Table Of ContentWallace Stevens
A Literary Life
Tony Sharpe
WALLACE STEVENS
Literary Uves
General Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English
Lancaster University
This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the
most admired and influential English-language authors. Volumes
follow the outline of the writers' working lives, not
in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace
the professional, publishing and social contexts which
shaped their writing.
Published titles
Morris Beja Mary tago
JAMES JOYCE E. M. FORSTER
Cedric C. Brown C/in/on Machal//!
JOHN MILTON MATTHEW ARNOLD
Peler Davison Alasdair D. F Macrae
GEORGE ORWELL W. B. YEATS
Richard Dutton Joseph McMinn
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE JONATHAN SWIFT
Ian Fergus Kerry McSweeney
JANE AUSTEN GEORGE ELIOT
James Gibson John Mepham
THOMAS HARDY VIRGINIA WOOLF
Kenneth Graham Miclwel O'Neill
HENRY JAMES PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Awl Hammond Leonee Ormond
JOHN DRYDEN ALFRED TENNYSON
W. David Kay Harold Pagliafo
BEN JONSON HENRY FlELDING
George Parfitt Linda Wagner-Martin
JOHNOONNE SYLVIA PLATH
Gerald Roberts Cedric Watts
GERARD MANLEY HOPKlNS JOSEPH CONRAD
Felicity Rosslyn John Williams
ALEXANDER POPE MARY SHELLEY
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Tony Sharpe
r S. EUOT Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitlmm
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY
Tony Sharpe BRONTE
WALLACE STEVENS
John Worthen
Grahame Smitil D. H. LAWRENCE
CHARLES DICKENS
David Wykl.'S
Janice Farrar Thaddeus EVELYN WAUGH
FRANCES BURNEY
Gary Waller
EDMUND SPENSER
Literary Lives
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Wallace Stevens
A Literary Life
Tony S harpe
Smior Lecturer and
fIend of Department of English
Lancaster U'liversily
© Tony Sharpe 2000
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First published 2000 by
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DOI 10.1057/9780230596313
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For Eva and Ned
Two sure answerers
Here lurks an immense homage to the general privilege of the
artist, to that constructive, that creative passion, ... the exercise
of \vhich finds so many an occasion for appearing to him the
highest of human fortunes, the rarest boon of the gods. He
values it, all sublimely and perhaps a little fatuously, for itself
as the extension, great beyond all others, of experience and of
consciousness.
(Henry James, from his preface to Tile American)
. "Oh-ho" dit-il en Portuguais, tine langue qu'il pariait tres
bien.' (Marcel Duchamp's remark, as reported b y Walter
Arensberg to Wallace Stevens)
There are things in a man besides his rcason.
Come home, wind, he kept crying and crying.
(from the poem 'Pieces')
Contents
Prefnce
V111
List of Abbrroiations xii
Ackl10wledgemellts xiii
1 The Metier of Nothingness 1
2 Starting with Nothing 19
3 Strict Arrangements of Emptiness 52
4 1914-23: Accents o f Deviation 81
5 1923-37: from the Edge to the Centre 111
6 1937-47: Helping People Live their Uves 147
7 1947-55: Private Man as Public Figure 177
Not~'S 199
Select Bibliography 207
Illdex 209
vu
Preface
On holiday in Connecticut last sununer, one hot afternoon I paid a
visit to Wallace Stevens's former house on Westerly Terrace,
Hartford, and to Elizabeth Park nearby. The imposing residence
(now owned by a olcal church and not open to the public) is situated
on a quiet street of similarly s tockbrokcrish dwellings that must,
when Stevens moved there in 1932, have identified their occupants as
Americans who had 'made it'. There is nothing to declare the house's
link with the pOC't, and as I stood in the (possibly uncharacteristic)
sunshine, with my ever-so-slightly-bemused family and OUf
escorting American friends, the place's anonymity struck me as both
poignant and appropriate. So it was, again, on my discovering how
relatively unremarkable Elizabeth Park is: smaller and less distinctive
than 1 had supposed. The plaqueless house and the modest park in
which he had so regularly walked were eloquent, in their omission of
precisely that factor of the extraordinary his poetry can evoke, even
by denoting its absence. And indeed, I reflected as I sat in the rustic
arbour amid the park's rose-beds, Stevens had already imagined his
own absence from these places (see 'Vacancy in the Park', for
example), and had foreseen how little of what mattered to him in
them might be recoverable by others (see "A Postcard from the
Volcano'): in his writing, the necessary angel is the one that has just
vanished, and his poems indicate the oscillating threshold between
plenihlde and vacancy.
[n his essay on MarvelL T.s. Eliot asserts that the great and
perennial task of criticism is to bring the poet back to life; yet
imagining Stevens, that exponent of American olneliness, can seem
like conducting a continual conversation with a silent man. It was the
spirit that I sought, on my naively archaic pilgrimage to Hartford, but
what perhaps I sensed was what he called the 'literate despair' of a
spirit storming in blank walls, whose poems were rooted in a life
unlived: which nevertheless became an exaltation of that life, both
jocular and uncompromising. The jubilant weather and the
prosperous neighbourhood, together with my awareness of Stevens's
not-being-there, were a minor enactment of the connection, in his
poetry, of opulence with absence: a plain sense of things he
expressed in a contestingly extravagant language. In Noles toward a
S1Ipreme Fietioll, he coined the phrase "sensible ecstasy', which is an
oxymoron that brings to birth a combinatory third thing: in
vm
Prefnce
microcosm of the way he felt poems served to mediate between the
worlds of common sense and imaginative transfiguration.
[ have wanted to write about Stevens, because his poetry has
been a sginificant influence on the way I think about literature, for
over twenty years; [ found his presence asserting itself when I was
addressing the work of other writers. To some extent, then, this is a
(not uncritical) personal statement, deriving from my particular
view of the man and his work, that is itself a consequence of what
he would have called my own peculiar plot. Implicit in my
approach is that I am a British critic beholding an American poet,
and my reading both of the life and writing is on occasions
adversarial: for what writer of importance docs not at times
infuriate the reader? The kind of book this is has been further
shaped by the requirements of the series and this subject. The
exploration of a writer's 'literary life' need not in principle involve
a large amount of literary criticism as such, since the emphasis falls
more on biography and the shaping of a career in letters; but it is
obvious that our interest in the life originates in a prior
engagement with the art. Stevcns·s development as a w riter is in
itself interesting; but I have supposed that, in addition to elarning
what happened, any reader will also wish to see how this Clffects
our reading of the poetry: the morc so, as the poetry in question is
generally considered to be difficult. Throughout this study,
therdore, I try to suggest ways in which certain poems can be read
in the context of my general exposition - without in any way
pretending that such a reading exhausts their interpretative
possibilities.
For a long time, Stevens remained an invisible poet, high and
aloof; now we hear more about the man than the mandarin, and
are encouraged to attend to the contexts in which his poetry came
into being. His can appear to have been an eminently sensible
ecstasy, with the insurance man safely bankrolling the poet; yet for
a[1 the reassuringness of his bourgeois exterior, I think much of
Stevens"s continuing significance lies in the inherent extremism of
his belief in the 'precious scope" of poetry; a belief whose stature
derives from the depth and extent of his commitment to it: as he
declared to Henry Church in 1943, 'The belief in poetry is a
magnificent fury, or it is nothing' (I- 446). In part, I read his life as a
dialogue between the requirements of sense and those of ecstasy,
with his s uccessive books as stages in the debate. ] read it, also, as a
continued awareness of fathers and fatherhood, with the particular
