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I. the Metler of NOTHINGNESS 2. Samuel French Morse, Quoted By

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I. the Metler of NOTHINGNESS 2. Samuel French Morse, Quoted By Notes I. THE METlER OF NOTHINGNESS 1. My title alludes to a phrase in 'Seventy Years Later" (CP 525-6), the whole of which late poem is suggestively relevant to this chapler. Sources of quotations from Stevens's published writings will be given in the running lext, using the abbreviations already described. 2. Samuel French Morse, quoted by Peter Brazeau in his Parts of a World: Wallacr Stevens Rt'IIJembi'rrd (New York: J{andom House, 1983), p. 152. Subsequent references to this book wil! be incorporated in Ihe running h.'xl as (Brazeau, p. -), 3. WI' Dream of Honour: John Berryman '5 Letters to his Mother, ed. I{ichard J. Kelly (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1988), p. 207;'So Long? Stevens' can be found in the collection His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), p. 148. 4. Thomas C. Grey, The Wallace Stevws Case: Law alld the Practice af Paetry (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University I'ress, 1991), p. 12. 5. Pound's remarks about Stevens date from 1933, and are quoted by Alan Filreis in Modernism from RiXI1t to Left: Wal/ace Stevells, the Tllirties & Literary Radicalism (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 147. 6. John Timberman Newcomb, Wallace StePt'lls alld Literary Callons (Jackson & London: University Press of Mi5Sis$ippi, 1992), pp. 3--4. 7. Henry James, HllwtilOrne, ed. Tony Tanner (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 55, 56. 8. D.H. Lawrence, Stlldies ill Classic Amrricall Literatllff! (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 70. [n citing Sacvan Bcrcovitch, I am thinki ng principally o f The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic COllstruction af America (New York & London: Routledge, 1993). 9. Stevens acquired a copy of Emilia in 1902, having ,llready read Smse and Sel/sibility at Harvard (sec Bibliography for articles detailing thc book$ in Stevens's personal library). The quotation I U$e h; found on p. 241 of the Penguin edition of Emlllil. 10. Stevens had also read his Emerson, whose assertion near the end of Natllre that ' the ruin, or blank, that we sec when we look at nature is in our own eye' was pre<:ursive of 'The Snow Man', and was itself precoursed by James Thomson's sentiment in 'Winter' (from The $easol1S (1744), 11. 704--6): 'All nature feels the renovating force / Of Winler - only 10 Ihe thoughtless eye / In ruin seen'. 11. This comes from Moses Coit Tyler's History of American !-itemtllre 1607-1765 (1878), quoted by Kermit Vanderbilt in IImerican Literatllre alld tile Academy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), p. 100. I was pleased to find a similar interpretation o f the 'bucks' o f 'Earthy Anecdotc ' as Indians, in Joan Ric ha rdson 's biography of Stevens (sec Bibliography), Vol. I, p. 531 n. l. 12. A letter from his fa ther to Stevens at Harvard implies a discussion between them about the Venus de Milo (L 15). 199 200 Noles 2. STARTING WITH NOTHING 1. The 1936 fistfight between Hemingway and Stevens is femunted by the former in his published Letters; the incidents of the tray of dri nks and the honorary degree are in Brazeau (pp. 74, 58-9); the story of the British philosopher comes from Frank Kermocle. 2. Brazeau, p. 28; for Elsie Stevens's insulting behaviour, see Braz~a u , p. 246. 3. Roethke's pOC'm is 'A Rouse for Stevens' (1955). An article by Steve Kemper in the Conncdicut paper Northeas t (24 March 1996), entitled 'Looking for Wallace Stevens', makes dear how unpopular Stevens was with his Hartford colleagues, and how slight the traces he has left in the city where he wrote most of his poetry. 4. John Updike, Huggillg the ShQre: Essays alld Criticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 612. An attempt to discuss the importance of Stevens's roots is made by Thomas F. Lombardi in Wallace Stevens and the Pl'1111sy/vallia Keyston/" (Seli nsgrove: Susquehanna University Press & London: Associated University Presses, 1996). 5. Garrett's letters to his son and their relationship at this time are well described by Milton j. Bates in Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (Berkeley & London: UniverSity of California Press, 1985). ReferencC$ to this book will hereafter be incorporated in the running text as 'Bates, p. -'. 6. George Silntayana, Interpretations of POi!/ry and Religiol1 (New Yo rk: Harper, 1957), p. 20. 7. Tile Poetry of Robert Frost, ro. E. Connery Latham (tondon: Jonathan Cape, 1971), p. 156. 8. Quoted by Ann Douglas in The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred Knopf. 