Four 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 read part one of my essay, go here. To read part two, go here. For part three, go here. To read part four go here.
I return where I began with
“ The Planet on the Table,
” the best of the best of Wallace Stevens.
In the late poem “The Planet on the Table”[1]
(1953), Stevens seems to assess his work with humility:
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he had
liked.
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of
his self
Were no less makings of the sun.
It was not important that they
survive.
What mattered was that they should
bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half
perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were
part.
In this poem, one of the last that he wrote before he died,
Stevens seems, with a measure of humility, to place his world, the body of his work, in the larger world.
In the
introduction to Opus Posthumous,
Samuel French Morse, says that this poem is “touched with a depth of personal
feeling that is surprising in a poet as detached as Stevens.”[2]
It
is Stevens’ detachment that, in the overview of his work, ultimately troubles
me, as one who herself tries to write, to create something in the world, with
all the problems that existence presents: the evil that persists in the world
at large, the illness and death of loved ones, my own process of aging, the
inexorable move toward my own death.
I must ask, What has been the nature of Stevens’ journey?
His poetry and essays reveal a world of his own making in
which the self through imagination is paramount. Perhaps in his later years, in
“The Auroras of Autumn” and “The Planet on the Table,” he acknowledges the
limitations of his “world.”
And, on
my continuum from Gass to Ozick, I do think he resides closest to Gass but,
still I assert, without Gass’s clarity. Though it seems clear that God is not a
part of the world he has created, it also seems clear that his arrival at this
point lacks a confrontation with the absence of God.
Ozick says, “. . . there
is always the easy, the sweet, the beckoning, the lenient, the interesting lure of the Instead of: the wood of the tree instead
of God, the rapture-bringing horizon instead of God, the work of art instead of
God. . . .”[3]
I conclude that Stevens has chosen the Instead
of with ease.
Ihab Hassan in a his essay on nihilism and belief
concludes, “The stutter of spirit, the struggle for belief, remain primal in
our condition. In this regard, nihilism may appear a saving grace, the
breakneck candor of a mind insisting on its own lucidity. Let us honor such
lucidity: not even the forgiving earth sanctions every vapid, errant, or wicked
belief. But by far in the most cases, such lucidity finally fails. Nor does
irony, which Kierkegaard calls the ‘infinitely delicate play with nothingness,’
suffice. Heart and mind continue to cry out to hell, to heaven for something
more. The cry is hopeless, its very hopelessness indistinguishable from hope on
the other side of despair.”[4]
Kierkegaard says, “[I]t is not faith but the most remote
possibility of faith that faintly sees its object on the most distant horizon
but is separated from it by a chasmal abyss in which doubt plays its tricks.”[5]
I ask, Where is Stevens’ abyss? Where is his despair?
If the
writer’s subject is the nature of existence, and if he concludes that faith in
God is not possible, it is not enough to assert that this is “the age of
disbelief.” His integrity and originality lie in the struggle that brought him
either to that conclusion or to the persistent residuum of doubt—and most
important for the writer—its expression in words.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977.
Doggett, Frank. Stevens’ Poetry of Thought.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966.
Gass, William. Fiction and the Figures of Life. New
York: Vintage Books, 1971.
Gass, William. The World Within the Word. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.
Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter. Minnesota: Graywolf
Press, 1992.
Hassan, Ihab. “The Expense of Spirit in Postmodern Times:
Between Nihilism and Belief,” The Georgia Review, Spring 1997, pp. 9-26.
Hassan, Ihab. Rumors of Change. Tuscaloosa: The
University of Alabama Press, 1995.
Kermode, Frank. Wallace Stevens. New York:
CHIP’S BOOKSHOP, Inc., 1979.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Edited
and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1983.
Ozick, Cynthia. Art and Ardor. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1983.
Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous. Edited by
Samuel French Morse. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace
Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.
Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’
Longer Poems. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Vendler, Helen. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of
Desire. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984.
[1]
Stevens, Collected Poems, p. 532.
[2]
Samuel French Morse, ed. Opus Posthumous, p. xvi.
[3]
Ozick, “The Riddle of the Ordinary,” Art and Ardor, p. 208.
[4]
Ihab Hassan, “The Expense of Spirit in Postmodern Times: Between Nihilism and
Belief,” The Georgia Review, Spring 1997, p. 26.
[5]
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 20.
Mary,
ReplyDeleteI still think you can confront these larger life issues without "taking a stand" about it, and I think Stevens' poems do fit into a larger spiritual context, although he doesn't dwell there, as you point out. I just think what matters to him is not the destination, but the doing, not what may be, but what is, and I think that is a valid response to the unknowable. Of course I'm still thinking about all of this...thanks for the mental stimulation, and expanding my view of Wallace Stevens.