Wally? Wally Wrote Poems?
I talked about Wallace Stevens in the blog before last, and I’m finally getting back to him now – can’t leave someone so important dangling like that!
I was drawn to Stevens’ poems even when I first read them back in high school, and revisiting his work all these many years later has been a wonderful journey through a lush and opulent landscape, even if I don’t always “get” them at the level of sophistication of the guy who wrote that article in the New York Review of Books.
But I have received some advice from another fine poet, Dan Gerber, who wrote this to me in an email: “Don't worry about ‘understanding’ Stevens. Just let yourself be grasped by his work. [As in the words of Rilke:] ‘And so we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.’”
Dan suggested that I start with Peter Quince at the Clavier, and so Idid: Music is feeling then, not sound.
As in the music that is poetry, I suppose. Feeling, then, not literal meaning only –– although the words of the poems sure do make some mellifluous sound, and they do carry significance and specificity; do they not? In any case, who would not be grasped by the compelling lure of lines like these:
In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay,
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.
Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions,
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.
The dew of old devotions. Ah yes, I know it well.
And how about Sunday Morning, where:
Complacencies of the peignoir and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
I guess I don’t have to fully understand it to experience its deliciousness, but it is clearly about a woman spending Sunday not in church, but in the secular and physical world, a woman who finds comfort in the sun and “pungent fruit and bright, green wings”, and cherishes the balm and beauty of earth. And why not? Are these not things to be cherished like "the thought of heaven"?
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
Such gorgeous lines, such sensory delight.And if the guy had written this one poem only (which in its entirety consists of eight sumptuous stanzas), it would have been enough, but he was prolific -- and yet quite busy in other realms too. A graduate of Harvard followed by New York Law School, he practiced general law for a few years and then began an illustrious career with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, becoming the firm’s vice-president in 1934, all the while creating poetry. I picture him retiring to his study late in the day to write poems in a notebook at a great mahogany desk, pausing now and then to contemplate a still life painting on the wall or the way the light of late afternoon spills into the room. From all accounts, his marriage was a lonely one, and although he enjoyed his sojourns to Key West, the Harvard-Yale football games, and a friendly rapport with his colleagues, he wasn’t exactly sharing poetry with his buddies at cocktail parties.
In fact, Dan Gerber told me a story told to him by a former professor and old friend of his named Clyde who had actually attended Wallace Stevens’ funeral.Apparently, when Clyde mentioned Stevens' poetry at the funeral, Stevens’ colleagues expressed surprise and bewilderment. “Wally?” one of them exclaimed.“Wally wrote poems?”
It’s an anecdote that is stunning in its implications about how little we can know about someone we see every day. Or in what it says of the vast complexity of the human spirit and its ability to compartmentalize. Or maybe it’s just revealing of Wallace Stevens, for whom poetry, or any work of art, existed in itself and for itself, a moment stopped and rescued from all the chaos, a leap from the mundane and sordid into the realm of imagination or a savoring of that green corn gleaming. Perhaps in his view no further justification, discussion, or accolades were needed.
Eve nwith provocative titles such as The Motive for Metaphor or The Idea ofOrder at Key West, which suggest all sorts of philosophical and intellectual explorations, or tangible visuals such as Two Figures in Dense Violet Light and Sea Surface Full of Clouds, the subject of the poem, according toStevens, is..ta-da!...poetry. And I think I'd rather read the poems than read about them, but I like this wrap-up quote from Delmore Schwartz(1913-1966) a poet from my own little hometown of Brooklyn, New York. He wrote: “Confronted by the need of conclusion or summary, one is impressed by how much more there is always to say about Stevens. No matter what aspect one begins, one has a sense of inexhaustible richness of significance and connection.”
As for me, to quote Wally once more:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes.