r This dissertation has been 63-4676 microfilmed exactly as received LORD, Georgianna Wuletich, 1931— THE ANNIHILATION OF ART IN THE POETRY OF WALLACE STEVENS. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1962 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan significant value. All of its efforts, therefore, are to make the un­ real— that in which the imagination desires to believe— real and therefore worthy of belief. Stevens’ poetry and thought, then,springs from a dialectic between the imagination and reality, both of which are, in their most basic sense, internalized in the mind as wish (aspiration) and reason. Wish Implies the urge toward pleasure; reason, toward common sense and logic. Wish is the impulse toward grace; reason, toward gravity. Stevens believed that the dialectic between reality and the imagination is endless, that there is a war in the mind that will never end because the mind's desire to satisfy itself will never be fulfilled. Indeed, the major premise of Stevens' thought is that the wish of the imagination will never be ful­ filled. Underlying that major premise is a clash of irreconcilable desires: the desire to achieve fulfillment; the desire to be discon­ tent. Put another way, it is the desire to believe and the inability to (desire not to) believe. The imagination and reality enjoy a temporary armistice whenever each new wish postulated by the imagination is momentarily refined and sanctioned by reason, instead of being denied categorically. Ihat tem­ porary armistice is, as Stevens writes in "The Necessary Angel," a bal­ ance of imagination and reality (imagination and reason). However, the truce is soon broken when reality sceptically questions the imagination's achievement, desiring to break down the "romantic tenements of rose and ice." Once those facile illusions are corroded, the imagination with inexhaustible reserves of vitality again proposes a new wish in which it for the Inhibited instruments/ Of overcivil stops." Above all, he is afraid of too much beauty* preciosity* refinement, elegance; for that will only stop him in his search "for the fecund minimum." He finds this in a realism turned sordid* of decay and stench. But ever the ele­ gant* inane connoisseur* posturing as if to Judge among fine wines one that he will have with a feast* Tilting his nose* He inhaled the rancid rosin* burly smells Of dampened lumber* emanations blown Fran warehouse doors* the gustlness of ropes* Decays of sacks* and all the arrant stinks That helped him round his rude aesthetic out (p. 3 6 ) • Crispin tries to arrive at an aesthetic, not for poetry* but for prose* whose single virtue* as Stevens was to note later in "a Collect of Philosophy," resides in its power to express a concept that is inher­ ently poetic. Anticipating this idea at the end of part III* he writes: He gripped more closely the essential prose As being... Die one Integrity for him* the one Discovery still possible.to make*... unless That prose should wear a poem's guise at last. However, Crispin is not Interested in the poetic concept at the core of prose. For him it must be prose on the surface and prose at the core: Exit the mental moonlight* exit lex Hex and prlnclplum* exit the whole Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose More exquisite than any tumbling verse. Art, for him the purest prose, will be addressed to the "rankest trivia" thus to be the "tests of the strength/ Of his aesthetic, his philosophy.' There is nothing benevolent in his vision: "The more invidious, the more desired." Finally, with sustained pomposity he writes "his prolegomena," 97 vhich, curiously enough, has little of the austerity of essential prose, hut rather recalls his trivial, though Innocent Interests before he even set out on a voyage. The natives of the rain are rainy men. Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes And April hllmides wooded white and pink Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears. And their music showering sounds intone (p. 37)* Again, and again, all of his attempts to baalsh romance, beauty, and to achieve the essential prose, Which Is perfection for Crispin, are doomed to fall. For the Imagination-- no matter how permanently maimed it may be (as It certainly Is with Crispin), still flickers. As Stevens writes: These bland excursions Into'time to come, Related in romance to backward flights, However prodigal, however proud, Contained in their afflatus the reproach That first drove Crispin to his wandering. Denying the Imagination, which for him Is Invariably associated"with counterfeit,/ With masquerade of thought, with hapless words..he Is nevertheless one to perpetuate counterfeit himself with his own delusions of grandeur. But he thinks all the while that he is being a heroic real­ ist s he Is always "serenely sly” of all artifice. He claims that he pre> fers "text to gloss," and therefore "humbly served/ Grotesque