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'E'HE THEME OF POETRY-
MAKRNG N THE PGETRY 0F
WALLACE STEVENS AND
QAUL VALERY
Thesis Ear f'ha Degree orf PhD.

WCHEGAN STATE UNWERSJTY

mam WWMERY YEARGERS
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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

POI'E'SIs: THE THEME 0F POETRY—MAKING IN ’THE
POETRY 01: WALLACE STEVENS AND PAUL VALERY

presented by
Marilyn Montganety Yeargers

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph.D. dc eem En lish
gr iComparative Literature)

Majorirofessor

Date November 14 1969

 

  
 
 

LIBRARY “4

Michigan State

University ,3:
3

_~ _ r..-—L.

ABSTRACT
POESIS:
THE THEME OF POETRY-MAKING IN THE POETRY OF
WALLACE STEVENS AND PAUL VAIE’RY
BY

Marilyn Montgomery Yeargers

This is a study of poesis, or the creative process, based on the
poetry of wallace Stevens and.Paul'Valéry, who devoted their lives in
art to disclosures of poesis both in prose and poems. 'workers in diverse
fields have described the creative process in similar terms: in
addition, the pattern of stimulation, frustration, and insight is
strikingly similar to the birthpdeath-rebirth pattern of myth and
literature. Herbert Weisingeri postulates that myth is the mind's
mode of perceiving itself in action. In order to answer the question,
how does the creative process figure forth thematically in.poetry,
Stevens and'Valery are studied, first separately and then comparatively.

‘Wallace Stevens' poetry can be read as an entity, the story of
a lifelong quest in which the imagination endlessly seeks an encounter
with reality. Poetry is the result of such an encounter; but the poet's
quest for the complete, central poem is an endless cycle. The end of
$he_§9llggted Poems of Wallace Stevens is barren rock, nearly devoid
of the poet's imaginative tincture, but the cycle begins again, as
spring follows winter.

For Valery, the creative process is a voyage into the self;

La Jeuge Parque is a paradigm of this voyage, in which a being shuts

Marilyn Montgomery Yeargers

out the world of others for a phase of withdrawal, but finally bursts
out of inner darkness to face day and life. This “autobiography in
form" is reflected in Vale/ry's other major poems as well.

"Le Cimetfere marin“ and "Sunday Morning" are both meditations
on death and time. Stevens' my; yearns for some permanence in a
world of flux. Vale’ry, on the other hand, is transfixed by static
noon; death for him is fixity, while the living are gnawed by anguish.
For both poets, poetry and creation are the answer to the problem of
man's mortality.

In Stevens' "Esth6’tique du Mal" and Vale’ry's Narcissus cycle,
the two poets are seen applying, each in his way, the poetry-making
faculty to questions which are ultimately unanswerable. ”Esthetique
du Mal” is Stevens' attempt to find the meaning of the existence of
evil; evil as an encounter between man and the world is an analogue
of poetry, the encounter between the imagination and reality. Narcissus

ropresents Vale’ry's devotion to himself, but Narcissus is shown to

be unfmitful and unnatural; his death is a suicide and at the same
time a release for Vale’ry's productive powers. Both poems are
examples of creative blocks, but they are dealt with in very different
ways.

Poesis for Stevens is a quest in which the imagination seeks
a reality separate from the poet. For Valery, the creative process is
an imard search for his deepest origins. But for both, poetry is the
end and goal of the process. Paradozdcally, for both the true aim of

the creative life lies beyond language, in the muteness of that which

Earilyn Mentgomery Yeargers

can be expressed only in art.

The creative process was a way of life for Stevens and Valery;
for them, each experience of poesis fed back into the poetry, as
materia poetica. Thus the poetic process figures forth thematically

in poetry. As the poet creates he is created.

 

13erbert weisinger, "The Mythic Origins of the Creative Process,"
in The Agogy and the Triumph: Papers on the Use and Abuse o§_Myth.
East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 196#.

PCESIS:
THE THEE-E 0F POETRY-MAKING IN THE POETRY 0F

wAmCE STEVENS AND PAUL VAIE/RY

By
Marilyn Montgomery Yeargers

A THESIS

Submitted to
hflchigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
léomparative Literature Programfl

1969

ACKNOWLEIISIENI‘S

I gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the following
peOple: Herbert Weisinger, for guidance and for the germ of an idea;
all those who read nw thesis and made helpful comments, particularly
Georges Joyaux and A. J. M. Smith; Linda Wertheimer Wagner and
Bernard J. Paris for invaluable advice and counsel; and esPecialJy

xv husband, Edward Yeargers, for all kinds of support and aid.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTERI: Introduction. . . . .. . .. . . . . . . ...

CHAPTER II: Wallace Stevens. The Quest for Reality . .
CHAPTER III: Paul Valery. The Voyage into the Self . .

CHAPTER IV: ”Le Cimetiere marin" and ”Sunday Morning."
The blather Of Beauty 0 O O O O O O O O O O 0

CHAPTER V: Narcissus and "Esthe’tique du Mal." Crises
Of the Spirit. 0 O O O O O O O O O I O O O 0

CW VI: Conc1u81on. O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O
BIBLImRAPHY . O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 0 O

18
54

88

118
162
185

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

This study is an attempt to arrive at some general conclusions
about the nature of the process by which poetry is made, and how the
process figures forth thematically in the poetry itself. As material
for the study I have chosen the works of two poets of recognized
stature, Paul Valery and wallace Stevens. Although some use has
been made of prose writings as evidence for the arguments and as
introduction to the poems, it is the poetic work which is the primary
source. As an additional limitation, only the final, published
form of the poetry has been utilized. Many germane conclusions about
the creative process can be drawn from studies of rough drafts and
subsequent manuscripts of poems, but that kind of inquiry is not
‘within.the scape of this study. Furthermore, poesis has been taken
as a theme, and a form. Mention will naturally be made of poetic
devices, but prosody and the poet's struggles with prosody are not
my major concern.

Because the tapic--poesis, or the creative process--under
investigation is of a general nature, it would not be sufficient to
study only one poet, because hisideas about poetrysmaking might be

eccentric. But if two poets seemed to agree at some point, or even
ddsagree in a meaningful manner, then the conclusions might have

some claim on universality. (Admittedly, two poets might be con,
sidered to be too few; in fact, the more artists who are studied in
1

2
this manner, the more will be known about creativity.) This is, of
course, the value of the comparative method: to explore the possi-
bilities of a theme without regard--as much as possible-“to biases
of specific culture and/ or language. Here again there are methodo—
logical limitations; I am an American, and my view of French poetry
is of necessity not the same as a Frenchman's view. There will be
allusions, references, innovations in thought and style that no
American can perceive. But there are limitations to every method;
an American studying only American poets would be less justified
in drawing broad conclusions about poetry in general.

It was necessary, as I mentioned above, to choose poets of
recOgniaed stature, because it had to be assumed at the outset that
they had actually succeeded in carrying out the creative process,
that is, had found or made or constructed a poem and thus had genuine
first-hand knowledge of the subject. There are other poets who have
written poetry about poetry; but none has concentrated more and
written more prolifically on this tepic than Wallace Stevens. And
Paul Vale’ry is a legend of self-analysis; his poems are ”autobio.
graphies in form,” autobiographies of Vale/1y the seeker and creator.
Thus the choice of these two poets: Both Stevens and Vale’ry had made
creativity and poesis the central focus of their mental lives.

As for structural organization, a munber of alternative
approaches could have been chosen. One N would be to begin with
a theory of creativity, and ask whether or not the two poets could be
fit to it. But (as will be discussed below) even though nw initial
interest in the project was indeed aroused by a certain theory of
creatiVity, I preferred to cast aside this hypothesis and approach the

material inductively. Another approach would have begun with single

3

poems dealing with the creative process, and comparisons on the level
of the individual poem.might well.have led to the same general theories
of creativity which were eventually evolved. In the sense that a
poet's lifeawork is made up of individual poems, I did, of course,
begin.this way. But the first item on my agenda was to trace the whole
curve of each poet's work. In the case of Stevens this meant subsuming
the whole of The Collected Poems of wallace Stevens under a single
thesis which would be the organic form for Stevens. In contrast, the
body of Valery's poetic work is less an.entity; I took the long poem
Lg Jeune figggue as a paradigm for Valeryt To take the whole book of
Stevens and discuss it almost as one might a novel and.then on the
other hand to use one poem of Valery's as indicative of the whole
body of work may seem inconsistent. But my aim was to draw true
conclusions, and to let the poetry dictate to me its treatment,
rather than deterministically to impose my own.preconceptions on the
material. This was the guiding methodological principle; and the
method was allowed.to dictate the structure of the study as finally
presented.

Thus, the chapters are arranged as follows: First there is
an overview of the poetry of Wallace Stevens, making mention of his
prose writings which are related to definitions of poetry, the role
of the poet, etc. Based on.a reading of the entire volume of the
Collected.Poems from.his first book, Harmonium, to the final section
entitled "The Rock," I concluded that poetry-making for Stevens was
a quest in which the imagination endlessly sought an.encounter and
a union with reality. Next is a chapter on Paul Valery; ; the form

of his creativeness was not like Stevens' questing in a world

1+

external to the poet. His was a kind of quest, yes, but marked by
inwardness, as though the beam of a lighthouse had been turned to
the inside.

Only after the poets have been treated separately are the
comparisons begun. In the chapter comparing ”Le CimetiBre marin”
and ”Sunday Morning," the two poets are shown to approach the
question of death and time in very different ways. And yet, out
of their separate meditations on this subject, both arrive at
poetry as a pathway out of death's finality, poetry as a solution to
the dark problem posed by death. Next the major poem-cycles
Narcisse and ”Esthétique du Mal" are compared. They represent
crises of creativity, which are dealt with in different ways by the
two poets. Thus, the first of the comparative chapters (Chapter IV)
shows Valery and Stevens arriving at strikingly similar motives for
poetry-making when they had begun with quite different attitudes
toward man's mortality. 0n the other hand, Chapter V, also a
comparison, shows Vale’ry and Stevens in a radical divergence.
Finally, in chapter VI a general overall conclusion is reached, in
which poetry, the verbal art, is shown to lie in a realm beyond
words where somehow a structure of pure verbality finds its meaning
in mteness.

How, then, does the poetic process ”figure forth thematically"
in the poems of these two men? The answer cannot be simple, for if
it is general, or abstract, enough to contain both poets, it rust at
the same time consider their individualities. Perhaps the clearest
way to say it is this: As the poet (Vale’ry or Stevens) wrote his
poems, he discovered himself, and lived a life in poetry. This poet's

5
life became, in turn, the material of the poem. For example, the
form of Stevens' quest for poetry is shown to dominate his thinking
in “Sunday'hbrning,” where the problem of a search for reality in the
form of eschatological.truth is solved by the creation of an orgiastic
chant, foreshadowing the lifetime form of the poetic quest, where a
'verbal structure becomes a bridge over the gap between man and.the
world, between the imagination and reality. Again in "Esthe’tique du
Hal” this pattern directs the search for an aesthetic of this world
of evil and pain. As another encounter between man and.his world,
poetry parallels the existence of pain.

