The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb

If a poem is like a picture, it is like an object, with the manifest presence of a thing. To say a poem is like music is to say it is like a process or performance, an event happening in time, and therefore fugitive. While pictures may or may not be mimetic, music rarely is, and that lack of external reference adds to the impression of fugitivity. When we look at a picture, we stand in a frontal, focalized orientation to an object at a certain distance from us. When we listen to music, even when we are seated in a hall, we are surrounded by an ambient phenomenon with no fixed location. Music sweeps over and through us. Arguably, because sound waves physically enter the body via the ear canal, music is present as much inside as outside of the listener.

To judge from the number of books and articles on the two subjects, criticism finds it easier to discuss poetry’s relationship to visual art than its relationship to music, although, in the primacy it gives to sound and the way it unfolds in time, poetry has demonstrably more in common with music than with visual art. Stevens scholarship is not an exception, having been more focused over the years on the poet’s relationship to modern painting and visual art than on his relationship to music. Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb’s The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens adjusts that balance with the first monograph overview of the subject. Rather than a sustained argument, the book is structured as a series of semi-independent chapters exploring diverse topics, including music and memory, melody, birdsong and the sounds of nature, and Stevens’s relationship to modern European composers. Despite this variety of approach, a unified view of Stevens emerges. Stevens’s poetry, the co-authors write, is “an art of textual performance that invites open-ended interpretive processes and embodied experiences” in the service of a “musical aesthetic of transience, ephemerality, and affective intensification” (2). This view is not entirely new: it is consistent with the American pragmatist poet represented in philosophically oriented accounts of Stevens. But the focus on music, by putting Stevens into the company of modern European composers, makes for a rich recontextualization of his aesthetic thinking and fresh reference points for the reading of individual poems.

Eeckhout and Goldfarb invite us to read “Of Mere Being,” for instance, with Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs in mind. “Im Abendrot,” the last of the songs, concludes with a pair of flutes imitating birdcalls at dusk (an unusual moment of unmistakably mimetic music). The co-authors suggest that Stevens, a longtime admirer of Strauss, “might have been haunt[ed] . . . —in whatever manner: consciously, unconsciously, semiconsciously—” by those “warbling” flutes (117) when, in his last poem, he imagined a “gold-feathered” bird singing “Without human feeling, a foreign song” (CPP 476). The link between Stevens’s poem and Strauss’s song is nicely worked out, but the conditional “might have been” raises questions about the status of the connection. When Eeckhout and Goldfarb go on to propose that Stevens might have been in the audience when Gustav Mahler conducted his First Symphony in New York, and that music might have informed his poem “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate,” some readers will balk at so much speculation. But the coauthors’ aim is less to insist on direct influence than to put Stevens’s poetry into conversation with modern orchestral music.

There is no doubt Stevens tried to create poetic equivalents of certain musical effects. Referring to the presentation of the silver rose in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, he wrote, “The glancing chords haunt me and sometimes I try to reproduce the effect of them in words” (L 744). Did he perhaps imagine orchestral composers as part of the audience for his poems? He did on at least one important occasion. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” was commissioned for the sesquicentennial celebration of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1949. Stevens knew Paul Hindemith had been asked to compose a concerto for the same program and that Hindemith would be present when he read his poetry aloud that day. Both “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Hindemith’s Concerto for Trumpet, Bassoon, and Strings were structured as variations on a theme. Again without insisting on direct influence, Eeckhout and Goldfarb point up an “aesthetic affinity” between Stevens and Hindemith based on “their relative abstraction, metamorphic approach, lack of a compelling narrative arc or emotional outbursts that command complete attention, the palpable pleasure they take in words and sounds” (130).

This book’s underlining of Stevens’s deep engagement with music illuminates the smallest details of his life and work. “Viola”—the middle name of Stevens’s wife, Elsie Kachel, who was an accomplished pianist—has never seemed so evocative. Before we place too much stress on Picasso’s Old Guitarist as the source for “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” we should remember that Stevens played the guitar himself. Stevens the philosopher is also Stevens the composer and musician. It is easy to be caught up in the Homeric story related in the late poem “The World as Meditation” and to overlook the poem’s epigraph from Georges Enesco, virtuoso violinist, composer, and conductor. Enesco’s quotation joins poetic and musical composition in the single continuous activity of meditation: “Je vis un rêve permanent, qui ne s’arrête ni nuit ni jour” (CPP 441). Enesco is Stevens’s modern Ulysses, forever journeying onward in the mind, through music.

