Wallace stevens across the atlantic

Also available by Bart EeckhoutLITERATURE AND SOCIETY: The Function of Literary Sociology in Comparative Literature co-edited with Bart Keunen POST EX SUB DIS: Urban Fragmentations and C

Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic

Also available by Bart Eeckhout

LITERATURE AND SOCIETY: The Function of Literary Sociology in Comparative

Literature (co-edited with Bart Keunen)

POST EX SUB DIS: Urban Fragmentations and Constructions (co-edited with the Ghent Urban Studies Team)

THE URBAN CONDITION: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary

Metropolis (co-authored and co-edited with the Ghent Urban Studies Team)

WALLACE STEVENS AND THE LIMITS OF READING AND WRITING

Also available by Edward Ragg

THE QUESTION OF ABSTRACTION: Wallace Stevens’ Poetry and Prose (forthcoming)

Wallace Stevens across

the Atlantic

Edited by

Bart Eeckhout and

Edward Ragg

With a Preface by Frank Kermode

Uitgegeven met steun van de Universitaire Stichting van België

Editorial matter and selection © the editors 2008 Individual chapters © the contributors 2008 Preface © Frank Kermode 2008

All rights reserved No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work

in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd Macmillan ® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.

ISBN-13: 978 0 230 53584 8 hardback ISBN-10: 0 230 53584 4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic : edited by Bart Eeckhout & Edward Ragg.

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-230-53584-4 (alk paper)

1 Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Criticism and interpretation 2.

Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Appreciation Europe 3 Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Appreciation Europe 4 Stevens, Wallace,

1879 1955 Influence 5 Modernism (Literature) I Eeckhout, Bart, 1964 II Ragg, Edward, 1976

PS3537.T4753Z8735 2008 811’.52 dc22

Introduction: The Lights of Norway and All That 1

Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg

Part I Descriptions without Place: Ideas of

5 ‘Without human meaning’: Stevens, Heidegger and

Irene Ramalho Santos

Massimo Bacigalupo

Helga Kos

List of Illustrations

(Plate section falls between pages 230 and 231 and reproduces images from

the artist’s book Ode to the Colossal Sun created by Helga Kos)

1 Volume 1 Title page

(printed on an advanced duplicator)

2 Volume 1 Above: Prelude part with CD of ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’.Below: detail

(printed on an advanced duplicator)

3 Volume 1 Above: ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ Below: detail(linoleum prints with screen-printed main text)

4 Volume 2 Above: opened at ‘A Child Asleep in Its Own Life’ and

Volume 3 opened at ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’ Below: Volume 2opened at ‘The Dove in Spring’ and Volume 3 opened at ‘Of Mere Being’(mixed printing techniques)

5 Volume 3 Above: ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’ Below: detail

(mixed printing techniques)

6 Volume 2 Above: ‘The Planet on the Table’ Below: detail

(printed in off-set from hand-painted plates)

7 Volume 3 ‘Of Mere Being’

(laser prints in combination with screen print)

vii

Notes on Contributors

Charles Altieri, Stageberg Professor of English, University of California,

Berkeley, is the author of ten books, including Self and Sensibility in rary American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1984), Painterly Abstraction

Contempo-in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Canons and Consequences (Northwestern University Press, 1990), Postmodernisms Now (Penn State University Press, 1998), The Particulars of Rapture (Cornell University Press, 2003) and The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Mod- ernism and After (Blackwell, 2006).

Massimo Bacigalupo, Professor of American Literature and of Literary

Trans-lation, University of Genoa, is the author of The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry

of Ezra Pound (Columbia University Press, 1980) and Grotta Byron

(Cam-panotto, 2001), and an award-winning translator of Stevens, Pound andWordsworth, among others He contributed a paper on ‘The Mediterranean

in Pound, Yeats, and Stevens’ to Anglo-American Modernity and the ranean, ed Caroline Patey et al (Università di Milano, 2006).

Mediter-Josh Cohen is Reader in English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths

College, University of London and is the author of Spectacular Allegories: modern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (Pluto, 1998), Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (Continuum, 2003) and How to Read Freud

Post-(Granta, 2005) In July 2004 he organized a symposium on Stevens at theUniversity of London

Bart Eeckhout is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at

the University of Antwerp He is the author of Wallace Stevens and the Limits

of Reading and Writing (University of Missouri Press, 2002) and has edited two special issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal (Fall 2001 and, with

guest-Edward Ragg, Spring 2006), of which he is also an editorial board member

He is a translator of Stevens into Dutch and, with Edward Ragg, co-organizedthe international conference ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe’(Rothermere American Institute, August 2005)

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College London He has

published widely on British, French and American poetry His publications

include Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Faber, 2000; Cornell University Press, 2001), A Driftwood Altar: Reviews and Essays (Waywiser, 2005), and two collections of poetry, Landlocked (Chatto & Windus, 1992, rpt 1998) and Soft Sift (Faber, 2001; Harcourt Brace, 2003).

viii

Lisa Goldfarb is the Associate Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized

Study at New York University, and a member of the full-time faculty She is

the author of many articles on Stevens and Valéry (The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Romanic Review and the Journal of Modern Literature) and is completing a book entitled ‘The Figure Concealed’: Valéryan Music in the Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens She is also preparing an international conference on Stevens

in New York

David Haglund is completing a DPhil on Stevens at Balliol College, Oxford

University He has taught at Harvard and Hunter College as well as Oxford,

and has published articles and reviews in the London Review of Books, Essays

in Criticism, PN Review, Slate magazine and elsewhere.

Frank Kermode is the author/editor of some forty volumes and one of the

most distinguished critics of our time In the world of Stevens criticism he

is well-known as one of the poet’s earliest champions in Europe, witness his

introductory monograph Wallace Stevens (Faber, 1960, rpt 1989), and as joint editor (with Joan Richardson) of Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose

(Library of America, 1997)

Helga Kos is a visual artist from Amsterdam She spent five years (1998–

2003) working on a hand-printed artist’s book, Ode to the Colossal Sun, which

was inspired by Ned Rorem’s 1972 song cycle ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’.The book has been exhibited internationally, including displays in Montreal,Buffalo, Leipzig, Paris and Oxford, and was short-listed for the award of ‘BestBook Designs from All Over the World’

George Lensing, Mann Family Distinguished Professor of English, University

of North Carolina, is the author of Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth (Louisiana State University Press, 1986) and Wallace Stevens and the Seasons (Louisiana State University Press, 2001) He is on the editorial board of The Wallace Stevens Journal, for which he also serves as book review editor.

J Hillis Miller is Research Professor at the University of California, Irvine and

one of the most influential literary scholars of our time He holds various orary degrees and is past president of the Modern Language Association ofAmerica Among his long-standing research interests is the poetry of Stevens,

hon-about which he has published for more than four decades, from Poets of ity (Harvard University Press, 1965) over The Linguistic Moment (Princeton University Press, 1985) to Topographies (Stanford University Press, 1995) and

Real-beyond J Hillis Miller is the author of more than twenty books, highlights

of which have been collected in The J Hillis Miller Reader (Stanford University

Press, 2005)

Justin Quinn, educated at Trinity College Dublin, is Associate Professor

at the Charles University of Prague He is the author of Gathered Beneath the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community (University College

Dublin Press, 2002), besides being a poet and poetry translator from the

Czech He is at work on The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000.

Edward Ragg completed his doctorate on Stevens at Cambridge University

in 2005 and teaches at Tsinghua University, Beijing He has published several

articles in The Wallace Stevens Journal and is completing a book entitled The Question of Abstraction: Wallace Stevens’ Poetry and Prose With Bart Eeckhout

he co-organized the international conference ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens

in Europe’ (Rothermere American Institute, August 2005); and subsequently

guest-edited a special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal (Spring 2006) He has published poetry in Carcanet’s New Poetries IV anthology as well as in PN Review, Agenda, Critical Quarterly and other international magazines.

