Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic
Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic
Also available by Bart Eeckhout
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY: The Function of Literary Sociology in Comparative
Literature (co-edited with Bart Keunen)POST EX SUB DIS: Urban Fragmentations and Constructions (co-edited with the Ghent
Urban Studies Team)THE URBAN CONDITION: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary
Metropolis (co-authored and co-edited with the Ghent Urban Studies Team)WALLACE STEVENS AND THE LIMITS OF READING AND WRITING
Also available by Edward Ragg
THE QUESTION OF ABSTRACTION: Wallace Stevens’ Poetry and Prose (forthcoming)
Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic Edited by Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg With a Preface by Frank Kermode
Uitgegeven met steun van de Universitaire Stichting van België Published with support of the University Foundation of Belgium Editorial matter and selection © the editors 2008 Individual chapters © the contributors 2008 Preface © Frank Kermode 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.® Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.
ISBN-13: 978--0--230--53584--8 hardback
ISBN-10: 0--230--53584--4 hardback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic : edited by Bart Eeckhout & EdwardRagg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-230-53584-4 (alk. paper) 1. Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Criticism and interpretation. 2.
Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Appreciation Europe. 3. Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Appreciation Europe. 4. Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Influence. 5. Modernism (Literature) I. Eeckhout, Bart, 1964 II. Ragg, Edward, 1976
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08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Contents List of Illustrations
vii
2 Stevens in Connecticut (and Denmark)
95 Justin Quinn 7 ‘The strange unlike’: Stevens’ Poetics of Resemblance 107
6 Early Christianity in Late Stevens
79 Krzysztof Ziarek
61 Charles Altieri 5 ‘Without human meaning’: Stevens, Heidegger and the Foreignness of Poetry
4 Stevens and the Crisis of European Philosophy
59
59 A PHILOSOPHICAL CONVERSATIONS
Part II Beyond Staten Island: Stevens in Transatlantic Conversation
41 Robert Rehder
3 Stevens’ Europe: Delicate Clinkings and Total Grandeur
23 J. Hillis Miller
13 George Lensing
Notes on Contributors
1 ‘The Switzerland of the Mind’: Stevens’ Invention of Europe
11
Part I Descriptions without Place: Ideas of Europe in Stevens
1 Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg
xv Introduction: The Lights of Norway and All That
Preface by Frank Kermode
xiii
List of Abbreviations
xi
Acknowledgements
viii
Josh Cohen vi Contents
B ARTISTIC CONVERSATIONS 119
8 Stevens, Duchamp and the American ‘ism’, 1915–1919 121
David Haglund
9 Picasso, Cézanne and Stevens’ Abstract Engagements 133
Edward Ragg
10 Music and the Vocal Poetics of Stevens and Valéry 151
Lisa Goldfarb
Part III Getting It Straight at the Sorbonne? Stevens’ Afterlife in Europe 163
11 Nicholas Moore, Stevens and the Fortune Press 165
Mark Ford
12 A Ghost Never Exorcized: Stevens in the Poetry of Charles Tomlinson
186
Gareth Reeves
13 A Poetics of Ignorance: António Ramos Rosa and Wallace Stevens
204
Irene Ramalho Santos
14 Reading Stevens in Italian 216
Massimo Bacigalupo
Coda: Ode to a Colossal Sun 231
Helga Kos Index
237 List of Illustrations
(Plate section falls between pages 230 and 231 and reproduces images from the artist’s book Ode to the Colossal Sun created by Helga Kos)
1 Volume 1. Title page (printed on an advanced duplicator) 2 Volume 1. Above: Prelude part with CD of ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’.
