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2 Wallace Stevens No More Arpeggios Nineteen twenty-three was a banner year for modernist American poetry .In addition toWilliam CarlosWilliams’s pathbreaking Spring andAll, the year witnessed the first books of poems by E. E. Cummings (Tulips and Chimneys) and Wallace Stevens (Harmonium). For Cummings it was a major breakthrough, for, outside of The Dial and a few issues of Broom, his poetry had not appeared much in print.1 Stevens, however, was well known and highly regarded by readers of little magazines like Poetry,Others , and The Little Review, where his poems had appeared often in the preceding nine years. In fact, several reviewers of Harmonium echoed Mark Van Doren’s observation that since the mid-teens “he has continued . . . to dance like a tantalizing star through magazines and anthologies. But there has been no volume until now.”2 When Harmonium finally did appear, it received several favorable reviews ,3 but these reviews established a stereotype that would haunt Stevens the rest of his career:he was the “dandy,” the aesthete par excellence, whose finely tuned rhythms, occasionally esoteric diction, and whimsical humor epitomized the “art for art’s sake”ethic of modernism and were completely detached from the poet’s political and social world.Descriptors like “exotic,” “fastidious,” “exquisite,” and “elegant” appear repeatedly in reviews of Stevens’s poems in the 1920s and 1930s.Typical of these reviews is Edmund Wilson’s in The Dial: “Mr.Wallace Stevens is the master of a style:that is the most remarkable thing about him. His gift for combining words is fantastic but sure:even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well.”4 Wilson goes on to identify two other qualities that subsequent critics would reiterate:his whimsical titles and his seeming lack of emotion: “When you read a few poems of Mr. Stevens, you get the impression from the richness of his verbal imagination that he is a poet of rich personality,but when you come to read the whole volume through you are struck by a sort of aridity. Mr. Stevens, who is so observant and has so distinguished a fancy, seems to have emotion neither in Wallace Stevens 49 abundance nor in intensity. . . . Emotion seems to emerge only furtively in the cryptic images of his poetry,as if it had been ...disposed of by being dexterously turned into exquisite amusing words” (63). Other reviewers of the 1923 Harmonium offered variants of Wilson’s appraisal; their vocabulary expresses the tenor of Stevens criticism for years to follow.Several observed his “love of magnificence”(Moore),the “scenery of luxuriant and intricate design”(Seiffert),his penchant for the exotic (Tate).Equally noted were his “pure phrasing”and “deliberately enunciated melody” (Van Doren), the “music of his words” ( Josephson), the “sheer beauty of sound, phrase, rhythm” (Monroe). Even a reviewer put off by Stevens’s “determined obscurity” recognized his “verbal elegance” (Untermeyer ).One critic,however,John Gould Fletcher,noted the social costs of Stevens’s aestheticism:“Stevens is an aesthete. . . . [He] is definitely out of tune with life and with his surroundings, and is seeking an escape into a sphere of finer harmony between instinct and intelligence.”5 Probably,the early review that most memorably characterized Stevens’s persona as a poet was Gorham Munson’s 1925 essay in The Dial, “The Dandyism of Wallace Stevens.”6 Two years after publishing a penetrating essay on Cummings,Munson defined Stevens as America’s first poetic dandy,in whom “impeccability is primarily achieved by adding elegance to correctness ....Elegance he attains in his fastidious vocabulary—in the surprising aplomb and blandness of his images” (79).Stevens,Munson continues,“is a connoisseur of the senses and emotions. [His] imagination comes to rest on them....The integration achieved is one of feeling;in the final analysis, it is a temperate romanticism” (80). In contrast to Baudelaire’s dandyism, which defied a society he despised, “tranquility enfolds Mr. Stevens. . . . The world is a gay and bright phenomenon and he gives the impression of feasting on it without misgiving....[a] well-fed and well-booted dandyism of contentment” (80–81). Munson concludes:“No American poet excels him in the sensory delights that a spick-and-span craft can stimulate :none is more skillful in arranging his music,his figures,and his design. None else, monocled and gloved, can cut so faultless a figure standing in his box at the circus of life. . . . No...

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