For Valery too the form of'poetry-making served as paradigm
for all his mental activity. His pattern is a search within the
depths of his own mind for his earliest origins, first memory—traces.
In addition, the story is often.marked by a crisis, a creative block
which must be overcome in order that the poetry and the poet may live.
Thus, each of these writers had found patterns for poetry in the story
of himself as creator. If the two stories are radically different,
they do have the one feature of poetry itself in common. But that was,
of course, the gipe.gga_pgg of the studys-that the two poets had
written about poetry. What would not have been foreseen is the
striking manner in which, at the end of the process, their individual
differences (caused perhaps by conditions as unwitting as physiology
or the circumstances of life) diminish. The true end of the creative
life becomes apparent; it is the muteness of that which can only be
expressed in art. Poetry, the verbal art, is shown to lie in a realm
beyond words. But because they are poets, Valery and Stevens have

succeeded in reaching this state of artistic expressiveness only

through the medium of language.

As I stated above, this thesis is an inquiry into the nature
of the poetic process. But can it be said that a study based on the
work of the two poets Wallace Stevens and Paul Vale/ry has claims on
general truths? To begin to answer this question, we must turn to
general theories of literature, and also to the point where the
study actually began. For I have learned from Paul Valery that a
piece of writing is either meaningless or dishonest if somehow its
genesis is not contained within it. Thus, I think a measure of
coherence may be added to this thesis by describing the initial
stimuli which led to nw interest in the creative process.

If the student is interested in inquiring into the origins of
literature, he may find the method of literary history unsuited to
his purposes. Even though he may fix in his mind every important
text from Beowulf to, say, T. S. Eliot, he has done no more than
memorize a few surface sparkles from the enormous sea of the
nythopoetic imagination. But add in another language or culture,
even one as closely related to his own as French, and he will begin
to perceive that the refractions from the sea that are texts written
in the English language look slightly different viewed under another
angle of the sun. Which is more fascinating and enlightening, the
similarities or the differences between the Romanticisms found in
England, France, and Germany? This is the value of comparative
literature: to understand what is basic and what is quirk in a
literary culture. For now, it may be sufficient for an American to
read French poetry to experience cross-cultural shock. But as
EurOpe, England, and North America continue to merge culturally,

7
it will become necessary to go farther and farther afield for data

on what is foreign.

What is fundamental and what is variation? The data on myths
have given answers and conclusions of the farthest-reaching
consequences for literary study. Studies such as The Golden Bough,

The filth of the Birth of the Hero, Jessie L. Weston's E:gm.Ritual to
Romance, Ernest Jones' Hamlet and Oedipus all show the existence of

 

patterns, both in myths and wellpdeve10ped pieces of literature, which
have striking similarities to the myths of countries which are geo-
graphically far apart, too wide-spread to have participated in dis-
semination of stories by means of influence or imitation. All this
is wellsknown; the facts and the texts are well—established.

But what is the explanation? The Jungian view is that there is
a ”collective unconscious,” a "racial memory." Freud's explanation
is more plausible: that an actual event such as father-murder actually
occurred once, or many times. But we must still ask why some events
seem more significant than others. Primitive men must experience many
impressive events, but some have been transformed into myth and others
have not. Some rituals, such as initiations, still have power over
modern man. Thus it may be well to take a look at the mind of the
beholder, and ask what he likes to behold.

In ”I 9888? entitled ”The lhthic Origins of the Creative
Process," (which might well have been called “The Creative Origins
of Myth?) Herbert Weisinger discusses literature as a ”social
phenomenon, not as a thing in itself, the poem on the printed page,
but rather as a relationship set up betweentthe writer and the

8
reader. . . ."1 Myth, with its ritualistic origins, is of course
a social.phenomenon as well. Now the creative process is something
that all of us have experienced. Anyone who has ever attempted to
put an idea into words has greped, been blocked, and then (if he is
capable of carrying through the process) succeeded at last. There
are certain definable stages to the creative process which can be
feund in any introductory psychology textbook. I offer Krech and
Crutchfield: ”Not only the psychologist, but all creative workers
have been interested in the description of the problem-solving
process. Each one brings somewhat different testimony, but one
descriptive schema appears again and again. This is the classical
feur stages of creative thought: preparation, incubation, lllEfllr
ggtign, and verification."2 The process begins with an irritant,
in.the mind.or outside it, which.produces a tension in the creator.
A question.begs to be answered, something is both wrong and right.
A grain of sand in the shell of the total being demands to be
covered with a protective buffer of nacre. Already, within this
first irritant phase the second phase of the battle against it is
contained. [And so the first attempts begin, but like as not they
are doomed to failure. Always the tension is growing, but nothing
can succeed in eliminating the source of the annoyance, the

tantalizing sense that there is a goal to be reachedp-but what is it?

 

1Her‘bert'W’eisinger, The Agog! and the Triggph: Papers on

the Use and buse of (East Lansing: Michigan State University
Press, 1935), p. 231.

2David Krech and Richard s. Crutchfield, Elements of
ngghology,(New York: Alfred.A. Knopf, 1958), p. 395.

9
There comes a time when it seems that the project is dead; there
is no answer to the question, and no way of resolving the tension.
Despondently, the thinker sinks his head into his hands. (Sometimes
this is the end; there are after all insoluble problems, even in
art.) But then, just at the darkest moment, just when it seemed that
all was lost, most importantly, just when the creator may have
decided to abandon the project, the climactic moment occurs: the
flash of insight. Suddenly it all seems clear, even easy, even
obvious. A great leap from.nothingness into being, from.perplexity
into understanding, has occurred. The artist feels a shock of
pleasure, and a glow of euphoria permeates his perception of the
entire world. This reward, this hedonic response, is so great that
it enables him to begin the final stages where drudgery ensues. He
must work out his perceptions-write it down, get it into form,
communicate it to others, collect data, or do whatever is necessary
to produce what must be produced. In this phase, the rocky shallows
of actual production, an.infinity of creative projects have been
wrecked. (It is important to note that the process I have been
describing may go on once when, say, a novelist conceives the whole
outline of a novel, and then again and again when he struggles with
a nuance of expression, a paragraph, a single sentence, a single
‘word that will be just the right metaphor.) But finally the thing
is finished; there is something new under the sun. The creator
rests, the mind resumes its accustomed calm. But it is a different
kind of peace; he rests on a higher level of wisdom and.under-
standing. He knows more than he knew before. He ig more.

Weisinger's essay,'which gives a similar description of the

10
creative process diVided into eight stages from stimulus to "the
attainment of order and shape and integration,"3 then draws together
myth and creativity in two paragraphs which I offer in their entirety:

You will have noticed, I am sure, that I have had to
describe the creative process dramatistically, in the form of
an action whose plot is that of birth, death, and rebirth.
But this is the very same plot of the action called myth,

a drama in which the divine king in his own person engages in
combat with an Opposing force, suffers, is defeated, dies,

is reborn triumphantly, celebrates his victory by the action

of creation in the divine marriage and by the sacred procession,
and grants the fruits of that victory in the settling of
destinies in which the peeple, for whom and with whom he
undergoes his suffering, death, and rebirth, are raised to a
new and higher stage of understanding and justice. To be

sure, the order of acts in the drama is not everywhere the

same, nor are all the scenes necessarily enacted; with the
passage of time some scenes are subordinated to others, some
given increased prominence, while others are eliminated alto-
gether, but whatever changes have been made, the shape and
intent of the pattern remain the same: the depiction of the
triumph of light, life, and good through suffering over dark,
death, and evil. Thus it would appear that on the conscious
level the creative process is a parallel re-enactment of the
myth and ritual pattern and draws its force and vitality from it.

But this is to think of the myth and ritual pattern as
fundamental and anterior to the creative process, at which
point we would.have to call a halt to our excavations, as it
were, since no further penetration below would.be possible.
If, however, we reverse the positions of myth and creation, we
are able to continue our digging so as to Open up even deeper
layers than we have so far managed to probe. As far as
creativity is concerned, its mode of Operation is common to
all its manifestations, varied only by their predisposition as
to purpose and form. we may liken the creative process to a
long tunnel through which all cars must pass in a si le lane,
turning only as they emerge into different exists sic taking
them to different destinations. Seen from.this point of view,
the myth.and ritual pattern now becomes the symbolic repre-
sentation of the creative process, that is to say, the mind's
figuring forth of itself. So that what I have been calling

the creative process appears to Be nothing less than the mode
of operation of the mind itself.

 

3Weisinger, "The Mythic Origins of the Creative Process," in
Th3 Agog! am the mm, p0 21+50

ide’ ppo 218-50.

11
Of course there are many questions to be answered here, enough to
found a new school of literary criticism, it seems to me. Does the
mind behave this way for plwsiological reasons having to do with
stmctures in the brain? Is it something like the progress of a
disease, which inexorably produces fever one day and spots the
next? Or do we somehow learn to behave this way?

Most interesting for me was a series of questions that ran
something like this: The nythOpoetio pattern really fits drama,
with its rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement,
best of all the literary forms. The novel, especially of the
nineteenth century, comes next in order of fit to the pattern. But
with poetry, the work of art was getting farther and farther away from
the general pattern. It was difficult to think of poems that fit
the mth and ritual pattern, unless they were poems with a sort
of plot, like ”The Rim of the Ancient Mariner" or the givine Comeg.
Nevertheless, nary poets, especially of the contemporary period,
have spent a great proportion of their creative energies writing
about poetry and the process by which poetry is made. (Conversely,
it is difficult to think of a drama which actually deals emlicitly
with the creative process.) It seemed to me that it was time to
detach the creative process from myth and ritual and try to look at
this genre of poetry on its own toms. I wanted to see what sort
or sorts of patterns could be found in poetry, and to answer the
question raised above: how does the poetic process figure forth
thematically in some actual poems?

It seemed to me that there would be real value in choosing
the poets from two different cultures, in order to achieve a

12
certain detachment from literary traditions. In addition, I hOped
that if I did find something of significance in common between the
two poets, it would not be a matter of influence, but something basic
to the creative process. It would.he partially true to say that this
is not strictly speaking a work of literary criticism, since my
chief aim was not to explicate the poetry itself, but rather to
disclose something about the creative process as it might be written
in poetry. Nevertheless, neither is this a psychological study. I
approached the poetry as made up of themes and forms, not disguised
autobiography.

I have been describing my own gradual discovery of the creative
process as an approach to literary study, from the general discip-

line of comparative literature, to comparative myths, to the creative
process as the structurer of myth and literature. But it should not
be inferred that poesis as a vantage point for the analysis of poetry
is dependent on mythetheory, even as an antecedent. Because I think
there is much promise of fruitfulness in.this kind of study, I shall
offer two other rationales--0ne involving reader psychology, and
another based on Cassirer's view of the role of art in culture.

