The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Wallace
Stevens needs to be read in isolation. His poetry makes little sense in
conjunction with anyone else's. Like many people, I was baffled when I first
read his poems in high-school anthologies: "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" sounded
like antique mumbo jumbo in comparison with the up-to-the-minute adolescent
angst of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Only when I began to read the
1954 Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens did I come to terms with him.
Stevens eludes the anthologists because no one poem is the great one. It's the
total book that counts. You can pick up the new Library of America edition,
turn to any page, and sink yourself into the unconditional, unfootnotable
splendor of the voice. I am not sure if this edition is the ideal packaging of
Stevens, even though it includes more of his work than any previous collection
did. It may include too much--the words look smaller, the margins thinner. For
a writer as worshipful of words as Stevens, these slight differences
matter.
Stevens' rough chronological equivalence with Joyce and
Eliot has created a mistaken notion that his poems are rich in complexity.
Blessedly, they are not. Stevens offers a double liberation: first from
meaning, then from modernist meaninglessness. His world is separate,
immaculate. You do not need a Dublin map or a German phrase book to travel in
it. Academic interpreters have failed to meet the challenge posed by Helen
Vendler in her landmark study On Extended Wings --to give up the search
for intellectual subject matter and to treat Stevens as "pure sound." Vendler
herself sometimes fails to meet that standard. She offers ingenious paraphrases
and elaborations, but she imposes a false order on a genially chaotic world.
She looks for process and argument in a poet who excels at sudden revelations
in miniature. She and others have also promoted the idea that the greatest
Stevens is to be found in his ambitious long poems. But it is in those
poems--"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and "An Ordinary Evening in New
Haven"--that his language is driest, his images dullest. Stevens came closer to
the Supreme Fiction in short forms, in fragments.
Rather
than try to launch a new exegesis, I want to name a few simple technical
devices with which Stevens makes his verbal music. More often than not, he
writes in iambic pentameter, the antiquated base rhythm of English poetry. Take
the famous opening line of "The Idea of Order at Key West": "She sang beyond
the genius of the sea." (Click for a longer sample.) He chooses the sounds with
great care. In this line, the vowels almost rhyme: "ee ah, ee aw, eh ee, yuh
oh, eh ee." Only two words have more than one syllable: Stevens follows to
extremes the old schoolhouse rule that short words work better than long ones.
Like Shakespeare, he loved the heave and ho of a line in which each beat has
its own word. (A lot of classic oratory also relies on monosyllables: "The only
thing we have to fear is fear itself"; "Ask not what your country can do for
you.") In Stevens, monosyllables run riot, sometimes saturating several
consecutive lines, as in the vertiginously beautiful climax of "Esthétique
du Mal ." (Click .)
"The Idea of Order" culminates in another
highly monosyllabic line: "And when she sang, the sea,/ Whatever self it had,
became the self/ that was her song, for she was the maker." But as the language
grows ever more chiseled and incisive, the picture grows more vague. That woman
singing on the beach is dissolving into abstraction. It seems as though some
principle is being preached. At this point, if you read the poem in high school
or college, you may remember deadly questions intruding from the poetry
anthologies: "Does the sea represent language? Is the woman the poet?" Any
question about meaning in Stevens, whether well or badly formed, ruins the
trance. His words are a dream melody of language, bells from nowhere. You can
hear as much in tapes of Stevens reading aloud; he is so intent on keeping an
even, magisterial tone that he occasionally loses himself in the convoluted
syntax on which Vendler expends such analytic energy. Stevens fashioned a new
oratory free of meaning; he wrote a surreal, agnostic King James Bible culled
from dilettante philosophy, dated chinoiserie, and picture-postcard
Americana.
Stevens' grandeur is an inch
away from absurdity, if not in the thick of it. This is by intention. He liked
to deflate solemnity with silliness. His humor is his least noticed attribute,
probably because it is so widespread. Even his titles--"The Revolutionists Stop
for Orangeade," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"--undercut their own pomposity.
Sometimes I think Stevens was a collegiate prankster who never gave away the
joke he played on literature. He comes close in some of the offbeat writings
that appear toward the end of the Library of America edition--especially in
such nonsense aphorisms as "A poem is a cafe," "A poem is a pheasant," and "All
men are murderers." More than a few of the poems, I think, are self-parodies,
although it's hard to say which. (A good candidate is "Of Hartford in a Purple
Light": "A long time you have been making the trip/ From Havre to Hartford,
Master Soleil,/ Bringing the lights of Norway and all that.") Stevens, securely
employed for much of his adult life by the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co.,
could afford to laugh aloud at the pretensions of the poetry business.
The
closeness of the sublime and the ridiculous, of the daft and the grand, is
central to Stevens. The poem that sets it out most clearly is "The Man on the
Dump," in which he writes: "One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail./ One
beats and beats for that which one believes." The monosyllables are the meaning
of the poem--the acting-out of a literary philosophy, which is to hammer new
beauty from well-worn words and modern bric-a-brac. The poem goes on to ask
these questions about the poet's task:
Is it
to sit among mattresses of the dead,Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur
aptest
eve ;Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and
say Invisible
priest ; is it to eject, to pullThe day to pieces and
cry stanza my stone?
Yes it is; this is what poetry is. But Stevens frames his
manifesto in questions, as if uncertain. I think he's pointing up a
contradiction. The poetry that he imagines being murmured on the dump--"aptest
eve," "invisible priest," "stanza my stone"--is not in itself distinguished; by
intention, it's a bit ridiculous. The sublimity comes in the way those
fragments of a Romantic vision glide together with artifacts of
ordinariness--bottles, pots, shoes, grass. The poem performs its theme; it is
self-sufficient, it runs on its own power.
It is the purity of Stevens'
language that makes the Library of America edition--edited by Frank Kermode and
Joan Richardson--seem a bit "off." Not only do the poems look better in the
Collected Poems (which, to be sure, omits great ones early and late);
they are also unencumbered by comparison with the "uncollected poems," which
include a lot of mystifying mediocrity. It's good to have all the poems in one
place, and also the published prose and a smattering of letters. But it's also
distracting and, occasionally, misleading. You can't find the real Stevens
voice in the early poems, but you can find it in early letters not printed
here. In one, the teen-age Stevens writes a dead-on Stevensian description of a
motley village band--"the piping of flamboyant flutes, the wriggling of
shrieking fifes with rasping dagger-voices, the sighing of bass-viols, drums
that beat and rattle, the crescendo of cracked trombones." Eight years later,
the young man writes flamboyantly to his fiancee, "I believe that with a bucket
of sand and a wishing lamp I could create a world in half a second that would
make this one look like a hunk of mud." For all its omissions, Collected
Poems is the better picture of that awesome world.