Below: detail (printed on an advanced duplicator)
3 Volume 1. Above: ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’. Below: detail (linoleum prints with screen-printed main text)
4 Volume 2. Above: opened at ‘A Child Asleep in Its Own Life’ and Volume 3 opened at ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’. Below: Volume 2 opened at ‘The Dove in Spring’ and Volume 3 opened at ‘Of Mere Being’ (mixed printing techniques)
5 Volume 3. Above: ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’. Below: detail (mixed printing techniques)
6 Volume 2. Above: ‘The Planet on the Table’. Below: detail (printed in off-set from hand-painted plates)
7 Volume 3. ‘Of Mere Being’ (laser prints in combination with screen print)
Notes on Contributors
Charles Altieri, Stageberg Professor of English, University of California,
Berkeley, is the author of ten books, including Self and Sensibility in Contempo-
rary American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1984), Painterly Abstraction
in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Canons
and Consequences (Northwestern University Press, 1990), Postmodernisms
Now (Penn State University Press, 1998), The Particulars of Rapture (Cornell
University Press, 2003) and The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Mod- ernism and After (Blackwell, 2006).
Massimo Bacigalupo, Professor of American Literature and of Literary Trans-
lation, University of Genoa, is the author of The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry
of Ezra Pound (Columbia University Press, 1980) and Grotta Byron (Cam-
panotto, 2001), and an award-winning translator of Stevens, Pound and Wordsworth, among others. He contributed a paper on ‘The Mediterranean in Pound, Yeats, and Stevens’ to Anglo-American Modernity and the Mediter-
ranean, ed. Caroline Patey et al. (Università di Milano, 2006).
Josh Cohen is Reader in English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths
College, University of London and is the author of Spectacular Allegories: Post-
modern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (Pluto, 1998), Interrupting
Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (Continuum, 2003) and How to Read Freud
(Granta, 2005). In July 2004 he organized a symposium on Stevens at the University of London.
Bart Eeckhout is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at
the University of Antwerp. He is the author of Wallace Stevens and the Limits
of Reading and Writing (University of Missouri Press, 2002) and has guest-
edited two special issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal (Fall 2001 and, with Edward Ragg, Spring 2006), of which he is also an editorial board member. He is a translator of Stevens into Dutch and, with Edward Ragg, co-organized the international conference ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe’ (Rothermere American Institute, August 2005).
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College London. He has
published widely on British, French and American poetry. His publications include Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Faber, 2000; Cornell University Press, 2001), A Driftwood Altar: Reviews and Essays (Waywiser, 2005), and two collections of poetry, Landlocked (Chatto & Windus, 1992, rpt 1998) and Soft Sift (Faber, 2001; Harcourt Brace, 2003).
Notes on Contributors ix
Lisa Goldfarb is the Associate Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized
Study at New York University, and a member of the full-time faculty. She is the author of many articles on Stevens and Valéry (The Wallace Stevens Journal,
The Romanic Review and the Journal of Modern Literature) and is completing a
book entitled ‘The Figure Concealed’: Valéryan Music in the Poetry and Poetics of
Wallace Stevens. She is also preparing an international conference on Stevens
in New York.
David Haglund is completing a DPhil on Stevens at Balliol College, Oxford
University. He has taught at Harvard and Hunter College as well as Oxford, and has published articles and reviews in the London Review of Books, Essays
in Criticism, PN Review, Slate magazine and elsewhere.
Frank Kermode is the author/editor of some forty volumes and one of the
most distinguished critics of our time. In the world of Stevens criticism he is well-known as one of the poet’s earliest champions in Europe, witness his introductory monograph Wallace Stevens (Faber, 1960, rpt 1989), and as joint editor (with Joan Richardson) of Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997).
Helga Kos is a visual artist from Amsterdam. She spent five years (1998–
2003) working on a hand-printed artist’s book, Ode to the Colossal Sun, which was inspired by Ned Rorem’s 1972 song cycle ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’. The book has been exhibited internationally, including displays in Montreal, Buffalo, Leipzig, Paris and Oxford, and was short-listed for the award of ‘Best Book Designs from All Over the World’.
George Lensing, Mann Family Distinguished Professor of English, University
of North Carolina, is the author of Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth (Louisiana State University Press, 1986) and Wallace Stevens and the Seasons (Louisiana State University Press, 2001). He is on the editorial board of The Wallace Stevens Journal, for which he also serves as book review editor.