1978), p. 235. My debt to her researches is clear. (Her later study of the diversities of American Modernism, Terrible Honesty: MOlIgrr1 Mrwlraltan ill the 19205 (1995), can also be recommended.) 9. Douglas, p. 82. Sec also the figures given by Harold Beaver in his description of 'The Literary Market-Place' in New Pelican Guide to English l.iterature, ed. Ford, Vol. 9 Amt'rican Literature (London & New York: Penguin, 1988), pp. 59--60. 10. Douglas, p. 8. 11. Frank Le nlricchia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 2. This is a useful study of the contexts of American Modernism JS exemplified in Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Pound. 12. Lentricchia, p. 59. 13. A well-known fictional description of the sl <lughter of these birds occurs in Chapter 22 of j.F. Cooper's The Pioneers (1823). 'The last immense nesting took place in Michigan in 1878. During the next thirty years the remaining flocks dwindled until they were gone. The last passenger pigeon in the world expired at the Cincinnati Zoo at 1.00 p.m. Central Standard Time, September 1, 1914' - thus runs the Notes 201 note in the Audubon Society's 'Baby Elephant Folio' edition of Arldllbtm's Birds of America (New York: reprint of 1981 edn), It is not impossible, therefore, that Stevens might have seen these birds in the wild, though only as 'casual flocks'. 14. See his comments in 'The Irrational Element in Poetry' (01'2225). The April after his Canadian trip, he noted in his journal that 'Spring comes this way, trait by trait, like a stage sunrise, biell calcule' (SP 131 l. 15. This alludes to one of the 'Adagia' (Or2 188). His observation of the mountains resurfaced in 'Arcades of Philadelphia the Past' (1939): 'The mountains are scratched and used, clear fakes' (CP 226). 16. Bynner's comments on Stevens are quoted by Jnan Richardson (see Bibliography) in Vo l. I, p. 553 n. 52. 17. The jar in question, Roy Harvey Pearce pOinted out (WS/ 1977, pp. 64- 5), may have been a 'Dominion Wide Mouth Special' fruil storage jar. 3. STRICT ARRANGEMENTS OF EMPTINESS I. Their niece recalls the poet's widow insisting on being addressed as 'Mrs Wallace Stevens' rather than as 'Aunt Elsie' (Brazeau, p. 252). 2. See the unpubliShed letter quoted by Joan Richardson, Vol. "p. 342. 3. See the unpublished letter quoted in Richardson, I, p. 260. 4. Richardson, I, p. 296. 5. Richardson, I, p. 260. 6. Definitions of Elsie as his second self can be found in letters quoted in Richardson, I, pp. 254. 288, 291. 7. The importance of Ihis kind of privilte publication of poetry (as by Emi ly Dickinson) has been underlined by Jerome McCilnn in Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (New Jersey: Princeton University ['ress, 1993). 8. Unpublished letter (WAS 1842) quoted in Richardson, I, p. 344. 9. Richardson, I, p. 339. 10. Williams's sonnet can be found in Tile Collected Poems 1909- 1939, cds [jlz & MacGowan (Manchester: Carcanet Press. 1987), p. 21. Eliot 's early work and its sources can be studied in 'nventions of I/Ie March Hare: Poems 1909- 1917, ed. Ricks (London: Faber & Faber, 1996). 11. Joan Richardson explores the possible influence of the Vagabol1dia poems on Stevens; I, p. 276ff. 12. Newcomb, Wallace Stevens and Literary CO/Ions, p. 26. 13. Here and elsewhere in this study I have used information given in American Litaary Magazines: Tire Twent;!'t!! Celltury, ed. Edward E. Chiclcns (Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1992). 14. For further explorations of these areas see Glen Macleod's two books: Wallan' Stevens a/ld Company: the Harmonium Years 1913- 1923 (Ann Arbor: UMI Rese.1Tch Press, 1983) and Wallace Stevel1s al1d Modern Art: From the Armory SllOw to Abstract EXl'n'ssiol1ism (New I laven & London: Yille University Press, 1993). 202 Notes 15. Robert H ughes, The Shock of the New (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991) p. 15. 16. A comparator here would be J{ ('nair's 'Le Coup de Vent', in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: where a landscape ruffled by wind is presented in the state of blurring that the eye might actually perceive. 17. Williams made these comments in his 'Author's Introduction ' to Tile Wedge (1944). 18. Tn the ea rliest version of 'Nude .. : (1911), it is clear that the staircase is spiral: a pleasingly predictive allusion to our centu ry's unlocking of thc doubly-helical s tructure of DNA. 19. Unpublished ietter(WAS 1789) quoted in Richardson, J, p. 262. 20. These remarks of Cezanne's are quoted in The Shock of the New, pp. 124, 18. 2l. Wallace Stevens and CompallY, p. ix. 22. Byoner's linkage to the literary old guard about to be displaced by the new writing was, Newcomb suggests, a significant factor in the earl y eclipse of his reputation. 23. Unpublished letter of 13 September 1909 (WAS t 902), quoted in Richardson, I, p. 365. 4.1914-230 ACCENTS OF DEVIATION 1. Macleod, Wallace Stevens and COmpMJY, p.
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