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CHAPTER 1

NOTATIONS OF THE WILD

Wallace Stevens was born in 1879, a time in America, and in the West generally, when the religion in which one was reared provided guidance about how to live, what to do. Between that moment and his death in 1955, the world changed dramatically — Stevens's life span was exactly the same as Albert Einstein's, and he came into his maturity as a poet in the years just after Einstein's discoveries. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, as the dust from the explosion of Charles Darwin's discoveries began to settle, disruptions in addition to Einstein's revelations disturbed both our sense of what it is to be human and our understanding of the nature of physical reality. Everything, in Stevens's words, was set "hissing and spinning." He described it as follows to those gathered at the University of Chicago on November 16, 1951, to hear his Moody Lecture, "A Collect of Philosophy":

The material world, for all the assurances of the eye, has become immaterial. It has become an image in the mind. The solid earth disappears and the whole atmosphere is subtilized not by the arrival of some venerable beam of light from an almost hypothetical star but by a breach of reality. What we see is not an external world but an image of it and hence an internal world. (CPP 857)

A few months earlier, in April, he had delivered another lecture, titled simply "Two or Three Ideas," to the members of the College English Association at its annual meeting at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He offered a moving description of the condition in which the creatures of our culture found themselves in the wake of the wonderful but terrifying discoveries of the modern world:

To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing. Since we have always shared all things with them and have always had a part of their strength and, certainly, all of their knowledge, we shared likewise this experience of annihilation. It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure we, too, had been annihilated. It left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness. What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or of the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. They were not forgotten because they had been a part of the glory of the earth. At the same time, no man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the nonparticipant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed; and whether it was so or merely seemed so still left it for him to resolve life and the world in his own terms.

Stevens then specified the subject of his address: "To speak of the origin and the end of gods is not a light matter. It is to speak of the origin and end of eras of human belief. ... In an age of disbelief ... it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief, in his manner and in his style. ... It is," he announced, "a spiritual role" (CPP 842).

Throughout his career Stevens would offer "notations of the wild, the ruinous waste," but would consistently underscore the salvific power of the imagination in the face of the actual: "the violence from within that protects us from the violence without." In a late letter to a friend about the years he spent at Harvard (as a special student from 1897 to 1900), he commented that what William James had called the "will to believe" in the face of the ever increasing "wild facts"— another of James's phrasings — hung over everything. Knowing that will in himself, Stevens created his "fluent mundo," in which all of us who are his readers come to experience at least "momentary existence on an exquisite plane."

As Stevens stated so clearly, in such an uncertain time — extending even more tensively into our own — it is the role of the poet to offer guidance about "how to live, what to do" (the title of a poem from Ideas of Order, 1936), a function that had been provided for earlier generations by the Bible and its ministers. Stevens took on this responsibility. In doing so he was following examples he himself had learned from and valued. Significantly, one set of models was drawn from the West, and the other from the East.

From the West, Stevens was deeply indebted to the British and other European romantic and later symbolist poets, all of whom prized inner vision in its intimate relation with nature. He was intent on having his corpus, Collected Poems, serve as a secular bible, a "world-book" in the manner of Novalis and of Friedrich Schlegel, who wrote, "For my own part, the goal of my literary projects is to write a new Bible," to explicate nature and human beings' place in it. This aspiration was shared by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose work Stevens began reading early in his life. His mother presented the young poet with the twelve-volume Houghton edition (1896–1898) of Emerson's Works for Christmas in 1898; Stevens marked many of the essays and incorporated innumerable phrases and references from Emerson into his own poetic vocabulary. (These volumes, which the poet kept throughout his life, now belong to the Wallace Stevens Collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.) In concluding the final essay of Representative Men (1850), "Goethe; or, The Writer," Emerson exhorted, "We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world." Stevens took this incitement to heart and mind.

It was Emerson as well who first opened for Stevens the doors to the East, not only to the ancient Sacred Books of The East, a fifty-volume set of English translations of Asian religious writings filled with hymns to nature, but also to their dissemination in later forms through Buddhism. "The Buddhist," Emerson observed, "is a Transcendentalist." At the close of his Divinity School Address (delivered to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School in 1838), Emerson enjoined the following:

I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.