Irene Ramalho Santos, Professor of English and American Studies,University of Coimbra, and International Affiliate, Department of Compar-ative Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of several

articles on American poetry (including many on Stevens) and of Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism (University Press of New

England, 2003; Brazilian edition, Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2007; Portugueseedition, Porto: Afrontamento, 2008)

Gareth Reeves, Reader in English, Durham University, is the author of two

books on Eliot, T S Eliot: A Virgilian Poet (Macmillan, 1989) and T S Eliot’s

‘The Waste Land’ (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), of Auden, MacNeice, Spender (Macmillan, 1992; with Michael O’Neill), of two volumes of poetry, Real Sto- ries (Carcanet, 1984) and Listening In (Carcanet, 1993), and of many essays

on twentienth-century English, Irish and American poetry

Robert Rehder, Chair of English and American Literature, University of

Fribourg, Switzerland; is the author of Stevens, Williams, Crane and the Motive for Metaphor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), The Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Macmillan, 1998) and Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry (Croom Helm, 1981) He is also a poet and has published The Compromises Will Be Different (Carcanet, 1995) He has published two books of poetry, The Com- promise Will Be Different (Carcanet, 1995) and First Things When (Carcanet,

2009)

Krzysztof Ziarek, Professor of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo

(SUNY), is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness: Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, Celan (New York State University Press, 1994) and The Force of Art (Stanford University Press, 2004).

The roots of the present collaboration stretch back some three years, when weorganized what was arguably the first major European conference on Wallace

Stevens, entitled Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe (August 2005) We

remain deeply grateful to Paul Giles and the staff of The Rothermere AmericanInstitute, University of Oxford, for hosting and sponsoring the intellectuallyenergizing conference that brought several of the authors assembled heretogether for the first time What follows, however, are not the publishedproceedings of that conference, but predominantly new essays that grew, inpart, out of the debate initiated at The Rothermere

Following that event, we were fortunate to publish a number of papers,

based on conference presentations, both in The Wallace Stevens nal and PN Review (publications that aptly symbolized the Transatlantic

Jour-nature of our and our authors’ work) We are much indebted to John N

Serio, who invited us to guest-edit the Spring 2006 issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal on ‘Stevens and British Literature’, and to Michael Schmidt,

who published three other significant papers derived from the Oxford

event in PN Review 169 (May–June 2006) Specifically, we would like to

acknowledge the publication of early versions of the essays here by David

Haglund and Gareth Reeves in PN Review and The Wallace Stevens Journal

respectively

Further thanks are due to the University Foundation of Belgium for itsfinancial support and its double peer review of the manuscript The pub-lication grant we have received from the University Foundation has made

a significant difference to the appearance of the book, both in enabling us

to include illustrations from Helga Kos’s artist’s book and in supporting thereproduction on the cover of Tom King’s early design for our conferenceposter Bringing the colour design from Tom King’s Mondrian-inspired depic-tions of Stevens to this project provides a fitting graphic emblem for what

we attempt to do here, while Helga Kos’s ingenuity, lovingly reported in thecoda to our book, is given added weight by the images accompanying heressay

We are most happy to thank also our editors at Palgrave Macmillan, PaulaKennedy, Christabel Scaife, Steven Hall and Penny Simmons, for their per-sistent help, encouragement and exemplary guidance Publishing a volume

of essays featuring a broad range of international contributors has its ownrewards and challenges; and we are particularly appreciative of the exactingcriticism and author care we have received This includes the two anonymousreferees who at different stages in the book’s composition process supportedour project and provided invaluable feedback

xi

Lastly, it gives us great pleasure to thank our diverse and distinguishedgroup of contributors for their sustained and invariably professional work

in helping us assemble what we hope is not only a significant addition toStevens criticism, but also an original attempt to redefine the contours ofthat criticism in a new era of appreciation for Stevens’ work

List of Abbreviations

The following abbreviations for the works of Wallace Stevens are usedthroughout As a rule, references to poems and prose are to the Library ofAmerica edition edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (abbreviated

as CPP) References to earlier editions appear only sparingly for text-intrinsic

reasons Page references are provided for individual poems in the main textonly where those poems are discussed in some detail

CP The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens New York: Knopf, 1954 CPP Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose Ed Frank Kermode

and Joan Richardson New York: Library of America, 1997

CS The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie.

Ed J Donald Blount Columbia: University of South CarolinaPress, 2006

FPof P ‘From Pieces of Paper’ In George S Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A

Poet’s Growth Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,

1986 166–200

L Letters of Wallace Stevens Ed Holly Stevens New York: Knopf,

1966; rpt Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996

OP 1957 Opus Posthumous Ed Samuel French Morse New York: Knopf,

1957

OP Opus Posthumous Revised edition Ed Milton J Bates New York:

Knopf, 1989

SP Holly Stevens, Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace

Stevens New York: Knopf, 1977.

SPBS Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujets: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book.

A Facsimile and Transcription Ed Milton J Bates Stanford:

Stanford University Press and Huntington Library, 1989

xiii

Frank Kermode

Since this rich volume is concerned with the impact of Wallace Stevens onEurope, and of Europe on Wallace Stevens, I hope it may be allowed as rele-vant rather than condemned as immodest of me to claim that I introducedthe Swiss to Stevens at some date around 1958–60 I had recently made aprogramme for the BBC, a reading with commentary of ‘Notes Toward aSupreme Fiction’ The reader was Anthony Jacobs, the best in the business,and we did several such programmes together It is hard to believe that theBBC would nowadays dream of allowing such highbrow performances Audi-ences below 50,000 could not be assessed, so we could, if we chose, pretend

to believe that there was a silent audience of around 49,000 Stevens asts A few hundred would probably be nearer the truth Many such wickedlyélite programmes were made in those profligate years

enthusi-Invited to address a literature seminar in Zurich, I asked if I might speakabout Stevens and especially about ‘Notes’ My host, Professor Heinrich Strau-mann, who as a young professor had delivered the University’s oration atJames Joyce’s funeral in Zurich, had not heard, or had heard very little, ofStevens, but he was adventurous and encouraged me to go ahead I took thetapes of the broadcast with me The students greatly enjoyed the reading,and I still remember the laugh that followed the lines

a kind of Swiss perfection comes

And a familiar music of the machineSets up its Schwärmerei .

(CPP 334)

I suppose they have subsequently found out more about Stevens’ idea ofSwitzerland Back in London, despite encouragement from the likes of JulianSymons and Nicholas Moore (on whom Mark Ford writes so engagingly inChapter 11 below) the reputation of Stevens was maturing slowly There wassome opposition; Larkin, increasingly influential himself, thought Stevens

‘not worth mentioning’ Stevens’ admirers were not numerous, but they weredevoted and various My friend John Wain, who as a ‘Movement’ poet and

a friend of Larkin might have been expected to have little time for this alienModernist, knew many poems of Stevens’ by heart I remember sitting withhim in a Reading pub on the day we read of the poet’s death, and beingtouched by the depth of his grief

That was in 1955, only two years after Faber at last published the Selected Poems That book remains in print, unlike most of Stevens’ books There was a

xv

rumour that Eliot was lukewarm about Stevens; this is now said, though out certainty, to be untrue, but it is certain that his firm has never been very

with-willing to keep Stevens’ other books in print The Selected doesn’t offer a full

view of the poet (imagine Stevens without ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’and ‘The Rock’) but for reasons unknown to me Holly Stevens’ much richer

selection, The Palm at the End of the Mind, has never been published in land, and most readers, unless they can afford the Collected and the updated Opus Posthumous, are presumably still stuck with the fifty-odd-year-old and inadequate Selected.

Eng-In some respects his work has been more cordially received on the tinent, as Massimo Bacigalupo testifies below (another Italian Stevensian,Nadia Fusini, has provided challenging annotated translations in book-form

Con-of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ and The Auroras Con-of Autumn) I have a copy

of a thesis on Stevens submitted for a doctorate at the University of Cracow in

1971, and no doubt many such essays were written, even in Eastern Europe,even at that time

Most of my own Stevens collection, which I liked to think probably amongthe best in England, was destroyed in an accident as I was moving house; but

by a happy minor accident inside the greater one my copy of the Alcestis Press

Ideas of Order survived the ordeal, though not in mint condition Probably it

was, perhaps it is, the only example in England It was Stevens’ own signedcopy, given to me long ago by Holly Stevens I am wondering who I shouldleave it to

Much of Stevens’ poetry derives from a continuing philosophical reverie,which is what he must have had in mind when he spoke of ‘tentative ideas

for the purposes of poetry’ (a phrase that, as one may see infra, caught the eye

of David Haglund) and it is not surprising that critics are sometimes tempted

to approach him obliquely, via another philosopher Here we are told of apoem that may be read ‘through Blanchot’, and another to be read ‘throughHusserl’ Santayana is of course an important presence, and so is Nietzsche,but one ought to consider what may be lost if Stevens is ‘read’ through them.Moreover, Stevens’ reading of philosophy was scant and essentially dilet-tante For example, he omitted the very simple inquiry that would haveinformed him whether Heidegger lectured in French or German In fact, hisrelationship with Heidegger is still almost as mysterious to me as it was when

I tried to sort it out in 1980 I am grateful, therefore, to Charles Altieri andKrzysztof Ziarek for their further elucidations of such philosophical relation-ships in that, unlike some other commentators, they resist the temptation topresent the poet as primarily an abstruse philosopher

There is room for disagreement or debate on these issues, and an importantfunction of this book is to promote discussion Anyway, I give it as my view,not of course shared by all or perhaps any of the contributors to this splendidbook, that Stevens was, in these matters, deeply and properly self-indulgent;

to forget this is to run the risk of turning him into another and less interesting

kind of writer His meditations bear something of the same relation to formalphilosophy that his Europe bears to the real continent – a topic valuablyexplored in this collection by George Lensing and Robert Rehder.

It does seem, as his daughter Holly remarked, that the poet came to prefer

a Europe of his own construction to the real thing And he seems always

to have been convinced that America, and American poetry, had best bedistinguished, or isolated, from other anglophone poetic dialects, even fromthe Irish, though I think he loved Ireland more than England His epistolaryfriend Thomas McGreevy, wounded on the Somme in the British cause, was

a Catholic Modernist who returned to Ireland from the France of Joyce andBeckett, and the London of T S Eliot, and spent his life among the pictures ofthe Dublin National Gallery – the sort of man Stevens might admire not onlyfor his verses or for the paintings in his charge but for his idiosyncratic style,his individual relationship to Catholic philosophy and to Irish nationalism

I think Stevens had no comparable English friend

Only the most learned of admirers will fail to be enlightened by the essaysthat follow If you have ever wondered how Jerome ‘begat the tubas’, youwill find the best explanation in Justin Quinn’s essay The years of obscuritywhen Stevens dined in Greenwich Village with Marcel Duchamp are muchilluminated by David Haglund For nuanced explanation of ‘Nuances of aTheme by Williams’ turn to Josh Cohen Indeed, throughout this volumelovers and students of Stevens will find the learned contributors providingthem with both instruction and pleasure, which are not often found together

in modern criticism, and which may fuel the speculations and the research

of another generation of admirers, now to be found all over the world

Introduction: The Lights of

Norway and All That

Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg

A long time you have been making the tripFrom Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil,Bringing the lights of Norway and all that

‘Of Hartford in a Purple Light’

To situate the quintessential Modernist poet Wallace Stevens ‘across theAtlantic’, where the lights of Norway mysteriously travel, is to place him in arealm that is at once dynamic and open-ended Our primary aim in puttingtogether this book is to reconsider Stevens’ development as he responds tointermingling influences from two different continents In particular, wewant to explore the nature of a poetics that may be called ‘Transatlantic’because it is neither precisely American nor European, but involves a largercomplex of literary, artistic and cultural qualities Indeed, Stevens’ poetry,

as we see it, threatens to disappear from view when discussed in simpleoppositional terms of its ‘American’ qualities or its assimilations and trans-formations of ‘European’ subject-matter In the language of Stevens’ ownlecture ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’, such amorphous notions as the

‘European’ and the ‘American’ are ultimately ‘too general to be serviceable’

(CPP 781) If either of these terms is to be rehabilitated in Stevens

criti-cism, then it had better be in the reconstructed sense in which millions

of Americans have implicitly defined themselves as ‘Transatlantic’: throughpreserving immigrant narratives, tracing genealogy (as Stevens did with hisDutch and German ancestry) or jostling different federal and state identitieswhich seek to adapt European inheritances on American soil

When we present ‘Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic’, then (without a

qualifying subtitle), we intend to honour the dynamic travel in both tions implied in our title To our more metaphoric purpose here the Atlantic

direc-Ocean serves as a magnetic, mutually enriching and defining horizon for the

cultures that have developed on either side of its expanse It is meant to

pro-vide perspective Moreover, oceans actively invite crossing: a notion which we

would like to deploy in its full complexity As with the ‘Twenty men crossing

1

a bridge / Into a village’ in Stevens’ early poem ‘Metaphors of a Magnifico’

(CPP 15–16), we should understand the word not only in its literal, physical

sense but as a reference also to language’s capacities to trope and translate(see Cook 177 and Maeder 49–51) Something similar applies to the word

‘Atlantic’, which is ultimately no more than a conventional name for a ity in permanent flux Any attempt at linguistically demarcating so fluid anentity inevitably engages in what Stevens called, in a poem that will be amongthe most frequently cited in this book, ‘Description Without Place’

real-If many another American author could be described as ‘Transatlantic’ inthe sense suggested, Stevens is nevertheless a special case; and not merelybecause this poet did not travel abroad extensively (visiting only Canada,Cuba and parts of the Gulf of Mexico) Far more significant is the extent to

which Stevens made a point of not travelling In some sense, his was the

‘stay-at-home’ mentality of Henry David Thoreau – albeit with greater ambivalencetoward the ‘transcendental’ and with a modern stance obviously shaped bythe international politics of his particular epoch Yet Stevens was also uncom-fortable following Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and, in his own era, WilliamCarlos Williams in writing in a self-consciously American grain His work ishardly ever nativist in the sense Walter Benn Michaels has explored in his

influential study Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism

Paradoxi-cally, this remains the case even with the late poetry and prose which appealsmore overtly to place, particularly to Connecticut

But neither was Stevens an American writer who happened to mineEuropean art and literature and then turn his findings into something elseagain – something ‘homegrown’ With him the situation was more ‘com-plex’, in the etymological sense of that word: more entwined and foldedover He was a poet who constantly explored American and European artisticproductions in order to find a voice which would be intrinsically satisfy-ing outside and beyond immediate national contexts Modulating upon his

famous aphorism that ‘French and English constitute a single language’ (CPP

914), we might say that to Stevens Europe and America constituted a gle culture, at least from the imaginative vantage of his home in Hartford,Connecticut

sin-We might also remind ourselves of the trouble Stevens had in izing his American experience His natural points of artistic reference werelargely French as were the majority of the paintings he bought His bookcollecting and correspondence took him considerably outside an Americancontext as well; and his literary influences were an eclectic mix drawing onFrench Symbolism, British Romanticism and the American Renaissance Timeand again, the correspondence reveals Stevens both constructing and failing

character-to realize what it means character-to be ‘American’ as well as what it might mean character-to

be ‘French’, ‘Irish’ or ‘Cuban’ As he wrote to his epistolary poet-friend inIreland, Thomas McGreevy: ‘One is so homeless over here and something

really American is like meeting a beautiful cousin or even one’s mother

for the first time’ (L 626) To a poet so concerned with place and genealogy,

this searching after a fleeting, provisional sense of identity – as well as theidea of living in a creative atmosphere composed out of words – became apersistent preoccupation

The effect of this preoccupation on his poetic output is plain for all to see.Any reader coming to Stevens’ work for the first time – without any advanceknowledge of the poet’s life – might suppose him to have been an experienced

international traveller: one of those American fin-de-siècle or Modernist

émi-grés who spent considerable time in Paris and elsewhere on the Europeancontinent, like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, F ScottFitzgerald, T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein or Hart Crane Stevens’poetry is chock-full of references to European places By name, it takes us on

a trip through a range of European countries: England and France, clearly,but also Ireland, Switzerland, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark,Italy, Spain, Poland and Bulgaria Even Belgian grapes are mentioned – as a

form of ‘fat pastiche’ (CPP 124) Within these countries, moreover, countless

names of cities are dropped: not merely Paris, but other French places such

as Fontainebleau, Aix, Arras, Le Havre, Avignon or Bordeaux In Switzerland,cities like Geneva, Basel and Zurich are named On the Italian peninsula

we find Florence, Venice, Rome, Bergamo and Naples; in Spain, Madrid,Seville and Segovia; and there are further references to Stockholm, Hamburg,Athens, Vienna, Salzburg and Leyden (but not to Amsterdam, and, in Britain,

little outside London: just ‘the mountainous coiffures of Bath’ [CPP 11] and some ‘Glasgow-frost’ [CPP 162]) In the same seemingly slapdash manner,