J. Hillis Miller is Research Professor at the University of California, Irvine and
one of the most influential literary scholars of our time. He holds various hon- orary degrees and is past president of the Modern Language Association of America. Among his long-standing research interests is the poetry of Stevens, about which he has published for more than four decades, from Poets of Real-
ity (Harvard University Press, 1965) over The Linguistic Moment (Princeton
University Press, 1985) to Topographies (Stanford University Press, 1995) and beyond. J. Hillis Miller is the author of more than twenty books, highlights of which have been collected in The J. Hillis Miller Reader (Stanford University Press, 2005). x Notes on Contributors
Justin Quinn, educated at Trinity College Dublin, is Associate Professor
at the Charles University of Prague. He is the author of Gathered Beneath
the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community (University College
Dublin Press, 2002), besides being a poet and poetry translator from the Czech. He is at work on The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000.
Edward Ragg completed his doctorate on Stevens at Cambridge University
in 2005 and teaches at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has published several articles in The Wallace Stevens Journal and is completing a book entitled The
Question of Abstraction: Wallace Stevens’ Poetry and Prose. With Bart Eeckhout
he co-organized the international conference ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe’ (Rothermere American Institute, August 2005); and subsequently guest-edited a special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal (Spring 2006). He has published poetry in Carcanet’s New Poetries IV anthology as well as in PN
Review, Agenda, Critical Quarterly and other international magazines.
Irene Ramalho Santos, Professor of English and American Studies,
University of Coimbra, and International Affiliate, Department of Compar- ative Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of several articles on American poetry (including many on Stevens) and of Atlantic Poets:
Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism (University Press of New
England, 2003; Brazilian edition, Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2007; Portuguese edition, Porto: Afrontamento, 2008).
Gareth Reeves, Reader in English, Durham University, is the author of two
books on Eliot, T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet (Macmillan, 1989) and T. S. Eliot’s
‘The Waste Land’ (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), of Auden, MacNeice, Spender
(Macmillan, 1992; with Michael O’Neill), of two volumes of poetry, Real Sto-
ries (Carcanet, 1984) and Listening In (Carcanet, 1993), and of many essays
on twentienth-century English, Irish and American poetry.
Robert Rehder, Chair of English and American Literature, University of
Fribourg, Switzerland; is the author of Stevens, Williams, Crane and the
Motive for Metaphor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), The Poetry of Wallace Stevens
(Macmillan, 1998) and Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry (Croom Helm, 1981). He is also a poet and has published The Compromises Will Be
Different (Carcanet, 1995). He has published two books of poetry, The Com-
promise Will Be Different (Carcanet, 1995) and First Things When (Carcanet,
2009).
Krzysztof Ziarek, Professor of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
(SUNY), is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness:
Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, Celan (New York State University Press, 1994) and
The Force of Art (Stanford University Press, 2004).Acknowledgements
The roots of the present collaboration stretch back some three years, when we organized what was arguably the first major European conference on Wallace Stevens, entitled Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe (August 2005). We remain deeply grateful to Paul Giles and the staff of The Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, for hosting and sponsoring the intellectually energizing conference that brought several of the authors assembled here together for the first time. What follows, however, are not the published proceedings of that conference, but predominantly new essays that grew, in part, out of the debate initiated at The Rothermere.
Following that event, we were fortunate to publish a number of papers, based on conference presentations, both in The Wallace Stevens Jour-
nal and PN Review (publications that aptly symbolized the Transatlantic
nature of our and our authors’ work). We are much indebted to John N.Serio, who invited us to guest-edit the Spring 2006 issue of The Wallace
Stevens Journal on ‘Stevens and British Literature’, and to Michael Schmidt,
who published three other significant papers derived from the Oxford event in PN Review 169 (May–June 2006). Specifically, we would like to acknowledge the publication of early versions of the essays here by David Haglund and Gareth Reeves in PN Review and The Wallace Stevens Journal respectively.
