“Sincerely Yours, Wallace Stevens”

OVER THE NEARLY TEN years that we have worked closely together to organize international conferences, seminars, and panels on Wallace Stevens, it was a particular honor to mount a conference at The Huntington entitled “Sincerely Yours, Wallace Stevens,” which took place on September 20–21, 2019. Already three years earlier, we had decided it was high time for a collective examination of Stevens’s letters, and it was thrilling to find ourselves at last in The Huntington’s grand Rothenberg Hall with a rostrum of distinguished scholars, all of them current or former Editorial Board Members of The Wallace Stevens Journal, to make a joint effort at valuing and revaluing the largest bulk of Stevens’s writings to which we turn with interest and glee over and over again—his correspondence.

There probably isn’t a single scholar of Stevens who hasn’t at one point or another referenced the poet’s letters, and yet the conference in 2019, generously sponsored and logistically organized by The Huntington, was the first to consider this corpus as the kind of literary writing Stevens practiced most consistently over the course of his life. We remember how energizing and enlightening it was to listen to the wealth of perspectives shared during our two-day gathering. It felt like a particularly poignant moment, moreover, to devote such careful, slow attention to the genre of letters: in our breathless age of nonstop e-mails, texts, tweets, emojis, and video calls, Stevens’s linguistically inventive, richly imaginative letters are able to remind us of the potential depth and range of the genre and of the inimitable quality of the epistolary voice that a great writer such as Stevens was able to craft for himself. Barely a year after the conference, with the coronavirus pandemic now raging across the world, it also seems like a particularly apt time to present the resulting essays in the Journal. Revisiting how Stevens in his letters responded to the “pressure of reality” in the first half of the twentieth century provides us with contemplative space to reflect on how we, in turn, are responding to the “violence without” with which we grapple (CPP 665).

As readers of this journal well know, Stevens didn’t socialize easily and was more comfortable corresponding with people than engaging with them face to face. During the years when he was poetically most productive, furthermore, he was an older man who stuck to his daily routines in Hartford, did not get around a lot, and enjoyed the practical perk of a secretary at the office to whom he could dictate his letters (which have thus survived mostly as typescripts). Circumstances held him back from the international voyages he had dreamed of undertaking. In his imagination, nevertheless, Stevens was a globetrotter throughout his life; he famously noted that to him life was a matter of places (CPP 901). He came to enjoy vicarious visits around the world through a large network of correspondents, with whom he could be verbally and imaginatively playful. He also welcomed opportunities to explain his challenging poetry in letters, though he usually wanted comments to be off the record and tended to be elliptical and enigmatic in his responses, trying to keep readers from developing a sense of interpretive closure that would limit the poems as aesthetic experiences. The interest raised by these epistolary comments is such that, on the occasion of the paperback republication of Letters of Wallace Stevens in 1996, the poet Richard Howard exulted in his Foreword that the volume “remain[s] a readily ascended Everest in a landscape of not-to-be-neglected Himalayas” (i.e., other American poets’ published correspondences). To Howard, the letters “afford the most consistent meditation any poet in any language has ever put in writing on the sense of his work; even Valéry was never provoked by admirers or quibblers to the same degree of specification; even Yeats never entranced himself into such complete orbits of accountability” (vii).

Holly Stevens first published her indispensable, nearly 900-page Letters for Alfred Knopf back in 1966. Most of these letters were subsequently sold...