Wallace Stevens and the imagination in modernist poetry

Wallace Stevens: The Emperor of American Poetic Modernism

The great interest of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking"

Epigraph to Wallace Steven's "Evening without Angels" by Mario Rossi

Beneath the quiet surface of the ordinary American businessman Wallace Stevens beat the heart of one of the greatest American modernist poets of the 20th century. "More than any other modern poet, Stevens was concerned with the transformative power of the imagination. Composing poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings, Stevens continued to spend his days behind a desk at the office, and led a quiet, uneventful life." ("Wallace Stevens," Poets.org, 2006) Stevens thought a poet did not have to flee one's desk job and relocate to Paris to write poetry, rather spying a blackbird on the way home from the office, a poet could find a fit subject for poetry, like "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," perhaps Steven's most famous poem. As noted in the above-quoted epigraph, the joy of having a body and gazing was enough, in Stevens' mind, to make a poet, he did not have to find his footing in the European tradition of letters, or even in evolving European tradition of modernism.

Unlike the more European-influenced American modernists like Earnest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein, Wallace Steven's modernist poetry was infused with "a wholly original style and sensibility: exotic, whimsical, infused with the light and color of an Impressionist painting" as well as the Cubist and Surrealist art of France. ("Wallace Stevens," Poets.org, 2006) Modernism as a literary tradition, according to the English novelist Virginia Woolf, began around the turn of the 20th century, as a way of expressing the need to describe and encompass the new ways that people experienced themselves in the world, free of tradition of religion, often horribly so. Thus modernism as a movement began as a result of the "modern writer's fervent desire to break with the past, rejecting literary traditions that seemed outmoded and diction that seemed too genteel to suit an era of technological breakthroughs and global violence." ("Modernism," Poets.org, 2006)

Modernism is called a movement because most of the artists associated with the movement lived, at least for a time in either London or Paris and thus much of it evolved as part of a collective artistic ethos. Today, the term modernism embraces what critics also call the aesthetics of Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Acmeism, and Imagism, all arts of fragmentation and divided consciousness. Modernism was self-reflective in most of its incarnations, concerned with fundamentally questioning and reinventing existing art forms, as seen in the painting of the French Matisse and Picasso, the diffuse wandering prose of the Irish James Joyce's Ulysses and the American novelist Gertrude Stein's strange turns of simple, assaulting, yet repetitive phrases like: "A rose is a rose... ("Modernism." Poets.org, 2006)

Old ideas about religion, nationalism, gender, and tradition were rejected, or when older works were considered, they were viewed with irony or despair, rather than with reverence and nostalgia, as before. "Make it new!" was the Modernist battle cry of Ezra Pound T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" did just that, using fragmented bits of Shakespeare, modern dialogue, and a collage of verse to create a sense of a new age, filled with a new sense of a displaced human consciousness that was forever wandering, rather than stagnant.

Yet the poet Wallace Stevens stayed at home. But in his verse this mild-mannered executive at a major insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut had "a flair" for the "flashiest titles," and turns of phrase in his verse such as "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle." Thus "Stevens, the aesthete par excellence" pressed "back against the pressure of reality" with a modernist spirit of innovation in his simple yet startling words and images ("Modernism." Poets.org, 2006) But Stevens' first work, rather than the result of engagement with other modernist authors, entitled "Harmonium" emerged as an unusual first book. It was not published until the poet was forty-four years old, and represented "the cumulative poetic works of his life up until that point. Because of the compressed intensity of this first effort, the range and variety of the poems are bewildering and beautiful," and shows the artist emerging fully formed into the world, rather than in dialogue with other modernists, like most of his American modernist contemporaries. ("Groundbreaking book." Poets.org, 2006)

However, Stevens was clearly conversant with some of the ideas of many Americans located in Europe, even if this was not evident through frequent publications over the course of his development as a poet. Take, for example, his famous poem entitled: "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." The poem is made up of many quiet, simple phrases that recall Japanese haiku such as:

was of three minds,

Like a tree

Of the women about you?