Further thanks are due to the University Foundation of Belgium for its financial support and its double peer review of the manuscript. The pub- lication grant we have received from the University Foundation has made a significant difference to the appearance of the book, both in enabling us to include illustrations from Helga Kos’s artist’s book and in supporting the reproduction on the cover of Tom King’s early design for our conference poster. Bringing the colour design from Tom King’s Mondrian-inspired depic- tions of Stevens to this project provides a fitting graphic emblem for what we attempt to do here, while Helga Kos’s ingenuity, lovingly reported in the coda to our book, is given added weight by the images accompanying her essay.
We are most happy to thank also our editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy, Christabel Scaife, Steven Hall and Penny Simmons, for their per- sistent help, encouragement and exemplary guidance. Publishing a volume of essays featuring a broad range of international contributors has its own rewards and challenges; and we are particularly appreciative of the exacting criticism and author care we have received. This includes the two anonymous referees who at different stages in the book’s composition process supported our project and provided invaluable feedback. xii Acknowledgements
Lastly, it gives us great pleasure to thank our diverse and distinguished group of contributors for their sustained and invariably professional work in helping us assemble what we hope is not only a significant addition to Stevens criticism, but also an original attempt to redefine the contours of that criticism in a new era of appreciation for Stevens’ work. List of Abbreviations
The following abbreviations for the works of Wallace Stevens are used throughout. As a rule, references to poems and prose are to the Library of America edition edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (abbreviated as CPP). References to earlier editions appear only sparingly for text-intrinsic reasons. Page references are provided for individual poems in the main text only where those poems are discussed in some detail.
CP The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1954.
CPP Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode
and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.
CS The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie.
Ed. J. Donald Blount. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006.
FPof P ‘From Pieces of Paper’. In George S. Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A
Poet’s Growth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,1986. 166–200.
L Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf,
1966; rpt Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.OP 1957 Opus Posthumous. Ed. Samuel French Morse. New York: Knopf,
1957.OP Opus Posthumous. Revised edition. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York:
Knopf, 1989.SP Holly Stevens, Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace
Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1977.SPBS Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujets: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book.
A Facsimile and Transcription. Ed. Milton J. Bates. Stanford: Stanford University Press and Huntington Library, 1989.
This page intentionally left blank Preface Frank Kermode
Since this rich volume is concerned with the impact of Wallace Stevens on Europe, and of Europe on Wallace Stevens, I hope it may be allowed as rele- vant rather than condemned as immodest of me to claim that I introduced the Swiss to Stevens at some date around 1958–60. I had recently made a programme for the BBC, a reading with commentary of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’. The reader was Anthony Jacobs, the best in the business, and we did several such programmes together. It is hard to believe that the BBC would nowadays dream of allowing such highbrow performances. Audi- ences below 50,000 could not be assessed, so we could, if we chose, pretend to believe that there was a silent audience of around 49,000 Stevens enthusi- asts. A few hundred would probably be nearer the truth. Many such wickedly élite programmes were made in those profligate years.
Invited to address a literature seminar in Zurich, I asked if I might speak about Stevens and especially about ‘Notes’. My host, Professor Heinrich Strau- mann, who as a young professor had delivered the University’s oration at James Joyce’s funeral in Zurich, had not heard, or had heard very little, of Stevens, but he was adventurous and encouraged me to go ahead. I took the tapes of the broadcast with me. The students greatly enjoyed the reading, and I still remember the laugh that followed the lines . . . a kind of Swiss perfection comes
And a familiar music of the machine . . . Sets up its Schwärmerei
(CPP 334) I suppose they have subsequently found out more about Stevens’ idea of Switzerland. Back in London, despite encouragement from the likes of Julian Symons and Nicholas Moore (on whom Mark Ford writes so engagingly in
Chapter 11 below) the reputation of Stevens was maturing slowly. There was some opposition; Larkin, increasingly influential himself, thought Stevens ‘not worth mentioning’. Stevens’ admirers were not numerous, but they were devoted and various. My friend John Wain, who as a ‘Movement’ poet and a friend of Larkin might have been expected to have little time for this alien Modernist, knew many poems of Stevens’ by heart. I remember sitting with him in a Reading pub on the day we read of the poet’s death, and being touched by the depth of his grief.
