Abstract
In the course of “Auroras of Autumn,” Stevens comes to “feel afraid” of his own appropriations, the violations that resulted in the explosions “flaring on the frame / Of everything he is” (p. 417). In “An Ordinary Evening in New haven,” Stevens acts on those fears. his project is to find “the thing apart” (p. 465) from the “thing as idea” (p. 295) he relished in “So-and-So Reclining on her Couch” Abandoning the frame with its “apparition[s]” (p. 295) of repressed seizures and “mechanism[s]” (p. 295) of poetic determinism, the Stevens of “An Ordinary Evening in New haven” struggles to work out an alternative to the oxymoronic “solid space” of the earlier poem. he finds it by redefining the reality of the “solid”:
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It is not in the premise that reality
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Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
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A dust, a force that traverses a shade. (p. 489)
In order to get to the newly interpreted real at the end, Stevens begins with an attempt to break free from “the origin of a mother tongue” (p. 470) he inherits from the patriarchal language of “th[e] form[s]” (p. 470) of desire, with their “inescapable romance” and “inescapable choice / of dreams” (p. 468). The “romance” of the “romance” looms in its infinite deferrals. Satisfaction is always just beyond reach.
History is the poisoned well seeping into the ground-water. It’s not the unknown past we’re doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will be an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history.
Destruction doesn’t create a vacuum, it simply transforms presence into absence. The splitting atom creates absence, palpable “missing” energy.
—Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces1
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Notes
Fugitive Pieces (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 161.
My premise here, that “automata” includes the political, might be disputed by those who say that Stevens was only concerned with artistic conformity. But Gromaire’s paintings are, in themselves often political commentaries, alternating between the same woman—a “So-and-So” reclining—and industrialized landscapes, peopled by sculptured industrial workers. Stevens describes them as intrinsic to what Gromaire “postulates [as] an ‘art directement social’ which transmits itself to the spectator without mediation or explanation.” See “Marcel Gromaire,” Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 251.
Marjorie Perloff is the most consistently critical of Stevens’s indifference to politics. Of the “major man” of “Notes,” Perloff writes, “What does it signify, in the middle of World War II—when the real Major Men included such names as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin—to posit the desirability, however fleeting, of Major Man?” See “The Supreme Fiction and the Impasse of the Modernist Lyric,” Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, ed. Albert Gelpi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 59. In answer to Perloff’s accusations, Dean Rader maintains, “What remains troubling about comments … by Perloff and others is that they assume an undeviating Stevens; that is, they take for granted the assumption that Stevens never changes his mind, and they tend to ignore that Stevens develops and alters his vision over time as America and Modernity change.” “Wallace Stevens, Octavio Paz, and the Poetry of Social Engagement,” The Wallace Stevens Journal 21.3 (1997): 181. On the question of Stevens and politics, refer also to James Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Alan Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Considering Stevens’s relationship to the continent, Helen Vendler writes, “It is only after students understand that maximalist euphony and minimalist colorlessness, Euro-culture and American bareness, are aesthetically troubling and divisive issues for Stevens that the teacher can begin to show them why accuracy of representation must be the artist’s standard of moral responsibility.” “Wallace Stevens: Teaching the Anthology Pieces,” Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays, ed. John N. Serio and B. J. Leggett (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), p. 10.
See David Jarroway, Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), p. 302 for a play on New haven and old havens as well as Eleanor Cook Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 268.
Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 92. Helen Vendler also reads the lines optimistically. On Extended Wings: The Longer Poems of Wallace Stevens (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 277–78. While Eleanor Cook regards canto XII as central and while she maintains that the sense of the canto “remains autumnal,” she still argues that the canto “affirms … the enduring power of human words” Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War, pp. 284–85.
“The Canzoniere and the Language of Self” Studies in Philology 75 (1978): 282.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997), p. 257.
In some ways, what Michael Davidson calls the “palimpset effect”—the “productive apparatus of a set of variable fictions, each one layered on top of the last” coincides with the oral reverberations and the visual burnishings Stevens imprints in this poem. Davidson notes the importance of dada and surrealism on modern poetry for precisely its emphasis on materializations of this nature. Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 5.
Alan Filreis complains that “the poem’s bread may seem to simulate realism, but it is actually constructed of types: the (typical) plate, the (typical) loaf of bread and so on. It does not depict the observed scene. Definitive articles stand for the universal; ‘the’ rather than pointing to misery points it away.” Filreis reads the poem as Stevens’s defense of not going to Europe. Relying on “post-card” images sent to him by Barbara Church, who went grandly to Europe but wrote accurately of postwar European deprivation, he was able to resist “the travel-writing cliché of the ‘grand tour.’” Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 226. On Stevens as armchair traveler, see Alison Rieke, “Stevens in Corsica, Lear in New haven,” The New England Quarterly 62.1 (1990): 35–59.
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: hill and Wang, 1981), p. 96. This quote is also in Ronald Schleifer and Nancy M. West, “The Poetry of What Lies Close at hand: Photography, Commodities, and Postromantic Discourses in hardy and Stevens,” MLQ 60:1 (1999): 50–51. Schleifer and West argue that “the advent of photography transformed verbal descriptions and taught poets such as Stevens and hardy to see the world differently, to notice things close at hand: both commodified facts and the institutions that condition their activity,” 52.
On Stevens’s capacity for Biblical word play, see Eleanor Cook, “Wallace Stevens and the King James Bible,” Essays in Criticism 41.3 (1991): 240–52.
“Blankness as a Signifier,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1997): 164.
Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 344.
Heidegger and “the jews’” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts, introduction by David Carroll (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 5.
The Winter’s Tale, ed. J. h. P. Pafford (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 98.
“The Theogeny of hesiod,” Hesiod, the Homeric hymns, and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass.: harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 91–95.
James Longenbach argues that “regendering in the late Stevens is meaningful precisely because it comes out of an earlier insistence on the imperatives of masculinist invention.” Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 225.
Angus Cleghorn writes that “in ‘The World as Meditation,’ Stevens gives ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ back to its singer.” See “And of that Other and her Desire: The Embracing Language of Wallace Stevens,” Ethics and the Subject, ed. Karl Sims (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), p. 235.
Erotic Dawn Songs of the Middle Ages: Voicing the Lyric Lady (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 1996), p. 31.
Elizabeth Harvey calls the process of male poets speaking through women a habit of “domesticating the alterity of female power sources and [turning] them into versions of male selves” See Ventriloquized Voices (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 132.
Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 3.
Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 47.
For a discussion of Winnicott’s theory in Wallace Stevens, and especially in “The World as Meditation,” as a way of mediating between the internalized image and objective reality, see Mary Sidney Watson, “Wallace Stevens and the Maternal Art of Poetry,” The Wallace Stevens Journal 22.1 (1998): 72–82.
See Louis Martz’s definition of the meditative tradition in The Poetry of Meditation (New haven and London: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 1. Martz recognized the scope of “The World as Meditation” early on. “Wallace Stevens: The World as Meditation,” Yale Review 47 (1958): 517–36.
For Loren Rusk, “Penelope is the counterpart of the poet” and Stevens comes close—with her inventiveness—to suggesting that the creative mind has an “androgynous center.” “Penelope’s Creative Desiring: ‘The World as Meditation,’” The Wallace Stevens Journal 9.1 (1985): 16, 23.
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© 2001 Barbara L. Estrin
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Estrin, B.L. (2001). “The Intricate Evasions of as”: History’s Duplicities in Stevens’s “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”. In: The American Love Lyric after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06765-4_4
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