ASSIGNMENT 21:
Wallace Stevens, selected poems

While poems such as Robert Frost's "Mowing" seem anti-modern in their emphasis on agrarian modes of working and feeling in close relationship with Nature, other Frost poems such as "Home Burial" are modernist in their depiction of speakers alienated from effective speech, thus from solidarity with family and community. Stevens translates those thematic concerns into a more intellectually developed approach.

Begin your work by reading "The Emperor of Ice Cream," and realizing that this poem does have a minimal strand of narrative running through it. The setting is a wake, perhaps in Florida or Cuba, and the speaker (who is in a room with the deceased woman) is here commenting, in tones both highly formal yet also somehow absurdly comical, on the finality of death. Yet these narrative elements are not what we remember after reading. Instead one comes away from Stevens's poem with a sharp recollection of its striking verbal somersaults and surprises. Strings of words like "kitchen cups concupiscent curds," the k-sounds alliterated through it like someone chipping away at a block of ice, are extraordinary if only for the unlikelihood of one's ever finding them together that way again. It is thus the extravagance of Steven's diction, his desire to lay striking words down in the lines much as a modernist painter might lay strikingly contrastive pigments down on the canvas, that we notice. Poetry as, simply, words in strings: this is one recognition Stevens gives to readers. In such an artistic practice the rules have seemingly been stripped away: "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."

Stevens's poetry plays out its dramas, not necessarily by what must be spoken, as typically in Frost, but "In the delicatest ear of the mind." It is at its best an intellectual activity, a process. Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar" well illustrates this tendency, where even though we can easily grasp the static visual image (of the jar) with which the poem begins, the greater significance of reading tends to develop from intellectual considerations of a process, a dynamic change achieved by placing the jar in a particular locale. His poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" will once again raise issues of perceptual process; how we see will be revealed as a set of consequences following upon the place that we see from.

The poem "Sunday Morning" is perhaps Stevens's most traditional poem, one written early in his writing career. It creates a dialogue between a woman and a narrator, or rather a monologue in which the woman is having an imaginary conversation in her mind, dealing with the nature of Christianity. In tracing the process of this interior monologue, Stevens will transform the religious connotations of Sunday, a day traditonally given over to the divinity, into a "day of the sun" which is given over instead to Humanity. In the "island solitude" created by this day of leisure, the "unsponsored, free" thought of the individual aspires to, invents finally, the "supreme fiction"-some god or explanation, pagan or Christian or even none of the above--in which mortality, and the workings of the universe, need no longer seem absolute and alienating conditions. Of course the Puritans would have named such ideas heresy (not to mention a violation of laws for Sabbath-Keeping) , but even Transcendentalist writers like Emerson and Thoreau would be critical of Stevens's claims in this poem. As you read it, note carefully the woman's relations with Nature. Does it speak to her? Does Nature provide any transcendent messages, much less Laws, regarding the fate of Man? Or is it simply thought, processes of intellection, that Stevens emphasizes, not only here but in his other poems? What would Emerson or Whitman have to say about that evident diminution of (or divorce from) Nature, as well as from God? These are the kinds of issues we take up in the questions that follow.

Reading Assignment

1. Wallace Stevens, selected poems (pp. 1166-1177).

Writing Assignment

1. Write a paragraph or two analyzing Stevens's use of sun imagery in "Sunday Morning," then use your analysis to write an interpretation of "Gubbinal."
2. Both "The Snow Man" and "Anecdote of the Jar" may be read as still life images, as studies of inanimate objects. Write a paragraph or two comparing the message Stevens derives from each of these "studies."
3. Read "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and "Peter Quince at the Clavier," then discuss how the process of looking at a thing or playing an instrument are related in Stevens's approach to artistic work.
4. "The Idea of Order at Key West" contains two poems or singers. There is the woman who sings, and there is the poet who says, or writes. What is the relationship between them that Stevens defines for us? Discuss in several paragraphs.
5. "Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame." So claims the speaker in "A High-toned Old Christian Woman. Using any other Stevens poem, write a brief essay showing why that is so, and what Stevens sees as the consequences--for living and believing--of that faith in his art.

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