Stevens’ poetry takes us along European rivers like the Danube, the Rhone,the Moldau or the Tiber And it betrays a mild obsession with the Alps.Ever since the 1910s, when Stevens began publishing and being reviewed

in the little magazines, critical responses to his work have naturally attended

to the poet’s transformation of European influences, particularly French bolism But for the Stevens specialist there are interesting lessons to be drawnfrom scanning the poetry specifically for such European place-names There

Sym-is the fact, for example, that the regular appearance of these names largely

post-dates the poet’s first collection, Harmonium (1923) It becomes a staple

of his writings only by the 1930s, at a time when Stevens was finally ing enough money as an insurance lawyer to be able to cross the Atlantic forhimself; only to realize that, in all likelihood, he would never do so That real-ization, and its consequences, is of greater interest than anything else for thisbook It means that what we have inherited, in the case of Wallace Stevens,

mak-is the singularly powerful literary heritage of a major Modernmak-ist poet whospent a large share of his imaginative life ‘in’ or ‘with’ places he had neverbeen to, and ‘in’ or ‘with’ cultures he constructed entirely out of words andimages (mostly from paintings and postcards)

Stevens’ well-nigh obsessive interest in the imaginative construction ofplaces lies behind several of the analyses in this book Any Stevens lover

knows this interest to be more than a personal quirk: it allows the poet – inthe indirect, self-reflective manner he favoured – to address wider notions

of identity as they impact on the personal and cultural existence of every

individual As John Serio explains in his introduction to a special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal devoted to ‘The Poetics of Place’: with Stevens any

composition of place becomes ‘the essential exercise in a composition of self’(4) To Serio the environmental determinism that limits some of the poetic

ideas on place pursued in Harmonium is superseded from the mid-thirties

by a new awareness on the poet’s part: ‘By seeing the relationship betweenpeople and place as a distinctively poetic process – “Poetry is a response to the

daily necessity of getting the world right” [CPP 913] – he modifies his ideas

concerning the relationship with one’s surroundings by translating them into

an active, aesthetic mode Recognizing that “the world about us would be

desolate except for the world within us” [CPP 747], he expresses the central

importance of the imagination’s non-geography to the world’s geography’

(ibid.) It is precisely this dynamic interaction between the imagination’s

non-geography and Transatlantic ingredients from the world’s non-geography whichthe current volume sets out to explore at different levels – some biographicaland material, others more abstract, indirect or allegorical

To address a sufficiently diverse range of perspectives in situating Stevensacross the Atlantic, we have chosen to divide this book – in somewhat Steven-sian fashion – into three interlinking sections The first part, ‘Descriptionswithout Place: Ideas of Europe in Stevens’, looks closely at the differentconceptions of Europe (and, in a continually defining dialectic, of Amer-ica) which we find in Stevens’ published writings Inspired by the tactic ofStevens’ own 1945 poem ‘Description Without Place’, these chapters reflectdirectly on how Stevens created imaginative projections of the Europeancontinent as part of his development as a literary artist The second, largestsection of the volume, ‘Beyond Staten Island: Stevens in Transatlantic Con-versation’, takes its lead from the poet’s own wistful comment that he had

‘never been closer to Europe than Staten Island’ (qtd in Brazeau 201) Thetypes of Transatlantic dialogue covered here are subdivided into philosophi-cal and artistic conversations, bringing together interesting new examples ofthe kind of comparative studies that are such a powerful staple of Stevens criti-cism Here Stevens’ poetics and aesthetics are considered as part of an ongoingcross-continental conversation with specific writers and artists These virtualinterlocutors may be philosophers and theorists, visual artists or poets, fig-ures from religious history, or a combination of such They may serve asidentifiable, likely sources of inspiration or else reveal notable affinities thatmanage to shed new light on the poet’s work

The third and final part (which could be expanded into a study in its ownright) concerns Stevens’ reception in various European contexts The poet’sown observation at the end of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ that ‘They

will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne’ (CPP 351) lends a fittingly ironic

title to this section, which includes neither the reflections of a Sorbonne fessor nor any attempt at getting Stevens unappealingly straight Our focus,rather, is on the instructive cases of two very different British poets (thefirst establishing a playful and eccentric lineage that died with him, the sec-ond doing his best to downplay and repress Stevens’ influence) as well asone living Portuguese poet for whom ‘affinity’ is a more apposite term than

pro-‘influence’; and, finally, the more palpable afterlife of Stevens’ translationinto Italian and French

* * *Our first chapter, George Lensing’s ‘ “The Switzerland of the Mind”: Stevens’Invention of Europe’, opens the volume beautifully by identifying many ofthe issues affecting the present work Capitalizing on Lensing’s long-standingexperience as a reader of Stevens – particularly his archival work on the poet’scorrespondence – Chapter 1 explores Stevens’ changing attitudes to the Euro-pean continent as a poetic and actual notion with reference to the letters, thepoet’s working notebooks and significant poems such as ‘The Irish Cliffs ofMoher’, ‘The Novel’ and ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’ Lensing establisheshow Stevens aimed to ‘bring Europe to himself in intimately personal waysand in ways that would have important consequences for his poetry’

J Hillis Miller’s ‘Stevens in Connecticut (and Denmark)’ also witnesses

a lifelong reader of Stevens reconsidering his sense of the poet’s overallachievement Miller blends compelling personal testimonial with incisiveclose-reading and instructive comparative allusions (to Husserl, Derrida,Plato and Blanchot, among others) Chapter 2 portrays Stevens as a ‘hybridpoet, mixing the indigenous with American culture’s essential Transatlanticlegacy’ Contrasting Stevens with the more nativist Williams, Miller analy-ses Stevens’ treatment of American place-names; focusing, in particular, onboth a passage from ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ and the rich late poem ‘TheRiver of Rivers in Connecticut’ The chapter reveals a Stevens who is bothindigene stay-at-home and cosmopolitan in his outlook and tastes Playfully,Miller argues of ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’: ‘This wonderful poem

is scarcely intelligible to someone not from Connecticut [But it is also]

scarcely intelligible to a reader who is not able to place it in the context ofEuropean ideas about “the wholly other”, which it obliquely dramatizes’

In Chapter 3, ‘Stevens’ Europe: Delicate Clinkings and Total Grandeur’,Robert Rehder artfully explains how for Stevens ‘European poetry was hisnatural heritage as an American and a poet’ but that with ‘Europe as a place’,the poet’s relationship was necessarily imaginative Rehder consolidatesLensing’s and Miller’s reflections in extended readings of both ‘DescriptionWithout Place’ and the masterful poem Stevens addressed to George San-tayana, ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’ Significantly, both Santayana andRome are transfigured in the architectural imagery of the poem through

which Rehder deftly explores Stevens’ complex imaginative dialogue withdifferent places, philosophies and descriptive strategies Indeed, Part I of thebook as a whole represents the reclusive poet who spent most of his pro-ductive writing life in the small city of Hartford as arguably one of the first

glocalists of the imagination: a writer who constantly read the global through

the local and vice versa, convinced that these two levels are indissociable,only making sense in relation to each other

Part II, ‘Beyond Staten Island: Stevens in Transatlantic Conversation’, findsCharles Altieri asking what can still be learnt from exploring the complexrelationships within Stevens’ work between ideas and words, philosophical

reflections and poetic statement Taking its lead from Edmund Husserl’s Crisis

in the European Sciences, Chapter 4 argues that Stevens’ mature poetry involves

a meditation on the ‘transcendentalist ego’ More especially, Altieri draws onhis own extensive experience in reading Stevens to argue that ‘Husserl’s capac-ity to blend the transcendental and the elemental helps us see what is

philosophically dynamic and engaging about Stevens’ sense of the tive tasks his poetry had to perform’ The sense of that task is emphasized

distinc-in Altieri’s analysis by his disagreement with aspects of philosopher Simon

Critchley’s Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (2005).

