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The Transition from Harmonium: Factors in the Development of Stevens' Later Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
Stevens' literary correspondence discloses some of the factors that determine the character of his later poetry. These formative elements are his changing concept of the ideal nature of poetry, his habits of work, his tendency to think inductively. Before 1930 Stevens was an advocate of the doctrine of “pure poetry,” but later became interested in the function of thought in poetry. Answering the questions of his critics, he pondered the significance of images and figures in his poems. His discussion of some of these figures shows an inherent tendency to expand them into universale. The pressure of business limited the amount of time Stevens felt he could devote to a poem. He did not build his poems from verbal elements or textual modification. He created from a preliminary meditation and depended for wording on his genius for improvisation. The meditations out of which his poems emerged could be more or less philosophical, or as slight as the evocation of a sense of place. Whatever thought prompted a poem Stevens wished that poem to be a complete idiomatic expression of it.
- Type
- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973
References
1 Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966); hereafter cited as Letters.
2 Stevens disclosed that theory elicited practice. Brushing aside a question about his theory of literature, he said, “One has a theory for each poem; I dare say that, in the long run, they all fit together” (Letters, p. 320).
3 First published in the Kenyon Review, Spring 1943.
4 Joseph N. Riddel in The Clairvoyant Eye (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1965) discusses some of Stevens' special uses of the term “pure poetry.” He not only quotes from “The Irrational Element in Poetry” but also from a statement by Stevens that appeared on the dust jacket of Ideas of Order. Stevens speaks of the poems in this book as being void of any economic, political, or social theory and hence as “pure poetry.” However, he did describe the ideas of two of the poems—ideas that were incipiently philosophical.
5 “The Irrational Element in Poetry” was a lecture delivered at Harvard in Dec. 1936, and published in Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Knopf, 1957).
6 A lecture delivered at the Univ. of Chicago in Nov. 1951 and published in Opus Posthumous.
7 Letters, p. 354. The image was very much in Stevens' mind at this time (1940); for the next year “Poem with Rhythms” appeared in Parts of a World. In the poem, the mind casts a shadow in space that is the conception of the world for a man sitting enclosed in a room, or the shadow is the thought and feeling of a woman waiting for her beloved.
The mind between this light or that and space, (This man in a room with an image of the world, That woman waiting for the man she loves,) Grows large against space: There the man sees the image clearly at last. There the woman receives her lover into her heart And weeps on his breast, though he never comes.
8 Bergson distinguished idea from object in that idea was without weight and mass, “being nothing more than the shadow of a body.” The Creative Mind, trans. Maybelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 167.
9 The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 94; hereafter cited as Poems.
10 Letters, p. 844. See also p. 641.
11 Letters, p. 533. See also p. 294. “A most attractive idea to me is the idea that we are all the merest biological mechanisms. If so, the relationship of origin is what I have just referred to as unity of nature.”
12 In a letter to Latimer, Stevens observed that objective idealism seemed a mode of thought that he could easily adopt. “The real world seen by an imaginative man may very well seem like an imaginative construction” (Letters, p. 289).