That was in 1955, only two years after Faber at last published the Selected
Poems. That book remains in print, unlike most of Stevens’ books. There was a xvi Preface
rumour that Eliot was lukewarm about Stevens; this is now said, though with- out certainty, to be untrue, but it is certain that his firm has never been very willing to keep Stevens’ other books in print. The Selected doesn’t offer a full view of the poet (imagine Stevens without ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ and ‘The Rock’) but for reasons unknown to me Holly Stevens’ much richer selection, The Palm at the End of the Mind, has never been published in Eng- land, and most readers, unless they can afford the Collected and the updated
Opus Posthumous, are presumably still stuck with the fifty-odd-year-old and
inadequate Selected.In some respects his work has been more cordially received on the Con- tinent, as Massimo Bacigalupo testifies below (another Italian Stevensian, Nadia Fusini, has provided challenging annotated translations in book-form of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ and The Auroras of Autumn). I have a copy of a thesis on Stevens submitted for a doctorate at the University of Cracow in 1971, and no doubt many such essays were written, even in Eastern Europe, even at that time.
Most of my own Stevens collection, which I liked to think probably among the best in England, was destroyed in an accident as I was moving house; but by a happy minor accident inside the greater one my copy of the Alcestis Press
Ideas of Order survived the ordeal, though not in mint condition. Probably it
was, perhaps it is, the only example in England. It was Stevens’ own signed copy, given to me long ago by Holly Stevens. I am wondering who I should leave it to.
Much of Stevens’ poetry derives from a continuing philosophical reverie, which is what he must have had in mind when he spoke of ‘tentative ideas for the purposes of poetry’ (a phrase that, as one may see infra, caught the eye of David Haglund) and it is not surprising that critics are sometimes tempted to approach him obliquely, via another philosopher. Here we are told of a poem that may be read ‘through Blanchot’, and another to be read ‘through Husserl’. Santayana is of course an important presence, and so is Nietzsche, but one ought to consider what may be lost if Stevens is ‘read’ through them. Moreover, Stevens’ reading of philosophy was scant and essentially dilet- tante. For example, he omitted the very simple inquiry that would have informed him whether Heidegger lectured in French or German. In fact, his relationship with Heidegger is still almost as mysterious to me as it was when I tried to sort it out in 1980. I am grateful, therefore, to Charles Altieri and Krzysztof Ziarek for their further elucidations of such philosophical relation- ships in that, unlike some other commentators, they resist the temptation to present the poet as primarily an abstruse philosopher.
There is room for disagreement or debate on these issues, and an important function of this book is to promote discussion. Anyway, I give it as my view, not of course shared by all or perhaps any of the contributors to this splendid book, that Stevens was, in these matters, deeply and properly self-indulgent; to forget this is to run the risk of turning him into another and less interesting
Preface xvii
kind of writer. His meditations bear something of the same relation to formal philosophy that his Europe bears to the real continent – a topic valuably explored in this collection by George Lensing and Robert Rehder.
It does seem, as his daughter Holly remarked, that the poet came to prefer a Europe of his own construction to the real thing. And he seems always to have been convinced that America, and American poetry, had best be distinguished, or isolated, from other anglophone poetic dialects, even from the Irish, though I think he loved Ireland more than England. His epistolary friend Thomas McGreevy, wounded on the Somme in the British cause, was a Catholic Modernist who returned to Ireland from the France of Joyce and Beckett, and the London of T. S. Eliot, and spent his life among the pictures of the Dublin National Gallery – the sort of man Stevens might admire not only for his verses or for the paintings in his charge but for his idiosyncratic style, his individual relationship to Catholic philosophy and to Irish nationalism. I think Stevens had no comparable English friend.