Altieri finds Critchley’s ‘model’ of reading to be ‘neither sufficiently rich inits affirmations nor sufficiently dark in its sense of tragedy to be adequate tolate Stevens’ His main concern is that ‘Critchley emphasizes the situationsthe late poems face rather than the situatings the poems afford if we readthem as exemplary acts of mind’

If Stevens criticism has already harnessed phenomenology in a variety ofways, and if Critchley’s study has proved both insightful and contentious,Krzysztof Ziarek adds to Altieri’s Husserlian account by revisiting the shadow

of Martin Heidegger in the poet’s late work Significantly, he also takes issuewith the Stevens proposed by Critchley In Chapter 5, ‘ “Without humanmeaning”: Stevens, Heidegger and the Foreignness of Poetry’, Ziarek provides

a new reading of the late poem ‘Of Mere Being’, glossing both Heideggerianand Stevensian concerns about the limits and extent of the human Thechapter subtly argues: ‘The reality of “mere being” is indeed without humanpurpose and human meaning; and it becomes disclosed as such through apoietic letting-be, a release from power performed by language’ As Ziarekcontinues: ‘For what Critchley calls the “simple ‘there is’ of things” is not

there of its own, as it were, prior to the entrance of the imagination: it is infact the very “minimal” transformation of the imagination that brings forththe “there is” of things.’ To this extent, Altieri’s and Ziarek’s chapters may beread as significant companion pieces

Justin Quinn’s ‘Early Christianity in Late Stevens’ sets a different, if notunrelated tone, to the Stevens who can be read through phenomenology.Taking its lead from the presence of St Jerome in ‘Notes Toward a SupremeFiction’, Quinn reminds us in Chapter 6 that Stevens’ relationship with

Christianity in his later poetry (especially Transport to Summer and The Auroras

of Autumn) is signally different from the attitudes to Christian faith

encoun-tered in the early work Dispensing with the Nietzschean gaiety and poetic

‘mockery’ of Christianity in Harmonium, the later poetry makes more robust

references to the influence of Christian doctrine on Western literature trasting Stevens with Yeats, Quinn finds the American poet meditating onEmperor Constantine in ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ and arguesthat his preoccupation with ‘saints and sanctity’ enables Stevens to definehimself as ‘post-Christian’ Rather than distance himself in the very act of

Con-addressing what the early Harmonium poem calls ‘A High-Toned Old Christian

Woman’, Quinn claims that Stevens explores Christian icons and phy in greater depth precisely to characterize his own post-Christian poeticexperience

iconogra-Josh Cohen in Chapter 7, ‘ “The strange unlike”: Stevens’ Poetics ofResemblance’, returns Stevens to idealist and phenomenological specula-tion, and simultaneously looks forward to the more literary conversations inthe next section His nuanced argument enlarges discussion by consideringSchlegel, Blanchot, Mallarmé and Freud in conjunction with the poet Specif-ically, Cohen explores the philosophical meanings and resonances acrossthe Stevens corpus of what ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ calls ‘the essen-

tial prose’ (CPP 29) Drawing on ‘Nuances of a Theme by Williams’ and

extending its reading throughout the corpus to ‘Notes Toward a SupremeFiction’ and beyond, the chapter argues that traditional concepts of ‘poetry’and ‘prose’ are insufficient to account for Stevens’ preoccupation with therelations between literary language and an idealist ‘thing’ As Cohen argues,

‘Paradoxically, prose can manifest itself only in the guise of a poem’ over, in Stevens, ‘the essential prose of “English” lives in and through theimaginative alienations of “French”’

More-The second half of Part II, which is devoted to more artistic conversations,opens with Chapter 8, David Haglund’s informative ‘Stevens, Duchamp andthe American “ism”, 1915–1919’ Following through on Cohen, Haglundexplores Stevens’ concept of his own poetic career as represented in ‘TheComedian as the Letter C’ Contrasting the gestures made by Stevens andDuchamp toward an ‘American art’ or ‘American identity’, the chapterdiscusses Stevens’ playful relationship with various ‘isms’ and the manifesto-aesthetics of early Modernism For Haglund, Stevens is sceptical about an

‘Americanist’ literature and his poetic project is clearly differentiated fromthat of William Carlos Williams Haglund also reads Stevens’ ‘Primordia’ and

‘Pecksniffiana’ sequences, focusing especially on ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, asinstructive instances of the poet’s battle with American soil and an emergentpoetic

Edward Ragg turns to the middle and mature phases of Stevens’ career inChapter 9, ‘Picasso, Cézanne and Stevens’ Abstract Engagements’ He setsout to demonstrate how the poet overcame his 1930s reservations about

abstraction and argues that the examples of Picasso and Cézanne galvanizedStevens’ acceptance of the advantages of an abstract aesthetic Focusing onsignificant moments in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ – a poem Ragg sug-gests ‘critiques the very abstraction it also embraces’ – the essay analysesPicasso’s effect on that poem as well as the presence of Cézanne in ‘Prelude toObjects’ The essay presents a Stevens who unashamedly turns to an abstractpoetic because of its restorative human powers rather than marking a retreat

into a world of the imagination Indeed, the paradox of an abstract

engage-ment informs the analysis of Stevens’ Transatlantic gestures throughout hiscareer

The chapters by Haglund and Ragg, which reconsider Stevens’ dialoguewith European visual artists, are followed in turn by a chapter revisiting con-nections with a specific European writer Lisa Goldfarb’s ‘Music and the VocalPoetics of Stevens and Valéry’ offers a discussion of the still underappreci-ated relationship between Stevens and his French contemporary Paul Valéry.Goldfarb’s aim in Chapter 10 is to bring the vocal poetics of Valéry to a read-ing of Stevens’ work After presenting the contours of Valéry’s vocal poetics,drawing from his many essays and voluminous notebooks, Goldfarb turns

to Valéryan echoes in Stevens’ prose, to highlight how his essays, letters and

‘Adagia’ call forth the shaping structure of Valéry’s more extensive theory Sheends by discussing a number of Stevens’ poems – most notably ‘The Idea ofOrder at Key West’, ‘Variations on a Summer Day’, ‘The Creations of Sound’and ‘Large Red Man Reading’ – to show how Stevens breathes life into theirshared poetics of voice According to Goldfarb, when we read Stevens’ workwith Valéry’s theory in mind, we hear each poet’s voice more accurately andfully, and feel Valéry’s presence in Stevens’ poetic world

Part III, ‘Getting It Straight at the Sorbonne? Stevens’ Afterlife in Europe’,opens with Mark Ford’s colourful investigation of the biographical and poeticlinks between Stevens and the English poet Nicholas Moore; as well as,through this connection, of Stevens’ dealings with the Fortune Press One

of the brightest young stars in the London poetry firmament of the 1940sand a widely published writer in the United States for a while, the charminglyeccentric Moore flew off the radar in the ensuing decades only to die in com-plete obscurity Ford offers a vivid, genial and at times hilarious portrait of theman’s life and endlessly inventive work, which would bring him into con-tact with Stevens, the Modernist poet whom he admired most and activelysought to launch to a British readership Thus Chapter 11 also tells the won-derful story of the Fortune Press and its shady founder, R A Caton, withcameo appearances by Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and the highly exoticTambimuttu It is a story that usefully reminds us of the crucial, at timesvolatile and unpredictable, role of ‘middle men’ in the establishment of apoet’s reputation and his ultimate canonization

