Stevens's Essays

Stevens’ Essays William Doreski Keene State College From Horace’s Ars Poetica through Sidney’s Defense of Poetry, Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” and Ezra Pound’s “A Retrospect,” poets have explained, justified, or contextualized their art. Stevens’ best essays are collected in The Necessary Angel (CPP 637-751). “Stevens’ other essays and shorter prose pieces are gathered in the section ‘Uncollected Prose’ in CPP 755-896.” They respond to previous critical and philosophical discussions and embody his own sense of the role of poetry in a world rendered problematic by the Great Depression and two world wars. He began this series of essays immediately before the US entered the Second World War, when the “pressure of reality” (CPP 650) lay especially heavy upon the social and cultural landscape. Determined to distinguish poetics from philosophy, Stevens is alert to the philosophers of his era, but ignores the poetics of his contemporaries. He cites Ernst Cassirer, C. E. M. Joad, Henri Bergson, and A. J. Ayer, indirectly refers to Gaston Bachelard, and discusses Blaise Pascal, but does not mention Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Pound, or other poets of his generation who had published theoretical essays about poetry. In his introduction to The Necessary Angel (CPP 639), Stevens, instead of invoking poetry as a timeless entity, notes that he intends to define it for himself and for his age. Avoiding the theoretical universals of Aristotle and his descendants, Stevens accepts the modern concern with social and cultural contingencies, but builds a case for historical continuity. While his poetry obscures links to everyday life, he is aware that ordinary reality lurks out there, shaping and directing us in inescapable and essential ways. Pragmatic in its appeal to particular texts and contexts, Stevens’ theorizing develops out of a specifically American modernist moment, when the work of William James and John Dewey exercised as much influence as Nietzsche and Freud. His thinking about poetry includes an examination of the same relationship between imagination and reality that empowers his poetry. However, he disclaims any systematic approach, or any organizing principles linking the seven collected essays. He suggests instead that the broader goal of contributing to the theory of poetry sufficiently unifies the book. Like Eliot’s The Sacred Wood, although that influential text goes uncited, The Necessary Angel includes both essays that are largely theoretical and others that are primarily applied criticism. “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” is the longest and probably the most frequently cited of Stevens’ essays. Delivered as a lecture at Princeton in May, 1941, and first published in 1942, in a difficult time for the imagination, it responds to the immediacy of the war through its choice of figures and its emphasis on resisting the excesses of reality. Stevens argues that too close an adherence to reality at the expense of the imagination is limiting, and can have definite consequences, but also that dissociation of imagination from reality is unwise. By imagination Stevens here means the mind‘s capacity to process perceptions and ideas. A clear apprehension of reality, the world outside of the self, is essential to that processing. If the imagination focuses on the unreal instead of reality then it becomes dysfunctional. Balancing the subjective interior world of the imagination with the objective world outside of the self—insofar as it is possible to grasp it—is crucial to the proper function of the poet. Objective reality—as in time of war—can seem overwhelming, but it cannot be allowed to overwhelm the imagination. Nor can the imagination be allowed to evade reality. Stevens references a classical figure from Plato—a two-horse chariot with one winged horse of noble breed, one of ignoble breed—to demonstrate a complex argument about the relationship between the imagination and reality, and about the shifting nature of mental states and their receptiveness to metaphor. Ideas and figures of speech, he notes, have histories, and those are records of change. He argues that “the imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real,” and that Plato’s metaphor lost its vitality because his chariot, so to speak, linked the horse of imagination to the horse of unreality, and that depletes the power of the imagination (CPP 645). This supports Stevens’ larger argument that excess pressure of reality can distort poetry when it negotiates between imagination and reality and attempts to balance their relative influence. His attention, as the essay proceeds, focuses on half of the chariot’s team, the horse of noble breed. Among “illustrations that constituted episodes in the history of the idea of nobility” (CCP 646), Stevens considers Verrocchio’s statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni and the literary figure Don Quixote. The first embodies the tradition of Italy, of the imagination. The second represents the tradition of reality, of Spain. While both embody ideas of nobility, the transition from Colleoni to Don Quixote, he argues, marks a shift toward an embrace of reality and