At the outset of this study I determined myself not to make a
Procrustean bed of what I already knew about the creative process.
But as the work progressed it became obvious that this would have
been difficult in any case, if not impossible. If Paul Valery and
wallace Stevens were aware that thewaere supposed to be undergoing
a definable process including “preparation, incubation, illumination,
and.verification," they never revealed it to me. For example, I

quote here a short poem of Valery's in its entirety:

13
LE VIN PERDU

J'ai, quelque jour, dans l'Oce’an,

(Mais je ne sais plus sous quels cieux)

Jet6, comme offrande au neant,

Tout un peu de vin précieux...

Qui voulut ta perte, 6 liqueur?

J 'obéis pout-etre au devin?

Peut—etre au souci de mon coeur,

Songeant au sang, versant le vin?

Sa transparence acc/outmne’e

Apr\es une rose fumee

Reprit aussi pure la mer...

Perdu ce vin, ivres les ondest...

J 'ai vu bondir dans l'air amer

Les figures les plus profondes...
Clearly this is a poem about artistic creation. But only by per-
version can it be fitted into the given mold. There is, on the other
hand, a valid way of fitting such a poem into the pattern: The poem
itself is the stimlus which begins a cycle of the creative process
in thg reader. As a reader experiences the difficulties, the questions
raised in all the toughness of their concrete evocation, gradually
overcomes the difficulties and blocks of the poem, achieves insight,
and finally understanding, all within the framework of a single poem,
he is experiencing perhaps a vicarious form of the creative process,
but nevertheless a form of it. The poem viewed in this manner
performs a function which really transcends social phenomena in
the ordinary sense. In undergoing the creative process mind-to-mind
with the artist, a kind of communication occurs between reader and
poet that does not occur between two individuals in arm other verbal
situation. But all this could be said of any poem. It is the
content of "Le Vin perdu" that is about an imaginative experience,

but it would be necessary to read the whole of Vale’ry's poetic work

1b
to discover how to interpret this poem through Valery's version of
the creative process. ("Le Vin perdu” will be taken up again in
Chapter III.)

New this fact of the presence of creativity in the reading of
the poem.as well as in.the making of it is one approach to the
creative process as a way of looking at literature. ‘Who, we must
ask, can form the audience for difficult poets such as Vale’ry and
Stevens? It is surely a small group; only a small fraction even
of educated Americans can recognize the name of‘wallace Stevens. The
only possible readers of such poetry are those who are most serious
about literature and the arts. These are peOple who do not shy from
what is difficult in art; indeed, they may take a pleasure in the
very difficulty of a work. (Conversely, if a work of art is too
immediately apprehensible, the most advanced readers may dismiss it
as trivial.) The irritation of the difficult work, the tension
felt, the insight suddenly gained, add up to an.imitation of the
creative process. One way or another, art lovers are those who
know and enjoy the creative process. Very often, our critics are
poets themselves, a distinguished line including Coleridge and
T. S. Eliot. Their central concern is poetry, the writing of it,
the preper reading of it, the existent form of it. Thus the subject
matter of their poetry often is poetry itself. Robert Penn warren,
another creative writer who is also a critic, has promoted reader
involvement into a criterion of value. The "good.poem," he says,
"must, in some way, involve the resistances; it must carry something
of the context of its own creation; . . . This is another way of
saying that a good poem involves the participation of the reader;

15
it must, as Coleridge puts it, make the reader into 'an active
creative being.'”5 In poetry as in all the arts, meaning must
gradually emerge out of a direct emerience of the work of art--
its content, its form, its structure.

A similar conclusion with regard to art is reached by the
modern philosOpher Ernst Cassirer, in An Essay 0.1.1.2139 In the con-
cluding chapter, Cassirer asks the question: Is human culture
characterized only by discontinuity and heterOgeneity, or can it be
said that there is an underlying unity? The answer is found in the
closing lines.

Human culture taken as a whole may be described as the
process of man's progressive self-liberation. Language, art,
religion, science, are various phases in this process. In all
of them man discovers and proves a new pgweruthe power to build
up a world of his own, an ”ideal” world.

Art, moreover, is a sort of paradigm for this basic principle, this
tension between the conservative and the productive powers, between
old and new forms, between (in Eliot's phrase) tradition and the
individual talent. In Cassirer's view our very perceptions of the
world are formed and transformed by the great epoch-making artists
such as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, and our languages kept alive
and in a state of change by the innovations of the poets.

Ultimately, then, the cultural role of art is to modify and
clarify our perceptions of things. Here is Cassirer's description
of the aesthetic mode of thought.

 

5Rohert Penn Warren, ”Pure and Impure Poetry” in Criti ues
and Esme ,i_n Criticism, Selected by Robert Wooster Stallman, (New
York: Ronald Press, 1916), p. 102.

6Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a

Philoso of Human Culture, (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 191+“), p. 132.

16
The organic beauty of a landscape is not the same as that
aesthetic beauty which we feel in the works of the great landscape
painters. Even we, the spectators, are fully aware of this
difference. I may walk through a landscape and feel its charms.
I may enjdy'the mildness of the air, the freshness of the
meadows, the variety and cheerfulness of the coloring,
and the fragrant odor of the flowers. But I may then experience
a sudden change in my frame of mind. Thereupon I see the
landscape with an artist's eye--I begin to form a picture of it.
I have now entered a new realm--the realm not of living things
but of ”liVing forms.” No longer in the immediate reality of
things, I live now in the rhythm of spatial forms, in the
harmony and contrast of colors, in the balance of light and
shadow. In such absorption in the dynamic aspect of form
consists the aesthetic experience.
But we do not understand the living forms of art simply by their
being presented to us. ”The sense of beauty is the susceptibility
to the dynamic life of forms, and this life cannot be apprehended
except by a corresponding dynamic process in ourselves." And, "In
order to feel beauty one must COOperate with the artist. One must
not only sympathize with the artist's feelings but also enter into his
creative activity."8 Thus Cassirer's view of art comes into line with
an approach through the creative process.

Throughout this discussion the existence of the creative
individual has simply been.taken for granted. But the motives of this
curious creature may well be called into question. Later it will be
time to wonder why a man writes a poem, and thereby is called a poet.
For now the more general form of the question should be posed: ‘Why
does a person choose to undergo the creative process? Too many of the
descriptions give the impression that it is a distinctly unpleasurable
experience throughout much of its length, much like having a minor

toothache relieved by an unanesthetized extraction. Let us follow

 

7Ibid. , p. 151-2.
lb

8 id., p. 151 and p. 162.

17
the argument in Arthur Koestler's chapter on motivation ianhg_Agt_
of Creation. He begins with the statement,

Future historians will probably regard it as significant
that throughout the first half of the twentieth century the
dominant schools of psychology--even schools as far apart as
behaviourism.and psychoanalysis.-recognized only one basic type
of motivation, and that a negative one: the reduction of
biological needs and drives, the diminution of tension,
escape from anxiety.

Freud too saw psychic activity as being the result of unpleasurable
tension, mental activity of whatever kind.being undertaken only in
order to reduce tension. But Koestler points out that there is ”a
whole class of experiences to which we commonly refer as 'pleasurable
excitement.“10 In Koestler's view, man is motivated only partly by
needsreduction; man is a creature who begins his greatest explorations
when his stomach is full and he is free from restraint. There is a
whole class of activities which are self-rewarding.

It is part of the nature of man to explore, to experiment,

to plmy, and.to create. Creativity may well be a bodily function,
made pleasurable by evolutionary processes. Man being what he is,

he cannot avoid having his curiosity aroused; thus the first stage of
the creative process is involuntary, universal, and normal. Artists
and scientists and.creative thinkers of all kinds experience a loving
pleasure in the tension of the second stage; they feel most alive in
just these states of pleasurable tension. If the phase of doubt and
despair then intervenes, then that is the price that must be paid.
Experienced.creators know that the end in wisdom and elevation of the
spirit is worth the pain.

 

9Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, a Laurel.Edition, (New
York: Dell Publishing Co., 1967). p. #95

loIbld., pa (+96.

CHAPTER II
WALLACE STEVENS: THE QUEST FOR REALITY

Wallace Stevens devoted his entire artistic life, his work as
a poet, to his search for poetry. Stated thus, it is a tautology.
For Stevens was a poet, and does not every poet devote himself to
poetry? But the difference between Stevens and most other poets is
' that for him poetry became the subject of mamr a poem. Poetry and
. the making or discovering of the poem were Stevens' major theme.
M Indeed, when his version of poesis is prOperly understood, it
becomes clear that all of his poetry deals with the quest for
poetry, because poetry is Stevens' paradigm, symbol, metaphor,
' patternm-call it what you will--for the great problem of man's
existence in a world essentially separate from himself.

This gap is, of course, purely perceptual; if it is not
perceived, it is not a problem. And the first effect of this
perceived separateness is a question: What do I know? Is what I
perceive ”true"? Does my knowledge of this world correspond in
some way to the reality which is not myself? This desire to know
is man's _f:_e_l_i_._x film, his lucky flaw. It is the beginning of the
creative process and of human culture. Stevens would call it ”the

first idea."1

 

1Wa].lace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens,
(New York: Alfred A. KnOpf, 19673: p. 381. Henceforth references to
Stevens' Collected Poems will be cited in text as 92. Likewise,

18

19
That wallace Stevens dwelt long and hard on this dualistic

nature of the world, and on bridging the gap between the parts of
the dualism, is the first key to any understanding of Stevens. His
words for the two parts of the world are ”imagination" and "reality.”
His theory is largely a matter of defining and describing these two
concepts, his poetry a matter of bridging the gap or of penetrating an
independently existing reality with the poet's faculty of imagination.

Thus, Stevens' theme is the imagination's quest for reality;
when the encounter is made, poetry is the result. If this quest
is a theme, it is also a form: Throughout the Collected oems a
certain.pattern is discernible, in the shape of a giant striding
toward an.ever-receding horizon (”The Plot Against the Giant,” ”The
Nan'with the Blue Guitar,” ”Netes toward a Supreme Fiction"), or a
man on a voyage to unknown shores (“The Comedian as the Letter C,"
”Prologues to What is Possible"), or a thinker outwardly sitting still
but inwardly pursuing the quest ("Sunday Morning,” ”Netes toward a
Supreme Fiction," "Esthetique du Mel,” "An Ordinary Evening in New
Haven"). It is in these latter poems that the theme of poesis becomes
most explicit, perhaps because Stevens, and most poets, experience
their quests in this sedentary way.

In this chapter I will attempt to establish wallace Stevens'
theory of poetry as an encounter between the imagination and reality,
and the poetic process as the quest for reality. In 11w view, the

Collected.Poems of‘Wallace Stevens may be read as an entity, the

 

NA refers to wallace Stevens, The Necessa A 61, a Vintage book,
(Row Ibrk: Random House, n. d.); ‘93 refers to wallace Stevens,
qus Posthumous, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957).

