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Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall 2009) The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 33 Number 2 Fall 2009 Contents “A Home Against One’s Self”: Religious Tradition and Stevens’ Architectures of Thought —Garth Greenwell 147 Wallace Stevens’ Odious Chords —William Doreski 164 Dark Muse: Paramour and Encounter in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens —Sean Keck 177 The Other Harmonium: Toward a Minor Stevens —Seth Perlow 191 Uncorrected Errors in Letters of Wallace Stevens —Chris Beyers 211 Wallace Stevens’ Savage Commonplace —Jeffrey Westover 217 Selecting Three Poems by Wallace Stevens: A Roundtable Discussion —George S. Lensing, J. Donald Blount, Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, Stephen Burt, Eleanor Cook, Alan Filreis 238 Poems 258 Reviews 262 News and Comments 275 Cover Word to Image: Wallace Stevens Liudmila Grigoryeva-Semjatizkaja Moscow The Wallace Stevens Journal EDITOR John N. Serio POETRY EDITOR ART EDITOR BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Joseph Duemer Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing EDITORI A L ASSIST A NTS EDITORI A L BO A RD William H. Duryea Milton J. Bates George S. Lensing Amber Eastman Jacqueline V. Brogan James Longenbach Maureen Kravec Robert Buttel Glen MacLeod Hope Steele Eleanor Cook Marjorie Perloff Bart Eeckhout Joan Richardson TECHNIC A L ASSIST A NT Alan Filreis Melita Schaum Jeff Rhoades B. J. Leggett Lisa M. Steinman The Wallace Stevens Society PRESIDENT ADVISORY BO A RD John N. Serio Milton J. Bates Owen E. Brady Robert Buttel David M. Craig Joseph Duemer Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing Glen MacLeod The Wallace Stevens Journal is published biannually in the Spring and Fall by the Wal- lace 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 $30 for one year or $50 for two years and includes membership in the Wallace Stevens Society. Rates for institutions are $40 per year domestic and $50 per year foreign. Back issues are available. Also available are volumes 1–25 on text-searchable 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 an electronic file of the article as well as photocopies of all secondary quotations. The Wallace Stevens Journal is indexed or abstracted in Abstracts of English Studies, Hu- manities International Complete, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents, IBR (International Bibliography of Book Reviews), IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Literature), 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. © 2009 The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 “A Home Against One’s Self”: Religious Tradition and Stevens’ Architectures of Thought GARTH GREENWELL I NE IS BESET, atteMPTING a discussion of any aspect of Wallace Stevens’ thinking about religion, by difficulties that seem every- Owhere to thwart an adequately scrupulous account. On the one hand, the assertion that Stevens’ “final mundo . offers the austere sat- isfactions of a ‘self’ dependent on the pure poetry of the physical world” (Litz vi), while certainly true of a great deal, perhaps most, of Stevens (certainly the Stevens of “Sunday Morning,” for instance), fails to account for the poet who could long for the “celestial ease in the heart” of “holi- ness” and “love,”1 who so often expressed dissatisfaction,2 and who asked, in what I read as at least momentary despair, “What good is it that the earth is justified, / That it is complete, that it is an end, / That in itself it is enough?” (388). I cannot hear the question as rhetorical, nor as the expression of a man, in whatever extreme of austerity, satisfied. On the other hand, the efforts of critics such as Charles M. Murphy or Dorothy Judd Hall to direct Stevens toward a final orthodoxy are anything but con- vincing, whatever their hermeneutic or biographical basis.3 Even critics at- tempting a via media between Yvor Winters’ hedonist and Father Hanley’s prodigal Christian4 seem finally to sanction one or the other view: thus Adalaide Kirby Morris, whose readings of the poems benefit greatly from her attention to biblical genre and who insists throughout her study on Stevens’ distance from Christianity conventionally conceived, in speak- ing of Stevens’ “transvaluation of the Christian trinity” makes the poet an Athanasian by another name;5 something similar, if subtler, more graceful and more modest, occurs in R. P. Blackmur’s discussion of Stevens’ “ro- sary of minor symbols” (215). The problem, of course, is that Stevens’ work provides material for all of these interpretations. He is a thinker wide enough to accommodate con- tradiction and stands in that American company (one thinks of Emerson and Whitman) for whom contradiction was the spur of fruitful thought, and scholastic consistency a stultifying “primness”: “What you don’t al- THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 33.2 (FALL 2009): 147–163. 