Vol. 23, No. 2 (Fall 1999)

The Wallace Stevens JournalThe Wallace Apocalyptic Language and Stevens The Wallace Stevens Journal Vol. 23 No. 2 Fall 1999 Vol. Special Issue: Approaching the Millennium Stevens and Apocalyptic Language A Publication of The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Volume 23 Number 2 Fall 1999 The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 23 Number 2 Fall 1999 Special Issue: Approaching the Millennium Stevens and Apocalyptic Language Edited by Eleanor Cook Contents Wallace Stevens’ “Puella Parvula” and the “Haunt of Prophecy” —Malcolm Woodland 99 “Cloudless the morning. It is he”: The Return of the Figural in Stevens’ Apocalypses —Carolyn Masel 111 “Gusts of Great Enkindlings”: Spectral Apocalypse in “The Auroras of Autumn” —Michael Hobbs 126 Stevens, Benjamin, and Messianic Time —Jonathan Ivry 141 Stevens, Hegel, and the Palm at the End of the Mind —Jennifer Bates 152 “The Statue at the World’s End”: Monumental Art as Apocalypse —Angus Cleghorn 167 The World After Poetry: Revelation in Late Stevens —James Longenbach 187 Afterword: Last Words on Stevens and Apocalypse —Langdon Hammer 194 Poems 197 Reviews 205 News and Comments 211 Cover Art Alpha and Omega, pen and ink drawing from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” by Kathryn Jacobi 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 Sandra Cookson Milton J. Bates A. Walton Litz Maureen Kravec Jacqueline V. Brogan James Longenbach Hope Steele Robert Buttel Glen MacLeod Eleanor Cook Marjorie Perloff TECHNICAL ASSISTANTS Alan Filreis Joan Richardson Richard Austin B. J. Leggett Melita Schaum Claudette J. VanEss George S. Lensing Lisa M. Steinman The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. PRESIDENT ADVISORY BOARD John N. Serio Milton J. Bates David M. Craig Owen E. Brady Kathryn Jacobi Robert Buttel George S. Lensing Ellen C. Caldwell 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 $25 for one year or $45 for two years and includes membership in The Wallace Stevens Society. Rates for institutions are $32 per year domestic and $37 per year foreign. Back issues are available. Manuscripts, subscriptions, and advertising should be addressed to the editor. Manu- scripts should be submitted in duplicate; word-processed manuscripts will not be re- turned. Authors of accepted manuscripts should furnish a nonreturnable 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. © 1999 The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 Wallace Stevens’ “Puella Parvula” and the “Haunt of Prophecy” MALCOLM WOODLAND N CANTO IV OF “Sunday Morning,” Wallace Stevens rejects the “haunt of prophecy” (CP 68) for its lack of enduring imaginative vitality. But Ithe late lyric “Puella Parvula” finds Stevens still haunted by that old poetic haunt—at least according to Harold Bloom, for whom “Puella Parvula” shows, like “Saint John and the Back-Ache,” that “Both the apocalyptic seer and the wary pain-of-the-past speak for Stevens” (300). Bloom’s division between the apocalyptic and backward-looking Stevens seems odd, though, since apocalyptic writings betray a strong debt to earlier texts, and, in turn, form a significant part of the past that weighs so heavily on Stevens’ imagination in these poems. In “Puella Parvula,” Stevens’ own complex relationship to the apocalyptic past initially emerges through a remarkable series of prophetic and apocalyptic echoes—echoes of the kind Eleanor Cook has elsewhere analyzed so thoroughly.1 Cook notes that Stevens “decreates” his sources, and then moves beyond, in order to retrieve what, after much testing, will hold. And what is retrieved and holds is different in kind, not just in degree, from what has preceded it. (“King James” 241)2 I, too, will be concerned with Stevens’ differences from (and with) the past in “Puella Parvula,” though I shall speak more of the persistence, rather than retrieval, of the past; in particular, I wish to explore some possible constraints upon Stevens’ desire to differ, constraints inherent in that prophetic and apocalyptic tradition that he attempts to break with in this antiapocalyptic poem. Here, Cook’s (“Introduction” 120) and Bloom’s readings of “Puella Parvula” as “apocalyptic” prove especially suggestive, since I hope to show that its antiapocalyptic stance proves difficult to distin- guish from an apocalyptic one. Jacques Derrida’s and Frank Kermode’s explorations of the paradoxes produced by antiapocalyptic writings are thus especially relevant to “Puella Parvula”; in particular, their work helps us to situate the poem’s biblical echoes and its intensely conflicted thematization of gender in relation to the apocalyptic tradition and the postmodern distrust of that discourse. Conveniently enough, Stevens’ critics offer varied understandings of the key terms “apocalyptic” and “antiapocalyptic.” It may be wise, though, THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 23.2 (FALL 1999): 99–110. © 1999 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. 