20
story of this quest. It will deveIOp that this quest is in
one sense neveraending, that is, the poet does not eventually find
the one true reality and.then come to rest; this fact is reflected
in the cyclic form of the Collecteanoems. The end is also a
beginning. 0n the other hand, neither could it be said that the
imagination never succeeds in bridging the gap, for each poem is
an.example of a successful encounter. For Stevens, the ultimate
truth of reality may be that there are many realities.

RV'primary concernvis with disclosures of the creative process
in the poetry of“wallace Stevens. But the prose essays of Stevens
are a prime key to Stevens' ideas, especially where the basic
elements of the imagination and reality are concerned. Indeed,
although Stevens' poetry itself will be the best definition of his
poetry, the reader may also profitably turn to the essays for
definitions of poetry. Thus the preliminary discussion, in which
the terms "imagination," "reality," and "poetry" are defined, will
draw on Stevens' prose. It will be seen that it is nearly impossible
to find Stevens in the act of defining any one of these three terms,
”imagination," ”reality,” and ”poetry," singly, that is, without
making reference to the other two. Nevertheless, it is instructive
to separate the three, one from the others.

Critics are continually discovering ambiguities, both
unresolved and.integrated, in Stevens. The meaning of reality is one
of’thele areas where there is more than one definition.to be found.
0n the one hand Stevens tells us that each age has its own version of
reality (NA, 9) and even that each person has his own individual
reality (NA, 94). On the other hand, the reader is aware that

21

there is a Realityua world pro-existent and independent of any
observer, indeed, g gr_i_o_r_i to all observers. Donald Sheehan, for
example, finds unresolved dualisms both in Stevens' theory of
metaphor, and Stevens' view of reality. Sheehan finds that there
are two poles in Stevens' thought, one in which the perceiver and
the thing perceived coalesce in metaphor, and another in which
reality is a thing, ultimately unknowable and unapproachable by
either reason or imagination. Usually, however, Stevens rejects both
of these extremes, for “Stevens constantly pulls back from absolute
statements. This attitude is irritating to the literary theorist. . . ."2
But Stevens' refusal. to resolve the dualism is " . . . not (as
Frye and others would have it) intellectual muddiness but a key to
Stevens' real vitality. Stevens' profound distrust of 'the lunatic
of one idea / In a world of ideas' (9:, 325) is what lies immediately
behind tbia.~3 "Intellectual mddiness?” Or a distrust of
dogmatism? In nnr view, the seeming confusion in Stevens' use of
philosophical ideas is part of a habit of mind that would allow him
to haggle back and forth endlessly between the two halves of a
dialectic both in poems (such as "Esthetique du Mal”) and in prose.
Stevens was capable of holding two minds on may questions, and
could say in a poem

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds. (92, 92)
Stevens always remembers, intellectually recognizes, that reality

 

2Donald Sheehan, "Wallace Stevens' Theory of Metaphor,”
PaErs on My and Literature, II, 59.

31bid. , 61.

22
is a thing, as he would say, a ”veritable ding-an-sich.” But most
of the time, when Stevens uses the word ”reality" he is talking
about his materia poetics, the world as he sees it, the world
informed by the poetic imagination, and thus a world of reality
embellished, understood, abstracted, above all, a reality imagined.

A passage of central importance for amr definition of the
word reality in Stevens is found in the essay ”The Noble Rider and
the Sound of Words":

The subject-matter of poetry is not that '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: (NA, 25).

”Things as they are"--this phrase, also found repeatedly in ”The
Man with the Blue Guitar," is sometimes taken by critics to mean
just that world of pre-existing reality meant by the more exact
term “things in themselves." But the quoted paragraph should show
that ”things as they are" are not ”things in themselves." Rather,
we should take the verb 1.3 92 here in its existential sense

rather than its essential sense. Things as they are are things
this year, right here, to us. Stevens' reality is in constant
flux, no sooner captured in metaphor or perception than it changes
and disappears. Reality is knowable, but only for an instant; thus
we are reminded that we do not create reality-«it is a ding-an-sich--
but we create the only version of it that we can ever know.

It is this fluctuating and evolving view of reality that
leads one critic to place Stevens within a new poetic, " . . . peculiarly
suited,” as he says, ”to Darwin's reality of process, and not
to Plato's reality of fixed ideas." For Frank lentricchia, Stevens'

23
modernity lies in his version of the world as a Darwinian universe
of flux and process. Stevens is a naturalist. ”In a naturalistic
view of epistemology, and in a naturalistic world of materialistic
process, how then is the poetic imagination framed? The answer is
implicit in the question. The modern imagination feeds on empirical
reality just as WOrdsworth's fed on infinitysuu' Empirical reality,
then, is Stevens' materia_poetigg, and the very concept of an
empirical reality goes far toward.resolving the disjunction in
Stevens' thought between an unreachable reality "out there” and a
reality which never exists outside our perceptions of it. Empirical
knowledge is based on experience; Stevens said that reality is ”the
life that is lived.”

In this discussion we are primarily concerned with.the aspects
of reality that are significant for the creative process, or that might
be the subjects of poems by wallace Stevens. But in keeping with
Stevens' dialectic habit of mind, we can find disclosures of unp
desirable forms of reality that shed as much light on the question as
revelations of its more attractive aspects. Indeed, there is an
important form of reality that must be resisted by the poet at all
costs, for his very identity as a poet depends on resistance of "the
pressure of reality,” a concept of vital importance in Stevens'
theory of'poetry and the poet.

The pressure of reality has been one of the most conspicuous
features of our own.time, and, one must believe, one of the greatest

difficulties for Stevens as a poet. He defines it very clearly:

 

“Frank Lentricchia, The Gaiety of Lagguége: An EssaLon the
Radical Poetics of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1938;, . 153.

2h
By the pressure of reglity,_;_mean the pressure gfgan
external event or events on the consciousness to the exglugigg
g§_any power of contemplatigg; The definition ought to be exact
and, as it is, may be merely pretentious. But when one is
trying to think of a whole generation and of a world at war,
and trying at the same time to see what is happening to the
imagination, particularly if one believes that that is what
matters most, the plainest statement of what is happening can
easily appear to be an affectation.(NA, 20, my italics).
Reality is thus revealed as a force, and moreover, a force which
must be combatted by the poet. For this reality which changes in
every age is the factor which determines more than any other the
artistic character of an.era (NA, 22). It is the poet's great
duty to society to defend his fellows, when necessary and when
possible, against this pressure from reality. For the poet is our
representative of the equally great force of the imagination.

At this point it becomes necessary to discuss directly
Stevens' concept of the imagination. But first I will sum up Stevens'
definition of the term.”reality.” There is no single definition of
reality in Stevens that applies to every poem, every discussion of
the tapic. But that is part of the meaning of the word, not merely
an ”unresolved dualism,” or "intellectual muddiness." For Stevens'
-reality is not a reality of ideals or essences, but a reality of
things that exist, and thus are subject to the laws of flux and
process found in all of nature, even the rocks that symbolize
reality in Stevens' poetry. Reality does exist as a realm apart
from.the poet, and Stevens' ideas about it depend on this realization.
But always there is the proviso that for us, reality is what we
abstract into the mind. Our version of reality is of necessity
partial and momentary.

If there are seeming contradictions in Stevens' theorizing

25
about reality, and in his statements about the nature of poetry as
well, the concept of the imagination at least seems to be all of a
piece. The imagination, one feels, is something that Stevens under-
stands very well. On the other hand, it is difficult to find any
direct description of the imagination; it may be that Stevens stood too
close to be objective about it. We find the imagination described
in terms of analogies, according to the things that it is pgt (not
reason, not belief), in terms of what it does, in terms of its
attributes, and even in terms of that to which it must stand in
direct Opposition (the pressure of reality), but never do we find
a simple direct definition of the imagination. The broadest genera-
lization that can accurately be made about Stevens' idea of the
imagination is that it is the poet's particular way of looking at
the world. Stated another way, the imagination is the poet's own
power or faculty. Such statements do not, of course, describe the
imagination directly. They only relate to its functioning. In the
thought of Stevens the concept of the imagination remains at bottom
a mystery, seen only in its effects.

The literary theorist always thinks of Celeridge in connection
with definitions of the imagination, and Stevens himself brings the
name of Coleridge into the discussion, in ”The Figure of the Youth
as Virile Poet.” Nevertheless, Coleridge is brought up only to be
dismissed, first as ”un phiIOSOphe,“ (NA, l+1) when we have just been
informed that there is a fundamental difference between poets and
philosophers, and second as ”a man who may be said to have been

defining poetry all his life in definitions that are valid enough
but which no longer impress us primarily by their validity” (NA, 1&1).

26
Coleridge's famous description of the imagination is, in brief, as
a creative power, ”a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act
of creation in the infinite I AM” (Biographia Literaria, I). It seems
likely that a knowledge of Coleridge stands behind.this passage in
which Stevens describes imagination as a process.

And having ceased to be metaphysicians, even though we have
acquired something from them as from all men, and standing in the
radiant and productive atmosphere, and examining first one detail
of that world, one particular, and then another, as we find them by

chance, and observing many things that seem to be poetry without
any intervention on our part, as, for example, the blue sky, and

noting, in any case, that the imagination never briggs ggythipg
into the worlg, but that on the contrary, like the person§;;ty_g§

the poet in the act o£;creatipg, it is no more than aAprocess, and
desiring with all the power of our desire not to write falsely, do

we not begin to think of the possibility that poetry is only

reality, after all, and that poetic truth is a factual truth, seen,

it may be, by those whose range in the perception of fact--that is,

whose sensibilitye-is greater than our own? (NA, 59, my italics).
The imagination does not create anything; it is like light, which adds
nothing to a scene--except itself, Stevens added (NA, 61).

Another important point contained in the sentence quoted above
is the distinction that Stevens makes between metaphysicians, or philo-
sOphers, and poets. His thesis about the poet and his faculty of
imagination.depends heavily on antitheses about other kinds of thinkers.
To distill what is spread out over several essays, imagination is to the
poet as reason is to the philOSOpher and as belief is to the priest.
Reason is not applicable to poetic truth (even though the perfect poem
would, incidentally, satisfy the reason along with the imagination).

But even as Stevens makes the point that the imagination is not the same
as reason or belief, it is clear that these other faculties are similar
to the imagination in important ways. Indeed, it is their similarities
that make them available as analogies. Basically the poetic faculty of

the imagination resembles the phiIOSOphic power of reason and the

27
religious power of belief in that all of them have an inherent drive
toward an object. Thus to Stevens' analogies we may add a third
term: As the philosOpher drives toward truth with his reason, as the
priest reaches out for God.with belief, so does the poet strive toward
reality with his imagination. This tendency of the imagination is
like a hunger. Elsewhere Stevens says "A poet looks at the world as
a man looks at a woman" (gg, 165). If imagination is a process, it is
a process with a teleOIOgy.