Stevens answered this call.

Incorporating the idea of the "world-book" and Stéphane Mallarmé's later iteration in the form of "le Grand Oeuvre" (the Great, or Grand, Work), Stevens wanted to title his own final collection "The Whole of Harmonium: The Grand Poem." (To the poet's regret, his publisher, Alfred Knopf, persuaded him that the simpler, more direct Collected Poems made better marketing sense.) In selecting the poems for this last and lasting volume, Stevens remembered another lesson he had learned along the way from the East. There was keen interest in all things Asian at Harvard during Stevens's time as a student: there had been the opening of Japan to the West in midcentury; the current news of the Boxer Rebellion in China; Ernest Fenollosa's contributions to the Oriental Collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; and increasing scholarly work branching from F. Max Müller's translations of Sanskrit texts and Japanese Buddhist tracts. (Later in his life Stevens referred to Müller as the foremost Orientalist of his day — before the term became politically incorrect — and indicated that he shared the excitement about his work, as Emerson had earlier.) Also among Stevens's cohort while an undergraduate were Arthur Davison Fiske and Witter Bynner; the three were immersed in discovering as much as they could about the art and literature of China and Japan, and Stevens developed an enduring friendship with Bynner. Pursuing this interest, Bynner eventually made two extended visits to the East: to Japan and China in 1917, and to China again for almost a year in 1921. During the 1920s Bynner collaborated on translations of Lao-tzu and of a major Chinese anthology; the latter was published in 1929 under the title The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology (Being Three Hundred Poems of the T'ang Dynasty, 618–906).

As Stevens shaped his personal anthology, the volume that would "take the place of a mountain"— an integral part of the "intelligence of his soil" — he recalled what he had read years earlier concerning what the "old Chinese" considered the perfect anthology. From Bynner and Kiang Kang-Hu's introduction to The Jade Mountain, he learned that the Chinese believed that approximately three hundred poems constitute the ideal number for an anthology. This was based on the old saying that "By reading thoroughly three hundred T'ang poems, one will write verse without learning." Such a volume was an integral part of any Chinese household — like the Bible in traditional American homes — and was to be read from every day in an ongoing attempt to harmonize human experience with the tremors and constantly demanding changes of nature. The perfect Chinese anthology was thought of as a secular sacred book. To those family members who could not read, the poems were read aloud. Stevens's memories of his mother's voice intoning phrases of Bible stories while he and his siblings prepared for bed — it was her habit to read a chapter from the Bible to them every night — mixed with his recollection of this bit of Chinese cultural history. His Collected Poems number 301. (It should be noted, too, that for the Chinese the preferred total number was to be odd: 301, 305, or 311, for instance.)

By thoroughly reading Stevens's 301 poems through the cycle of the seasons, year after year, one can come to write verse without learning: his Collected Poems is a script for a human, not a divine, comedy. His project, "the cosmic poem of the ascent into heaven" (CPP 859), was to include all he could understand in his lifetime, not only from his direct contact with nature but also from what he read about developments in science and the philosophical traditions of West and East. Thinking about thinking as it responded to and traced through history our "bond to all that dust" in the "imperfect [that] is our paradise" would, he hoped, demonstrate "the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart."

CHAPTER 2

ADEQUATE TO THIS GREAT HYMN

The most formative and enduring of the experiences framing "the compass and curriculum" of Stevens's poetry began, as it were, at his mother's knee, hearing her voice carrying the cadences of the King James Bible as he prepared for bed and then lulling him into sleep. Later in his life, while a student at Harvard and afterward making his way in New York City, he often commented in his journal and in letters to Elsie Moll, his future wife, on his still "hankering after hymns" even as his faith diminished: "The feeling of piety is very dear to me. I would sacrifice a great deal to be a Saint Augustine but modernity is so Chicagoan, so plain, so unmeditative"; "I wish that groves still were sacred — or, at least, that something was. ... I grow tired of the want of faith — the instinct of faith" (L 32, 86). He was particularly involved with Psalms, as evidenced by his markings in the copy of the Bible he kept into his maturity (also part of the Wallace Stevens Collection at the Huntington Library). Of the 73 (of a total of 150) psalms attributed to King David, 13 relate specifically to incidents in the king's life, and in the King James translation his prayer is called a cry. "The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it," Stevens offers in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven."