a perhaps unwarranted dismissal of the imagination. Stevens is here demonstrating not only that the relationship between imagination and reality is cultural, historical, and shifting, but also that it is we, who read this essay and regard the issues, in whom this shift occurs. Stevens then refers to the mounted figure of Andrew Jackson by Clark Mills in Washington DC, a statue that displays no use of the imagination but only a fanciful relation to reality. Contemplating this work, we encounter the unreal. In his first mention of poetry, Stevens concludes that “there can be works, and this includes poems, in which neither the imagination nor reality is present” (648). A contrasting example of a painting by Reginald Marsh entitled Wooden Horses, a work Stevens characterizes as “wholly favorable to what is real,” suggests that imagination may enter into a work paradoxically by reason of its openness to reality (CPP 649). The Jackson statue, on the other hand, is too determinedly unreal, too self-conscious to allow imagination to enter it at all. At this point the essay engages a larger argument: that the relation between imagination and reality varies not only from work to work but as a general factor distinguishing the works of one era from those of another. Stevens is concerned specifically with the present moment. When he wrote this essay the “pressure of reality” had recently increased. The duress of a given historical moment, especially the onset of a major war, may be great enough to enforce a shift from one “era in the history of the imagination” (CPP 656) to another, and to shift language from primarily connotative to primarily denotative (CPP 650-651). The exigencies of the age can affect every aspect of language by manipulating rhetorical effects, favoring (in the case of the present) the dramatic over the meditative. Having established that, he refocuses to “construct the figure of a poet”: to determine how the shifting four-way relationships among reality, imagination, denotation, and connotation shape the new poet for the new age (CPP 656). Stevens’ “figure of a poet,” a highly imaginative (and fully imagined) representation of two thousand years of poetry, is capable of distilling from the pressure of reality an abstract idea—a fiction—to help process that reality through the imagination. This is an indirect response to William Carlos Williams’ notion of the poet as an arbiter of external reality, one who finds “no ideas but in things.” Both Stevens and Williams find ideas in things, but Stevens would have the poet develop, from those ideas, larger abstractions (which he calls fictions); while Williams would adhere much more closely to the things themselves. The old idea of the noble rider no longer pertains, but then neither does the idea of reality as a fixed quality. Philosophy and physics have unseated the notion of matter as solid and static, so the poet may understand reality as a product of the life that lives or experiences it. Reality, then, is what we experience, “things as they are,” but it is our perception that shapes them. Thus “Things as they are / Are changed on the blue guitar,” the instrument of the imagination (CPP 135). The successful poet resists the pressure of reality of the kind that must be resisted. For Stevens the reality of totalitarianism, for instance, places a particular burden on the poet, and this suggests that all successful imaginative work—art and poetry and music—is political in this way. But for poetry, imagination and reality are equals. And in assessing their respective functions, Stevens denies that the poet has any particular social or political purpose, although the poet’s resistance to the pressure of reality may have indirect political significance. To note that the subject of poetry is life is not to entail a social or moral obligation but simply to describe the art form. Not even Stalin (Stevens argues) can impose such obligations, although poets might of their own accord feel moved to engage in social issues as subject matter. So what is the poet’s function? It is to illuminate the imagination for all of us. This in an important role: it helps us live our lives. If the means by which it does so seems escapist it is not so in the most negative sense of that word, except in instances where the poet loses all touch with reality. The poet creates the supreme fiction that shapes and colors our lives by balancing imagination and reality, developing their relationship rather than denying it. Because this supreme fiction is so vital its words, its music, will remain audible and comprehensible regardless of shifts in poetic fashion. In much the same way, the notion of nobility—including the nobility of rhetoric—, while unavailable in this era, remains a vital force insofar as it represents the imagination pushing back against reality. “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” responds to both the onset of the Second World War and the fading crisis of the Great Depression. Although Stevens and his family fared well economically in the Depression, he was troubled by the elitist nature of his view of art and its place in an uneasy world. His argument that the poet performs a vital function by linking our