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Spring 2004 the Wallace Stevens Journal The Wallace Stevens Journal A Publication of The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Volume 28 Number 1 Spring 2004 The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 28 Number 1 Spring 2004 Contents Wallace Stevens and the World of Tea —Nico Israel 3 Wallace Stevens’ Defense of Poetry in “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” —Jeannine Johnson 23 “The Figure Concealed”: Valéryan Echoes in Stevens’ Ideas of Music —Lisa Goldfarb 38 “A Little Hard to See”: Wittgenstein, Stevens, and the Uses of Unclarity —Andrew Osborn 59 The Structural Modes of Wallace Stevens’ “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” —Sidney Feshbach 81 Poems 101 Reviews 109 Current Bibliography 114 Cover Significant Landscapes (after “Six Significant Landscapes”) Lino print/collage Joan Colbert 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 Joyce Freitag 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 $25 for one year or $45 for two years and includes membership in the Wallace Stevens Society. Rates for institutions are $34 per year domestic and $39 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. © 2004 The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 Wallace Stevens and the World of Tea NICO ISRAEL I HEN THE SPEAKER OF “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” concludes, “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard Wor felt came not but from myself; / And there I found myself more truly and more strange” (CP 65), he implicitly links tea with percep- tion, sensation, self-knowledge, and a strange kind of truth: significant claims for something so apparently insignificant.1 Tea might initially seem rather like other objects in Wallace Stevens’ poetry—jar, tree, or rock, for example—in that it hovers the border between imagination and reality, seminal terms in Stevens’ own formulation of his poetics. But tea is far more worldly: both raw product of nature and refined product of culture, it has an economic and social history, comes from and passes through par- ticular geographical locations, and is aesthetic in that it is at once a source of pleasure and a tasteful substance that enters (and leaves) the human body. Tea, as ceremony and commodity, infuses both periods of Stevens’ po- etic life: the early period leading up to the publication of Harmonium, as- sociated with aestheticism, sonic experimentation, occasional imagism, and, importantly, orientalism, and the later period of longer, more overtly philosophical poems often involving a display of connoisseurship.2 In fact, an examination of the figure and fact of tea reveals an important connec- tion between orientalist aestheticism and philosophically inclined con- noisseurship in Stevens’ work and allows us to reconsider the relation between his earlier and later poetic output. More broadly, Stevens’ sense of place, as expressed in and through tea, itself discloses something strange, but true, about the relation between aesthetics and global politics as they shift over the course of Stevens’ poetic career. In short, tea tells us much about Stevens’ world, and about our own. II That tea has thus far escaped attention from Stevens critics seems odd, especially considering that one of the two or three earliest poems to be written is “Tea,” which Stevens placed second-to-last in Harmonium.3 One THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 28.1 (SPRING 2004): 3–22. © 2004 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. 3 of Stevens’ most overtly imagistic poems, “Tea” is economical enough to be quoted in its entirety: When the elephant’s-ear in the park Shrivelled in frost, And the leaves on the paths Ran like rats, Your lamp-light fell On shining pillows, Of sea-shades and sky-shades, Like umbrellas in Java. (CP 112–13) The second-person audience of this complex poem is elusive. If we take the implied “you” to indicate a human listener (a guest or perhaps a lover), then that listener’s illuminating presence transports the undesignated speaker out of a particular place—presumably the autumnal northeast of the United States, where there is a park with paths strewn with dead leaves—to an exotic, colorful elsewhere associated with the light, sea, and sky of the East, engendering a warming that occurs, paradoxically, under the shade of an imagined umbrella. On the other hand, if the “you” of the poem is tea itself, then it is tea’s own “lamp-light,” the light it carries within itself, that falls on shining pillows of shades, creating its own warming. The ambivalence of addressee extends to the poem’s portrayal of geog- raphy. Carl Van Vechten, noting that “every line” of the poem “in some way conveyed the impression of tea,” claimed that the penultimate line, which logically reads as an enjambment but is preceded and followed by commas, was originally “Of teashades and seashades” (Van Vechten 43).4 This variant would change the feeling of lightness and space given off by “sky-shades,” but it would not blunt the powerful yet confusing force of the final simile, “Like umbrellas in Java.” Java, the name for the central island of present-day Indonesia, was at the time the poem was written the prized possession of the Dutch East Indies, a colonial formation that emerged out of the spice trade and then the tea trade, though large scale cultivation and production of tea began there, as in most of the world (even in British India), only in the early nineteenth century.5 “Java” is sig- nificant in the poem not for its association with colonialism or the produc- tivity of modernity, but for the opposite reason: the soothing, protective property that the listener or tea provides the speaker or taster. The logic of the concluding simile is either (1) that the sea-shades and sky-shades them- selves are like umbrellas in that they offer a form of shade (which word also picks up a sense of color); or (2), more satisfactorily but running con- trary to the grammar and punctuation of the lines, that the lamp light of tea or the listener fell as light falls on umbrellas in Java; or (3), least satis- factorily, that “Your lamp light fell on shining pillows” in the way that umbrellas in Java fall. 4 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL But what, one may wonder, are umbrellas in Java “like”? Are they, as one suspects, protection from the sun (even though much of Java is actu- ally a rainforest) or from the rain? If the former, why not “parasol,” a word Stevens used in the title of an unpublished early poem, “The Ballade of the Pink Parasol”? Was Stevens just entranced with the sound of “umbrellas in Java”? If so, would not the poem work better without the “like,” which seems as unnecessary as a “like” in Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” between “The apparition of these faces in the crowd” and “Petals on a wet, black bough” (Personae 109), a poem whose elegant brevity and orien- tal veneer clearly influenced the early Stevens? I interrogate these lines not merely to point out the nonsensical quality of the simile and thereby to reinforce the notion that, as in Frank Lentricchia’s parody of early Stevens criticism, the Harmonium poems are “on principle mindless: maybe gemlike, but also without point” (207). On the contrary, the confusion—perhaps we can call it a catachresis (itself a kind of rhetorical “falling”)—points up a quandary concerning the relation between tea and umbrellas in Java and, indeed, between tea and the poetry of Wallace Stevens.6 In this sense—returning again to the beginning of the poem—what is crucial to understand is that even in the unidentified “park,” presumably a figure for Western rationality or “order,” “elephant’s ear” and rodential nature (leaves scattered by the wind, echoing the idea of tea leaves) dis- turb that order, as if themselves awaiting the falling light of the guest/ lover or of tea itself. This falling light offers, for the speaker or drinker, a kind of protection: like umbrellas in Java.7 The “shining pillows” seem simul- taneously inside a luxurious interior and outside in the luminous sky in the Dutch East Indies.
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