Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism (review)

“It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem,” Wallace Stevens once quipped: he meant to imply that that’s a good thing (CPP 905). The threshold at which the world becomes provocative enough to be transmuted into poetry ought to be very high, and as Elizabeth Bishop (another poet with daunting standards) once quipped, poets needing to do something else with their time can either drink or write literary criticism, it doesn’t much matter which.

The truth of Bishop’s observation is borne out by the careers of innumerable poets, but judging by what evidence we have, the young Wallace Stevens indulged excessively in neither of these pastimes. From 1900, when he left Harvard College, until around 1914, when the First World War began, Stevens wrote very little poetry, and instead of falling back on a poet’s more typical ways of filling up his days, he absorbed the sights, sounds, and smells of New York City, where he lived until 1916. He worked as a reporter, a law clerk, a lawyer; he got married; he lived in Greenwich Village and Chelsea, in Fordham Heights in the Bronx. Anybody who is acquainted with Stevens’ life and work is aware of these years, but Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism, edited by Lisa Goldfarb and Bart Eeckhout, is the first sustained examination of those years—years in which the world did not often shape itself into a poem, years that would shape Stevens’ poetry for the rest of his life.

“The nine chapters of Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism,” write the editors in their introduction, “collectively show that, although Stevens would reside in and around the city for just sixteen years, the experience imprinted his imagination in myriad ways—in the walks he took, the music he heard, the galleries and libraries he visited, the books he read, and certainly also the food he tasted and the wine he drank” (18). The essays supporting this contention are written by some of the finest minds engaged with Stevens’ poems today (along with Eeckhout and Goldfarb, Bonnie Costello, Alan Filreis, Barbara Fisher, George Lensing, Glen MacLeod, Axel Nesme, Edward Ragg, and Juliette Utard), and the essays themselves explore every possible aspect of Stevens’ New York experience, from the obvious to the arcane: not just books, museums, and concerts, but architecture, dance, and gastronomy. In approach, the essays range from the more broadly biographical (Lensing’s “Stevens and New York”) to the deftly analytical (Nesme’s “On Stevensian Transitoriness”), to the unexpectedly delightful (Filreis’ “Wallace Stevens of the New York School”). The poem with which Filreis concludes his essay, a poem he has constructed out of quotations from Stevens’ letters suggests that this literary critic should (I speak metaphorically) spend less time drinking and more time making poems like this:

In the small gallery one is always in danger of knocking things over with one’s elbows, particularly on a Saturday afternoon when one has more elbows than usual.

I go into a fruit store nowadays and find there nothing but the fruits du jour: apples, pears, oranges, I feel like throwing them at the Greek.

One is so homeless over here.

I spend the time walking in the open air.

(169)

It’s easy to imagine that making a poem exclusively out of found or borrowed words is child’s play, but such poems demand an ear capable of detecting the finest nuances in language, of isolating and arranging those nuances in patterns that make them fully audible. These are the skills required to make any poem, since the language of all poems is borrowed, trailing the glories of prior use. Has anyone before been able to hear the brilliant nonchalance of the phrase “particularly on a Saturday afternoon when one has more elbows than usual”?

Filreis does not mean to argue that Stevens wrote poems like those written by John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara in the early years of what came...