While it is difficult to say what the Stevensian imagination
is, it is much easier to see what it does. In the discussion of reality,
above, we saw that the poet had a kind of duty to his fellow man.to
defend them and himself against "the pressure of reality." The faculty
or power which enables him to accomplish this task is none other than
the imagination. An additional function performed by the poet on
behalf of his age is to provide a substitute for our lost faiths and
beliefs.

The paramount relation between poetry and painting today,

between modern man and modern art is simply this: that in an age
in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief,
indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the
arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what
has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest
power to faith: the reigning prince (NA, 170-71).

Another great poet of the skeptical twentieth century, T. S. Eliot,
tried to furnish new beliefs out of other cultures as substitutes for
our lost gods; the result was certainly a great poetry, but probably
not a viable religion. Stevens' approach to belief is through
credible fictions, always with the awareness that our fictions are
just that.

This happy creature--It is he that invented the Gods.

It is he that put into their mouths the only words they have
ever Spoken! OP, 167).

28
Stevens' poetry does not even require a willing suspension of
disbelief, for disbelief is one of its foundations. Faith,in
Stevens, has been replaced by the imagination.

I have said that Stevens attempts to describe the imagination
through the use of antitheses and anaIOgies. Just as the faith of
the past is discharged from duty in favor of the modern imagination,
so is ary conception of ”inspiration" in creativity. Gone is the
"mystic muse, sister of the Minotaur“ (NA, 60, 67). Here in its
place is the imagination, power of living poets and real earthly
men. But if the Stevensian imagination is mysterious, even to him,
this is not the same as saying that it is nystical. It may be, says
Stevens, ”that the imagination is a miracle of logic.” "The truth
seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the
reason has established them” (NA, 151+).

When it comes to definitions of poetry, we find Stevens at
his most self-contradictory, at one moment describing poetry in terms
of the imagination, at another saying that poetry is the same as
reality, and yet again saying that poetry is metaphor or metamorphosis.
Stevens' quest for poetry is not, at its heart, a matter of writigg
poems, and all his struggles for a central poem are something other
than a matter of composing a structure of words. Among his Ada is,
we find aphorisms such as these:

The collecting of poetry from one's experience as one goes
along is not the same thing as merely writing poetry (Pg, 159).

The poet comes to words as nature comes to dry sticks (92, 171).
On the other hand, he also pointed out that " . . . above everything
else, poetry is words; and that words, above everything else, are,

in poetry, sounds." (NA, 32). The question is, does poetry exist as

29
ideas, as things that lie in the world, or as words? Stevens
supplies the answer in a couple of his Adagia:
Poetry is a poetic conception, however expressed. A poem
is poetry expressed in words. But in.a poem there is a poetry of
words. Obviously, a poem may consist of several poetries (92, 163).

Every poem is a poem within a poem: ‘the poem of the idea
within the poem.af the words (9g, 174).

Thus, for Stevens poetry may mean either the words of a poem, or the
subject of the poem. But it would be a mistake to try to pin Stevens' ' '
theory of poetry down.to any narrow conception of poetry as text. The
Stevensian imagination on its mighty quest for poetic truth is concerned
with something more universal.

The concept of metaphor is of prime importance in defining
Stevens' concept of poetry, but even here he does not intend for
metaphor to be understood only as a figure of speech. Metaphor in
the thought of Stevens represents a rare Opportunity for the processes
of the poet to parallel the structure of reality, for metaphor
relies on resemblances, and resemblance, Stevens tells us, is part
of the structure of reality. In reality, things resemble each other,
as ”each man resembles all other men, each woman resembles all other
women, this year resembles last year" (NA, 72). In the case of
metaphor (and analogy) one term is found in reality, and the second
term is supplied by the imagination of the poet. In the second.part of
"Three Academic Pieces,” Stevens allows the reader to witness him in
the act of metaphorizing, or metamorphosing, a pineapple placed on a
table. For example:

1. The hut stands by itself beneath the palms.
2. Out of their bottle the green genii come.

3- A vine has climbed the other side of the wall. (NA, 86)

30

'Is this kind of thing anything more than an exquisite exercise? In
“Effects of Analogy,“ Stevens admits that if analogy is considered
only as figures of speech, poetry is little more than a trick. But
analogy has in addition a social function; better, it fulfills a
human need.

The venerable, the fundamental books of the human spirit are
vast collections of such analogies and it is the analogies that
have helped to make these books what they are. The pictoriale
izations of poetry include much more than figures of speech. ‘we
have not been studying images, but however crudely, analogies, of
which images are merely a part. AnaIOgies are much the larger
subject. . . . In any case, these are the pictorializations of
men, for whom.the world exists as a world and for whom life exists
as life, the objects of their passions, the objects before which
they come and speak, with intense choosing, words that we
remember and make our own (NA, 129-30).

We must infer that these men of whom Stevens speaks are our poets.
Their words have made a world that transcends the world and a
life livable in that transcendence. It is a transcendence
achieved by means of the minor effects of figurations and the
major effects of the poet's sense of the world and of the motive
music of his poems and it is the imaginative dynamism of all these
analogies together. Thusgpoetry becomes and:;s a transcendept
analogue composed o§_the_particu;ars gggreality, created by the
poet's sense of the worlg, that is to say, his attitude, as he

intervenes and interposes the appearances of that sense (NA, 130,
my italics).

I pointed out above that to construct a metaphor, the poet takes a
first term from, let us say, reality or his subject matter (the
pineapple on the table), and supplies a second term from his imagination
(”The hut stands by itself beneath the palms.”). In this metamorphosis
of a pineapple into a hut beneath palm fronds, imagination and reality
have come tOgether; poetry has been created.

It is important to Stevens that imagination and reality come
together to form.poetry. Ideally, in fact, poetry would be an inter-
dependence of imagination and reality as equals (NA, 27). The kind of

conceit represented in "Three Academic Pieces“ comes to seem artificial

31
in comparison with the definition of poetry found in the passage
which follows, a definition which, it will be obvious, also involves
an encounter between the imagination and reality.
Poetry is the imagination of life. AApoemAA§_a particulgr_g£_
AAfe thought of for so lepg that one's thought has become an
ApseparabAg:part of_At or a particular of life so intensely felt
that the feeling has entered into it (NA, 65, my italics).
Poetry, then, is ”a transcendent analogue,” a thing in the world that
has been metamorphosed by the power of poetic imagination, and thus
the poet's approach to reality. The things of poetry exist only
in poems. "A poet's words are of things that do not exist without
the words” (NA, 32).

But Stevens is at his best when his poetry is allowed to stand
as its own definition. There remains one aspect of the interdependence
of imagination, poetry, and reality that has not been contained in this
divided treatment: the joy of creativity. I said above that metamor-
phosis is part of Stevens' concept of poetry, a kind of transformation
of a thing in nature into a thing of poetry. But another metamorphosis
occurs at the same time: the transformation of the poet into a pure,
almost godlike being, when he has achieved the gnostic moment of

creativeness.

The way a poet feels when he is writing, or after he has written,
a poem that completely accomplishes his purpose is evidence of the
personal nature of his activity. To describe it by exaggerating it,
he shares the transformation, not to say apotheosis, accomplished
by the poem. NA, 49).

Three times in the same essay, this delightful experience is described.
we find the poet "still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely

accomplished his purpose, . . . uttering the hymns of joy that followed
his creation” (NA, 51). And, ” . . . the moment of exaltation that the

poet experiences when he writes a poem that completely accomplishes his

32
purpose, is a moment of victory over the incredible . . ." (NA, 53).
Clearly the poetic process to Stevens is a pleasure that transcends
most earthly delights; along with many other creative peeple, Stevens
can easily be pictured as a kind of addict of the creative process.
Interestingly, Ronald Sukenick has hypothesized a ”radical experience”
in those moments when there is an encounter between the imagination
and reality for Stevens
Though we exist in reality we are bound.by the mind, and thus

it is not the nature of reality that matters so much as our sense

of it, the sense of it that the imagination gives us. However, the

favorable sense of reality that the imagination can produce, the

”agreement with reality,” is momentary:

For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew. (92, 168)

These moments are for Stevens a radical experience5 which, it

would not be too mugh to say, all his theoretical poetry merely

tries to recapture.
Perhaps this kind of hedonism is the true motive for creativity.
Stevens held with incredible tenacity to his quest for true encounters
with reality, for genuine poems; perhaps such a life's work requires a
joyousness. (Later, in Chapter V, we will see Stevens near the end of
a long poem on the subject of pain and evil, declaring, ”This is the
thesis scrivened in delight, . . .") 'When.Stevens speaks of the
”radiant and productive atmosphere” which surrounds the young and

virile poet, we can imagine that this powerful poet is himself.

 

5In a footnote, Sukenick acknowledges J. V. Cunningham, "Tradition
and Modernity: 'Wallace Stevens," Poetgy, LXXV, 148-165.

6Ronald Sukenick, wallace Stevens: MusApg the Obscure;

Rea s and to tations and a Guide to the Co cted oet ,
New I" : New Yerk University Press, 1 7 . p- 2 .

33

In sum, then, poetry is a way of encountering the world; all
Stevens' poems are different ways of perceiving reality. For every
poetic ana10gue of the world there has been an act of the mind, an
act in which the demands of reality and the demands of imagination have
each been met as hilly as possible. Poetry is both the recording of
the process and the instrument of it.

The reader will be wondering in what particulars Stevens'
poetry corresponds to his theory. This is not an easy question to
answer, for while it seems only reasonable to assume that there must
be connections, it is difficult to assert that Stevens' theory of
poetry tells us axwthing very important about his own poetry. Perhaps
the main value of the phi1080phical writings is not in their details,
but in the broad outline-—the idea of poetry as man's willful attempt
to penetrate a hard reality with his imagination. As such, the
poetry can be seen as a quest for reality through poetry. Stevens'
poetry, then, is about this poetic self, told by means of his own
version of the creative process, just as any story of a quest is not
about the goal, but the seeker.

Quest is process, and thus plot. Let us say that Stevens'
book, The Co cted Poems of Wallace S evens is the story of this
man's life not in its externals, which are after all not the reality
of his life as a poet, but the inner life, the life of the mind. As
epigraph to ”The World as Meditation" Stevens chose the following
quotation:

J 'ai passe] trap de temps \a travailler mon violon, \a voyager.
Mais l'eloercice essentiel du compositeur--la meditationurien
ne l'a jamais suspendu an moi . . . Je vis un réve permanent,
qui ne s'arrete ni nuit ni jour (_c_1_=_, 520).

That unending meditation and permanent dream are the poet's life.

