Two weeks ago, I began an in-depth study of Wallace Stevens’ work that I
deeply admire and my contention, despite the great love I have for his work,
that he did not confront, perhaps not until close to his death, the primary
issues of faith: a subject he deals with again and again through his view of
the imagination as all, his view that whatever is spiritual comes out of the
mind.
To review from the end of part one of my essay: I do not
believe Stevens confronted the absurdist implications of his philosophical
stance. One cannot have it both ways: If the writer who creates in words and
whose subject is the nature and meaning of existence—and I believe this is
Stevens’ subject—if this writer concludes there is nothing but human
consciousness, then he must also, at the very least, confront faith as an
insurmountable abyss.
First here is the full text of the poem I discuss next “The
Man on the Dump.”
The Man On The Dump
Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.
The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche
Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho ... The dump is full
Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.
The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,
And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems
Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,
The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box
From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.
The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.
The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says
That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs
More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.
The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green
Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea
On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew
For buttons, how many women have covered themselves
With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads
Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.
One grows to hate these things except on the dump.
Now, in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,
Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),
Between that disgust and this, between the things
That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)
And those that will be (azaleas and so on),
One feels the purifying change. One rejects
The trash.
That’s the moment when the moon creeps up
To the bubbling of bassoons. That’s the time
One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.
Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon
(All its images are in the dump) and you see
As a man (not like an image of a man),
You see the moon rise in the empty sky.
One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.
One beats and beats for that which one believes.
That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all
Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear
To a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:
Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.
In “The Man on the Dump”[1] (1938),
Stevens uses nonsense word play and speaks of the philosopher, the priest and
the truth. He gives us nonsense in “Ho-ho ... The dump is full/ of images.” And
word play: “With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads/ Of the
floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.” And then “bubbling bassoons,”
“elephant coverings of tires.” The powerful last stanza provides a stunning
contrast:
One
sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.
One
beats and beats for that which one believes.
That’s
what one wants to get near. Could it after all
Be
merely oneself, as superior as the ear
To
a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack
the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
Solace
itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is
it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On
the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles,
pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest
eve:
Is
it to hear the blatter of gackles and say
Invisible priest; is it to eject, to
pull
The
day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where
was it one first heard the truth? The the.
I ask, Why is Stevens posing these questions? Critic Harold Bloom
answers my question this way: “The suggested answer to the six
not-quite-rhetorical questions turns out to be a unanimous if always hesitant
‘yes.’ Yes, it is oneself, a superior self.”[2]
With
the final “The the” of the poem, it seems to me that Stevens is saying language
is “where it is, as Gass says,
defining, naming. But Stevens’ subject here is “the truth.” He may very well be
rejecting the “dewiest dew,” “the floweriest flower,” and he may very well be
saying one must descend to the images of the dump to define and name, but, if
Bloom is correct, a superior self emerges with “The the”—a superior self who
creates the world.
Stevens speaks to the issue of language in his 1942 lecture
and essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” But first he places his
discussion in clearly theological terms when he makes clear
“that art sets out to express the human soul.”[3] The poet creates a world: “[W]hat makes
the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he
creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that
he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive
of it.” With that said, he talks about the role of language as he will do in
later essays: “A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the
words.”[4]
In 1943 Stevens extends the role of the poet further in the
essay “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet”: “In philosophy we attempt to
approach truth through reason. Obviously this is a statement of convenience. If
we say that in poetry we attempt to approach truth through the imagination,
this too, is a statement of convenience. We must conceive of poetry as at least
the equal of philosophy.”[5] He
then confirms that he is, in fact, creating his own world: “Summed up our
position at the moment is that the poet must get rid of the hieratic in
everything that concerns him and must move constantly in the direction of the
credible. He creates his unreal out of what is real.”[6] And
he confirms again that his issue is the nature of existence: “The pleasure is
the pleasure of powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by the
reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation.”[7]
Here is what I consider to be his most telling statement in this essay of the
poet’s role: “What we have called elevation and elation on the part of the
poet, which he communicates to the reader, may not be so much elevation as an
incandescence of the intelligence and so more than ever a triumph over the
incredible.”[8]
Does this not have the ring of the theological, of Bloom’s
“superior self”? On my continuum from Gass to Ozick, Stevens moves closer to
literature as idol.