external and our internal worlds assumes a reasonably educated audience, one that has the leisure to consider its social and cultural well-being, as opposed to people who are desperately clinging to the necessities of survival. Stevens was aware of this, but he could not compromise his belief in what poetry could and could not do, and for whom it could do it. His arguments grow out of a larger understanding of how people have understood poetry and its function in the past, and he tries to incorporate these notions into his figure of a possible contemporary poet. The next essay in The Necessary Angel consolidates and further develops this trope. “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” (1943), presented as a lecture at Mount Holyoke College, tentatively defines poetry as “an unofficial view of being” (as opposed to philosophy’s “official view of being”) and offers a glimpse of Coleridge dancing on a packet boat on his way to Germany with a company of Danes (CPP 667). Coleridge’s depiction (in Biographia Literaria) of what he calls the secondary imagination, which “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate,” is important to Stevens’ poetics (304). But Stevens expands his notion of poetry’s function in a way that would confound Coleridge. Stevens argues that poetry is at least potentially superior to philosophy because “the poet, in order to fulfill himself, must accomplish a poetry that satisfies both the reason and the imagination” (CPP 668). Coleridge locates the reasoning function in what he calls the primary imagination: “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (304). Stevens essentially combines Coleridge’s primary and secondary imaginations in the poetic act itself. If defining poetry is the goal, Stevens argues, then describing its desired outcome, however necessary, is insufficient. In claiming that “we are never at a loss to recognize poetry” he links the experience and creation of poetry to the composition of the self (CPP 670): neither, as Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” would have it, an escape from personality nor an indulgence in it, but an extension of the process that makes a personality (43). The dynamic that creates an individual shapes a poem. This does not make the poet the subject of the poem, but it does require the poem to draw its life from the living poet. And this, Stevens concludes, is why one cannot define poetry, any more than one can absolutely define personality. Variations on the romantic notion of poetry as self-expression dominate twentieth-century poetics. Ezra Pound, for instance, during his Imagist phase before the First World War, argues in The Spirit of Romance that the poet or artist operates by giving shape or form to “such part of the life force as flows through him.” (92-93). Although Pound leans toward a more Jungian idea of a collective psycho-social experience, his idea that art draws upon the life force in the poet chimes with Stevens and many other twentieth-century writers. The idea of art as self-expression has always been around, but after Kant and Hegel, Freud and Jung, it assumes a more sophisticated veneer and a scientific vocabulary that give it a new legitimacy. More importantly, it better responds to the need for poetry, no longer moored to religious and social traditions, to find a place in a shifting, multifaceted world. In the fourth section of “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” Stevens reviews his attempt “to equate poetry with philosophy” (CPP 672). He qualifies his earlier assertions by emphasizing the individual nature of the creative process: the physical and mental qualities that enable or restrict the individual. Underscoring the personal experience of writing further distances the poem from larger cultural expression, but increases its value in self-transformation. This value is transferable to the reader as an act of liberation. That is, the poet empowers both the poet and the reader’s imagination: the one in the act of writing, the other in the act of reading. Working with Bergson’s concept of religious aspiration, Stevens constructs a model of writing that includes both aspiration and fulfillment: concepts that further exclude the wider social implications of art and focus on the singular experiences of poet and reader. Section five of this seminal essay explores Stevens’ concept of literary tradition.as a passing-down of imaginations from elderly poet-fathers to virile young poet-sons. Stevens emphasizes that the centuries “have a way of being male” (CPP 675). Whether that is because of bias in ordinary usage or because he believes that intelligence moves along a patrilineal line is not clear. In considering that most masculine of centuries, the seventeenth, Stevens claims that writing a successful poem is a victory over the “incredible,” which occurs when the poet replaces the incredible with the credible, or makes the incredible seem credible (CPP 676). Provocatively he brings up the “Miltonic image of a poet,” which suggests that explaining the ways of God to man may seem a prime example of making the incredible into the credible (CPP 676). If, as the essay goes on to speculate, “poetic truth is an agreement with