34

It is perhaps a comfort to choose a cyclical thing as a
metaphor for life: if death is like a sunset, then we can infer
that there will be something to correspond to the next morning's
sunrise. Likewise, if an individual lifetime proceeds as though
from spring to winter then there may be hepe of renewed warmth after
all. Whether Stevens planned at the outset to write a life's book
which proceeded from spring through all the seasons to winter, or
not, I do not know. But the titles of the separate books and of the
poems within outline a plot. Harmonium, the first book, is a
Springtime in a virgin country, fertile and green. The Collected
£9393 progress through a single year, ending with Transport to Summer,
The Auroras of Autumn, and The Rock--in nature, static fulfillment,
deciduousness, and then barrenness.7

There must be few books of poetry in the English language as
strikingly individual, rich, and varied as Wallace Stevens' Harmonium.
In it we find everything from the most incredible grotesqueries of
language to the most straightforward blunt declarations. Harmonium
is at once the beginning of Stevens' life-quest for poetry (The Rock
marking the end of the book and the quest), and a preview of the whole
quest. We can see the young poet in arrogant possession of his power,
confident of his ability, as in ”Sea Surface Full of Clouds”, and in
lines such as these from ”Thirteen Ways of looking at a Blackbird."

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms; (92, 94)

 

7Without making mention of the annual cycle represented by
Stevens' work as a consecutive entity, Donald Sheehan discusses
Stevens' use of the seasons as part of his theory of metaphor. "Stevens'
seasons are states of imaginative perception, moving from summer, when
reality is metaphor, to winter, when reality is unknowable thing, with

autumn and spring partaking of both realities.“ "Wallace Stevens' Theory
of Metaphor,” 61.

35

But that same strophe in its last three lines contains the antithesis
which is also part of W.

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know. ‘ (92. 94)
And we remember that Stevens was, after all, forty-four years old
on the publication of this first book, already percipient of the
dimensions of the quest he had set for himself. W foreshadows
Stevens‘ life-quest, his extraordinary use of the linguistic medium,
and even the final ambivalence of failure within success found in
The Rock. Harmonium is a world of contraries: a craving for winter
in the midst of paeans to spring, nihilistic dreaming among sensual
affluence, sterile age and potent youth, futility and arrogance.

”Sea Surface Full of Clouds," the parade of power and the

disgust for power, is a paradigm of this ambivalence. Meanwhile it
can also be taken as an illustration of the multiple-endedness of the
poetic process. The poet is aware that there is a plurality of ways
of looking at--and thus of writing about--his poetic object. The
SOphistication of poetry lies in the skillful poet's management of
pluralistic meaning; the true poem of a truly poetic object will be
mltisignificant. The final arrangement of tone, imagery, and color
is a matter of a choice among possibilities, even though it may seem
to the poet that the chosen one is the only one. ”Sea Surface" figures
forth all these ideals in a virtuoso performance, indeed, a prodigious
performance, at once self-confident and ostentatious. For any one of
the five sections could be considered sufficient poem; the five together
are a display. It is something like Monet's sixteen paintings of
Waterloo Bridge, perceptions of the subtle changes of that surface under

36
the changes of light, except that Monet's exercise is almost humble
under the realities of the scene before him. If Nonet had been
arrOgant enough to paint instead of the perceptions the mind that is
capable of such perception, then‘we would have had something more
closely analOgous to the sea surfaces of Stevens--a parade of powers.
In his essay entitled "The Relations Between Poetry and
Painting“ Stevens discusses the way in which a line of poetry is
like a line in painting, in that they both.take on their meaning in
the context of the whole composition. Poets and painters reconstruct
and.reform.their experience, making something new out of the familiar
materials of the senses. Thus,
Modern.reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations
are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our
own.powers. The greatest truth we could hOpe to discover, in
whatever field we discovered it, is that man's truth is the final
resolution of everything. Poets and.painters alike today make
that assumption.and this is what gives them the validity and
serious dignity that become them as among those that seek wisdom,
seek understanding.(NA, 175).
“Sea Surface" begins conventionally enough in a boat in the
Pacific ”off Tehuantepec.” ‘While lake water may lap, here the sea
sounds like ”slapping,” until one night it grew still, "And in the
morning summer hued the deck." we can imagine the ocean lying so still
that reflections of the clouds in the sky are visible in the water. It
is provocative to know that the clouds really originate in the sea,
and are simply a metamorphosis of sea water. The clouds seem far
below the surface of the water, and they remind the poet of flowers.
"Who, then, evolved the sea blooms from the clouds / Diffusing balm
in that Pacific calm?" he asks. And the answer, an echo from Baudelaire,

but still innocuous in this first poem, "C'etait mon enfant, mon

bijouI mon Qme." He is asking, by what process came the clouds to be

37
"sea-blooms?" Who is reSponsible for this transformation? The
answer points to a second self-«the creative self that perceives the
world as significant forms, and analOgues. Thus the question of the
origin of metaphor is raised, and the answer is appropriate for the
static world of this first poem. Stable in time, it ends with a
verb in an imperfect past tense: "And sometimes the sea / Poured
brilliant iris on the glistening blue" (92, 99). Stevens has
furnished a motif on which he will play his own variations.

In the second poem, placidity is transferred into malevolence
and fakery. "At breakfast jelly yellow streaked the deck" (CP, 99).
In ”jelly yellow" sound and sense combine to produce a sense of
ignobility. Where before the ocean lay "like limpid water,” now
it lies "in sinister flatness.” Now the reflected clouds seem
macabre; "sea-blooms” have metamorphosed into ”water-glooms." Here
the vision is chased away by a storm; the real clouds rain in
”crystalline pendentives on the sea," and the reflected clouds
disappear (Q, 100).

Morning never comes in the third poem; sibilants, and a
palette of silver and white produce an effect of moonlight and
dreams. A seductive vision, there is "milk within the saltiest
spurge" (913, 100). Its origin? "c'était mon extase et mon amour" (93, 100).
In this atmosphere of love and darkness, shadows are shrouds, and
"The shrouding shadows made the petals black" (_C_Ij, 100) and then
blue as ”the rainy hyacinth,” and ”sapphire blue” (92, 101). With
love and death, hyacinth and the sea, Stevens seems to be toying with
the idea of tapping into the reservoir of nythOpoeic archetypes. From
time to time, even in later poems (as, ”The Countryman," and

38
”Metaphor as Degeneration") this voice can be heard, but it is
really not characteristic of Stevens. Poem.four moves on into an
aniflstic sea-scape with the beginnings of nythic figures--"Salt
masks of beard and mouths of bellowing” (92, 101). The source of
this outlook was faith. But he throws off this point of view quickly,
and.the figures become flowers ("mallows") again.

Poem.V in."Sea Surface Full of Clouds” might actually be
read.as self-criticism, it is so apt a description of Stevens in
one of his most characteristic mrsonae. "Bowing and voluble,”
this time day comes on the deck as a "Good clown . . .” (_C_P_, 101-2).
The crucial question is phrased and answered:

What pistache one, ingenious and droll,
Beheld the sovereign clouds as jugglery

And the sea as turqoise-turbaned Sambo, neat

At tossing saucers--cloudy-conjuring sea?

C'etait mon esprit batard, 1'Agnondnie. (91:, 102)
In the end the attitude is ambivalent. Was it unfitting for the
poet to behold "the sovereign clouds" as tricks, draleries for a
playful mind? Finally there is a trumpet call for "loyal conjuration,”
providing the perfect balance of truth, loyalty to reality, and poetic
legerdemain. Then the real possibilities of the scene Open up—-"fresh
transfigurings of freshest blue" come from the scene more than from the
poet's invention (92, 102).

Can this set of exercises in poetic expression be said to be

an entity; is it five poems, or one poem? The question is important
because if there is no link between the first and fifth poems, no
deve10pment, and in short no progress into depth, then the poet's
powers have been very linn'.ted. The poet's show of strength will have

been a falsification. But Stevens has considered this possible failure

39
of power in the last poem; he is ready to condemn himself--or part
of himself--for trifling with sovereign reality. FrancOphile Stevens
finds just the right word for the faculty which took this conjurer's
attitude: ggpgig, the word for reason, and wit. And how he despises
it: The answer to the difficulty, if it can be called an answer, fore-
shadows the late, reality-oriented Stevens. The "sovereign clouds"--
the real beginnings of the whole fantastic structure--”come clustering."
Conjuration is still in the picture, but it must be ”loyal conjuration."
In the end, the sea and the heaven achieve atonement. metamorphosis--
”fresh transfigurings”--does occur, but it is in reality; the poet's
inventive powers are feeble compared to the power of true realityeper-
ceiving (92, 102).

Thus the five poems are brought tagether. Each successive posture
is a wrong approach, a poetic dead end. But it is also a complete poem,
and thus must be considered.p§r g2 as a right approach, Each poem leaves
the poet's true goal unreached, and so leads to the next poem. But the
complexity of the search, and.thus the multi-significance of the ultimate
poem.have been molded in.

I have been using ”Sea Surface Full of Clouds" as a paradigm for
the kind of questing for poetry found in Harmonium, where again and again
the poet leads a fresh assault on his goal of true expression, genuine
meetings with reality. To say that "Sea Surface" is not the ultimate
answer to Stevens' quest is not to belittle the poem: rather, it is to
magnify the importance of Stevens' ambition. Now Harmonium.as a whole
contains the theme and the complex of attitudes which persist throughout
the book of the QgAAected Poems. Stevens wanted to call this latter

book The Whole of Harmonium, and it is true that even in the last pages

40
the goal of the quest is still as far away as ever, still as important
and desirable as ever. The youthful mood of arrOgance has abated
somewhat, but there remains a consciousness of special powers. The
cynicism.and deepair also function in the end. ‘What has occurred is a
progress in depth. The repeated attacks do not solve the problem; on
the contrary, they increase its difficulty. The poet's growing aware-
ness of the magnitude of the search causes the search to be so augmented
that its goal becomes more remote--and at the same time more worthy of
the gigantic effort. The quest theme has not changed, it has enlarged,
swelled. The QgAAected Poems are ”The Whole of Harmonium."
To demonstrate the point, I offer the late poem, "PrOIOgues

to What is Possible." As in ”Sea Surface,” the poet is on a boat--apt
symbol for the quest motif--but the scene is very different. ”There
was an ease of mind that was like being alone in a boat at sea," he
begins. The poet is passive, a passenger. Nevertheless, he is alert,
he is standing up, ”leaning and looking before him." The imagery with
Which Stevens describes this boat is awesome: it is brilliant, made of
stones that have lost their weight, its symbol is a ”speculum of fire on
its prow,' and it glides over the water on "glass-like sides" (92, 515—516).

As he traveled alone, like a man lured on.by a syllable

without any meaning,
A syllable of which he felt, with an appointed sureness,
That it contained the meaning into which he wanted to enter,

A meaning which, as he entered it, would shatter the boat
and leave the oarsmen quiet

As at a point of'central arrival, an instant moment,
much or little,

Removed from.any shore, from any man or woman, and

needing none. “239 515)
Stevens has produced a metaphor for his life in poetry, and it stirs
his fear, for he himself does not understand it. Like the dream of a

Biblical prOphet, it could be explicated indefinitely: the speculum,

41
symbol of the boat, is loaded, of course. A speculum is a mirror, also
an instrument for medical examination, also a compendium of knowledge.
In part II, lines 1 and 2, Stevens almost seems to be warning the
critics away from.his creature. He knows he is nearing the end of his
life in poetry, and he speculates on some possible self within himself
which has not been loosed, something "Snarling in him for discovery
as his attentions spread” (92, 516). This would be like the sudden
perception of an entirely new color, never seen before, a powerful
flick, even if from the smallest lamp. It is only an indication of the
vast universe of possibilities for poetry, but nevertheless a genuine
indication of something that is really there, like the first sighting
of a star in the evening sky. The quest begins again.