Gareth Reeves in Chapter 12, ‘A Ghost Never Exorcized: Stevens in thePoetry of Charles Tomlinson’, tells a very different, more earnest story of

a poet who instead of insouciantly emulating his Transatlantic forebearambivalently struggled with him Although Tomlinson is widely regarded asone of the most ‘Americanized’ of the British poets to come to prominence

in the twenty or so years following the Second World War, his relationshipwith American poetry, Reeves argues, is not easy to categorize His poetry

is haunted by the contradictions inherent in American poetic Modernism,summed up as the Symbolist tendencies of Stevens on the one hand and theImagism of Williams on the other The common view of Tomlinson, fostered

by the poet himself, is that an early, mistaken allegiance to Stevens gave way

to a more fruitful reading of Williams But the picture Reeves offers is lesssimple and more fascinating: for one way of looking at Tomlinson’s poeticcareer is as an attempt to exorcize the ghost of Stevens

If, in the case of Moore and Tomlinson, we are clearly talking of thedirect influence exerted by Stevens on a younger generation of Transat-lantic poets, this is altogether different in the case study presented byIrene Ramalho Santos Chapter 13, ‘A Poetics of Ignorance: António RamosRosa and Stevens’, offers the first extended investigation of the promi-nent Portuguese poet Ramos Rosa’s work in conjunction with Stevens’aesthetics The essay argues that rather than see Ramos Rosa as explicitlyresponding to Stevens (with whose poetry he claims to be only vaguelyfamiliar), the later poet gathers inspiration from a ‘poetics of ignorance’

in which Ramos Rosa’s acquaintance with Stevens is a cannily ing’ catalyst for his own work Ramalho Santos’ suave chapter is inter-ested more in understanding what she calls ‘constellations of poets’ based

‘unknow-on a shared aesthetic affinity and a joint resistance to poetry’s col‘unknow-oniza-tion by philosophy than in tracing direct intertextual genealogies Suchconstellations offer extended possibilities for critical exploration, as shebriefly illustrates with the further example of the Brazilian poet Manoel deBarros

coloniza-Finally, Chapter 14, Massimo Bacigalupo’s insightful and good-humoured

‘Reading Stevens in Italian’, rounds up the academic chapters in this ume by looking at another mode through which Stevens has been crossingthe Atlantic: through the efforts of translators to let him be heard in otherlanguages Bacigalupo’s own experience as an award-winning translator (notjust of Stevens but of several other major poets) allows him to survey therich translation history of Stevens in Italy and to testify to the multiple joysand frustrations of translating this particular poet Working through a closelyconsidered study of lapses, slips and miscomprehensions, he shows us howtranslators of Stevens, in their own indirect ways, are important critics too,who present us with their proper mix of blindness and insight His discussion

vol-is all the more rewarding for drawing not only on hvol-is own translations but

on those of Italian colleagues as well as recent French versions by Claire roux Bacigalupo wraps up his caressingly detailed investigation with variouspassages from ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’, thus returning one final time

Mal-to a poem already held up for inspection by several other contribuMal-tors Mal-to thevolume.

While the academic chapters may thus be said to have come full circle, weare pleased to be able to append a visually attractive coda as a concludinginstance of Stevens’ Transatlantic afterlife This time, however, the crossingsinvolved are also generic: the personal testimonial offered by Helga Kos isthat of a visual artist from Amsterdam who learnt of Stevens first throughthe musical transposition of seven late poems by famous American com-poser (and author) Ned Rorem, to which in turn she was invited to provide

a painter’s response What was originally intended as a relatively scribed, short-lived assignment ran out of hand as Kos became mesmerized

circum-by Stevens’ powerful appeal as an image-maker The result was a happilyobsessive five-year adventure that ended with a three-volume ‘artist’s book’which we have tried to evoke, however imperfectly, through a series of colourreproductions Ideally, however, the book itself, as Kos explains, should beexperienced – like Rorem’s music – in time, thus presenting us with an appro-priate concluding image for a study of Stevens that is especially interested inthe open-ended act of finding what crossings will suffice

Works cited

Brazeau, Peter Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered: An Oral Biography.

New York: Random House, 1983.

Cook, Eleanor Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens Princeton: Princeton

Michaels, Walter Benn Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 1995.

Serio, John N ‘Introduction: A Personal Reflection’ The Wallace Stevens Journal 27.1

Part I

Descriptions without Place: Ideas

of Europe in Stevens

‘The Switzerland of the Mind’:

Stevens’ Invention of Europe

George Lensing

Why did Stevens, loving Europe as he did, never visit there? And what did itmean to him as a poet that he didn’t? We know that as early as 1923, Stevensand his wife were able to make a leisurely sea voyage through the PanamaCanal, and, on other occasions, he went on to vacation in places like Floridaand Maine He also made a couple of brief visits to Cuba Eventually, he hadthe means financially to make a journey across the Atlantic, even as he wasable to and did purchase paintings from an art dealer in Paris, carvings andjewellery from Ceylon, and other artefacts from other countries To the poet

for whom ‘life is an affair of places’ instead of ‘people’ (CPP 901), one might

expect a visit to Europe to beckon him commandingly

In addressing these questions, I want first to outline the passion for Europethat Stevens indulged throughout his adult lifetime in correspondence, note-books and poetry Secondly, one can only speculate that, at some point inhis middle age, perhaps earlier, he realized that it was unlikely he wouldever visit Europe or any of the other distant continents That being the case,

he proceeded to explore ways in which he could bring Europe to himself

in intimately personal ways and in ways that would have important sequences for his poetry Two entries in one of his working notebooks ablyserve as illustrations of important premises that became part of Stevens’ largerpoetics: ‘Poetry As The Switzerland Of The Mind’ and ‘The Alp at the end of

con-the street’ (FPof P 184 and 167) In con-the end, Europe was only a ‘Switzerland

Of The Mind’ or an ‘Alp at the end of [his] street’ – an intrinsically different

Europe, but a construct of immense and enduring importance and pleasure

to the poet – a unique description without place The final entry in the samenotebook entitled ‘From Pieces of Paper’ is ‘One Must Sit Still To Discover

The World’ (FPof P 188).

We know that during his three years at Harvard, Stevens studied Frenchand German languages and literature, as well as British literature These, infact, made up the core of his curriculum there He majored, one might say,

in European languages and literature Later, in one of his ‘Adagia’, he would

affirm that ‘French and English constitute a single language’ (CPP 914) Then,

13

at the age of 20, resolving to leave the university without completing a degree,Stevens confided in his journal his plans for the future: ‘I am going to NewYork, I think, to try my hand at journalism If that does not pan out well, I

am resolved to knock about the country – the world’ (SP 70) After beginning his tenure as a reporter at the New York Tribune, he was dreaming just a few

months later, ‘I hope to get to Paris next summer – and I mean to if I have the

money’ (SP 90), and, back in New York having spent Christmas in Reading, he

had not abandoned his plan: ‘I am likely to remain here until Spring, at least

Europe is still on the other side of the ocean’ (SP 94) Because of straitened

financial circumstances in the ensuing months and years, it remained on theother side of the ocean

In 1904, Elsie Kachel entered his life, though the two were not wed until

1909 In one letter to her during the engagement, he indulged again in hisdream:

Bernard Shaw has just brought out a new thing in London called ‘TheAdmirable Bashville.’ There is no scenery and the actors act in their every-day clothes It is a burlesque of Shakespeare, I believe – Wouldn’t it benice to live in London and go – say, on Saturday evening? We’ll be goingover there one of these days, I hope – I should mope in Paradise (possibly)

if I were to die without first having been to London – On Sunday, it wasBerlin – I have had my hours for Paris, too – When I could see the Street

of Little Stables, and the Street of Beautiful Leaves, and the Bridge of Arts,and the Church of Our Lady, and the Arch of Triumph – as clearly as I cansee you looking out of that frame – Good Fortune, send us to them all.We’ll save for that It isn’t so impossibly expensive, you know People who

go once go often. It seems much nearer, too, when the steamers start

from the foot of your own street, as they do here

(CS 141)

It is noteworthy that Stevens has already visited these locations mentally –last Sunday in Berlin and ‘I have had my hours for Paris, too’ His letterspeaks of a certain familiarity with Paris, resulting, we might speculate, fromhis reading, photographs or, more likely, his own interior constructions Butthose interior visitations still anticipate the real London, the real Berlin, thereal Paris ‘We’ll be going over there one of these days, I hope’, and withsomething like adolescent plangency: ‘I should mope in Paradise (possibly)

if I were to die without first having been to London.’