In the long, masterful poem “The Auroras of Autumn” (1948),
the poem I will focus on next, and which I place in his later years along with
the essays, written shortly after, I believe, Stevens tests the limits of
language in poetry and questions “the triumph over the incredible.”
In 1948 Stevens wrote the essay “Imagination as Value”[9];
in 1951 he wrote three essays: “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting,”[10]
“A Collect of Philosophy,”[11] and
“Two or Three Ideas.”[12] In
these essays Stevens once again confirms his subject as the nature of
existence, but he also begins in my view to question the limits of language. I
do not think, however, that he confronts in a significant way the issue of
faith as an insurmountable abyss. He does not make what I view as the essential
philosophical move forward that all he has written seems to call out for.
In “Imagination as Value” he comes for the first time,
closer to the essential question: What do we do when faith is not possible? He
does confront his own world, the world he has created in his poetry, when he
asks the question, “What, then is it to live in the mind with the imagination ... ?” But his answer is, in my view, anything but a confrontation with the
abyss when faith is not possible or seems, at best, doubtful. He says, “only
reason stands between it [the imagination] and the reality for the two are
engaged in a struggle. We have no particular interest in this struggle ... .
[T]he more we think about it the less able we are to see that it has any heroic
aspects or that the spirit is at stake or that it may involve the loss of the world (my italics).”[13]
But that is exactly the point—the struggle
between reason and reality, the choice of the self-referential world of the
imagination does indeed involve a “loss of the world,” of belief in the
Absolute, in God. He sounds like Gass when he says “Poetry does not address
itself to beliefs.”[14]
And he sounds like Ozick when he says, “The constant discussion of imagination
and reality is largely a discussion not for the purposes of life but for the
purposes of arts and letters.”[15] But
he does not do what both Gass and Ozick do, i.e., place the act of writing in
the context of belief or its loss. He says, sounding like Gass that “it [poetic
value] is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the
value of the imagination.”[16] But
then he says this—in striking contrast to Gass—“If the imagination is the
faculty by which we import the unreal into what is real, its value is the value
of the way of thinking by which we project the idea of God into the idea of
man.”[17] This strikes me as literature as idol
because Stevens has not profoundly
confronted what he has rejected. If there is no God, the imagination is not
God—it is, at the very least, the absence of God. And that needs saying, I
would think.
One might argue that Stevens comes close to saying this in
“The Relations Between Poetry and Painting”: “Modern reality is a reality of
decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but
precious portents of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to
discover, in whatever field we discovered it, is that man’s truth is the final
resolution of everything. Poets and painters alike today make that assumption
and this is what gives them the validity and serious dignity that become them
as among those that seek wisdom, seek understanding.”[18]
Gass, I think, would agree that our revelations are not the revelations of
belief, but, because he has confronted the absence of God, he would, I think be
troubled by the words “man’s truth,” “the validity and serious dignity” of
painters and poets. He has no such allusions, and neither at the other end of
the continuum, does the believer Ozick.
Coming, part four, next week.
[1]
Stevens, Collected Poems, pp. 210-203.
[2]
Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, p. 147.
[3]
Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951),
p. 30.
[4]
Ibid., pp. 31-32.
[5]
Ibid., pp. 41-42.
[6]
Ibid., p. 58.
[7]
Ibid.
[8]
Ibid., p. 60.
[9]
Stevens, Necessary Angel, pp. 133-156.
[10]
Ibid., pp. 159-176.
[11]
Stevens, Opus Posthumous, pp. 183--202.
[12]
Ibid., pp. 202-216.
[13]
Stevens, Necessary Angel, p. 141.
[14]
Ibid., p. 144.
[15]
Ibid., p. 147.
[16]
Ibid., p.149.
[17]
Ibid., p. 150.
[18]
Ibid., p. 175.
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