Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Linda W. Wagner-Martin
Classroom Issues and Strategies
The sheer difficulty of apprehending meaning from some of Stevens's
poems turns many students away. Yet Stevens is one of the most apt voices
to speak about the perfection, and the perfectibility, of the poem-- the
supreme fiction in the writer's, and the reader's, lives. If students can
read Stevens's poems well, they will probably be able to read anything
in the text.
The elusiveness of meaning is one key difficulty: Stevens's valiant
attempts to avoid paraphrase, to lose himself in brilliant language, to
slide into repetition and assonantal patterns without warning. His work
demands complete concentration, and complete sympathy, from his readers.
Most students cannot give poetry either of these tributes without some
Close reading, usually aloud, helps. The well-known Stevens language
magic has to be experienced, and since the poems are difficult, asking
students to work on them alone, in isolation, is not the best tactic. Beginning
with the poems by Stevens might make reading T.
S. Eliot, Robert Frost,
and William Carlos Williams
much easier, so I would make this selection central to the study of modern
Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues
The value of poetry (and all art); the accessibility of great moral,
and mortal, themes through language; the impenetrability of most human
relationships; the evanescence of formalized belief systems, including
religion; the frustration of imperfection; and others. Stevens often builds
from historical and/or philosophical knowledge, expecting "fact"
to serve as counterpoint for his readers' more imaginative exploits. But
this technique is not meant to lead to easy or facile explication. It is
a way of contrasting the predictable and the truly valuable, the imaginary.
Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions
Stevens's intricate stanza and rhyme patterns are a school of poetry
in themselves, and each of his poems should be studied as a crafted object.
His work fits well with that of T. S. Eliot, as does some of his aesthetic
rationale: "Poetry is not personal." "The real is only the
base. But it is the base." "In poetry, you must love the words,
the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything
at all." "Poetry must be irrational." "The purpose
of poetry is to make life complete in itself." "Poetry increases
the feeling for reality." "In the absence of a belief in God,
the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the
aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate
Modernism was so specific a mood and time that students must understand
the modernists' rage for control of craft, the emphasis on the formalism
of the way an art object was formed, and the importance craft held for
all parts of the artist's life. Once those conventions are described, and
Stevens placed in this period, his own distinctions from the group of modernists
will be clearer. ("Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism
was that it did not recognize this." "A change of style is a
change of subject." "In the long run the truth does not matter.")
Conscious of all the elements of form, Stevens yet overlays his work with
a heavily philosophical intention, and the shelves of commentary on his
poetry have been occasioned because that commentary is, in many cases,
Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections
The T. S. Eliot of
the Four Quartets (likenesses) or the William
Carlos Williams of the short poems (differences).