Six months later, his longing for London was unabated as he noted inhis journal: ‘London continues to be the ultimate point of romance to me

I wish there was some chap there to whom I could write for things’ (CS 141).

Here, at the age of 29, Stevens for the first time expresses the alternative ofbringing Europe to himself by finding a ‘chap’ who could arrange to send him

‘things’ He had thereby discovered a strategy that would remain intact forthe remainder of his life By the time his poem ‘Autumn Refrain’ appeared in

1932, the music of the European nightingale with all its Keatsian evocationshad become purely imaginary: ‘Though I have never – shall never hear that

bird’ (CPP 129).

At the age of 54, he mentioned in a letter, ‘For my part, I never really liveduntil I had a home, and my own room, say, with a package of books from

Paris or London’ (L 301) The letter to James Powers is noteworthy because

it establishes the terms of a certain compromise Stevens has made First heneeds the security of his own home and the privacy of his own room as acondition for enjoying the package of books Europe, so to speak, has becomedomestic and solitary Lacking all these circumstances, he explains, he ‘neverreally lived’

For some reason, and this is an anomaly in Stevens’ responses to Europe,

he found in 1951 a visitor from Sweden irksome:

On Saturday, a visitor from Sweden, a very pleasant and intelligent person,came to the house We had an agreeable talk He was well mannered, but

he reeked of tobacco smoke He also reeked of Swedish poetry and when hefinished his call he left with me a book of Swedish songs with their scoresand, in addition, an anthology of Swedish poetry translated into English.Now, I have not the slightest desire to sing Swedish songs correctly orincorrectly and at the moment a Swedish anthology is the last thing inthe world that I should ever look at This is simply typical of the sort ofthing that runs one ragged

(L 712)

It must have been at this time that he entered into his notebook of proposed

titles the following: ‘Shrinking From Sweden’ (FPofP 171).

Switzerland, on the other hand, held out a greater appeal To José RodríguezFeo he wrote in 1948, ‘But, suddenly, I began to think about Switzerland.There is a great deal coming from Switzerland Then, too, Switzerland issomething that one ought to think about in the summertime It is so muchmore agreeable to think about Lake Geneva at this time of the year than it is

to think about the rue de Babylone, nicht wahr?’ (L 594) Two years later, he

was still thinking of that country, saying to Bernard Heringman, ‘I assumethat you will see something of Switzerland, which has been everywhere in

my mind recently’ (L 665) In the notebook of titles, he wrote out ‘Poetry

As The Switzerland Of The Mind’, ‘A Sudden Importance of Switzerland’ and

‘Swiss Widow’ (FPof P 184, 185, 178).

In many ways, Stevens’ correspondence became his passport to Europe andother countries and continents – Ireland through Thomas McGreevy; Francethrough his art dealer, Anatole Vidal, and, after Vidal’s death, his daughterPaule A poem like ‘Our Stars Come from Ireland’ is the direct result of two

poems by McGreevy, who was Director of the National Gallery in Dublin andwhom Stevens knew almost solely by correspondence McGreevy’s poemsrecollect his youth in the town of Tarbert near Mal Bay, locations that areprominently drawn into Stevens’ poem Another postcard with a photograph

of the Irish Cliffs of Moher in County Clare came from the director of theLamont Library poetry room at Harvard, John Sweeney, who was vacationingthere In a later letter, Stevens acknowledged that the photograph ‘eventu-

ally became a poem’ (L 770), the one called ‘The Irish Cliffs of Moher’ On

yet another occasion, Stevens was also quite taken with the account written

by his lively Cuban correspondent José Rodríguez Feo about an Argentinewriter who suffered through a bitterly cold Parisian winter That story led toRodríguez Feo’s decision to decline the offer of a job with UNESCO in Paris.Here is Rodríguez Feo’s letter:

I gave up the job at the Unesco at Paris because mother was afraid I wouldfreeze in the Parisian hotels She happened to listen in on a conversa-tion wherein a friend of mine described in gruesome details the fate of

an Argentine writer At night he would go to bed, cover himself withblankets – protruding from the pile of wool a hand, in a black glove, holds

a novel by Camus That was the only safe way he could keep in touch withFrench literary events Mother was much impressed by the picture of theengloved hand holding a trembling little volume She begged me to stayaway

(L 617)

This episode of the Parisian winter and the Argentine writer was made intoStevens’ poem ‘The Novel’, coming, as he later told Rodríguez Feo, ‘from one

of your letters to me’ (L 687).

In the spring and summer of 1949, Stevens was writing ‘An OrdinaryEvening in New Haven’ and, in canto XXVIII, he incorporated several lettersand postcards from friends in Europe Here is the first part of the canto:

If it should be true that reality exists

In the mind: the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it,The long-bladed knife, the little to drink and herMisericordia, it follows that

Real and unreal are two in one: New HavenBefore and after one arrives or, say,

Bergamo on a postcard, Rome after dark,Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes

Or Paris in conversation at a café

(CPP 414)

Many years ago, while doing archival research at the Huntington Library, Idiscovered the sources for these references ‘Rome after dark’ had come from

a recent postcard sent by McGreevy describing his nights in Rome Stevensresponded, ‘Your postcard from Rome set me up Rome is not ordinarily

on the itinerary of my imagination It is a little out of the way, covered bycypresses It is not a place that one visits frequently like Paris or Dublin’

(L 629) ‘Sweden described’ (the country toward which his sympathies had

apparently softened) came from a woman named Ebba Dalin, an Americanmarried to a Swedish-American engineer; she had sent several pictures ofStockholm with an invitation to visit More recently, Barbara Church, widow

of Stevens’ friend Henry Church, sent him a succession of postcards andnotes throughout the summer of 1949, including a postcard from Stockholm

in June She also provided the description of ‘Paris in conversation at a café’after her visit there in July ‘Bergamo on a postcard’ also came from MrsChurch later that month

In retrospect, one can appreciate the importance of these hastily scrawledmessages that made their way through the mails to Hartford Here is a kind

of vicarious identity with the poet’s friends and their travels; the notes andcards personalized for him a connection to European cities otherwise left

to his imagination In the late summer of 1950, for example, he wrote toMrs Church that he had ‘looked forward to a particularly busy summer run-ning around all over Europe (in other people’s shoes) because there are quite

a number of people over there this summer’ (L 689) Three summers later

he wrote to her again, ‘The postcards from Ville d’Avray came the otherday They did me a lot of good In fact, I survive on postcards from Europe’

(L 797).

Stevens also survived on postcards and other items from Europe by merging

an image of remote cities and lands with the immediacy of his own familiarsurroundings In this way, the foreign and the familiar came to depend uponeach other, at times evoking a form of creative tension and at other times

a harmonious convergence A purely Stevensian comparison between den mangoes on his table at Hartford and a description of ‘blue and whiteMunich’ three years after the bombings of that city in the Second WorldWar came together for Stevens as a result of a letter from Mrs Church in theGerman city:

Hay-We have on a table in the dining room at home several Hayden mangoes.What healthy looking things they are A friend who has been to Munichthis summer wrote to me the other day of the extent of the destruction

of ‘blue and white Munich’ It is like changing records on a gramophone

to speak of the red and almost artificial green of mango skins and thenspeak of blue and white Munich But unless we do these things to reality,the damned thing closes in us, walls us up and buries us alive After all, asyou spend your summer getting well again, aren’t you in an extraordinary

position to carry on the struggle with and against reality and against thefifth column of reality that keeps whispering with the hard superiority ofthe sane that reality is all we have, that it is that or nothing Reality isthe footing from which we leap after what we do not have and on whicheverything depends.

