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Other___________________________ _____________________________________ University Microfilms International THE DECOMPOSER’S ART: IDEAS OF MUSIC IN THE POETRY OF WALLACE STEVENS DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University by Barbara Holmes Boring, B.A., M.A. a a a * * The Ohio State University 1987 Dissertation Committee: Approved by John Muste Anthony Libby Adviser Daniel Barnes Department of English ©1987 BARBARA HOLMES BORING All Rights Reserved VITA 1980.................... .B.A. Ohio State University 1982............................. M.A. Ohio State University 1980-1986 Teaching Associate, Department of English, Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Modern British and American Literature Other: Interdisciplinary Poetics Fiction American Literature to 1900 English Renaissance Literature ii TABLE OF CONTENTS VITA......................................................... ii PREFACE..................................................... iv CHAPTER ONE .................................................. 1 INTRODUCTION: THE THING HUMMED CHAPTER TWO ................................................. 45 INEVITABLE MODULATIONS CHAPTER THREE...............................................88 FROM UBIQUITOUS THUNDER TO STILL SMALLER SOUNDS CHAPTER FOUR............................................... 146 A NEW RESEMBLANCE CHAPTER FIVE...............................................202 REFLECTIONS AND RECONFIGURATIONS CONCLUSION................................................. 236 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED.............................. 241 iii PREFACE In the bulk of criticism dealing with Wallace Stevens' poetry, music has not been given the attention it deserves. A few critics have touched on the subject, have even analysed, albeit briefly, the effects of the medium on the poet's method. For example J. Hi 11is Hiller, Northrop Frye, Helen Vendler, and John Hollander have all discussed Stevens and music. But no consistent analysis to date has adequately considered the convergence of poetry and music in Stevens’ poetry. Even though, as contemporary composer Stephen Paulus notes, Stevens’ poetry is full of musical ideas, and even though the poet demonstrated a lifelong interest in poetry’s "sister art," no large scale study of Stevens has included music in its agenda. It is the purpose of this dissertation to elaborate on this subject of the poet and music: to understand Stevens’ attitude toward the "art" of music, and to discover how he incorporated that attitude into his own poetry. Finally, my aim is to further discover how Stevens’ musical insight affected composers who looked to his poems for inspiration. The presentation of the musical parallel should serve two purposes. Literary scholars, and laypersons as well, iv may be able to observe the poems from a perspective that would clarify some of the illusory effects of the later poems--explain their difficulty--and the apparent nonchalance of the early ones. And to the extent that this interdisciplinary study successfully investigates a convergence of two similar, though unique, art forms, it should advance the cause of tandem appraisals for future critics interested in the role of the musician in the poet's craft. To ignore Wallace Stevens’ abundant references to music--its structure, expressive potential, acoustical properties, and philosophical dimensions--is to deny the poet a full response to his works. So often in Stevens criticism a poem or passage containing several figures, images, or references to music is explicated and analyzed in apparent disregard of the importance of the musical analogue or reference. But like the multifarious voices that sing in contrapuntal association throughout all of J . S. Bach's musical textures, not a thread of any Stevens poem is Incidental to the fabric of the whole piece. Remove one syllable, word, or phrase and you interfere with the poem's character, as you would a fugue's by removing a note or sequence. To ignore any aspect of a Stevens poem or a work by Bach is to rearrange the mind of its creator--to misread the text. My method relies on biographical data from Stevens’ essays; his poems; his library of books and recordings; v hia letters and journals; and biographer Peter Brazeau's interviews with the poet’s friends, family, colleagues, and business acquaintances. 1 have also turned to Stevens’1iterary and musical predecessors, poets and composers who may have influenced him along the way to achieving his pre-eminent status in this century. Finally, with the further intent of "rereading'’ Stevens through the musical setting, I have provided an analysis of two recent settings of Stevens’ poems by contemporary American composers Roger Reynolds and Stephen Paulus. The five chapters of this dissertation approach the ideas of music in Stevens' poetry from several different perspectives. Crucial to each is the sum of biographical and critical data indicating Stevens’ disposition toward music as both subject and strategy for poetry. Profoundly influenced by the English and American Romantic poets, as well as several composers and philosophers, Stevens adapted his Innate musical sense to the project of "decomposing" an original idea as a first step in the process of interchanging or exchanging its elements to form a new version. Many of Stevens’ musical images and structures proved particularly useful to him as he “performed'' his poems in the language of open-endedness, temporariness, or, as he would call it, "endless elaboration." vi Three chapters of my dissertation discuss Stevens' decompositions! or performative techniques- two focus on the musical figure--the bird, the human singer, the instrumentalist, the dancer, and others; another focuses on the musical form (particularly ‘Theme and Variations"). All three chapters analyze Stevens in relation to his predecessors--musicians and poets--by providing new readings of poems based on Stevens* interdisciplinary ‘new romantic" aesthetic. The fifth and last chapter of my study explores the validity of my central hypothesis of “developing variation'' as the basis of Stevens' style as it appears in an avant-garde setting of "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" by Roger Reynolds. Another setting, by Stephen Paulus, considers the antiphonal character of "Sunday Morning." As the aforementioned musical settings and the bulk of the Stevens canon indicate, the art of the decomposer is not limited by system or medium. Indeed, as the century advances, more and more artists change places, so to speak, recognizing themselves, like Stevens before them, in homogeneous settings "in which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once." The ideas of music in Stevens’ poetry are simply one way "on which to play//. .a new aspect, bright in discovery." vii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION THE THING HUMMED On December 8, 1936, during his debut as a lecturer at Harvard, Wallace Stevens characteristically aligned