[Originally published on September 19, 2009.]
This week I was reminded by a review in a recent New York Times Book Review (August 23) that my freshman year in college I wrote a paper for Philosophy I on a book of essays titled The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). The review, “The Plain Sense of Things,” by Helen Vendler, was of a book of Selected Poems of Stevens, edited by John N. Serio.
Vendler mentioned that the Library of America, “in 1997, gave us all of his poetry and some of his prose.” I thought I had purchased the volume, and this evening I found it in my library. I was surprised to find that I had to remove its shrink wrap to confirm that it included the essays (pp. 637-751). I knew that I found Stevens’ poetry difficult, but still in shrink wrap! The dust jacket includes the characterization of Stevens’ “body of work of astonishing profusion and exuberance, brilliant poems that have remained an inspiration to generations of poets and readers.”
I couldn’t remember whether I’d read any of Stevens’ poems for that paper on The Necessary Angel, but I think I have the means to find out, for incredibly I think that I still have the paper. I can picture the box, in the garage, in which it would be. I’m too tired to look tonight, but I will tomorrow (I did), to see what reflections I might have made on a passage like:
The subject matter of poetry is not the “collection of solid, static objects extended in space” but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are.That seems pretty clear to me now, except for the final sentence, which jumps abruptly from the preceding sentence. It might simply be saying the “life that is lived” (reality) defines what is for us (subjectively), not the physical objects among which it is (objectively) set. I think that’s essentially what I was saying to my grand nephew Joe the other day, in response to his referring to some anecdotes I’d told him about his family as “an epic story”:
I’m glad you enjoyed the “epic story,” though of course it’s hardly that, just a few snippets (which alas is about all I have, for my sense of family narrative was always, from my early years, subordinated to the world of the mind that began to be revealed to me in high school [emphasis mine]).That “world of the mind” had become “the life that I lived” within the scene set by my family circumstances, and realer for me than those circumstances.
One sentence in Vendler’s review made me think that I am (and perhaps was, at least incipiently, even as a freshman in college) much closer to Stevens than I’d realized:
Stevens’ conscience made him confront the chief issues of his era: the waning of religion, the indifferent nature of the physical universe....If I applied myself to reading the pertinent poems (Vendler mentions “the saddest of Stevens’ poems, ‘The Snow Man,’ in which a man realizes that he must make something of a permanently wintry world of ice, snow, evergreens and wind, attempting to see ‘nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’”), would I find a writer who voiced in poetry my own thoughts and feelings the way Sam Harris, for example, voices them in prose?
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Ah, "The Snow Man", a veritable blueprint for the vast alienation that seems to have swept upon the world when I was a young man and swamped it, or perhaps I had simply entered my own "world of the mind" (a fascinating concept, the world really is what we each make of it). An old magazine cover showed a faceless man in a suit, titled "Nobody nowhere doing nothing." I found Stevens thick, difficult, but worthwhile. I was always fond of "The Idea of Order in Key West," but it
ReplyDeletes full meaning, I fear, escapes me even now.
I don't read “The Snow Man” as a statement of some sort of cultural alienation that moved in, but as a sub specie aeternitatis expression of a natural truth, a truth that has become clearer and clearer to me in my advancing age. But, now that I have your view, I will re-read it.
DeleteAnd I know what you mean about "The Idea of Order in Key West." It is so difficult, I have yet to grit my teeth and try to comprehend something from it. Might it be helpful to remember that Stevens was a heavy drinker, getting into more fights with other writers in Florida (beside Ernest Hemingway & Robert Frost) than we may know about?