Between the pages of his Bible, in Psalms, Stevens laid a newspaper clipping (undated) that suggests how to read the thirty-one chapters of Proverbs, the book that follows Psalms: read one a day, and "at the end of the month you will be surprised to find how many problems of right and wrong have been solved for you." There is no evidence that Stevens practiced this exercise, but he seems to have adapted the suggestion to fashion his own breviary drawn from the Psalms. He circled the numbers of verses in many, underlined certain other verses, and in some cases indicated entire psalms, adding circlings, checkmarks, and underlinings. He quoted from Psalm 19 to Elsie in a letter: "Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge." Above Psalm 100, "A Psalm of Praise," Stevens wrote, "An exhortation to praise God cheerfully."

That the letter C is the roman numeral for the arabic number 100 seems, given Stevens's notation, to be one of the hints surrounding the naming of "The Comedian as the Letter C." On the inside back cover of one of his notebooks — the last entry, dated January 10, 1901 — Stevens copied verse 19 from the gimel section of Psalm 119: "I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me." Gimel is the third letter of the Hebrew alphabet, equivalent to the English G but corresponding in Latin to both C and G; it is used as a subheading in the King James translation of Psalm 119 as a reminder that each of the verses in this section — a stanza in Hebrew — begins with the letter gimel. There are twenty-two stanzas in this psalm, an alphabetical acrostic in which each stanza consists of eight lines all beginning with the same Hebrew letter; the twenty-two stanzas use all twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet sequentially in an extended paean to God's law. The elaborate play on and with the sounds of letters and words was not lost on the poet in his later persona as "The Comedian." Stevens would also have known that the Greek root of the word "psalm," psallo, is a verb meaning "to pluck, to play a stringed instrument"; his "Man with the Blue Guitar" is an avatar of David.

Concentrated, intense attention characterizes prayer in all its forms, from voicing desolation and calling for solace to expanding the spirit into a sacrament of praise for mere being — as Emerson offered in Nature (1836), "Is not prayer also ... a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite?" Throughout his career as a poet, Stevens stretched his early expressed wish that something remain sacred into a habit of mind that uncovered the miraculous in the ordinary or, perhaps better, revealed the ordinary to be miraculous — in this again recalling a lesson learned from Emerson: "The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common." In "quiz[zing] all sounds, all thoughts, all everything," in what he called the "exquisite environment of fact," including the fact of his own thinking, Stevens also affiliated himself with an earlier priest of the invisible whose spirit continued to inhabit the Connecticut Valley: Jonathan Edwards. Edwards described God as "a communicating being" whose disclosures are revealed to us through our giving close "attention of the mind in thinking." This exercise was, for Edwards, the purest form of piety, requiring what he described as "being's consent to Being," an activity demanding repeated renewal, the persistent turning and returning of attention to an aspect of creation until it yielded the secret of its place and purpose. Consent, for Edwards, carried its full etymological weight as "feeling with"— feeling with what he described as the "sense of the heart," an additional sense to our usual five, activated by recognizing what he particularized as the "excitement" pulsating in our various responses to this or that "part or particle of God," in Emerson's later phrasing.

It is in this kind of engagement that we and the world around us come to tremble in transparencies of recognition. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's observations concerning the integral connection between breathing and forms of prayer, a scholar of the phenomenology of prayer has noted that "there is an infinity of ... modalities" of feeling in experience, "changes in the time, texture, space, and rest, or articulation of silence, sound, and movement that are constantly changing in relation to the external and internal environments of the psyche and soma." Stevens came to excel in closely attending to and scoring his arc of being within this infinity.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "How to Live, What to Do"
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