apprentice­ ship to chance event," humbly submitted to the vicissitudes of fortune; but perhaps, as Stevens writes, not so humbly after all: "A clown perhaps, but an aspiring clown" (p. 31). The aspiration for fame, nobility, perfection can no more be denied in Crispin than can the romantic dreams which for him are "not/ The on­ coming fantasies of better birth," but rather "a monotonous babbling." Even in dreaming, "he did it in a gingerly vay," desiring that "all dreams ...he expunged." Are ve to conclude, therefore, that vith his retreat to hermitage, to ”A Nice Shady Home" he has finally forsworn romance, and achieved true asceticism, 'becoming finally "pure and capa­ ble"? It seems that he is no longer "discontent," no longer the "prick­ ling realist." (Ironically, for Crispin, discontent is associated vith the quest for reality and not, as it is for Stevans, vith the romantic agony,) "He might have come/ To colonize his polar planterdom/ And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee.” In these lines Stevens forecasts the end of Crispin's career: a colony which amounts to taking a wife and having children. This idea evidently occurs to Crispin in "A Nice Shady Home" soon after he has retired into his hermitage. But, as Stevens writes, "his emprize to that idea soon sped," and therefore Crispin temporarily resists the final reduction by reality. What then is this monastic existence like? And what artistic achieve­ ment does it finally culminate in? Again his mind proceeds not to the romantic, but rather to "things within his actual eye," to the real, now seen not harshly, cruelly in its stark elemental forms, but leavened by desire for comfort and pleasure. Even so, he strives for asceticism, "alert/ To the difficulty of rebellious thought/ When the sky is blue." But the "blue infected will,” the imagination Infects, corrupts his asce­ tic spirit, Stevens writes ironically. Crispin sees that "Infection" not as liberation— as Indeed it would have been had his commitment not been befuddled in the first place; rather for him it is confinement: But day by day, now this thing and now that Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned, 99 Little by little, as If the suzerain soil Abashed him by carouse to humble yet Attach (p. hO). He might have been glad to think that this confinement was part of the "chance event" to which he decided melodramatically to surrender himself. Indeed, he says that It seemed haphazard denouement." But Isn't this sweet, maternal confinement always the refuge he sought when he was driven from the storm In Yucatan to the bosom of the church, when In rounding his rude aesthetic out, he progressed from the harsh elemental ding an sich to the "gold's maternal warmth" (p. 32), when he left the Artlc for "a flourishing tropic," when, finally having shown the exit to "Bex..., princlplum" and the whole/ Shebang," he himself began to Inscribe "Com­ mingled souvenirs and prophecies"? What he attempts to deny has all come back upon him with tender vengeance, for "These bland excursions” of his "Contained in their afflatus the reproach," the very thing that from the beginning Crispin has been struggling to deny. His only course of action, whether he will or no, Is to return to what he had denied: He first, as realist, admitted that Whoever hunts a matlnal continent May, after all, stop short before a plum And be content and still be realist. Realist though he claims he has become, precisely what kind of a realist Is he now? In answering that question, Crispin Indeed defines the kind of art he finally produces. Realizing that the real form of the plum outlives all of those forms that the artist appropriates to It, he decides that his moral Integrity leads him to demand the real thing. For him the real thing is "good, fat, guzzly fruit,” and seen In this way, the only thing he can do Is to eat It. "So Crispin hasped on the 100 surviving form." The search for artistic Integrity comes to an end— or almost to an end— as he gulps down the plum. In what is a hilarious, grandiloquent prologue to the finale, Stevens questions precisely how Crispin will choose to describe his final decision to eat the plum. Will he, as we would expect from someone who has a sense of perspective, sim­ ply say nothing at all? Or, instead Was he to bray this in profoundest brass Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems? Was he to company vastest things defunct With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky? Scrawl a tragedlam's testament? Prolong His active force In an inactive dirge, Which, let the tall musicians call and call, Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen Through choirs unfolded to the outmost clouds? Because he built a cabin who once planned loquacious columns by the ructlve sea? Because he turned to salad-beds again? Crispin, of course, never gives up the chance to see himself In some heroic and noble pose.