The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens Edited by John N

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-84956-2 - The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens Edited by John N. Serio Frontmatter More information

the cambridge companion to wallace stevens

Wallace Stevens is a major American poet and a central figure in modernist studies and twentieth-century poetry. This Companion introduces students to his work. An international team of distinguished contributors presents a unified picture of Stevens’ poetic achievement. The Introduction explains why Stevens is among the world’s great poets and offers specific guidance on how to read and appreciate his poetry. A brief biographical sketch anchors Stevens in the real world and illuminates important personal and intellectual influences. The essays following chart Stevens’ poetic career and his affinities with both earlier and contemporary writers, artists, and philosophers. Other essays introduce students to the peculiarity and distinctiveness of Stevens’ voice and style. They explain prominent themes in his work and explore the nuances of his aesthetic theory. With a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading, this Companion provides all the information a student or scholar of Stevens will need.

john n. serio is Professor of Humanities at Clarkson University, New York, and editor of the Wallace Stevens Journal.

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO WALLACE STEVENS

EDITED BY JOHN N. SERIO

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sa˜o Paulo

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First published 2007

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CONTENTS

List of contributors page vii Chronology x List of abbreviations xvi

Introduction 1 JOHN N. SERIO

1 Wallace Stevens: a likeness 8 JOAN RICHARDSON

2 Stevens and Harmonium 23 ROBERT REHDER

3 Stevens in the 1930s 37 ALAN FILREIS

4 Stevens and the supreme ﬁction 48 MILTON J. BATES

5 Stevens’ late poetry 62 B. J. LEGGETT

6 Stevens and his contemporaries 76 JAMES LONGENBACH

7 Stevens and romanticism 87 JOSEPH CARROLL

CONTENTS

8 Stevens and philosophy 103 BART EECKHOUT

9 Stevens’ seasonal cycles 118 GEORGE S. LENSING

10 Stevens and the lyric speaker 133 HELEN VENDLER

11 Stevens and linguistic structure 149 BEVERLY MAEDER

12 Stevens and painting 164 BONNIE COSTELLO

13 Stevens and the feminine 180 JACQUELINE VAUGHT BROGAN

14 Stevens and belief 193 DAVID R. JARRAWAY

Guide to further reading 207 Index 214

CONTRIBUTORS

MILTON J. BATES is the author of Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (1985) and The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conﬂict and Storytelling (1996). He has edited the revised edition of Stevens’ Opus Posthumous (1989) and Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book (1989). He teaches at Marquette University.

JACQUELINE VAUGHT BROGAN has published several books on twentieth-century poetry, including Stevens and Simile: A Theory of Language (1986), Part of the Climate: American Cubist Poetry (1991), Women Poets of the Americas (co-edited with Cordelia Cha´vez Candelaria, 1999), and The Violence Within/The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics (2003). She teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

JOSEPH CARROLL is the author of The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold (1982), Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism (1987), Evolution and Literary Theory (1995), and Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (2004). He has also published a contextualized, annotated edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (2003). He teaches at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

BONNIE COSTELLO is Professor of English at Boston University specializing in modern and contemporary poetry. She is the author of Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (1981), Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), and Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry (2003). She is General Editor of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (1997).

BART EECKHOUT is the author of Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (2002). He has guest-edited two special issues of the Wallace Stevens Journal, one on ‘International Perspectives’ (2001) and the other, with Edward Ragg, on ‘Wallace Stevens and British Literature’ (2006). He teaches at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

ALAN FILREIS is Kelly Professor, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, and Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (1991), Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties and Literary Radicalism (1994), and a new edition of Ira Wolfert’s Tucker’s People (1997). He has just completed a new book, entitled The Fifties’ Thirties: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–60.

DAVID R. JARRAWAY is Professor of American Literature at the University of Ottawa and is the author of Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark (1993), Going the Distance: Dissident Subjectivity in Modernist American Literature (2003), and many essays on American literature and culture.

B. J. LEGGETT is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee. His books on Stevens include Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory: Conceiving the Supreme Fiction (1987), Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext (1992), and Late Stevens: The Final Fiction (2005).

GEORGE S. LENSING is Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth (1986) and Wallace Stevens and the Seasons (2001).

JAMES LONGENBACH is the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester. He is the author of three books of poems, including Fleet River (2003) and Draft of a Letter (2007), as well as five critical books, including Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (1991) and The Resistance to Poetry (2004).

BEVERLY MAEDER teaches at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. She is the author of Wallace Stevens’ Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute (1999).

