through the woods on the opposite side of the river. His early journals and letters tell us that he returned there repeatedly to escape the city; he took walks through what was then the countryside in every season: in fall, the leaves crunched under his feet; in winter, he marveled at the beauty of the bare trees; in spring, he reveled in the birdsong he heard and the robins who made the woods their home; in summer, he lay on the ground to feel the moist earth under his tired body. After all, he might have walked many miles through Manhattan, up through Spuyten Duyvil to Yonkers, where he took the ferry to the other side. And we know that once out of the city, Stevens loved the sights, sounds, and smells of nature. Since his walking "somehow or other" entered the rhythm or "movement of the poems" (L 844), perhaps here in Stevens's habit of walking was a deeper connection. As a young man, Stevens walked to know New York City and to get beyond its boundaries, and this habit continued throughout his life: he walked from his home...