99 to begin with a brief definition of “apocalypse” in its biblical (and extra- canonical) forms. Richard Bauckham describes apocalypse as a highly specialized development of eschatological prophecy; it incorporates ele- ments (dream visions, otherworldly journeys, angelic interpreters and guides, etc.) not native to earlier prophecy, and expands prophecy’s con- cerns with the future of the nation of Israel to include the end (both as termination and purpose) of the entire world (2–5).3 In apocalypse, the past is fulfilled only by means of a radical break with the past—a point emphasized in James Longenbach’s readings of the rhetoric of catastrophic disruption and termination in Stevens’ antiapocalyptic poetry. He shows Stevens rejecting not just the imminence of the end, but the very idea of “The End,” and offering a rhetoric of social continuity in opposition to the apocalypticism prevalent in some cultural and political spheres during and between the two World Wars.4 Cook (Poetry 267–94), Joseph Adamson, and Patricia Parker (236–43), in contrast, have shown how Stevens subtly undoes the metaphors of veiling and unveiling, appearance and reality, figure and truth, that are implicit in the concept of “apocalypse.” But the apocalyptic echoes of “Puella Parvula” are largely concerned with the idea of “The End.” Stevens’ “antiapocalyptic” stance in this poem takes the form of an opposition to the idea of any preordained end of history, and in particular to the biblical language in which that idea has been embodied. It may facilitate the discussion, then, to begin with the poem and all its prophetic haunts: Every thread of summer is at last unwoven. By one caterpillar is great Africa devoured And Gibraltar is dissolved like spit in the wind. But over the wind, over the legends of its roaring, The elephant on the roof and its elephantine blaring, The bloody lion in the yard at night or ready to spring From the clouds in the midst of trembling trees Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat, Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs Like a trumpet and says, in this season of memory, When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past, Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch. O mind Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella. Write pax across the window pane. And then Be still. The summarium in excelsis begins . Flame, sound, fury composed . Hear what he says, The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale. (CP 456) 100 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL The possible coexistence of two sets of echoes in the poem’s first lines— one Stevensian, one biblical—complicates any attempt at interpretation. The lion “ready to spring / From the clouds” and “one caterpillar,” along with the uses of “dissolved” and “trembling,” echo key passages from Old Tes- tament prophecies of the Day of the Lord; “gnashing” recalls the activity (usually accompanied by wailing or weeping) performed by the wicked at the last days (at least according to New Testament eschatology—Matt. 13:42, 24:51, 25:30, Luke 13:28).5 Borroff (21–22) and Bloom (300), however, relate the animals in “Puella Parvula” to the lion and elephant of “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” I v; they are vocal figures of a natural violence that must be tamed by “the heroic children whom time breeds / Against the first idea” (CP 385). Stevens’ vocal tropes of the sea’s meaningless sounds, too, are familiar from “Notes” I iii, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and many other passages. Since the “bloody lion” belongs to both realms of figuration, one might wonder whether the poet were now opening this “sov- ereign[] of the soul” (CP 124) to its prophetic past. Bloom describes the animals of “Puella Parvula” as “a giant, composite pathetic fallacy or series of impositions of an animal consciousness upon the reality of nature” (301); but the echoes of “Notes” also challenge the biblical ones, reducing the fearful voices of biblical prophecy that Stevens hears in the wind to mere animal or natural violence and noise. The provenance of this wind and of the eleventh line’s trumpet, however, should prevent any critic from resting at this opposition.

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