ROBERT REHDER’S books include Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry (1981), The Poetry of Wallace Stevens (1988), Stevens, Williams, Crane and the Motive for Metaphor (2004), and he has edited A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1999). He is the author of two books of poems: The Compromises Will Be Different (1995) and First Things When (2007). He holds the chair of English and American Literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

JOAN RICHARDSON is the author of Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879–1923 (1986), Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923–1955 (1988), and co-editor, with Frank Kermode, of the Library of America’s edition of Stevens’ Collected Poetry and Prose (1997). She has just published A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (2006). She teaches at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

JOHN N. SERIO has been editor of the Wallace Stevens Journal since 1983.Hehas published Wallace Stevens: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1994) and, with B. J. Leggett, Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays (1994). He has also edited Poetry for Young People: Wallace Stevens (2004) and created, with Greg Foster, an Online Concordance to Wallace Stevens’ Poetry (2004). He is Professor of Humanities at Clarkson University.

HELEN VENDLER is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard. She has written extensively on Stevens, including On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems (1969) and Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (1984). Her recent books include Poets Thinking: Pope, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats (2004) and Invisible Listeners: Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (2005). She is at work on a study of Yeats’s lyric forms.

CHRONOLOGY

1879 Born October 2 in Reading, Pennsylvania, the second son of Margaretha (Kate), a former teacher, and Garrett Stevens, a lawyer and businessman, whose other children included Garrett, Jr., born December 19, 1877; John, born December 9, 1880; Elizabeth, born July 19, 1885; and Mary Katharine, born April 25, 1889.

1885–1891 Although raised Presbyterian, attends Lutheran grammar schools and studies, among other subjects, French and German, which he continues to read throughout his life.

1892–1897 Takes classical curriculum at Reading Boys’ High School and, after being held back one year due to illness and low grades, graduates with merit, having won prizes for writing and public speaking.

1897–1900 Attends Harvard College as a special student in a three-year, non-degree program, taking most of his coursework in English, French, and German languages and literature. Publishes over thirty poems, short stories, and sketches in the Harvard Advocate and Harvard Monthly, often under pseudonyms, and serves as secretary of the Signet Society and president of the Harvard Advocate.

1900–1901 Tries his hand as a reporter in New York, working for the New York Tribune and World’s Work, a monthly magazine, but ﬁnds journalism unfulﬁlling.

CHRONOLOGY

1901–1903 Persuaded by his father, enrolls in New York Law School; clerks for W. G. Peckham, a New York attorney, during the summer of 1902; graduates in June 1903.

1903–1904 Works as a law clerk for Peckham, who befriends him and takes him in late summer 1903 on a seven-week hunting trip to British Columbia.

1904–1908 Admitted to the New York bar in June 1904,visitsReading and meets Elsie Kachel, born in Reading June 5, 1886; begins a five-year courtship, carried on mostly in correspondence. Struggles as a lawyer in New York, moving from firm to firm.

1908 In January, secures a position with American Bonding Co., initiating his lifelong legal specialty in the insurance business. In June, sends Elsie “A Book of Verses,” composed for her twenty-second birthday. Becomes engaged to Elsie at Christmas, despite family objections to her lower social status.

1909 Composes “The Little June Book,” a collection of poems for Elsie’s twenty-third birthday; marries Elsie on September 21 in Reading, with no family members in attendance; resides in New York with Elsie until their move to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1916.

1911 Father dies in Reading on July 14, and Stevens attends the funeral.

1912 Mother dies in Reading on July 16, and Stevens attends the funeral.

1914 Joins the New York ofﬁce of Equitable Surety Company in February as a vice president. Publishes minor poems, including two poetic sequences, “Carnet de Voyage” and “Phases.” His return to poetry stimulated in part by his ﬁnancial stability and by the company of writers, artists, and musicians – including William Carlos Williams and Marcel Duchamp – who gathered regularly at the New York apartment of Walter Arensberg.

CHRONOLOGY

1915 Publishes ﬁrst mature poems such as “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Sunday Morning.”

1916 Joins the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and moves permanently to Hartford. Specializing in surety bonds, travels extensively throughout the United States, visiting places such as Florida, Oklahoma, and Minnesota, which often form backdrops to his poetry. Wins $100 Poetry prize for verse drama Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise. Wife’s proﬁle serves as image of Mercury on the American dime through mid-1940s.

1917 Does not attend sole performance in October of verse play Carlos among the Candles in an off-Broadway theater in New York.

1919 In May, Mary Katharine, his youngest sister, dies in France while serving as a Red Cross volunteer during World War I.

1920 Does not attend the only performance of Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise by the Provincetown Players in New York in February. Wins Levinson Prize from Poetry for group of poems, “Pecksnifﬁana,” in November.

1921 Submits “From the Journal of Crispin” for the Blindman Prize, sponsored by the Poetry Society of South Carolina, and receives ﬁrst honorable mention from judge Amy Lowell. Revises the poem as “The Comedian as the Letter C.”

