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Wallace Stevens' “Visibility of Thought”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joseph N. Riddel
Joseph N. Riddel*
Affiliation:
Duke UniversityDurham, N.C.
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Extract

Human experience, according to Santayana, may be described as a conflict between the spirit and the imperfections which distract it from the pure and ideal toward which it aspires. And yet, to complete the paradox, there is no spirit without these imperfections, the matrix of flesh and world, space and time, which contains it. This is as much as anything a poet's dramatic vision: it is Yeats's with his passion to preserve the senses in an eternity of time, and it is Wallace Stevens' with his more realistic search for a balance between the antinomies of self and world. For Stevens, the imagination is the single power that can effect the vital unity, in life or in poetry: it alone can provide the aesthetic economy of experience so urgent for the modern romantic sensibility. Stevens is a romantic, or better, a neo-romantic poet who has gone to school to the French Symbolists and post-Symbolists only to conclude that the ends available to the artist are not metaphysical but aesthetic, and thus human. The romantic poet necessarily lives in two worlds: that of his sensual experience and that of his imaginative vision. In those moments when he manages to blend the two, he achieves not only a poem but that singular experience of “truth” from which he draws his spiritual sanctions. And if God is absent from his universe, as he is from Stevens', the moments of reconciliation become increasingly problematical but no less pressing.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1962 , pp. 482 - 498
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

1 See esp. The Realm of Spirit (New York: Scribner, 1940), passim., and Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Scribner, 1923). This essay assumes, without detailing every explicit instance, the important debt Stevens owes to Santayana. Their sharing of sensibility and thus their similar regard for the depth of aesthetic experience has not gone unnoticed, and could not. C. Roland Wagner was the first to make extensive use of the parallel in his unpub. diss., “The Savage Transparence” (Yale, 1952). See also D. J. Schneider's unpub. diss., “Wallace Stevens: The Application of His Theory of Poetry to His Poems” (Northwestern, 1957), and esp. Frank Kermode's recent study, Wallace Stevens (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1960), which appeared in the U. S. in a Grove Press format after the completion of this essay.

2 See Louis L. Martz, “Wallace Stevens: ‘The World as Meditation’,” Literature and Belief, English Institute Essays, 1957 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 139–165, and The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), pp. 67–68.

3 “Comment,” Poetry, lxxxvii (Jan. 1956), 234–239.

4 Quotations and other references to Stevens' writings are from: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954); Opus Posthumous, Poems, Plays, Prose by Wallace Stevens, ed. with introd. by Samuel French Morse (New York: Knopf, 1957); and The Necessary Angel, Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1951), subsequently noted in the text: CP, OP, NA.

5 “Reflections on Wallace Stevens,” Partisan Review, xviii (May-June 1951), 335–344. Recent studies have certainly redressed the oversight, particularly those of Martz, Kermode, Frank Doggett, and Roy Harvey Pearce. See esp. Pearce, “Stevens Posthumous,” International Literary Annual, No. 2, ed. John Wain (London: John Calder, 1959), pp. 65–89, now incorporated into The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961).

6 “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens,” Yale Review, (March 1955), 340–353.

7 Cf. Stevens: “My own remarks about resisting or evading the pressure of reality mean escapism, if analyzed. Escapism has a pejorative sense, which it cannot be supposed that I include in the sense in which I use the word” (NA, pp. 30–31).

8 See Kermode, p. 124, for a slightly different interpretation of the symbol as, strangely, indicative of the “reconciliation of opposites.” It is this only when absorbed into the poetic self and become the “icon” of self-world, the poem or the imagined reality that constitutes the spiritual order of his secular meditations. See also Ralph J. Mills, Jr., “Wallace Stevens: The Image of the Rock,” Accent, xviii (Spring 1958), 75–89. The most interesting comment on the range of possibilities in Stevens' concern for the “rock” and the “ground” is in Pearce's The Continuity of American Poetry, p. 411: Pearce comments on the “enormous pun” involved in Stevens play with “ground” as mundane, physical reality, and the implicit meaning of “Ground” as a metaphysical term, combining here Stevens' view of the earth-ground as source of being in every sense. The rock, in short, is the otherness with which we contend, and yet paradoxically, of which we are integrally a part.

9 Cf. Martz, “The World as Mediatation,” p. 141.

10 Cf. Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith, p. 109: “The origin of beliefs and ideas, as of all events, is natural. All origins lie in the realm of matter, even when the being that is so generated is immaterial. …”

11 “Wallace Stevens' Later Poetry,” ELH, xxv (June 1958), 139, 146.

12 Some time after writing this sentence I discovered Kermode's remarkably similar comment, which underscores, I think, the importance of this poem in Stevens' canon: “Considering the grandeur of this structure of Stevens, it is hard to believe that anyone now holds the view that he came to grief a little way on from Harmonium.” Wallace Stevens, p. 124.

13 “Wallace Stevens and ‘Old Higgs’,” Trinity Review, viii (May 1954), 35–36.

14 “Imagination and Reality,” Nation clxvi (5 April 1947), 400–402.

15 See S. F. Morse, Wallace Stevens, A Preliminary Checklist of His Published Writings, 1898–1954 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Library, 1954), p. 54.

16 “An Examination of the Practice and Theory of Wallace Stevens” (unpubl. diss., Boston Univ., 1952), pp. 279–280. See also, “The Motive for Metaphor,” Origin V, ii (Spring 1952), 54.

17 “Wallace Stevens' Later Poetry,” p. 153.

18 The poem-giant symbol is most completely developed in “A Primitive Like an Orb” (CP, p. 440), a more compact variation on the theme of “An Ordinary Evening.” “Primitive” is a revealing instance of the pseudo-logical order of Stevens' later meditations, for it follows rigorously a pattern of metaphorical investigations toward the ecstatic discovery of its concluding stanza.

19 Kermode, pp. 109, 121 n., identifies the quotation with an explicit passage from Santayana.

20 Frank Doggett, in “Wallace Stevens' Later Poetry,” suggests the Boethius allusion in relation to Boethius' method of personifying the consolations of philosophy.

21 “Materia Poética,” View, ii (Oct. 1942), 28. This aphorism appears in the collection of “Adagia” (OP, p. 161), slightly modified and not the least improved.