147 © 2009 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. low for is the fact that one moves in many directions at once. No man of imagination is prim: the thing is a contradiction in terms” (L 300). Too few readers of Stevens take account, in considering his religious thought, of their subject as a man who could write, in letters only three days apart and addressed to the same correspondent, both that “no one believes in the church as an institution more than I do” (L 348) and that “my direct inter- est is in telling the Archbishop of Canterbury to go jump off the end of the dock” (L 351). It is difficult to synthesize such multitudes. Nor did Stevens concern himself overmuch with their synthesis, resting more easily in his encompassing thought than those who would reduce that thought to a set of propositions: “Sometimes I believe most in the imagination for a long time and then, without reasoning about it, turn to reality and believe in that and that alone. But both of these things project themselves endlessly and I want them to do just that” (L 710); more simply, “One often says contradictory things” (L 798). The best readers of Stevens have resisted both the urge to recuperate from his work some recognizable orthodoxy and the temptation to divorce him finally from the lure of the transcendent, to make him a hero of earth- bound men celebrating earth-bound fate. Geoffrey Hill’s attribution of a “magnificent agnostic faith” (16) to Stevens, and Helen Vendler’s deduc- tion in his work of “the tonality of genuine prayer” (341) are scrupulous and just, avoiding both Nathan A. Scott’s objection, certainly warranted, that “conventional opinion amongst Stevens’ interpreters represents a great disinclination to take him at his word when he forswears any sort of allegiance to atheism” (35) and Eleanor Cook’s charge against critics who “assimilate Stevens a shade too easily into the Christian fold” (300). My hope in this paper is to attempt to tread an equally fine line, the first step of which requires asserting the modesty of my project: I aim to exam- ine a single symbol—architecture—through three poems, each of which adopts a distinct stance in relation to tradition, especially religious tradi- tion, as a source of, or support for, supreme fictions or systems of thought. In the early, minor poem “Architecture,” we see the repudiation of tra- dition, with an accompanying confidence in original creation; in “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” the recovery of tradition, though not in propria persona; and in “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside,” something that accommodates both tradition and novelty. I consider the poems chrono- logically, with the unfortunate consequence that they seem to form a neat trajectory, as though Stevens arrived, in the end, at a conclusion with all the certainty of dialectical synthesis. Perhaps he did. But I rather think this an accident, and that other, later poems would have seen Stevens figure his architectures of thought still differently, reversing or further revising his stance. I take seriously Stevens’ claim, which enables the variety and adventure and also much of the pathos of his work: “I have no wish to ar- rive at a conclusion” (L 710). 148 THE wallace STEVENS JOURNAL II Architectural images—houses, churches, cathedrals, “chastels”—appear frequently in Stevens’ poems,6 and seldom are they merely structures of wood or stone; nearly always they bear a crucial metaphoric weight: “Ar- chitecture, as the creation of visible order from fragments of reality, be- came one of his major figures for the act of design or discipline of shaping” (Morris 70). This is true, but does not go quite far enough: frequently, in the poems, architectural space figures not just a designed or shaped thing, but rather an entire system of thought: “Take the moral law and make a nave of it / And from the nave build haunted heaven” (47). In imagining adequate systems of thought, Stevens imagines the structures that will house them, and what he seems repeatedly to pursue is the dream of an inhabitable thought—of “the ultimate politician,” he writes: “He is the final builder of the total building, / The final dreamer of the total dream, / Or will be” (294). Architecture, as a master figure, provides for a number of nuanced particular images: structures come in different kinds, grand and intimate, private and public, civic and domestic, fresh-made and in- herited, all of which clothe abstraction in recognizable, affecting forms. In “The Plain Sense of Things,” one of Stevens’ most powerful lines registers the shock of diminishment when what had seemed a grand system suffers deflation, when what was taken to be one kind of architectural space is revealed to be another: “The great structure has become a minor house” (428).
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