Rather, what is important to Stevens is that he conveys striking images; with as little complicated language as possible, in a way that affects the mind of the reader and conveys his own fragmented sense of mind, when wandering in his thoughts while wandering home after a day at work. The reader is taken back and forth, from icicles hanging from a window of barbaric glass, indicating the modernist violence that exists even in a domestic setting, and suddenly is transported back in time to a Near Eastern context, all within a dizzying space of a few lines.

Stevens' unapologetic Americanism is seen in this poem, however, because rather than dwell purely in a far-off context, or use a Japanese or Chinese setting to make use of Asian-influenced styles and phrases, Stevens remains squarely located in a fairly ordinary setting, of a man looking at birds from a window. Even the "thin men of Haddam" section is mainly about the men looking at the walking birds. Unlike Eliot, an American who infused Shakespeare and English cockney slang into "The Waste Land," Stevens uses a humble American bird he saw every day as his subject, and he does not adopt the voices of Asian men or women, like Pound. His choices as a poet reflect the idea that one need not go to Europe to apprehend the evolving great ideas and ideals of the modernist movement, and that these ideas should be applied to an American concept.

For some, "it is difficult to combat the widely held view that America is merely the recipient of European culture." (Peters, cited by Filreis, 1992) But Stevens did not have any such difficulty; rather by his own window he could find inspiration. Hence:

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

Rather than create a W.B. Yeats-like mythology of a lost past, Stevens creates a mythology of the present for the American blackbird. Hence the idea of as expressed in the epigraph "Evening without Angels" regarding "the voluptuousness of looking" because simply gazing at something, not necessarily a great work from the European past, but simply enjoying the physical experience of gazing and apprehending another being is profoundly enriching and the source of poetry. Unlike the European modernists who were full of a sense of the past that they had abandoned, or rejected, the less tradition-obsessed Americans like Stevens could give themselves over to the joy as well as the sorrow of the world that was still finding its way, violently and heroically, image by image.

In Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice Cream," the ice cream man dispensing frozen childhood treats is both violent as well as caring, and the common food is given celebrated status, when seen through the eyes of a child:

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

The children gather around the curls of cream, to wonder at the miraculous substance and this ordinary, humble labor is made momentarily great by his trade, a European Emperor who can give and take at will, and thus also seems faintly sinister in his muscularity.

Stevens celebrated "the emergence from old ideologies in the form of what was rapidly becoming an aesthetic ideology," a form of "American home-grown" modernist abstraction that still had its roots in the concrete, the concrete nature of imagism, and also of plain, simple, profound American reality. Unlike other American modernists, like T.S. Eliot (who eventually became a British citizen and converted to Anglicanism) or Ezra Pound (a permanent expatriate) Stevens had no self-consciousness of not being part of the European tradition, nor did he aspire to tie his poetry to that tradition. (Filreis, 1992)

It is true that Stevens was profoundly interested in pictorial art, which also heavily influenced the more European modernists, particularly in their reliance upon imagism. Again, imagism stressed the need to create a picture with words, rather than to create a coherent storyline or meaning, even if these images were not necessarily connected. (Like the blackbirds, or the strange curls of the "Emperor of Ice Cream.") However, Stevens resolutely defended his right to pick and chose his influences, and did not approve wholesale of all modern art, which often struck him as deliberately obscure -- when he used fragmentation, he did so out of a genuine artistic need to express himself, he said, not to confuse the reader, as modern art often aspired to confuse the viewer with no real purpose. "All art that is not modern is antique; and all modern art... enjoys the completes possible prestige merely because it is modern. If I go into a gallery containing the work of a dunce, I am certain to find him protected; and if I tear my hair at his ineffectiveness, the dealer recognizes me as illiterate and insensitive." (Stevens, Letters cited by Filreis, 1992)

In other words, unless Americans were careful, they could be just as hidebound by European traditions as their forefathers, even if their tradition became that of a fascination with modernism, or specific traditions of art or literary production. Art should express the imagination, and the needs of the here and now, rather than attempt to be part of a movement -- and in this iconoclasm, with roots in American independence and individualism far older than 20th century modernism, Stevens made his mark as a uniquely national modernist poet.