I have been thinking a lot about Wallace Stevens recently. It is hard to pick favourites when you study literature, but I'm going to go ahead and say that Wallace Stevens is right up there on my list. I find his poetry beautiful and moving, in part because of its unapologetically ambitious desire to get as close to the centre of a thing as language will allow, and also partly because of the obvious joy he takes in doing so.
Wallace Stevens wrote that ‘Realism is a corruption of reality.’ In Stevens’ poetry we find an interesting dynamic between what is real and what is realistic. To describe the sea as being ‘like a body wholly body, fluttering its empty sleeves’ may not be considered the most accurate description of what we see, but Stevens argues that metaphor is simply an additional dimension of observation that the writer uses to communicate the reality of the situation. In this poem,
The Idea of Order at Key West, what is real, what is being described, is much more than a scene the eye would witness (a girl walking by the sea). Reality is far more complex than mere observation. In the poem reality is changed by the intellectual and emotional responses of the girl, the speaker, even the enigmatic Ramon Fernandez. Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘Do we not begin to think of the possibility that poetry is only reality, after all, and that poetic truth is a factual truth, seen, it may be, by those whose range in the perception of fact – that is, whose sensibility – is greater than our own’. The poet’s way of seeing constitutes a part of their self, of their own sensibility in a way that is natural and beyond control. In an essay on the irrational nature of poetry, Stevens expresses a belief that ‘Poets continue to be born not made’ and that a poet expresses his or herself through the medium of poetry because that is the form their sensibility takes. All experience is subjective, and the fact of poetry is the same as the fact of reality. The sea may be blue, and the sun yellow, but the images Stevens uses to describe that which is visible to us do not disagree with that, they simply enhance our understanding of what he sees by describing what we see through a filter of poetic sensibility.
In his ‘Adagia’, Stevens writes, ‘perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.’
In Stevens’ poetry, then, the distinction between what is happening internally and what exists externally becomes immaterial. The subject and object within Stevens’ work somehow create one another, almost that their existence is mutually dependent. Of reality Steven Shaviro writes, “desire at once actively produces and passively encounters the real. Reality is a fiction, but so is the author of the fiction.” The use of the word ‘author’ is interesting because it relates closely to several ideas in The Idea of Order of at Key West. For example:
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
In this extract from the poem we see the singer (or author) as the ‘maker’ and we also see that the ‘self’ mentioned is not hers, but belongs to the sea. Interestingly, this self and the self of her song- a self which must on some level belong to the human singer- mingle to become one. One gets the impression of a cyclical quality to the poem that echoes Stevens’ idea of what writing should be. The artist creates the world they represent, in which they create art. Stevens is forced to break through the barriers of the external versus the internal and present us with a world less interested in compartmentalising experience. Reality, it seems, is not created by the subject, neither is it something that exists to which the subject conforms and so to write realistically is to create reality.
The Idea of Order at Key West explores the line between art and reality in another interesting way; through the exploration of language. Emerson wrote, rather beautifully, that ‘The poet is the Namer or Language-maker. Naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets made all the words[...] Language is fossil poetry.’ And The Idea of Order at Key West seems to glory in this idea. Stevens himself wrote that ‘the word must be the thing it represents otherwise it is a symbol. It is a question of identity.’To name an object is for the object to become that name. There must be no difference between the two. Sometimes this fusion of identity is impossible, and Stevens examines the futility of language in the poem’s second stanza:
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
Again, we see Stevens struggle with the internal versus the external. If the singer sings of the sea then what she sings cannot be ‘medleyed sound’ because the singer will always sing in words and not the language of the sea itself. In this metaphor Stevens expresses his own frustration with the limits of language, the idea that the sounds of the sea and the wind can only ‘stir’ in the song and not be fully present there echoes the poet’s struggle to externalise on the page the internal image they long to communicate.
Gaston Bachelard writes that ‘Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere, we are dreaming in a world that is immense.’ Here the conflict lies in the idea that when we are stationary and solitary, the space we are in expands immeasurably. This immense world is the world of the artist; it is perhaps what Stevens means when he says a poet has a sensibility ‘greater than our own.’
Stevens’ poem
The Snow Man is another excellent example of the importance of spaces. In it the speaker claims that
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow...
Here language is once more elusive. Rather than capturing the external scene of winter, Stevens has projected words and images associated with it onto the speaker of the poem himself. To suggest the possibility of having a ‘mind of winter’ is to make a bold statement because the reader is forced to remove the barrier between subject and object, allowing both the mind and winter to exist as one entity. The poem continues to say that one must have a mind such as this and
Have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind
The negative ‘not to think’ gives the poem a sense of longing. The speaker wishes to have a ‘mind of winter’ in order to appreciate the scene around him without sorrowful connotations. Stevens’ Snow Man represents the artist who cannot experience his surroundings without emotional experience clouding everything he surveys. The poem is complicated by the desire to relinquish these emotional responses in favour of becoming ‘cold’ – despite the fact this is not a typically desirable quality. Sharon Cameron writes of the speaker that, “Could he rid himself of all human characteristics, become transparent, he might see the world as it is, mirror it. Instead he makes the world transparent, a creation in his own image.” This idea is interesting because it implies that Stevens’ speaker cannot establish a clear sense of meaning for himself. For Cameron the things that prevent this clarity are ‘human characteristics’, and so we have the added complication wherein the subject projects his emotions onto the external world with such a force that it begins to mirror him, similar to the situation in The Idea of Order at Key West.
For Simon Critchley, ‘winter is the season of hard reality, of the world contracted into the absence of imagination, where the human subject is powerless before an oppressive, violent and indifferent reality.’The speaker of the poem is confronted by this hard reality when he, ‘nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’Stevens’ ‘nothing’ then, cannot be an absence – or at least not entirely- for this nothing can either be or not be, and in order for that to be true the ‘nothing’ must be a ‘something’. The speaker is ‘nothing himself’, but we know that he exists and has a complex internal dialogue. Bachelard writes in his Poetics of Space that ‘The dialects of the house and the universe are too simple, and snow, especially, reduces the exterior world to nothing rather too easily.’ This reduction is temporary, beneath the snow is the same welcoming space that was once there, the same fertile land of imagination. Bachelard goes on to say that ‘in the outside world snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound, conceals all colors. As a result of this universal whiteness, we feel a form of cosmic negation in action.’And here we see Stevens’ point. If one were to have a mind of winter, to become winter – ‘a listener in the snow’- then he would be part of this great negation, he truly would be nothing, devoid of any imaginative feeling, and beholding nothing. But this nothing is simply a concealment. The imagination allows you to see what lies beneath the snow, and although for the Snow Man this experience is one of ‘misery’ it is nonetheless real and impossible to cast off.
Issues of subject and object and an internal versus external consciousness raise many questions for Stevens. The way in which he writes so intimately about spaces helps us to understand this fascination, and in an extension of Stevens’ ideas of the ‘poetic fact’ we begin to see that for The Snow Man , the internal and external worlds can interact and be felt simultaneously, both co-existing bodily. What I find interesting is the struggle that Stevens faced in searching for a purity of language and form which would most effectively convey his true meanings to the reader. This search is one without an end. The girl will never be able to sing the sounds of the sea just as the writer is never able to entirely eliminate the distance between their mind and our own. While this collective consciousness is not fully reached, can not be fully reached, Wallace Stevens produced moving and beautiful work that comes as close to touching our own imaginative sensibilities as any can.
