Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall 1996)

The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 20 Number 2 Fall 1996 Contents The Influence of Wallace Stevens on Contemporary Artists —Glen MacLeod 139 One Word of the Sea: Metaphysics in Wallace Stevens —José A. Benardete 181 Wallace Stevens and the Cummington Press: Additions and Reflections —Carolyn Masel 199 Exceeding Responsibilities: Politics, History, and the Hero in Wallace Stevens’ War Poetry —Steven Miskinis 209 “Alone in an Immense Valley”: A Note on Stevens’ “Valley Candle” —Tom W ha len 229 Poems 235 Reviews 245 News and Comments 252 Cover: Wallace Stevens, 1981 Acrylic on aluminum by Mimi Gross The Wallace Stevens Journal EDITOR John N. Serio ART EDITOR POETRY EDITOR BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Kathryn Jacobi Joseph Duemer George S. Lensing EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS EDITORIAL BOARD Maureen Kravec Milton J. Bates Jacqueline Vaught Brogan Hope Steele Robert Buttel Eleanor Cook Alan Filreis B. J. Leggett TECHNICAL ASSISTANTS George S. Lensing A. Walton Litz Richard Austin James Longenbach Glen MacLeod Michael Short Marjorie Perloff Joan Richardson Claudette J. VanEss Melita Schaum Lisa M. Steinman The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. PRESIDENT ADVISORY BOARD John N. Serio Milton J. Bates Owen E. Brady Robert Buttel Ellen C. Caldwell David M. Craig Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing 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]; Home Page: http://www.clarkson.edu/wsj. The subscription rate for individuals, both domestic and foreign, is $25 per year ($45 for two years) and includes membership in The Wallace Stevens Society. Rates for institutions are $30 per year domestic and $35 per year foreign. Back issues are available. Manuscripts, subscriptions, and advertising should be addressed to the editor. Manuscripts should be submitted in duplicate; word-processed manuscripts will not be returned. Authors of accepted manuscripts should be prepared to furnish a disk copy. The Wallace Stevens Journal is indexed or abstracted in Abstracts of English Studies, American Humanities Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents, IBR (In- ternational Bibliography of Book Reviews), IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Lit- erature), Literary Criticism Register, MHRA Annual Bibliography, MLA International Bibliography, and Year’s Work in English Studies. This journal is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. © 1996 The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 The Influence of Wallace Stevens on Contemporary Artists GLEN MACLEOD It is a visibility of thought, In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once. —“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” O AMERICAN POET has inspired a broader range of artists than Wallace Stevens. The following examples illustrate that influence. NArtworks have been selected to represent the full spectrum of re- sponses to Stevens’ poetry, from pure abstraction to straightforward figu- ration, from delicate line drawing to painterly expressionism, from small watercolors to very large mixed-media constructions, from serene still lifes to apocalyptic visions. I hope this representative grouping will make un- deniably clear the extent and variety of Stevens’ appeal to visual artists. One reason Stevens has had such wide-ranging influence is that he is such a complex and many-sided poet. Each artist responds to that aspect of Stevens that speaks most directly to him or her. There is the Stevens of “The Snow Man” whose cold rationalism surfaces in Jasper Johns’s Win- ter; the Stevens of the Florida poems whose gaudy, sensual effects corre- spond to those in works by William Baziotes and Grace Hartigan; the high romantic Stevens of The Auroras of Autumn whose sublime vision inspires Jesse Murry, Gregory Botts, and Jennifer Bartlett; the Stevens whose delicate nuances are like the color harmonies of Milton Avery or Fairfield Por- ter; the comic Stevens whose spirit presides in works by William Burney, Mimi Gross, and Claes Oldenburg; and the Stevens of endless hesitations and revisions like those in works by Jack Tworkov or Richard Diebenkorn. The list could be greatly expanded. Another reason Stevens speaks so directly to artists is that his poetry was often written in direct response to contemporary developments in the visual arts. His mature career (1913–1955) exactly spanned the period from the Armory Show (1913) to the ascendancy of Abstract Expression- ism in the 1950s, and Stevens followed the course of modern art during those years with close attention.1 His Collected Poems, in the words of Hayden Carruth, “present to us the whole movement of this century in art.”2 His poetry, therefore, addresses problems that concern most mod- THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 