Edward Ragg

Without External Reference? The Public-Private Helen Vendler

INTERVIEWER Do you have a motto? VENDLER A motto. What an interesting idea! “God and the imagination are one,” from Wallace Stevens? “How high that highest candle lights the dark”? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I wish I had set eyes on Stevens once. It grieves me that we were alive at the same time, but that he was dead before I read him. I would have liked to have seen his face and heard his voice, just to have had an immediate sense of his character. (Vendler and Cole)

Apophatic Auden, Abstract Stevens: From Kierkegaard to Cézanne in "The Sea and the Mirror" and "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet"

CURSORY SURVEY of the careers of W. H. Auden and Wallace Stevens might lead one to assume these two poets shared little in common—at least by the early 1940s, when the English Auden, transplanted to the States, had embraced Christianity and was occupying an ambitiously professional, if polemical, place in American letters, while the American Stevens was exploring an essentially secular scrutiny of “abstraction” with only the occasional public appearance on his native turf for the odd lecture or two (“The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” also qualifying as an “odd lecture” both in its subject matter and performative qualities). 1 However, on closer inspection, especially considering “The Sea and the Mirror” and Stevens’ similarly “experimental” lecture, we witness two poets seeking novel voices, almost new modes of expression, in that period, influenced by the Second World War, in which modernism reconfigured itself. That is, if early modernism was colored by an avant-garde replete with manifestos and the attempt to “make it new” in just about any medium—an overall cultural phenomenon marked by the disturbing modernity of the Great War—the poets and artists who survived to experience a second global conflict were by the early forties preoccupied by crises of faith (“religious” and “secular”) in which the validity of anything, poetry included, was debatable. Auden inherited his sense of modernism, at least in English, primarily from T. S. Eliot; and, born in 1907, came to maturity early as the leading English poet of the 1930s. Auden quickly investigated poetry’s and the poet’s roles in the public domain in the hilarious “Letter to Lord Byron” (1936), among other socially and politically engaged works (ACP 79–113). 2 As Aidan Wasley has observed (2), it was significant, therefore, that the first poem Auden wrote on emigrating to the US in January 1939 was “In

Introduction: The Lights of Norway and All That

To situate the quintessential Modernist poet Wallace Stevens ‘across the Atlantic’, where the lights of Norway mysteriously travel, is to place him in a realm that is at once dynamic and open-ended. Our primary aim in putting together this book is to reconsider Stevens’ development as he responds to intermingling influences from two different continents. In particular, we want to explore the nature of a poetics that may be called ‘Transatlantic’ because it is neither precisely American nor European, but involves a larger complex of literary, artistic and cultural qualities. Indeed, Stevens’ poetry, as we see it, threatens to disappear from view when discussed in simple oppositional terms of its ‘American’ qualities or its assimilations and transformations of ‘European’ subject-matter. In the language of Stevens’ own lecture ‘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 criticism, then it had better be in the reconstructed sense in which millions of Americans have implicitly defined themselves as ‘Transatlantic’: through preserving immigrant narratives, tracing genealogy (as Stevens did with his Dutch and German ancestry) or jostling different federal and state identities which seek to adapt European inheritances on American soil.

Picasso, Cézanne and Stevens’ Abstract Engagements

To consider Stevens’ persistent attention to the idea of things (or places), particularly in a Transatlantic context, naturally raises the vexed question of abstraction. This is not merely because Stevens’ middle career evidences a growing interest in an abstract poetic. It is also because mental conception involves abstracting phenomena and giving that data ‘reality’: a never-ending process of imaginative renewal both for the mind itself and a frequent element in Stevens’ writing. My phrase ‘abstract engagements’ refers, then, to two aspects of Stevens’ work: first, the poet’s tireless grappling with a notion of poetic abstraction and, second, the idea that Stevens’ abstract meditations on people, places — what one poem calls ‘The News and the Weather’ (CPP 237) — are paradoxical connections. For, rather than conceiving Stevens as a victim of his own abstractions, as a poet out of touch with his cherished ‘actual world’ (L 292) — as Marjorie Perloff has argued with reference to Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) — I suggest Stevens’ own brand of abstraction actually marks the poet’s paradoxical contact with ‘reality’, at the very least its interrogation. In an idealist loop which is hardly solipsistic, Stevens’ meditation on mind and ‘reality’ as poetry is directed by his abstractive spirit.