Wallace Stevens 101

Now regarded as a towering figure of modern verse, Wallace Stevens was probably better known as an insurance man for much of his adult life. But during a long and comfortable career at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, he also wrote poems that cut to the very heart of existence. Like his near contemporary (and sometimes rival) Robert Frost, in his poems, Stevens sought out “what will suffice” in a turbulent era of war and social upheaval. Combining absurd humor and philosophical heft, the ideas of the Romantics and the French symbolists, he synthesized his own world of thought, a “planet on the table.” That world can sometimes feel esoteric, even obscure. As Stevens writes, “the poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.” But this difficulty is inseparable from his myriad delights and innovations. “Stevens’s greatest originality,” critic Helen Vendler writes, “lay in his more hidden forms of utterance,” in his “strategies of concealment.” Despite these “secrecies,” his work has left a mark that’s lasted generations, influencing poets ranging from John Ashbery to Terrance Hayes. This brief selection from across his career introduces readers to his abiding concerns, to his forms of “originality” and “concealment.”

“The Comedian as the Letter C”
It can be easy to feel “washed away by magnitude” reading this poem from Stevens’s first book, Harmonium (1923). Not only long but also dense, it features him at his most playful and elaborate. But beneath its verbal pyrotechnics, “Letter C” is essentially a veiled autobiography, an epic of intellectual development. Like many characters in Stevens’s work, the sailor Crispin is a disguise for the poet himself. Steven’s career, like Crispin’s journey, is a “voyaging […] between two elements”: between a love of artifice, “an eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,” and a desire to free oneself of those artifices, to be “the poetic hero without palms / Or jugglery, without regalia.” With all its luxuriating in language and intellection, this particular poem is clearly closer to the former pole—a rich “mythology of self” rather than the skeptical negation of one.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
Like the speaker in this well-known but enigmatic poem, Stevens is a writer torn between “inflections” and “innuendos.” Sometimes he seems to prefer the former. In the first section here, for example, description is an end unto itself—“lucid” and “noble” as a haiku or an Imagist poem, his lines do little more than paint a picture of a blackbird. Elsewhere, however, the blackbird feels symbolic, full of implication and portent—the second section literally makes the bird figurative, and the fourth turns it into a variable in a very odd math problem. Trying to “solve” that problem inevitably leads to frustration, however, because the poem is less about what the blackbird stands for, and more about the human impulse to make it stand for something. Still, Stevens suggests, there is value in the collision between these two modes of thinking, these two ways of reading and depicting the world. In a murder mystery or detective story, the search for resolution is often more pleasurable than the resolution itself. By constantly varying style and perspective, Stevens lingers in that space of portent, of feeling on the brink.  

“The Snow Man”
Another poem of paradox, this brief pastoral from Harmonium, originally published in Poetry magazine in 1921, is both austere and exuberant, bleak and optimistic. Its dramatic situation seems straightforward enough at first: a self-effacing, philosophical speaker “regard[s]” a snowy January landscape. But the poem’s single long sentence ends by doubling back on itself, its syntax growing complex and repetitive. Indeed, the poem nearly collapses under the difficulty of seeing the world, of distinguishing between subject and object, real and imagined. Still, for Stevens, making such distinctions is noble, even necessary, work, as the poem’s opening imperative (“one must”) implies. As he writes in his later “The Plain Sense of Things,” even “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.” If readers can see winter as something more (or less) than a “bare place,” full of “misery,” then they might also perceive its “distant glitter” and the majesty of its “junipers shagged with ice.”

“The Idea of Order at Key West”
Few poems possess “keener sounds” than this lyric from Stevens’s 1936 collection Ideas of Order. But if its blank verse often evokes the musical lushness of John Keats, it owes its structure to another Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, whose “Tintern Abbey” is a clear influence. As in that poem, the speaker here reconsiders a familiar landscape and explains his thinking to his companion. That companion is Ramon Fernandez, a fictional version of a real literary critic whose work considered the relationship between imagination and social order. “Whose spirit is this,” they ask, moved by the singer they’re listening to. Where does her “genius” come from, if not the world around her? And how can that singing then change that world? If these questions were too major to answer—Stevens spent his entire career considering them—the poem still offers a sublime expression of art’s “enchanting” power, of how music can rearrange and deepen the world around us.

“The Man on the Dump”
Like “Sunday Morning,” this allegory from Steven’s mid-career Parts of a World (1942) is a meditation on belief. How do we organize our lives without the old convictions of religion and God? A grand question, considering the poem’s setting, but a garbage dump may have seemed an appropriate site in the midst of another devastating war. For Stevens, solace lay in poetry and the tireless creation of a “supreme fiction” that provides a sense of order. “That’s what one wants to get near,” he writes here. Getting nearer requires not only imagination but also responsiveness to change—like anything else, ideas and figures ultimately end up in the trash and so must be continually “shed” and replaced. The pile of questions in the poem’s final stanzas parodies a range of ideas from poetic history, including some Stevens himself shares. But as the final line suggests, he remains most skeptical of “the the,” of final, absolute truth rather than those truths we make ourselves, the ones we weave from reality.

“The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract”
Mortality always figured prominently among Stevens’s themes, as earlier poems, such as “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” demonstrate. But his late career preoccupation with death yielded some of his most powerful poems and some of his most scathing self-assessments. This airy, celebrated piece from his National Book Award–winning collection, The Auroras of Autumn (1950), exemplifies both tendencies. As its title suggests, the poem takes place nowhere in particular, but its occasion is noteworthy: it begins in discouragement, with the poet hesitating above the page, unable to find the right words. Labeling himself a “lecturer / On This Beautiful World Of Ours,” Stevens mocks his love of rhetoric with thumping iambs and casts a doubtful glance back at his accomplishments, which he sees as “writhings in wrong obliques and distances.” But from this frustration and doubt, he wrings spare lines of rare majesty. In his signature tercets—borrowed from Dante—he yearns to be “just once, at the middle,” certain of the truths he observes rather than “helplessly at the edge,” distrusting his own ideas and longevity.

“Of Mere Being”
Likely the last that Stevens wrote, this 12-line poem hearkens back to the enigmatic anecdotes of Harmonium. It describes a scene that is at once artificial and natural, physical and mental, distant and close. The palm here, for instance, suggests something both “foreign” (a tropical tree) and familiar (the bottom of a hand). But couched within his painterly composition is an epiphany—that “reason” or explanation is not what “makes us happy or unhappy.” Instead, as the title suggests, merely “being”—experiencing the “fire-fangled feathers,” the song “without human feeling”—is what brings us satisfaction. Such an epiphany may seem “mere” in the face of death, a cold comfort. But as the final lines, certain and end-stopped, suggest, Stevens finds some peace in once more describing what lies “beyond the last thought.”