20.2 (FALL 1996): 139–180. © 1996 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. STEVENS’ INFLUENCE ON CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS 139 ern artists; and it speaks the dialect of the art world. Taken together, the following artists and artworks provide a kind of guided tour of Stevens’ poetic world. Milton Avery Milton Avery (1885–1965) grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. His family moved to the area in 1898, and he lived there until 1925, when he left for New York City. As a lover of poetry, he was well aware that Hartford was also home to one of America’s greatest living poets, Wallace Stevens. Avery’s wife and fellow-artist, Sally Michel Avery, recalled that poetry played an important role in their life together. The family often read poetry out loud. Milton especially liked doing this, and he would read favorite poems again and again.3 One of the poems he liked best was Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” Probably he was drawn to the poem’s witty allusions to Picasso, since he, like Stevens, often used guitar images in his own paintings as self-conscious references to the undisputed leader of modern art. With a similar mixture of respect and humor, Avery also named his dog Picasso. Often he read “The Man with the Blue Guitar” aloud to his family.4 Robert Hobbs has suggested that Avery’s Self-Portrait (1947) may be related to Stevens’ poem since it shows the artist dressed entirely in blue.5 This painting also calls to mind that poem’s central theme of the complex relations between imagination and reality: in the background are other paintings, all of them portraits of his wife and daughter posing. This is the self-portrait of an artist for whom life and art are inextricably intermingled. Another of Avery’s favorite poems, which he also liked to read aloud, was “The Idea of Order at Key West.” This poem took on spe- cial significance for him when, on doctor’s orders, he spent the winter of 1959–1960 in Key West, living in a rented house with his family. As Martica Sawin has pointed out, Avery’s Lone Bather (1960) seems closely related to “The Idea of Milton Avery, Lone Bather, 1960 6 Oil on canvas, 50 x 72" Order at Key West.” Milton Avery Trust, New York 140 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL Like Stevens’ poem, this painting depicts a single female figure on a beach, facing away from us toward the vibrantly colored sea and sky. She is the poet- or artist-figure who creates the world in which we live: For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. (CP 129) According to his wife, what Avery loved most about Stevens’ poetry was its sound.7 The close affinity between Stevens and Avery may perhaps best be summarized by drawing an analogy between Avery’s sensuous use of color and Stevens’ sensuous use of language. It is a sensuousness at once elegant and strange, startling and seductive. Martica Sawin relates it to their common experience in Hartford: “Avery and Stevens were both fru- gal New Englanders by conditioning, who seem to be forever compensat- ing for some early sensory deprivation by reveling in exotic and subtle hues.”8 Jack Tworkov Jack Tworkov (1900–1982) reached maturity as part of the Abstract Ex- pressionist movement whose leading figures were Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning. (Other artists in this article associated with Abstract Expressionism are William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Richard Dieben- korn, and Grace Hartigan.) Abstract Expressionism emphasized sponta- neity, freedom, direct expression of emotion, and an exuberant, painterly delight in the medium itself. Tworkov’s painting Adagio (1953) is typical of the “gestural” abstraction for which this movement is known. Like Wallace Stevens, the Abstract Expressionists developed their art under the combined influences of surrealism and abstraction during the 1930s and early 1940s, and their mature paintings provide a suggestive parallel to Stevens’ abstract late poems such as “The Auroras of Autumn” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” They became famous in the early 1950s, at the same time that Stevens was becoming known as perhaps the greatest living American poet, whose work owed its “major” status primarily to a coherent, overarching aesthetic theory. Naturally the Abstract Expressionists turned to Stevens’ writing for help in explaining the new painting they had recently developed. STEVENS’ INFLUENCE ON CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS 141 Jack Tworkov was reading and talk- ing about Wallace Stevens in the early 1950s. This was entirely in character, since Tworkov originally wanted to be a poet. He had been an English major at Columbia College before dropping out to devote himself to painting.

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