reality, brought about by imagination…, expressed in terms of …emotion, or…personality” then, as he claims, the difference between philosophy and poetry is essentially the same as “the difference between logic and empirical knowledge” (CPP 676). Philosophy does not negotiate with empirical knowledge, although it may use it as a referent. Poetry, on the other hand, must maintain a companionable relationship with reality even as the imagination pushes back at it. The “simple figure of the youth as virile poet” must beware of the tendency to confuse philosophy and poetry. Further, that figure must remain apart from politics and live in a “radiant and productive atmosphere,” alien to the philosopher (CPP 679). This is a world of sound and music, the world of “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The purpose of music, in Stevens’ world, however, is not to create a world apart, but to “produce an agreement with reality” (CPP 679). The world in which imagination and reality exist in accord is one that pleases the imaginative man but alienates the philosopher, who occupies “the gaunt world of the reason” (CPP 679). Pleasure, in the poet’s world, is not an indulgence, but is aesthetically and morally necessary. The last section of this essay begins by summing up: “Our position at the moment is that the poet must get rid of the hierarchical in everything that concerns him and must move constantly in the direction of the credible. He must create his unreal out of what is real” (CPP 679). This relationship between the real and unreal also distinguishes culture from nature with a formulation that would seem familiar to Coleridge. Stevens refuses metaphysics—and all philosophy as such—because poetry maintains a more direct and sounder relation to reality and therefore to truth. This is not Keats’ “Beauty is truth,” but may be construed as an interpretation of that frequently derided argument. Stevens does not embrace what he calls “absolute fact” but rather fact that has been mediated by the imagination, although “absolute fact includes everything that the imagination includes” (CPP 681). If imagination is “the sum of our faculties” then it necessarily tints everything we perceive (CPP 681). The virile poet composes his poems at the level at which his personality intersects with reality. This enables him to levitate the more leaden aspects of the real and illuminate the world for those who lack the full rich imagination to do it for themselves. A poem is an act of thought as well as perception, and the intersection of those faculties creates the feeling that empowers it. These two essays constitute a theory of poetry that while not entirely comprehensive suffices to illuminate Stevens’ own poetry as well as the work of subsequent poets, like John Ashbery, Mark Strand, and many others who have embraced the idea of the poem as a bridge between the world of received reality and the world of the individual imagination. While not neglectful of the public function of poetry, Stevens’ theory requires some extrapolation to account for the presence of social and political issues as such. However, like all romantic or expressive theorists, Stevens, by defining a place for the real, allows the presence of any potential concern, topic, or subject. Following this broad exploration of the relationships between poet and public, poet and tradition, reality and imagination, The Necessary Angel offers five briefer essays that focus on particular aspects of these relationships. “Three Academic Pieces” (1947) is a study of metaphor. By framing it as a study of the “structure of reality,” Stevens demonstrates that likeness inheres in the nature of things (CPP 686). Therefore metaphor is not a peculiar manifestation of poetry but the reasonable extension of universal and natural resemblances. This is significant because it defines a force that binds the otherwise varied elements of the universe together. In this remarkably phenomenological essay, Stevens briefly explores a variety of resemblances and concludes, however tentatively, that “poetry is a satisfying of the desire for resemblances,” and more importantly expresses a “desire to enjoy reality” by alerting us to ambiguities that are favorable to resemblances and increase our enjoyment of them (CPP 690). Two illustrative poems, constituting the other two “academic pieces,” follow this essay: “Someone Puts a Pineapple Together” (CPP 693) and “Of Ideal Time and Choice” (CPP 697). The first illuminates the constructive aspect of resemblances and touches upon some of the issues raised in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” including the function of the incredible in the making of a poem. This poem’s topic is the way in which we perceive metaphor. We experience it everywhere we look, but it challenges us to understand its genuine function as opposed to “false metaphor,” a manifestation of the incomplete processing of the incredible (CPP 695). The incredible does have an important function, though. It gives the poet “a purpose to believe.” Eventually in its third section the poem sifts through a variety of relations and resemblances and completes the pineapple on the table (foreshadowing “The Planet on the Table,” CPP 450) by