Only the most learned of admirers will fail to be enlightened by the essays that follow. If you have ever wondered how Jerome ‘begat the tubas’, you will find the best explanation in Justin Quinn’s essay. The years of obscurity when Stevens dined in Greenwich Village with Marcel Duchamp are much illuminated by David Haglund. For nuanced explanation of ‘Nuances of a Theme by Williams’ turn to Josh Cohen. Indeed, throughout this volume lovers and students of Stevens will find the learned contributors providing them with both instruction and pleasure, which are not often found together in modern criticism, and which may fuel the speculations and the research of another generation of admirers, now to be found all over the world.
This page intentionally left blank Introduction: The Lights of Norway and All That Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg
A long time you have been making the trip From Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil, Bringing the lights of Norway and all that.
‘Of Hartford in a Purple Light’ To situate the quintessential Modernist poet Wallace Stevens ‘across the Atlantic’, where the lights of Norway mysteriously travel, is to place him in a realm that is at once dynamic and open-ended. Our primary aim in putting together this book is to reconsider Stevens’ development as he responds to intermingling influences from two different continents. In particular, we want to explore the nature of a poetics that may be called ‘Transatlantic’ because it is neither precisely American nor European, but involves a larger complex of literary, artistic and cultural qualities. Indeed, Stevens’ poetry, as we see it, threatens to disappear from view when discussed in simple oppositional terms of its ‘American’ qualities or its assimilations and trans- formations of ‘European’ subject-matter. In the language of Stevens’ own lecture ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’, such amorphous notions as the ‘European’ and the ‘American’ are ultimately ‘too general to be serviceable’ (CPP 781). If either of these terms is to be rehabilitated in Stevens criti- cism, then it had better be in the reconstructed sense in which millions of Americans have implicitly defined themselves as ‘Transatlantic’: through preserving immigrant narratives, tracing genealogy (as Stevens did with his Dutch and German ancestry) or jostling different federal and state identities which seek to adapt European inheritances on American soil.
When we present ‘Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic’, then (without a qualifying subtitle), we intend to honour the dynamic travel in both direc- tions implied in our title. To our more metaphoric purpose here the Atlantic Ocean serves as a magnetic, mutually enriching and defining horizon for the cultures that have developed on either side of its expanse. It is meant to pro- vide perspective. Moreover, oceans actively invite crossing: a notion which we would like to deploy in its full complexity. As with the ‘Twenty men crossing
2 Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic
a bridge / Into a village’ in Stevens’ early poem ‘Metaphors of a Magnifico’ (CPP 15–16), we should understand the word not only in its literal, physical sense but as a reference also to language’s capacities to trope and translate (see Cook 177 and Maeder 49–51). Something similar applies to the word ‘Atlantic’, which is ultimately no more than a conventional name for a real- ity in permanent flux. Any attempt at linguistically demarcating so fluid an entity inevitably engages in what Stevens called, in a poem that will be among the most frequently cited in this book, ‘Description Without Place’.
If many another American author could be described as ‘Transatlantic’ in the sense suggested, Stevens is nevertheless a special case; and not merely because this poet did not travel abroad extensively (visiting only Canada, Cuba and parts of the Gulf of Mexico). Far more significant is the extent to which Stevens made a point of not travelling. In some sense, his was the ‘stay- at-home’ mentality of Henry David Thoreau – albeit with greater ambivalence toward the ‘transcendental’ and with a modern stance obviously shaped by the international politics of his particular epoch. Yet Stevens was also uncom- fortable following Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and, in his own era, William Carlos Williams in writing in a self-consciously American grain. His work is hardly ever nativist in the sense Walter Benn Michaels has explored in his influential study Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Paradoxi- cally, this remains the case even with the late poetry and prose which appeals more overtly to place, particularly to Connecticut.