It is evidence of the significance of the topic and the suggestiveness of their treatment of it that Eeckhout and Goldfarb light up more paths than they pursue. Stevens’s taste in music, they note, on the basis of his record collection, was “resolutely Eurocentric” (6), and so is their account of Stevens and music. They hardly comment on his appreciation of jazz, blues, hymns, and other forms of American popular music. After dinner in his Hartford home, Stevens put Mahler on the turntable and had a deep think. But he also spent weekends in New Haven and New York in cocktail bars with other music sounding in the background. In “Of Modern Poetry,” the metaphysician “twanging a wiry string” is playing the banjo (CPP 219). It is a common, country sound, very possibly a Black sound, that Stevens finds quintessentially modern. Or consider the music of Charles Ives, Stevens’s precise contemporary and fellow Connecticut resident, who wittily collaged quotations from classical and popular music. Could there be some similar play of cultural forms in Stevens? If he was a poet of the “imagination’s Latin,” he was also an artist of the “lingua franca,” the local, and the everyday (CPP 343). It is likely this aspect of his sensibility colored his experience of music too.

Stevens delighted in and puzzled over birdsong throughout his career. Thinking about birdsong was a triangulated means of reflecting on his poetry’s relationship to music. When he experimented with the transcription of birdsong, he stopped short of translation, gesturing, in effect, toward the essential mystery of music. Unlike “his Romantic predecessors,” Eeckhout and Goldfarb argue, Stevens “rarely conflates the poet and the bird into a single figure.” “At no point does the accumulated force of . . . birdsong in Stevens culminate in a transcendent movement” (93). Instead, Stevens’s poetry of birdsong takes the form of unresolved call and response, posing an ongoing problem for Stevens’s attentive, daily exegesis.

One of the pleasures of this book is the ability of the co-authors to find the telling unfamiliar quotation. For example, Stevens mentions in a letter “a wild dove that was sitting high up on a wire near home a few mornings ago cooing about nothing much. I stopped to look at her. She turned around so that she could see me better but went right on with her talk” (L 610). Eeckhout and Goldfarb comment on this passage: “The dove’s ‘cooing’ notably happens spontaneously, and its sound occurs separate from human meaning—it is ‘cooing about nothing much.’ Yet, Stevens cannot help but linger on his perception of an exchange of glances between the two” (103), even while the dove “went right on with her talk,” being indifferent to him in the end.

Usually, when we speak of the “music” of a poem, we are speaking metaphorically, making a vague analogy between the acoustic dimensions of a text (which are inaudible on the page or screen, save when read aloud, and so difficult to identify and describe) and something we can actually hear. Appeals to analogy, parallels, and affinity structure the way Eeckhout and Goldfarb speak of poetry’s relationship to music, for the most part. And they have done a great deal with the musical analogy. But Stevens himself spoke of it, defensively, as “a bit old hat and romantic” (CPP 719). Is there a way to speak of “poetic music” (whether Stevens’s or someone else’s) as being, well, really music, and not merely like it?

The closest The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens comes to doing that is in a chapter on melody, the most adventurous and theoretical in the book. Igor Stravinsky, the author of The Poetics of Music, provides an attractively simple definition of the term: “Melody is the musical singing of a cadenced phrase” (qtd. on 52). This brings us very close to a statement about poetry, yet literary criticism has made little use of “melody” as an analytic tool. But perhaps the definition is not so simple. The near tautology of “musical singing” hints at a difficulty, and what exactly makes a phrase “cadenced”? Eeckhout and Goldfarb engage these problems from an original direction via a provocative comment from Stevens: “Personally, I like words to sound wrong” (L 340). Stevens’s preference is observed in lines that are simultaneously stunning and challenging to pronounce, such as the conclusion of the opening stanza of “The Plain Sense of Things”: “Inanimate in an inert savoir” (CPP 428). Eeckhout and Goldfarb subtly reveal the sonic complexity of that line and present it as characteristic of “a poet who actively foregoes the satisfaction of harmonic arrival” (72).

The co-authors cite Theodor Adorno’s essay “Music, Language, and Composition” as a guide to their approach to Stevens. Music and language, Adorno writes, both entail “a temporal succession of articulated sounds that are more than just sound” (qtd. on 3), which is to say, sounds organized in non-arbitrary, expressive ways. “Applying such principles to our readings of Stevens’s poems,” Eeckhout and Goldfarb write, “helps to accentuate the musicality intrinsic to them” (4). The term “musicality” is helpful here. It indicates an aesthetic property which music models but of which music is not the only example. Maybe, if we follow Eeckhout and Goldfarb’s investigations, and experiment with the uses of terms like melody for literary criticism, we can begin to describe “poetic music” as the particular kind of music it is.