Stepping Barefoot, and Laughingly, Into Reality: On Paul A. Bové's Love's Shadow

Paul A. Bové's new book, Love's Shadow, makes a critical argument that feels compatible with "Large Red Man Reading," a post-World War II poem that is in Wallace Stevens' most demotic later style, a solemn procession ritually progressing and repeating its rhetorical formulations. The return of the ghosts in the poem can remind a reader of earlier poems by others, such as Emerson's "Bacchus," Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry;" or even can recall the millions lost in the latest war, including those lost due to the first and second atomic bombs ever dropped on Japanese civilians. Indeed, Stevens's genealogical research into his ancestors may also inform the presence of the ghosts. The poem can also remind a critical reader of one of the earlier figures of the poet as an embodiment of the sun in its daily or even future revolutions through the skies, from reddish dawn to the heightened blaze of yellow noon and the bluest of skies, down to evening twilight and its purplish tones.

The poem, which I will now cite, includes the full measure of reality, from heaven to earth, past to present to future, from "the outlines of being" and "the literal characters" to prophetic or "vatic lines," the manifold levels of being and its expressings: anagogic to literally physical: "the most coiled thorn." The poem embodies a theory of the poet and poetry's making as cosmic creation providing what the ghosts had lacked in their previous existence but which "the poem of life" will provide, the words that are feeling-full.

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expectedmore.There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem oflife,Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips amongthem.They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality, That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frostAnd cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leavesAnd against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae…

(Stevens 1954, 423)

As the poem closes the diurnal circle, it approaches its most sacrosanct dimension of proposal: "The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law." This is where Stevens expresses his secular romantic faith in "Poesis, poesis," by which he means the literal and prophetic power to invoke into being what human beings lack and so desperately need at all times, what these ghosts lacked and needed most in their exhausted hearts and spectral ears, the feelings that they had lacked.¹

Of course, the apocryphal story of the poet overhearing a student telling a late lecture-goer in the hall outside the room of the prestigious institute or Ivy League university where he was reading from his own Collected Poems, that "the large red-faced man in there" is indeed Wallace Stevens, that could never be the real truth of it, and never the entire truth. Dates do not allow it.

Bové's comment on "The Nobel Rider and the Sound of Words" is apposite: "imagining the figure of the poet is the primary act of the theory of poetry and poetics itself. A defense of poetry, as it were, requires transporting the poet yet again. Stevens's poet exists over and above and, indeed, against social obligation. In conceptualizing the poet, Stevens thinks the figure as autonomous—an idea often keeping with tradition but also often opposed by moral and ideological critical programs."² Bové presents those programs as enjoining a mode of reading that is reductively allegorical, that is, reading according to a world vision not imaginatively creative and expansive as in "Large Red Man Reading" but of universal ruination, a gnostic demolition of the fullness of the world to broken fragments of failed...