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Fall 2005 the Wallace Stevens Journal The Wallace Stevens Journal Special Issue Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound A Publication of The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Volume 29 Number 2 Fall 2005 The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 29 Number 2 Fall 2005 Contents The Two Voices of Wallace Stevens’ Blank Final Music —Andrew Goldstone 213 “These Minutiae Mean More”: Five Editions of Wallace Stevens’ “Esthétique du Mal” —Jeff Jaeckle 233 From Deconstruction to Decreation: Wallace Stevens’ Notes Toward a Poetics of Nobility —Ayon Roy 249 The Lyric Element and the Prosaic World in “The Idea of Order at Key West” —Victoria Shinbrot 263 Anding and Ending: Metaphor and Closure in Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” —Karen Helgeson 275 Poems 304 Reviews 310 News and Comments 324 Cover Wallace Stevens On the occasion of receiving an honorary doctorate from Wesleyan University on June 15, 1947 (AP/Wide World Photos) 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 Faye A. Serio Robert Buttel Glen MacLeod Hope Steele Eleanor Cook Marjorie Perloff Alan Filreis Joan Richardson TECHNICAL ASSISTANT B. J. Leggett Melita Schaum Sue Campbell 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, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents, IBR (In- ternational Bibliography of Book Reviews), IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Lit- erature), 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. © 2005 The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 The Two Voices of Wallace Stevens’ Blank Final Music ANDREW GOLDSTONE HE LATE POETRY of Wallace Stevens is disquieting. Gone are the spirit of playfulness and the riot of sensuous imagery that were an Tirrepressible part of his earlier work. In their place, Stevens’ last poems evoke personal death and the end of the imagination, sometimes in language so abstract as to seem cold, even affectless. Stevens could be describing the world of his own later poems when he writes, in the last lines of “Burghers of Petty Death,” of “an imperium of quiet, / In which a wasted figure, with an instrument, / Propounds blank final music” (CP 362). When the poems do depart from the icy conceptual realm, they do so fleetingly and disconcertingly. Stevens’ late works do not address us with a smooth, continuous, personable voice. They move abruptly from image to idea and back, rendering the thoughts that we try to sense behind the poem difficult, elusive, even, sometimes, aloof. Mark Halliday, in his cri- tique of the poet in Stevens and the Interpersonal, condemns this aloofness as a total withdrawal from compassion for others. Halliday sees an im- poverished worldview in Stevens, a retreat into emotionally exhausted abstraction and a self-centered concern with poetry and the imagination as a way of escaping from interpersonal responsibilities. I hope to show, however, that it is also possible to set this withdrawing tendency within a larger framework by characterizing the late poetry of Stevens as a dia- logue between two voices, one cosmic and cognitive, the other unforgiv- ingly perceptual and down-to-earth. Stevens’ late poems not only treat his great theme of the relationship between reality and the imagination; they also exhibit various versions of the dialogue form. The older Stevens’ poetic language is jagged and diffi- cult because it is composite; it is, in fact, two kinds of language in an- tiphony, what “The Man with the Blue Guitar” calls “a duet / With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds, / Another on earth” (CP 177). The duet takes many forms, and the oppositions between the voices are at once lexical, syntactic, and thematic. The voice in the clouds uses an abstract vocabulary and intricate hypotactic syntax to formulate metapoetic state- ments in favor of the value of the poetic imagination, whereas the percep- tions by the voice on earth of a barren world symbolize a refusal to THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 29.2 (FALL 2005): 213–232. © 2005 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. 213 acknowledge anything except the harsh reality of things. The thematic positions the voices stake out, however, are rarely as stable as the particu- larity of their language; the dialogic give-and-take, though irresolvable, is a genuine exchange of energies. If the late poems derive their power and their elusiveness from this two-voiced dynamic—this dual music—then to listen to only one of Stevens’ voices is to misread him. Stevens is not only the poet of thought depicted by Frank Doggett in Stevens’ Poetry of Thought, nor the perpetually remote figure of Halliday’s reading. The older Stevens is a complex entity, and we can, I think, come to a more nuanced understanding of his later poetry if we take full account of his multivocal- ity.1 One of Stevens’ most clearly two-voiced late poems is “The Plain Sense of Things,” in which statements of metapoetic analysis and perceptions of a bare reality take turns. A propositional, reflective language is in dia- logue with a descriptive language of stark facts. These two components, set in counterpoint, are the melodies of Stevens’ two poetic voices. The plain-sense voice observes concrete things; the analytic voice comments on the poem’s progress, offering explanations and qualifications. I show here the antiphonal relation of these two voices: Plain sense: After the leaves have fallen, Analytic: we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. Plain sense: The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Analytic: Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. Plain sense: The great pond, Analytic: The plain sense of it, Plain sense: without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, 214 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL Analytic: all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires. (CP 502–03; headings added) This division of the poem into propositional and descriptive linguistic modes corresponds to a thematic division, a conflict in the mind of the speaker. The metapoetic voice, arguing mostly by abstraction, seeks to capture the world in collapse portrayed by the plain-sense voice as some- thing required by and inherent in the imagination. Despite the definitive- sounding abstract diction of the metapoetic voice, however, it need not have final authority over our reading of the poem. The plain-sense words also have meaning on the symbolic plane. Since the metapoetic voice em- phasizes the process of imagining, it is easy to construe the plain-sense “great structure” as an edifice of the imagination, now decayed, leaving the poet a lonely “rat come out to see” the wreckage, trying to scavenge for something left to imagine. To assess the poem as a whole, we must see it as a dialogue whose meaning is not dictated by either voice alone. In the poem’s three-quatrain first section, the plain-sense, concrete voice holds sway, but not without interruption. The poem’s self-consciousness begins in its first line. “After the leaves have fallen” is pure description, but its corresponding main clause, “we return / To a plain sense of things,” is conspicuously metapoetic in its recapitulation of the title of the poem itself. The disruptive mid-sentence leap from one linguistic mode (physi- cal description) to another (abstract, metapoetic statement) is the first indi- cation of the poem’s characteristically Stevensian difficulty and complexity. The abrupt transition belies the plainness of the poem as a whole: if the poet were committed to the facts of things alone, he would not allow him- self any metapoetic statement. Instead, he would move directly from the fallen leaves of the first line to the blank cold of the sixth. The metapoetic voice suggests an argument against plainness: the conditional mood cre- ated by the “It is as if,” which ends the second line, undermines the decla- ration of “an end of the imagination,” proposing that all that follows is itself a cast of the imagination.
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