TASTING ‘CERTAIN PHENOMENA OF SOUND’ (1942)

Stevens' gastronomic references could inform an entire study in their own right. The elusive ‘lobster Bombay’, mango chutney, Burgundian wines (Meursault, Le Montrachet, Chablis, Corton), Champagne, persimmons, pears, peaches, strawberries, even a glass of water: these are only some of the stimulants affecting Stevens' literal and abstractive palate. Gastronomy in Stevens often unites ‘high ideas’ with living, immediate pleasures. As the poet wrote to Henry Church: ‘Being, as I think of it, is not a science but merely eating duck, or doing some such thing.’ Such calculated flippancy is a reminder to Stevens' more earnest Heideggerian readers that ‘being’ was hardly the ‘be-all and end-all’ for this poet. Numerous Stevens poems refer to bread and wine, where such staples imply imaginative and domestic well-being, whether present or disturbingly absent. Following Santayana, Stevens gave the word ‘poverty’ a particular resonance; sensing economic and imaginative hardships frequently conjoin. Domestic comforts thus take on aesthetic significance in the poetry, not least through gastronomy. That significance chimes with the argument I make for Stevensian abstraction: namely, that aesthetic meditation re-connects us with the world and that an abstract aesthetic potentially maximizes its number of gourmet readers.

Stevens no doubt delighted in Mauron's claim that ‘[w]ithout the originality of artists our human world would lose half its taste’ (underlining the phrase in his personal copy).

The two years following Ideas of Order formed a period of intense experimentation for Stevens. Although he would omit ‘Owl's Clover’ from the 1954 Collected Poems, his attempt at a quasi-allegory concerning the function of art in the Depression marked a greater engagement with ‘reality’ than Ideas had achieved (despite poems such as ‘Mozart, 1935’). The jacket statement to the trade edition of Ideas defensively asserted: ‘The book is essentially a book of pure poetry.’ Whilst Stevens acknowledged ‘economic […] political and social changes’, he apparently sought a modernized ‘pure poetry’ rather than abandoning one kind of verse for a socially more responsive but poetically less sophisticated idiom. As we have seen, however, Ideas of Order was anything but ‘pure poetry’ in the sense of verse aspiring to the condition of music, of sounds miraculously free from the significant world. Harmonium too thrived on a tension between Symbolist experiment (‘To the One of Fictive Music’), poems that revel in sonority (‘Bantams in Pine-Woods’) and more ‘theoretical’ explorations of self and world (‘A High-Toned Old Christian Woman’, ‘Theory’, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, ‘The Snow Man’ and so on).

TAMING ‘THE GUERRILLA I’: THE EARLY POEMS OF PARTS OF A WORLD (1942)

In 1938 Stevens entered one of the most fecund phases of his writing career. With The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems he reached the end of an experimental period, during which he realized abstraction's potential and the poetic possibilities of a novel first-person speaker. If Stevens had not answered his speaker's question in ‘Blue Guitar’ – ‘Where / Do I begin and end?’ – he was certainly more confident about employing this elusive ‘I’ as a speaker, especially in an abstract space. In the poetry following ‘Blue Guitar’ Stevens would break new ground, attracting fewer comparisons with a dandy or Surrealist aesthetic (apart from in the eyes of Cleanth Brooks and Yvor Winters).

Even Picasso's influence on Stevens waned. In 1938, approving a ‘just placing of Picasso’, Stevens copied down Herbert Furst's summary of ‘Guernica’:

MASTERY OF LIFE: AT HOME WITH WALLACE STEVENS

Stevens' final decade witnessed a number of achievements as the poet's reputation finally grew. With Transport to Summer, The Auroras of Autumn, The Necessary Angel, two Selected Poems and the long-resisted Collected Poems, Stevens experienced greater magazine publication, increased academic criticism and a raft of honorary degrees and awards.

‘MAJOR MAN’ REVISED: ‘PAISANT CHRONICLE’ (1945) AND ‘DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE’ (1945)

The year 1945 was pivotal in Stevens' poetic development. Following Parts of a World and ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ the poet experienced a re-examination of his own. Those texts had featured an icy world replete with heroic figures and other nominally ‘cold’, crystalline entities. Stevens' embrace of abstraction engaged a new vocabulary characterized by poetic symbols, the nomenclature of his early 1940s aesthetic. Largely advertised by ‘Notes’, ‘major man’, ‘the first idea’, a ‘supreme fiction’, the ‘death of the gods’, the ‘fluent mundo’, even ‘the abstract’ itself became the terms of a specialist idiom. The impulse toward such rhetoric emanated from Ideas of Order, as Stevens desired to overhaul ‘pure poetry’ in a modern age. But the highpoint for creating an abstract language built into the fabric of an increasingly abstract poetic was 1942, and although Stevens continued to write abstractly he would have less use for an explicit vocabulary, as the mature poetry of his final decade indicates.

Stevens carefully jettisons his 1942 idiom in poems written during 1943–45. Whilst the later poetry refers to such terms as ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’, the need for stylized abstract figures occupied Stevens less.

In January 1935, answering Ronald Lane Latimer's request for an inscribed copy of Harmonium, Stevens wrote:

Stevens had good reason to be ironic about his first book. The poet knew well that neither was Harmonium an autographed edition nor had his signature been in demand following its publication in September 1923. He could joke about ‘only one copy without an inscription in existence’ because, despite featuring in the little magazines, Stevens was not, like Byron, made famous overnight. Agreeable damsels flung themselves at his Romantic predecessor, but such advances were rare for Stevens. However, as so often in Stevens' correspondence, surface humour accentuates a deep-seated wit. Latimer was eagerly awaiting the manuscript of Stevens' second book Ideas of Order, and his request for an inscribed copy of Harmonium jostled the poet's nerves about his publishing prospects almost twelve years on.

ROMANTIC ADAPTATIONS: WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, STEVENS

In The Prelude Wordsworth expresses doubts about Coleridge's idealist imagination. Wordsworth observes his friend has introspected to the extent that the ‘actual world’, as Stevens calls it, no longer influences Coleridge's imagination. Coleridge lives on the ‘self-created sustenance of a mind / Debarred from Nature's living images, / Compelled to be a life unto itself’. But in charging Coleridge with relinquishing his talent to ‘Platonic forms of wild ideal pageantry’ Wordsworth checks his own tendency toward conceiving Coleridge's life in the abstract.