Such is the access to the central poem: just as one star proves
the existence of possible other universes, so one poem leads to all the
poems and to the one great poem, This proof, though, is not the proof
of logic, it is the proof of imagination. In ”A Primitive Like an Orb,"

One poem proves another and the whole,

For the clairvoyant men that need.no proof:

The lover, the believer and the post. (93, 441)
The central poem is the "poem of the whole, / The poem of the composition
of the whole” (CP, 442), a final form, or an order which underlies
everything. The central poem.attracts the poet as the beloved attracts
a lover, as God.attracts the believer. The resemblance between lover,
believer, and poet is taken up again in ”An Ordinary Evening in New
HavenP'where Stevens shows how the analogy breaks down. For now, though,
the point is made that the quest for poetry is a drive toward a goal,
and.the poet is enabled to continue by the partial glimpses he has
gotten.in lesser poems. Still, even though the poems are lesser, poetry

42
is there, a "huge, high harmony" that sings out briefly.
In the instant of speech,

The breadth of an accelerando moves,

Captives the being, widens—-and was there. (92, 440)
And thus he believes that there is a central poem. His metaphor for
it is a giant on the horizon, a giant invested with every kind of
flashy adornment, brightly stirring enough for children, and yet
majestically serious, with something for the ear and something for the
eye. The catch is that though in reality the giant is at the center of
things, yet that center will always be the horizon for us. His location
is “the centre on the horizon, concentrum . . .” (EN, 443). He is
”patron of origins." What does it mean, then? At the end of the poem,
lover, believer, poet, and painter are assembled again, each to grape
toward the giant as best he can. Each one is always changing, and the
giant is always changing. In fine, he is unapproachable; he is "the
giant of nothingness“ (92, 443).

Stevens' nihilism cannot be called disillusion, for it was pre-
figured.in.Harmonium. It is not even.pessimism, for we know that death,
change, and nothingness are the begetters of beauty (e. g., ”Sunday
Morning”) and thus poetry. I believe it is the product of his deeperate
struggle with the idea of reality. The central poem is reality, or the
poet's final penetration into reality. But after all his striving he
could not penetrate this mystery. All he has seen is surface, reflections
from.the sun. Is the answer, then, that beneath the surface, beneath
appearance, lies only nothing? But he must try again, for while he has
still not approached any nearer to the giant, who remains on the horizon,
he has had a glimpse, and if he has not yet created the one central poem,

still he has made a genuine, if lesser, poem. And after all, it may be

43
that the idea of a horizon itself is a key: no matter where on earth
one stands, one is no nearer the horizon, but on the other hand it is
always there.

The giant appears as a character in this picaresque poetry from
the beginning. The first occurrence is on page 6, "The Plot against the
Giant." He also appears as a symbol in regard to the ”supreme fiction,"
something different from, but related to the central poem. -In ”Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction,” the giant is “A thinker of the first idea"
(EN, 386), and as such he is at the center and source of things, the
”myth before the myth began" (92, 383). In the same poem he is also
connected with the idea of "major man,” an important aSpect of poetry's
task. The "idea of man," in fact, is the poet's responsibility to the
other men of the planet, it being his duty to explain his generation to
themselves.

In "The Man with the Blue Guitar,“ another of the major quest
poems, and also one in which the giant appears, the poet's compulsion
to seek comes not so much from himself as from those others of his
generation. The guitarist is a man among men, separated from the others
by the simple fact of his possession of the blue guitar. The others
approach the poet, demanding that he play for them ”things exactly as
they are.“ He explains that on.bis instrument things are changed; the
day, for example, is not blue like the guitar, but green. Furthermore,
his song is not of ordinary man, but of a hero, a composite which can
never be or re-create a single real man, Exact reproduction of reality
is an unapproachable limit; whatever is played on the blue guitar is
unavoidably affected by the instrument. But even though he knows his

limitation he cannot give up the struggle. The guitarist is the poet of

44
course; the blue guitar is language and its music is poetry. Much
later in the poem he refers to the struggle in terms of a “giant that
fought / Against the murderous alphabet . . .» (pg, 179). Although.the
giant, here, ”man number one" (_CL 166) is the poet's goal, and in fact
is what he does manage to play, the giant is not reality. Since the
problem of belief is a major theme of this poem, the giant can be taken
as an anthr0pomorphic god or godlike man, something created by the poet
not so much in answer to the people's demand for “a tune . . . / Of
things exactly as they are,” (CP, 165) but because the shadowless and
thus seemingly flat others need a substitute for the historical earths.

Poetry

Exceeding music nmst take the place
0f empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar. (CP, 167)

Left without religion, the peOple still crave some one thing that is
final, beyond change. An aesthetic object might just be a viable icon.
The problem is to form not an ersatz religion, something otherworldly,
but a way of looking at and living in the real world, especially for
Stevens the plnrsical world. Thus, ultimately the quest is still a quest
for reality. In canto VIII he preposes laudatory couplets--"The vivid,
florid, turgid sky, / The drenching thunder rolling by” (CP, 169), and
so on, but then steps to offer an aside.

I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;

And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there. (93, 169)

Like the jar in Tennessee, the guitarist's tune is an artifact. Once

made, it simply occupies a place among all the other existing objects,

45
just one more inaccessible digg-anesich. And.yet somehow it does
pertain. It brings the poet at least, one step closer to reality,
because the poet is "The maker of a thing.” Know reality by adding a
tiny part to it? There is a suggestion of this. The poet is ”The
maker of a thing yet to be made" (g3, 169); in the creative process
the thing being made, the instrument or medium, and the maker all are
one for a time.

Tom-tom, c'est moi. The blue guitar
And I are one. (92, 171)

Strummdng, guitar, and guitarist are an entity. The poem in process
is the poet; once made, the poem becomes a part of reality, and in this
sense the poet achieves atonement with reality.

Canto XXII I shall quote in its entirety because it is so
germane to the whole question of the relation of poetry to reality.

Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.

But are these separate? Is it
An absence for the poem, which acquires

Its true appearances there, sun's green,
Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?

From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,
In the universal intercourse. (gg, 176-7)

He is saying that the poetic process is cyclical; the poem begins with
an aesthetic insight into something in the world, and the end must be in

reality too. The question is, what happens in between? Apparently the
middle phase is imaginative; the materials taken from.the real world are

shaped, arranged, and colored by the imagination. In the phase of most

46
imaginative tincture, reality's influence is least. And vice versa:
the more reality holds sway, the less imagination contributes. The
scheme is almost Yeatsian, even to the final line of Canto XXII.

And thus the poet's dilemma: insofar as he is reconciled with
reality he has lost his imaginative faculty, that which first gave him
his insight. But to draw back from reality is to impoverish oneself.
The guitarist must have both: play real songs for real peeple or his
art is worthless, form without content. On the other hand, plain
reality is impossible on the guitar, for the guitar is imagination.
The player must be skillful, and he must be tough.

In the end he speaks again of “That generation's dream" (EN, 183),
their desire for a poetry exceeding the hymns of heaven, something
that would show them.things as they are. The man with the blue guitar
has not created anything final, or anything to satisfy them. Thus
they can only forget the dream, except at times in certain

. . . moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay. (9.13.. 184)

Playing ”major man," it seems, is not the way to the central poem.

The search continues; in The Auroras of Agtgmp, another
major poem is devoted to the theme. This is ”An Ordinary Evening in
New Haven," a full-scale attack, thirtyeone cantos of siX'tercets
each, on the prOblem of reality, and reality's appearance. As is
customary in phiIOSOphical discussions of this type, the first question

is what we see.

The eye's plain version is a thing apart,
The vulgate of experience. Of this,
A few words, an and.yet, and yet, and.yet--

As part of the nevereending meditation,
Part of the question that is a giant himself:
Of what is this house composed if not of the sun, . . .

(£32. 465)

47
The vulgate is the common tongue, the language that everybody speaks,
or at least everybody except poets. Just so, their version of appearance,
or experience, is different from the poets' version. The things they
see are, for example, the houses in.Hew Haven by the light of the
sun. From this viewpoint, too, reality is an unapproachable giant on
the horizon. Now for the poet, "a second giant kills the first;” the
poet's giant is

A mythological form, a festival Sphere,
A great bosom, beard and being, alive with age. (92, 466)

For the poet's point of view, there is a new sun on new houses. The
light is the mind, and the houses are ourselves, or our selves, is»
palpable and nondimensional, "Without regard to time or where we are"
(92, 466). This is the reality of a poet, and "things-as-theyeare” must
lie somewhere in this realm; here he must find ”The poem of pure reality,
untouched / By trOpe or deviation" (92, 471). He wants to see ”without
reflection," as though the eye might see a house without benefit of
reflected light. Can he do it? It may be an impossible goal, and
herein lies the difference between a poet and a lover (or believer).
The lever desires ease and fulfillment. It is the same with the
believer on his quest for God. But the poet's quest for reality is
different in that it cannot possess. ”It is desire . . . / Always
in emptiness that would be filled" (Q2, 46?). The quest itself is the
central poem, and the quest pattern is the pattern of Stevens' poetry.

Reality is the beginning not the end,

Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,

Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals. (92, 469)
The job of poetry is never done; the central poem is never reached.

In.a sense the world of beauty and.poetry is as static as Keats'

Grecian,urn; in.another sense it is eternal change, a never-ending fire.

48
The process of searching for poetry is poetry itself, for the poet as
he undergoes the primary creative process and for the poet's audience
pushing toward an understanding of the poetry,

This very realization is a kind of fulfillment of the quest, and
a serenity descends over the poet. Now, in ”An Ordinary Evening in New
Haven,” autumn has passed, the last leaf has fallen, and.barrenness
comes over the land. The barrenness is not a matter of absence, though,

It is a coming on and a coming forth.

The pines that were fans and fragrances emerge,

Staked solidly in a gusty grappling with rocks. (92, 487)
Only air is left to cover the rocks, and it is all clarity, "A
visibility of thought.”

Just as winter provides a necessary resting time for the
biological world, so the final barrenness of reality (the rock) is a
renewal for poetry. Poetry will, and indeed must, renew itself in
every generation. For poetry is ”the nucleus of a time,” "the growth
of the mind / or the world . . .n (913, 446). As above, reality might
be a force, perpetual but in constant need of renewal. Certainly the
mind is a force, ”the terriblest force in the world” (92, 436). Only
the mind can defend itself against itself. we are both at its mercy and
dependent on it. It is mind that posits fictions and mind that believes
them; but mind is the only thing that can guard against false beliefs.
Thus the unending, perpetually renewing quest is the price of reality.