Some books came recently wrapped in a Paris newspaper which containedphotos of some fountains at Aix, not great things, but enough to make alittle sound as one walked by This makes me think of a little dove thatwas sitting high upon a wire near home a few mornings ago cooing aboutnothing much I stopped to look at her She turned around so that shecould see me better but went right on with her talk

(L 610)

The convergences of ‘blue and white Munich’ with the Hayden mangoes

on the table and the photos of the ‘fountains at Aix’ with the cooing dove inHartford display the kinds of syntheses by which Stevens constructed many

of his poems More specifically, they show how Europe had become the richlyevocative and constant landscape of his imagination directly attached to theimmediate world as he knew it

Stevens’ correspondence, providing him with ready materia poetica from

postcards and letters, is perhaps not his most significant absorption of theEuropean influence on his work I am suggesting that, in a more funda-mental way, the unattainability of Europe, leaving the poet disappointedbut later ruefully resigned, became itself an endemic quality of many of hispoems The theme of desire and longing for a world outside the self, butattempting to possess it nonetheless with one’s own interior resources andreserves, is of course foundational to his poetry The world outside the selfcould be sun, sea, field, star – but it could also be Europe itself I want to lookbriefly at an enigmatic poem called ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’ as an illus-tration of Europe-as-world, or Europe-as-reality Then, I will look to the finalcanto of ‘Description Without Place’ as Stevens’ compensatory and placatingpossession of Europe-as-world

‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’ is a highly sensuous poem about the pleasuresderiving from the sight, smell, feel and taste of peaches in their rich summerripeness ‘With my whole body I taste these peaches, / I touch them and

smell them’ (CPP 206), the poem begins But the peaches are not just any

peaches; their satisfactions relate in a peculiar way to one’s native origins,one’s identity with one’s native land The speaker in the poem, a Russian,delights in the peaches the way that ‘the Angevine / Absorbs Anjou’, the way

‘the black Spaniard plays his guitar’ His delight is partially but not completelysuccessful In the end, he is, in fact, an alien among the peaches: ‘But it must

be that I, / That animal, that Russian, that exile, for whom // The bells of thechapel pullulate sounds at / Heart.’ At the same time, the exiled Russian findsthe peaches ‘full of the colors of my village / And of fair weather, summer,dew, peace’ But peace is not his at the end of the poem He emerges finally as

a divided self These peaches are like Russian peaches; even the title declares

‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’ But the ‘peace’ of the Russian’s homeland givesway to the ‘ferocities’ of his exile, perhaps in Anjou itself or Spain Here ishow the poem concludes, a sharp reversal:

Even the drifting of the curtains,Slight as it is, disturbs me I did not knowThat such ferocities could tear

One self from another, as these peaches do

One self is divided from the other – a Russian of Russia and a Russian in exile from Russia – even though the peaches themselves almost allow him to

escape such painful division

The poem perhaps has a bearing upon the issue of Stevens’ relation toEurope It is a poem about a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a Russian Thefirst two are one with their native origins The third, the Russian, is anexile Among other possible readings, I want to suggest that the Russian isrelated to a Stevens who himself remained exiled from absorbing Anjou like

an Angevine, or, for that matter, like an American The Russian exile is anexile in Europe; Stevens is an exile from Europe Such ‘ferocities’ of separa-tion for Stevens also came at a personal cost, a sense of loss, a divided self,

a hunger for the peaches of Europe that remained the forbidden fruit of adistant land

What redeemed Stevens from the provincialism of a circumscribed life inNew England was an innate curiosity and sensibility that made him, in fact,the least provincial of poets Through his magazine subscriptions, his booksand his correspondence, including a large assortment of artefacts mailed tohim from around the world, he became one of our most cosmopolitan poets

In a more personal way, he could truthfully say, ‘I survive on postcards fromEurope’ In the end, he could ‘Sit Still To Discover The World’

When he was beginning to write his poem ‘Description Without Place’,Stevens wrote to Henry Church, a wealthy editor and sponsor of the artswho lived as much in France as in the United States (in some ways a kind ofStevens alter ego): ‘I have only one piece of news, and that is that I am going

to read a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard next June [1945] I amabout to settle down to my subject: DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE It

seems to me to be an interesting idea: that is to say, the idea that we live inthe description of a place and not in the place itself, and in every vital sense

we do This ought to be a good subject for such an occasion’ (L 494).

If our knowledge of the world is always its seeming, we are always, likethe Russian in ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’, exiles from that world If, inthe words of ‘A Collect of Philosophy’, ‘we never see the world except the

moment after’ (CPP 857), then the separation of the eye from its object can

be distanced by a few inches or by the Atlantic Ocean itself Europe, like allother objects, is necessarily the seeming of it I believe this is what Stevens

is saying in the final canto of ‘Description Without Place’ Here, thinking ofSpain, he speaks of ‘The invention of a nation in a phrase’, as if by the act

of naming he created it After acknowledging that ‘the word is the making

of the world’, he presents the Spanish hidalgo:

the hard hidalgoLives in the mountainous character of his speech;

And in that mountainous mirror Spain acquiresThe knowledge of Spain and of the hidalgo’s hat –

A seeming of the Spaniard, a style of life,The invention of a nation in a phrase

(CPP 302)

In ‘The World as Meditation’, Penelope’s passionate longing for the return ofUlysses yields to her mind his visionary presence in the motions of the sun

‘It was Ulysses and it was not’ (CPP 442), the poem concludes And so it is

with Stevens’ lifelong romance with Europe The presence of that continent,and the many countries that perpetually fascinated him, was and was not.The seeming of Europe was his seeing of it

In a letter written two years before his death, Stevens admits to a ence for his personal, fictitious Paris: ‘I am one of the many people aroundthe world who live from time to time in a Paris that has never existed andthat is composed of the things that other people, primarily Parisians them-selves, have said about Paris That particular Paris communicates an interest

prefer-in life that may be wholly fiction, but, if so, it is precious fiction’ (L 773).

In another letter written about a year later, more than a half-century after

his earliest resolves to visit there, he again set forth the great and ing appeal of his fictitious invention Here, unlike the Russian exile, hehas escaped the ‘ferocities’ of the alienated self Like Penelope yearning forUlysses, there is a mixture of pathos and triumph: ‘I have often seen Sevillebefore but never smelled the heavy fragrance of its orange blossoms And

endur-I have seen Granada but never felt the noise of its mountain water Also,

I have been in Madrid but this time it was a change to get away from thePrado and to go to restaurants and sit by the door and look out at the18th century I liked to stop in Bordeaux where other friends of mine have

lived’ (L 837).

In the end, perhaps Stevens came to prefer his private Europe over its actual

presence Holly Stevens hints of this in her remark about why her fathernever visited Europe: ‘I think my father always thought that he would get toEurope someday As a young man he couldn’t afford it, and later he was mar-ried to someone who was a terrible traveler and constantly carsick or seasickwhenever she went anywhere After the war I think he was afraid of findingthings too much changed By that point, of course, he had constructed hisown Europe’ (qtd in Mee 48)

Just two years before his death, Stevens had the satisfaction of seeing hisown poems collected and published in the United Kingdom When Faber

published his Selected Poems, it was with the assistance of T S Eliot and ianne Moore Ironically, a second Selected Poems, a pirated edition from the

Mar-Fortune Press, was published in that country one year before, though thisedition was suppressed and its copies confiscated Faber would go on to pub-lish Stevens’ essays and letters It seems that his work had found a location inEurope in spite of the poet’s personal distance Even so, in the half-century

since the publication of Faber’s Selected Poems, and with notable exceptions,

Stevens’ work remains largely unknown in Britain Stevens himself saw part of the difficulty: ‘The truth is American poetry is at its worst inEngland and, possibly in Ireland or in any other land where English is spokenand whose inhabitants feel that somehow our English is a vulgar imitation’

fore-(L 597).

One could argue that as a poet Stevens benefited from the long denial ofEurope – however difficult it was for him to forgo the journey itself Europebecame part of his sensibility, a synecdoche for the larger world he never tired

of pursuing, an idealized geography, a paradise unvisited but not ungained.One of the entries in ‘From Pieces of Paper’ is this: ‘I Was Born In Europe’

(FPof P 177) In a sense, one could say he also died there ‘To an Old

Philoso-pher in Rome’ is Stevens’ meditation on the final days of George Santayanadying in a convent in Rome in 1952 – three years before his own death.Friends from Stevens’ Harvard years more than a half-century earlier, bothSpanish philosopher and American poet cling to the presence of that thresh-old city at the end For Santayana in Rome but also for Stevens in Hartford, apoet’s imagined Rome offers the ultimate consolation: ‘The sounds drift in