The Wallace Stevens Journal The Wallace The Wallace Stevens Journal Special Conference Issue, Part 2 Special Conference Vol. 29No. 1 Spring 2005 Vol. Special Conference Issue, Part 2 A Publication of The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Volume 29 Number 1 Spring 2005 The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 29 Number 1 Spring 2005 Contents Special Conference Issue, Part 2 Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecticut Edited by Glen MacLeod and Charles Mahoney Introduction —Glen MacLeod and Charles Mahoney 7 THE PLACE OF HOME IN STEVENS’ POETRY The Fictive Coverings of Home —Angus Cleghorn 9 Wallace Stevens at Home in the Wilderness —William Doreski 18 “Inessential Houses” in Stevens and Bishop —Jacqueline Vaught Brogan 25 CONTINENTAL STEVENS How Dutch Was Stevens? —Bart Eeckhout 34 Modernist Muses that Matter: Inspiration Revisited in Pessoa and Stevens —Irene Ramalho Santos 44 STEVENSIAN CONFLATIONS: PHYSICAL, COLONIAL, ANALYTICAL Privative Synecdoches —Douglas Mao 56 “Being There Together”: Stevens and the Postcolonial Imagination —Anna Boyagoda 62 Reading Stevens with Lacan on the Real: Toward a Poetics of Destitution —Gina Masucci Mackenzie and Daniel T. O’Hara 72 MIDDLE STEVENS The Absence of the Poet as Virile Youth —Stephen Burt 81 “Amen to the Feelings”: Wallace Stevens and the Politics of Emotion —Malcolm Woodland 91 Good-bye Major Man: Reading Stevens Without “Stevensian” —Edward Ragg 98 SUBLIME AND COMMON PLACES Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace —Liesl M. Olson 106 The Mind’s Lyric and the Spaces of Nature: Wordsworth and Stevens —James Applewhite 117 Stevens’ Revisions of the Romantic Sublime in “Esthétique du Mal” —Burton Hatlen 131 STEVENS AND PHILOSOPHY Vaihinger and Stevens: A Rumor That Won’t Go Away —Leon Surette 142 “The World Is My Idea”: Similar Worlds (Similar Ideas) in Wallace Stevens and Arthur Schopenhauer —P. Michael Campbell 156 Philosophical Parallels: Wallace Stevens and Paul Valéry —Lisa Goldfarb 163 LATE STEVENS God, Imagination, and the Interior Paramour —B. J. Leggett 171 Stevens’ Prosody: Meaningful Rhythms —Natalie Gerber 178 Collecting Oneself: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens —Juliette Utard 188 Poems 198 Reviews 199 Current Bibliography 203 Cover Image by Cheryl Jacobsen From the broadside “Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecticut” Designed and printed by C. Mikal Oness at Sutton Hoo Press The Wallace Stevens Journal EDITOR John N. Serio POETRY EDITOR ART EDITOR BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Joseph Duemer Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS EDITORIAL BOARD William T. Ford Milton J. Bates A. Walton Litz Maureen Kravec Jacqueline V. Brogan James Longenbach Hope Steele Robert Buttel Glen MacLeod Eleanor Cook Marjorie Perloff TECHNICAL ASSISTANT Alan Filreis Joan Richardson Sue Campbell B. J. Leggett Melita Schaum George S. Lensing Lisa M. Steinman The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. PRESIDENT ADVISORY BOARD John N. Serio Milton J. Bates Joseph Duemer Owen E. Brady Kathryn Jacobi Robert Buttel George S. Lensing David M. Craig A. Walton Litz The Wallace Stevens Journal is published biannually in the Spring and Fall by the Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Administrative and editorial offices are located at Clarkson University, Box 5750, Potsdam, NY 13699. Phone: (315) 268-3987; Fax: (315) 268-3983; E-mail: [email protected]; Web site: www.wallacestevens.com. The subscription rate for individuals, both domestic and foreign, is $30 for one year or $50 for two years and includes membership in the Wallace Stevens Society. Rates for institutions are $37 per year domestic and $43 per year foreign. Back issues are available. Also available are volumes 1–25 on CD-ROM. Manuscripts, subscriptions, and advertising should be addressed to the editor. Manu- scripts should be submitted in duplicate and in Works Cited format. Word-processed manuscripts will not be returned. Authors of accepted manuscripts should furnish a nonreturnable disk copy as well as photocopies of all secondary quotations. The Wallace Stevens Journal is indexed or abstracted in Abstracts of English Studies, American Humanities Index, Current Contents, IBR (International Bibliography of Book Re- views), IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Literature), MHRA Annual Bibliogra- phy, MLA International Bibliography, and Year’s Work in English Studies. This journal is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. © 2005 The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 Celebrating Fifty Years of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens Joseph Wood Krutch, William Faulkner, and Wallace Stevens, left to right, hold gold medal awards presented to them at the sixth annual National Book Awards at the Hotel Commodore in New York City, January 25, 1955. Krutch’s nonfiction book The Measure of Man, Faulkner’s novel A Fable, and Stevens’ book of poetry The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens were cited as best in their fields. (AP/Wide World Photos) Introduction GLEN MACLEOD AND CHARLES MAHONEY HIS NUMBER OF The Wallace