But neither was Stevens an American writer who happened to mine European art and literature and then turn his findings into something else again – something ‘homegrown’. With him the situation was more ‘com- plex’, in the etymological sense of that word: more entwined and folded over. He was a poet who constantly explored American and European artistic productions in order to find a voice which would be intrinsically satisfy- ing outside and beyond immediate national contexts. Modulating upon his famous aphorism that ‘French and English constitute a single language’ (CPP 914), we might say that to Stevens Europe and America constituted a sin- gle culture, at least from the imaginative vantage of his home in Hartford, Connecticut.
We might also remind ourselves of the trouble Stevens had in character- izing his American experience. His natural points of artistic reference were largely French as were the majority of the paintings he bought. His book collecting and correspondence took him considerably outside an American context as well; and his literary influences were an eclectic mix drawing on French Symbolism, British Romanticism and the American Renaissance. Time and again, the correspondence reveals Stevens both constructing and failing to realize what it means to be ‘American’ as well as what it might mean to be ‘French’, ‘Irish’ or ‘Cuban’. As he wrote to his epistolary poet-friend in . . . Ireland, Thomas McGreevy: ‘One is so homeless over here and something . . . really American is like meeting a beautiful cousin or even one’s mother
Introduction: The Lights of Norway and All That 3
for the first time’ (L 626). To a poet so concerned with place and genealogy, this searching after a fleeting, provisional sense of identity – as well as the idea of living in a creative atmosphere composed out of words – became a persistent preoccupation.
The effect of this preoccupation on his poetic output is plain for all to see. Any reader coming to Stevens’ work for the first time – without any advance knowledge of the poet’s life – might suppose him to have been an experienced international traveller: one of those American fin-de-siècle or Modernist émi- grés who spent considerable time in Paris and elsewhere on the European continent, like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein or Hart Crane. Stevens’ poetry is chock-full of references to European places. By name, it takes us on a trip through a range of European countries: England and France, clearly, but also Ireland, Switzerland, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Poland and Bulgaria. Even Belgian grapes are mentioned – as a form of ‘fat pastiche’ (CPP 124). Within these countries, moreover, countless names of cities are dropped: not merely Paris, but other French places such as Fontainebleau, Aix, Arras, Le Havre, Avignon or Bordeaux. In Switzerland, cities like Geneva, Basel and Zurich are named. On the Italian peninsula we find Florence, Venice, Rome, Bergamo and Naples; in Spain, Madrid, Seville and Segovia; and there are further references to Stockholm, Hamburg, Athens, Vienna, Salzburg and Leyden (but not to Amsterdam, and, in Britain, little outside London: just ‘the mountainous coiffures of Bath’ [CPP 11] and some ‘Glasgow-frost’ [CPP 162]). In the same seemingly slapdash manner, Stevens’ poetry takes us along European rivers like the Danube, the Rhone, the Moldau or the Tiber. And it betrays a mild obsession with the Alps.
Ever since the 1910s, when Stevens began publishing and being reviewed in the little magazines, critical responses to his work have naturally attended to the poet’s transformation of European influences, particularly French Sym- bolism. But for the Stevens specialist there are interesting lessons to be drawn from scanning the poetry specifically for such European place-names. There is the fact, for example, that the regular appearance of these names largely post-dates the poet’s first collection, Harmonium (1923). It becomes a staple of his writings only by the 1930s, at a time when Stevens was finally mak- ing enough money as an insurance lawyer to be able to cross the Atlantic for himself; only to realize that, in all likelihood, he would never do so. That real- ization, and its consequences, is of greater interest than anything else for this book. It means that what we have inherited, in the case of Wallace Stevens, is the singularly powerful literary heritage of a major Modernist poet who spent a large share of his imaginative life ‘in’ or ‘with’ places he had never been to, and ‘in’ or ‘with’ cultures he constructed entirely out of words and images (mostly from paintings and postcards).
