Twenty-One Ways of Looking at a Poetry Collection
Some Appreciations of Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium
The following are selections from various critics’ writings on Wallace Stevens’ first and most celebrated collection of poetry, Harmonium. Scroll to the bottom for their sources, and for links to Stevens’ poetry available for free online.
§1
Harmonium is a sun-drenched place, a world of cocks and blackbirds and ripening strawberries, a place of light and of the green of growing things and of violent color, an orchard of rotting apples all the more beautiful for their rotting, a state of mind in which Stevens accepts joyfully the cosmic turmoil and change and seldom, if ever, allows himself to deny by any thought or wish the tenuous, ever-ebbing beauty of the human condition.
§2
Characterized by bold, bizarre, and immaculate phrasing, imagistic concreteness, incisive prosody, and the pictorial and tonal effects of color, his poems achieve a remarkable vividness, a palpability; and with techniques derived from the Symbolists, he extended this mastery to the intangible, imbuing those areas of reality accessible only to the imagination with the same vividness.
§3
Though nothing in his thought (which derives from William James, Santayana, Bergson, and Nietzsche, among others) is philosophically original, no modern poet has been better at reproducing in verse the way a meditative mind moves — inching forward, doubling back over its tracks, qualifying its original assertions, unfolding the ambiguity and self-deception of its own phrases, querying its own results, mocking its own certainties.
§4
This is what Stevens learned to demand of his poems, that as imaginative creations they contain and elicit the essence of reality itself.
§5
Marianne Moore describes Harmonium in terms of its “kaleidoscopically centrifugal circular motion” — and the centrifugal nature of these poems permits a spectrum of voices, characters and possible interpretive contexts.
§6
Utterances range from the serious to the non-sensical, from the muscular to the fragile, and from incisive irony to bad jokes, in which language is used against itself rather than against its object.
§7
Stevens’ symbolic geography stretches from Tehuantepec and Africa to Hartford, from Tallapoosa to Minnesota, and back again from the harsh abstractions of the North to the jungles of Southern flora.
§8
Harmonium ranges between Floridian lushness and Northern cold, stretching over a continent to which Stevens, caught in a relatively provincial New England world, was beginning to awaken.
§9
One is met in these poems by some such clash of pigment as where in a showman’s display of orchids and gladiolas, one receives the effect of vials of picrocarmine, magenta, gamboge, and violet mingled each at the highest point of intensity.
§10
Harmonium is a cornucopia of modernisms: the poems flirt variously with surrealism, with ‘nonsense’ and with dreams, with symbolism, Imagism and Dada; they suggest chinoiserie and the ‘Yellow’ Nineties, and contexts in modern art from Impressionism to Readymades.
§11
Stevens’ predilection for the bizarre, the irrational, and the grotesque is certainly exploited fully in Harmonium. That volume is rich in imagery that strikes directly at the reader’s own fund of unconscious experience, evoking a vivid sense of the fantastic or of reality perceived from odd perspectives. Distorted, perplexing landscapes and figures loom up, projecting the inner violence of the imagination, giving the object and the emotion a presence, an authenticity. The boundaries of reality are extended to include the unconscious, and the interplay between the imagination and the actual is dramatized and made more complex, with attendant effects of wit, humor, and grotesquerie, often combined as they are in the unconscious.
§12
The style is not divorced from the substance, and the sensuous, urbane, dazzling, and initially perplexing surfaces of the poems — surfaces enjoyable in themselves — draw the reader into surprising depths of thought, emotion, and aesthetic pleasure.
§13
Stevens’s riddles of purport press his reader to notice the language of the poem, since it seems at first an obstacle to, rather than a means of, import. The poem then becomes — as any poem not dulled by over-familiarity should — a friction of language into iridescence, redeeming communication from the bland transparency of its everyday, information-retailing behavior. The modern reader reads, in a practical sense, almost exclusively for information-retrieval; Stevens’s aim is to retrain that reader into a consciousness of the surface of language, that “visible core” (as Ashbery calls it) which by its manner suggests its depths.
§14
In the largest sense, these are poems about poetry, about the poet in search of how far he can go in re-creating the world in feelings and words, and how much he is held by reality to the world as it is. They are poems of a sensitive, alienated self, the poet as outsider seeking to be an insider, trying heroically to find his way through the world rather than beyond it.
§15
Stevens’ style arises out of his deeply felt need to discover ideas of order in an age of cultural change and confusion. Furthermore, he is a direct descendant out of the Romantic poets in his unceasing exploration of the relationships between the inner, subjective, human point of view and outer, objective nature — or, as he so often stated it himself, between imagination and reality.
§16
To consider briefly the literary situation inherited by Stevens’ generation is to understand why he demanded a new freedom within which he could experiment and discover techniques equal to his emerging view of poetry’s high function; he would come to claim, in face, that “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”
§17
Literary experimentalism in the 1920’s cannot be separated from the search for moral forms. In a time which lacks the assurance of tradition, the place of the self in a naturalistic cosmos is highly problematical, and the meaning of death, once absorbed in the metaphysics of transcendence, becomes increasingly the sensitive man’s obsession. For Stevens, there were only the forms of art to replace the lost forms of belief, a romantic formula that the previous century had disproved. But he was not alone in a time that was rapidly discovering that art for art’s sake had become art for life’s sake.
§18
So much beauty emanating from darkness, so great an affirmation of life in the presence of death — this indeed is the essential Harmonium, in which gaiety is born in decay.
§19
The world of Harmonium is pierced by a doubt, by shadows which lengthen over the imagination, accentuating the poet’s isolation from things.
§20
And there I verge upon what I take as the clue to his greatness; in the curiously esoteric but centrally American tradition of Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau and Dickinson, Stevens is uniquely the twentieth century poet of that solitary inward glory we can none of us share with others. His value is that he describes and even celebrates (occasionally) our selfhood-communings as no one else can or does.
§21
Contrary to all appearances, to the difficulty of his verse, and to the preoccupied, distracted interpretations of contemporary critics, Wallace Stevens’ poetry is a profoundly spiritual force. Anyone interested in the spiritual problems of modern humans must reckon with it.
Sources
Section 1 is from Wallace Stevens’ “Whole Harmonium” by Richard Blessing
Sections 2, 4, 11, 12, 15, and 16 are from Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium by Robert Buttel
Sections 3 and 13 are from “Wallace Stevens” by Helen Vendler from The Columbia History of American Poetry
Sections 5 and 10 are from “A Pluralistic Universe: Rereading Wallace Stevens’s ‘Harmonium’” by Lee Jenkins
Sections 6, 7, 8, 14, 17, 18, and 19 are from The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens by Joseph N. Riddel
Section 20 is from Wallace Stevens: Modern Critical Views Series by Harold Bloom
Section 21 is from “An Introduction to Reading Wallace Stevens as a Poet of the Human Spirit” by Dana Wilde