Stevens Journal is the second of a two- part special issue presenting the proceedings of the international Tconference Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecti- cut, organized and hosted by the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, April 8–10, 2004. The conference was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the publication of Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems in 1954. Coincidentally or not, the appearance of this second num- ber marks the 50th anniversary of Stevens’ receipt in 1955 of the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Award for that same collection (see photograph on opposite page). Over the course of three days at the University of Connecticut, almost fifty speakers from around the world examined a multitude of issues in relation to Stevens’ work, its influences, and its varied legacies. (For a detailed overview of the conference proceedings, see our introduction to the first part of the published conference proceedings in the Fall 2004 is- sue of The Wallace Stevens Journal.) On Saturday morning, April 10th, twenty- seven speakers presented papers over the space of nine panels. These panels are presented here, in the order in which they appeared in the con- ference program. There are two exceptions to this procedure: (1) the pa- pers from the first two sessions, “Stevens and Later American Poets” and “Early Stevens,” appeared in Part 1 of the proceedings, published in the Fall 2004 issue of the journal; (2) Emily Wallace’s paper on Stevens and Cézanne, from the session “Continental Stevens,” will appear in a future number of the journal. The Saturday morning panels illustrate the impressive array of per- spectives that made the entire conference such a memorable event. Over the course of the morning, three panels in particular—“Early Stevens,” “Middle Stevens,” and “Late Stevens”—directed attention to the full range of Stevens’ ouevre as well as career. Established Stevens specialists were joined by a number of promising younger scholars in an effort to assess the work done in the fifty years since the publication of the Collected Poems and to consider future directions for Stevens scholarship. The quality of THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 29.1 (SPRING 2005): 7–8. © 2005 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. 7 work being done by so many fine scholars bodes well for the future of Stevens studies. In addition, many international scholars—from Belgium, Portugal, En- gland, Canada, France, and Japan—brought the planet to the table, so to speak, to celebrate The Planet on the Table, as Stevens refers to his Col- lected Poems in his poem of that title. One of these, Juliette Utard, con- cluded the morning’s proceedings (and this number of The Wallace Stevens Journal) with her paper “Collecting Oneself: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens,” an incisive consideration of what it means to “collect” a poet or a body of poetry. As she notes at the outset of her talk, “To celebrate Wal- lace Stevens’ birthday and the publication of the Collected Poems conjointly is to reduplicate a connection Stevens himself orchestrated fifty years ago.” In “orchestrating” Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Con- necticut, we are delighted to have been anticipated by Stevens himself. Fifty years after Stevens “collected” his poems, it has been a pleasure and a privilege first to “collect” so many outstanding Stevens scholars in Con- necticut and, now, to “collect” their work in the pages of this two-part special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal. University of Connecticut 8 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL The Fictive Coverings of Home ANGUS CLEGHORN HIS CONFERENCE SITUATES the mature Wallace Stevens in his resident-state, Connecticut. My paper investigates a different home T in Stevens’ poetry—the idea of home that the poet attempts to find. This domestic site is physical and metaphysical; it is Stevens’ final fusion of body and spirit in language. In his final constructions of home, Stevens continues to manipulate figurative tropes to satisfy his sense of place. Spe- cifically, I want to look at Stevens’ leaves covering The Rock as metony- mies covering the metaphorical boulder that fuses external and internal home. Because this rock’s shadowy largesse, this subman, this muddy center, is too enormous and erratic to be represented fully by metaphor— “philosophy . is a walk on the slippery rocks,” as Edie Brickell sings in “What I Am”—Stevens decorates it with leaves. These fictive coverings of home are the necessary fabrics of Stevens’ fictions: they must be abstract, indeed, because each fiction is configured as a figurative relation. Yet they are provisional; they are layered in flux; they are metonymically placed on top of the big rock. In placing them, Stevens illustrates the necessarily material applique of language.1 By covering the rock with leaves, the poet creates “a cure of the ground” (CP 526). These leaves are a cure for the ground precisely because these metonymical figures do not ground, or state a resemblance, or pin down a core idea; they merely add layers.