acknowledging its complexity and the verdant excess of its fruition. The second poem, “Of Ideal Time and Choice,” explores the construction of time, an abstraction that we take into ourselves to find the resemblance that makes it real. “Three Academic Pieces” is Stevens’ most concerted venture into phenomenology, and is roughly contemporaneous with Gaston Bachelard’s studies of the phenomena of earth, air, dreams, water, and reverie. Stevens knew Bachelard’s work well, and he demonstrates in this essay a particular affinity with Bachelard’s sensitivity to the interplay of matter and mind in ordering the world of objects and sensations. Of the remaining four essays, “Imagination as Value” is probably the most important. After an interesting description of Pascal’s uneasy relations with the imagination, Stevens claims that “the imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things; but if this constitutes a certain single characteristic, it is the source not of a certain single value but of as many values as reside in the possibilities of things” (CPP 726). This is both a thesis and the statement of a problem. After quoting Ernst Cassirer’s Essay on Man in order to contest his claim that romantic thought is metaphysics, Stevens notes that imagination means different things to philosophers and poets: “Imagination, as metaphysics, leads us in one direction and, as art, in another” (CPP 726). He then dismisses the romantic notion of the imagination (although we might find him congruent with it) by claiming that it is belittling. However, Stevens may mean “romantic” in a sense other than the one that refers to Coleridge, the great theorist of the imagination, and may be confining himself to challenging Cassirer’s contention that “’In romantic thought the theory of poetic imagination has reached its climax. Imagination is no longer that special human activity which builds up the human world of art. It now has universal metaphysical value’” (CPP 726). It is easy to see why Stevens would reject that notion. One could argue that The Necessary Angel, as a whole, represents a further and richer development of the romantic and expressive theory of poetry, one beyond Cassirer’s comprehension. Stevens then raises the issue of Freud’s possible response to the idea of the imagination as “the clue to reality.” Freud’s idea of human development (a process he believes is hindered by religious and sexual inhibitions) challenges the primacy of the imagination. Stevens, though, suggests that the imagination may be the means of overcoming these inhibitions by developing a “science of illusion,” which presumably would expose and render them harmless. He claims that “deliberate fictions” (imaginative abstractions) may be the basis of such a future science. Stevens then acknowledges that the complexity of the relationship among reason, imagination, and reality lies beyond the scope of his discussion, but argues that this does not preclude him from perceiving and condemning abuses of that relationship. Although there are “different imaginations,” including “the imagination of evil,” the poetic imagination, in the end, because we “live in the mind,” epitomizes the imagination at its most valuable (CPP 728-729). Imagination “is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos” (CPP 737). The imagination does this by preceding reason in thought and experience, so that the avant-garde in literature (Rimbaud is an example) directs us to normalize and absorb the previously abnormal into a modified and enlarged world. While “The Relations of Poetry and Painting,” which argues that a search for humanist ideas of truth and knowledge unites these two different kinds of art, “Effects of Analogy,” which explores the link between image and psychological states, and “About One of Marianne Moore’s Poems,” which distinguishes reality from facts, deserve full consideration, we must stop here and review the main points of Stevens’ poetics. In his essays, Stevens argues that poetry derives from personality, that metaphor inheres in the universal nature of things, that negotiation between reality and the imagination respects both, and that reality is the basis of poetry, but mediated by the imagination. This is a romantic-expressive poetics that extends and develops ideas about poetry founded in the work of Coleridge, Schlegel, Hegel, and Kant. It is generous enough to accommodate a social function for poetry, on the one hand, and a delicate sense of spiritual (though not necessarily religious) presence, on the other. The Necessary Angel not only illuminates his own poetic practice but generates aesthetic principles that apply to much of the poetry produced in the western world at least since the Enlightenment. Works Cited Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Ed. James Engel and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. Vol. 1. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. NY: Harcourt, 1975. Pound, Ezra. The Spirit of Romance. NY: New Directions, 1969. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. NY: Library of America, 1997. ----. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. NY: Knopf, 1966. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 13