Stevens’ well-nigh obsessive interest in the imaginative construction of places lies behind several of the analyses in this book. Any Stevens lover
4 Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic
knows this interest to be more than a personal quirk: it allows the poet – in the indirect, self-reflective manner he favoured – to address wider notions of identity as they impact on the personal and cultural existence of every individual. As John Serio explains in his introduction to a special issue of The
Wallace Stevens Journal devoted to ‘The Poetics of Place’: with Stevens any
composition of place becomes ‘the essential exercise in a composition of self’ (4). To Serio the environmental determinism that limits some of the poetic ideas on place pursued in Harmonium is superseded from the mid-thirties by a new awareness on the poet’s part: ‘By seeing the relationship between people and place as a distinctively poetic process – “Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right” [CPP 913] – he modifies his ideas concerning the relationship with one’s surroundings by translating them into an active, aesthetic mode. Recognizing that “the world about us would be desolate except for the world within us” [CPP 747], he expresses the central importance of the imagination’s non-geography to the world’s geography’ (ibid.). It is precisely this dynamic interaction between the imagination’s non- geography and Transatlantic ingredients from the world’s geography which the current volume sets out to explore at different levels – some biographical and material, others more abstract, indirect or allegorical.
To address a sufficiently diverse range of perspectives in situating Stevens across the Atlantic, we have chosen to divide this book – in somewhat Steven- sian fashion – into three interlinking sections. The first part, ‘Descriptions without Place: Ideas of Europe in Stevens’, looks closely at the different conceptions of Europe (and, in a continually defining dialectic, of Amer- ica) which we find in Stevens’ published writings. Inspired by the tactic of Stevens’ own 1945 poem ‘Description Without Place’, these chapters reflect directly on how Stevens created imaginative projections of the European continent as part of his development as a literary artist. The second, largest section of the volume, ‘Beyond Staten Island: Stevens in Transatlantic Con- versation’, takes its lead from the poet’s own wistful comment that he had ‘never been closer to Europe than Staten Island’ (qtd in Brazeau 201). The types of Transatlantic dialogue covered here are subdivided into philosophi- cal and artistic conversations, bringing together interesting new examples of the kind of comparative studies that are such a powerful staple of Stevens criti- cism. Here Stevens’ poetics and aesthetics are considered as part of an ongoing cross-continental conversation with specific writers and artists. These virtual interlocutors may be philosophers and theorists, visual artists or poets, fig- ures from religious history, or a combination of such. They may serve as identifiable, likely sources of inspiration or else reveal notable affinities that manage to shed new light on the poet’s work.
The third and final part (which could be expanded into a study in its own right) concerns Stevens’ reception in various European contexts. The poet’s own observation at the end of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ that ‘They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne’ (CPP 351) lends a fittingly ironic
Introduction: The Lights of Norway and All That 5
title to this section, which includes neither the reflections of a Sorbonne pro- fessor nor any attempt at getting Stevens unappealingly straight. Our focus, rather, is on the instructive cases of two very different British poets (the first establishing a playful and eccentric lineage that died with him, the sec- ond doing his best to downplay and repress Stevens’ influence) as well as one living Portuguese poet for whom ‘affinity’ is a more apposite term than ‘influence’; and, finally, the more palpable afterlife of Stevens’ translation into Italian and French.
- Our first chapter, George Lensing’s ‘ “The Switzerland of the Mind”: Stevens’ Invention of Europe’, opens the volume beautifully by identifying many of the issues affecting the present work. Capitalizing on Lensing’s long-standing experience as a reader of Stevens – particularly his archival work on the poet’s correspondence – Chapter 1 explores Stevens’ changing attitudes to the Euro- pean continent as a poetic and actual notion with reference to the letters, the poet’s working notebooks and significant poems such as ‘The Irish Cliffs of Moher’, ‘The Novel’ and ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’. Lensing establishes how Stevens aimed to ‘bring Europe to himself in intimately personal ways and in ways that would have important consequences for his poetry’.