1923 In September, shortly before his forty-fourth birthday, publishes ﬁrst book, Harmonium, with Alfred A. Knopf. Takes ﬁrst extended vacation with Elsie, traveling to Havana, the Panama Canal, the Gulf of Tehuantepec, California, and overland back to Hartford.

1924 Holly Bright Stevens, his only child, born on August 10 in Hartford.

1925–33 Claiming the new baby and work consume his energies, virtu- ally gives up writing poetry.

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CHRONOLOGY

1931 Harmonium reissued by Knopf in a revised edition (three poems were deleted and fourteen – most composed before 1924 – added). Initiates lifelong relationship with Parisian bookseller, from whom he also purchases paintings.

1932 In September, moves to 118 Westerly Terrace in Hartford, the only home he owned, located near Elizabeth Park.

1934 Named vice president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in February, earning, during this year of the Depression, $17,500 (based on the Consumer Price Index, equivalent to $264,500 in 2006 dollars).

1935 Ideas of Order published in a limited edition by Alcestis Press in August.

1936 In February in Key West, gets into a ﬁstﬁght with Ernest Hemingway and breaks his hand on Hemingway’s jaw (the two make amends and conceal the cause of the injury). In October, Knopf publishes trade edition of Ideas of Order. Awarded The Nation’s Poetry Prize for “The Men That Are Falling.” Alcestis Press issues a limited edition of Owl’s Clover in November. Delivers lecture “The Irrational Element in Poetry” at Harvard in December.

1937 The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems published by Knopf in October. Older brother Garrett Stevens, Jr., dies in November in Cleveland, Ohio.

1940 Younger brother John Bergen Stevens dies in July in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1941 Presents lecture “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” at Princeton University in May. Initiates genealogical studies that preoccupy him for the rest of his life.

1942 In September, Knopf publishes Parts of a World. In October, Cummington Press publishes a limited edition of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.

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CHRONOLOGY

1943 In February, Elizabeth Stevens MacFarland, his last surviving sibling, dies in Philadelphia. Delivers lecture “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” at Mount Holyoke College in August.

1944 In August, against Stevens’ objections, Holly marries John Hanchak, a repairman.

1945 Presents lecture “Description Without Place” as the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in June. Esthe´tique du Mal published by Cummington Press in a limited edition in November. Elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in December; inducted the next year in May.

1947 Reads essay “Three Academic Pieces” at Harvard in February. Transport to Summer published by Knopf in March. His only grandchild, Peter Reed Hanchak, born on April 26. Receives an honorary doctorate from Wesleyan University in June. Three Academic Pieces published by Cummington Press in December.

1948 Presents lecture “Effects of Analogy” at Yale University in March and at Mount Holyoke in April. Reads paper “Imagination as Value” at Columbia University in September.

1949 In September, receives Still Life by Pierre Tal-Coat from Parisian art dealer, inspiring him to write “Angel Surrounded by Paysans.” In November, reads “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” at the 150th celebration of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences in New Haven.

1950 Awarded Bollingen Prize in Poetry for 1949 in March. The Auroras of Autumn published by Knopf in September.

1951 In January, delivers lecture “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; later that month, awarded Gold Medal of the Poetry Society of America in New York. In March, wins 1950 National Book Award in Poetry for The Auroras of Autumn. Awarded an honorary doctorate from Bard College in

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CHRONOLOGY

March. Reads essay “Two or Three Ideas” at Mount Holyoke in April. Receives an honorary degree from Harvard in June. Holly Stevens granted a divorce from John Hanchak in September. In November, Knopf publishes The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. Presents lecture “A Collect of Philosophy” at University of Chicago and at City College of New York.

1952 In June, receives honorary doctorates from Mount Holyoke and Columbia.

1953 Selected Poems published in England by Faber and Faber in February.

1954 Records reading of poems for Harvard Library. Reads “The Sail of Ulysses” as Phi Beta Kappa poem at Columbia in May. In October, on the occasion of his seventy-ﬁfth birthday, Knopf releases The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

1955 In January, receives National Book Award in Poetry for 1954. In April, diagnosed with cancer of the stomach. Awarded Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in May. Receives honorary doctorates from Hartt College of Music in Hartford and Yale in June. Dies of stomach cancer on August 2 at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford.

1963 Elsie Stevens dies on February 19 in Hartford.

1992 Holly Stevens dies on March 4 in Guilford, Connecticut.

ABBREVIATIONS

Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Wallace Stevens are taken from Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997) and cited paren- thetically in the text with page numbers only. Other works will be cited with the following abbreviations: L Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. SP Stevens, Holly. Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1977. SPBS Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book. A Facsimile and Transcription, ed. Milton J. Bates. Stanford: Stanford University Press and Huntington Library, 1989. Other works by Stevens may be found in the Guide to Further Reading.

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