Reality is a rock (that is, rock is a metaphor for reality as we
find it): solid, though this too is a metaphor, unchanging, impene-
trable, and barren. As such, it is something of which we need to be

cured. "The Rock" is the final section of the Collected Poems; unlike
the other sections it was not published as a separate book. In the

49

yearbook of Stevens' life it is the end at winter and also the
beginning of a new cycle. The first poems of "The Rock" show great
age. (Stevens was 76 years old when the QgAAggted Poems were published;
he had been a poet for more than 40 years.) Death has been a part of
the meditations from.the beginning; now the poet thinks back to his
forefathers, and "back to a parent before thought, before Speech . . .n
(922 501). In "The Plain Sense of Things” he tells that he has come
to the end of imagination. It had to happen, but how he regrets it:

It is difficult even to choose the adjective

For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.

The great structure has become a minor house. (92, 502)
The sunlight fades in ”Lebensweisheitspielerei,” and all the heroes are
gone from the world. Only humans remain, ”Natives of a dwindled sphere"
(CP, 504). But the mood of regret shifts with "To an Old PhilosOpher
in Rome.” Meditating on an old man (Santayana) in a room in.Rome he
begins to see that "It is a kind of total grandeur at the end . . ."
(CP, 510). Every visible object seems immense.

He stOps upon this threshold,

As if the design of all his words takes form

And frame from thinking and is realized. (92, 511)
It is still winter, but it is March, the last month of winter. Now he
can look ahead, in "PrOIOgues to What is Possible." From the vantage
point of a long life in poetry, he can say

... 'Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.
The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun. (92, 522)

The ambience of ”The Rock," in general, is passivity, a willing sub—
mission to what is. The poet is not so much an active seeker as a
witness. The poetic powers of adjective and metaphor which seemed so
promising in "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" have failed after all. For

air, our element (and representative of our spiritual life) is "A thing

50
not planned for imagery or belief . . ." (92, 518). Our thinking is
as random as the shifting of the wind. All our poetic anthrOpomorphizing
of the world was backward; in truth it is mind that resembles "the
bow of the world . . ." (C2, 519). Mind only mirrors the world;
the mind's disorder is nature's disorder. On the other hand, nature
has "blunt laws" (Q, 519). independent of man, existing not to be
discovered by him, but only because they exist. Simple striving will
not take the poet to knowledge of things as they are, but by being
constantly receptive, like a mirror,he can be ready for knowledge when
it comes.

PeneIOpe waiting for Ulysses in "The World as Feditation" is
Stevens' figure for this passive state of mind. Pene10pe has composed
herself, and "mended the trees" in preparation for Ulysses' return. The
sun on the eastern horizon is a "form of fire” that awakens Pene10pe's
world of meditation. At first she thinks the warmth of the sun might
be Ulysses himself. But "It was only day. / It was Ulysses and it was
not” (_C_P_, 521). The point is that PenelOpe by her faithfulness has kept
her husband; by thinking the sun was Ulysses and welcoming him, she has
in a sense come in contact with him. The rising of the sun is encourage-
ment for her. In the nyth she is rewarded. Similarly, the poet waits
for his reunion with the sun, symbol of the world of reality, and thus
true poetry.

In this final book the theme of age gives way to renewal, sub-
missiveness metamorphoses into hepe. In the poem "The Rock” barrenness
is transformed back into fertility, winter to spring. An ultimate
acceptance and atonement with barren reality would force the old poet

to admit that "The sounds of the guitar / were not and are not" (92, 525).

51
But he finds this absurd. He remembers an embrace on the edge of a
field at noon, "an embrace between one deeperate clod / And another . .
. / In a queer assertion of humanity" (92, 525). His human pride and
stubbornness are reviving.

There is something inherent in nothingness itself that desires
to be covered, Even illusion is needed, it seems. Green leaves and
lilacs cover the rock again every year; to be true to nature we must
include its decorations--the leaves, the blooms, and their fruit. 'We
must be cured of the barrenness of reality, and we can do it by eating
the brightly colored fruit of the world. Now Stevens glosses his own
parable: ”The fiction of the leaves is the icon / 0f the poem, . . . /
And the icon is the man” (92, 526). Poem, icon, man: all these combat
the rock. The leaves of the world do not merely cover barrenness, they
transform it. leaves, blooms, and fruit represent the cyclical nature
of the world, its promise to renew itself. The poem, man, and imagination
are part of this endless cycling. It is poetry that makes meaning of the
rock.

But the rock represents that which is always there, unchanging.
It is the basic foundation upon which.man must stand. Reality is the
first step, and it is also the world we live in, ”the habitation of the
whole” (CP, 528). It is the beginning, and it is the end.

Finally, spring begins again. The last poem in the Collected
292mg is ”Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself.“

At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry'from.outside

Seemed like a sound in his mind. (92, 534)
But he knows that this sound is coming from outside, not from a dream.

He likens the scrawny cry to the first note of one singer whose voice

52
precedes the choir. The note is part of the coming Spring, part of
the new day, part of the sun, much like the first sighting of the

evening star in ”ProlOgues to what is Possible."

It was like
A new knowledge of reality. (92. 53”)
* * * * * * * * * *

In Stevens'lmgndg, there are many themes. Since it would be
impossible to do final justice to Stevens' poetry in a chapter of this
length, I have been concerned here with Stevens' treatment of the
poetic process, aspects of his poetry which relate to his idea of
poesis. There are several book-length studies of Stevens' poetry, and
one book on Harmonium alone. The reader is referred to the section
entitled Bibliography and List of General Reference .

we begannwith a discussion of Stevens' essays on the nature
of imagination and reality, in which a serious of prOpositions about
poetry and the poet were develOped. But it should not be inferred that
Stevens' poetry was intended to illustrate these prepositions; poetry
is not of a prOpositional nature. It is probable that the essays were
written out of Stevens' experiences as a poet, rather than.vice versa.
Stevens' ideas in poetry come to us by means of the images, ideas, and
patterns of his poetry.

In tracing the curve of Stevens' work, we saw a change from a
poem like "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" in which the poetic powers of
metaphor and metamorphosis were brought to bear on a single scene to a
poem.like ”Prologues to What is Possible" in which the final mystery and

impenetrability of reality was acknowledged. The comparison.between these
two poems shows the quest in microcosm, but so does each poem singly,

53

as well as other poems discussed, notably "The Man with the Blue
Guitar." So barren, both in language and idea, did the end of the
book appear, that it almost seemed that the poet had found his whole
life to be a failure. But at last it was seen that the quest was a
cycle after all. Once the end of the cycle had been met, the beginning
was at hand. And thus the book was compared to the cycle of the
seasons of the year, in which spring follows winter, and indeed
depends on winter for its existence. There is a need for a period of
cold and sleep and.barrenness, in the mind as in nature.
What, then, is poesis to wallace Stevens? It is joyful,

and it is difficult, within his capabilities and.yet impossible of
final consummation, one of life's luxuries and yet a genuine necessity,
both private and public. It is a paradox and a puzzle, like life
itself, which comes to us unasked but yet must be lived out.

One poem proves another and the whole,

For the clairvoyant men that need no proof:

The lover, the believer and.the poet.

Their words are chosen out of their desire,

The joy of language, when it is themselves.
'With these they celebrate the central poem, . .

CP, “#1)

CHAPTER III
PAUL VALRTRI: THE VOYAGE INTO THE: SELF

‘While in the preceding chapter we have seen that for wallace
Stevens poetry must be found in a relationship between the poet and
the world, it will develop that for Vale’ry poetry--and indeed, all
forms of creative endeavor--requires a phase of withdrawal from the
world. Valery's poetry is not really concerned with the world, except
as setting for his meditation; his subject is always himself.
Valery said, ”De quoi j'ai souffert le plus? Pent-etre de l'habitude
de déveIOpper toute ma pensee, d'aller jusqu'au bout en moi."1 To
To go to the limit within oneself: In Valery this process resulted
finally in a loss of individuality, in a discovery of universality.
Thus, although the paradigm of Valery's thought is a voyage into the
self, as in the long poem La Jegne Parqpe, the result is a renunciation
of self and a freeing of the spirit from the narrow confines of
selfishness. (Other aspects of self-renunciation will be shown in
the succeeding chapters, ranging from a casting away of the life of
pure contemplation in,"1e Cimetiere marin” all the way to suicide in
the cycle of Narcissus.”

More than most poets, Valery expended a great prOportion of

 

67 lAsathe Vale’ry Rouart, Paul Vale, , (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
p- 1 -

54

55
his creative energies on works other than poetry. His dialogues,
letters, lectures, essays, the quasi-novel MOnsieur Taste and its
cycle, and above all the vast study which is the Qéhéfiiéi all this may
come to be recOgnized as work equal to the more generally famous poems.
In'Valery'a kind of modernpday Montaigne is gradually emerging, for
like Mbntaigne he was one of those universal minds who are able to
apply themselves to various spgcific subjects because they are so well
acquainted with the general workings of human intelligence. ‘Whatever
Valery did, he did with rigor; his poems are prosodically flawless,
for example, and.be once wrote a dialogue to order of a given number of
letters. Vague and loose writing and thinking were anathema to him.
His very life was lived with rigor. As much as possible, he carried
out his ideas to their logical conclusion, even to the point of refusing
as a matter of principle to publish his poetry. Valery was always
striving toward that which was best in himself; his discipline was to
exist deliberately on a plane equal to his best moments. Here is Valery
on the subject of his faith:

MOI. I1 adore cette religion qui fait de la beaute un de ses
dogmes, et de l'Art, le plus magnifique de ses apotres. I1 adore
surtout son catholicisme a lui, un peu espagnol, beaucoup wagnerien
et gothique.

Quant‘a la croyance pure! Voici ce qu'il en pense (voulant etre
avant tout franc, et, avant tout, l'etre avec lui-meme):

”La plus grossiere des hypotheses est de croire que Dieu exists
objectivement... Gui: Il existe et le Diable, mais en nous!

”Le culte que nous lui devons--c'est 1e respect que nous
devons a nous-memes et 11 faut l'entendre: la recherche d'm
Mieux par notre force dans la direction de nos aptitudes.

.un deux.mots: Dieu est notre ideal particulier. Satan ce
qui tend a nous en detourner.”

Thus he was utterly self-centered, but in a detached way, thinking of

 

2Paul Valery, Letth a que lg ues—uns, (Paris: Gallimard,
1952), P' 21-2.

56

the "self" as an object for speculation, perhaps even experimentation.
He never sought fame or gory for himself; fame did come, and glory too,
but Valery was the most unwilling of all literary lions and he quickly
grew to think of his reputations-when it suddenly sprang up, almost
overnight--as something so separate from himself as to be almost unp
recOgnizable. And.yet his intellect was the greatest part of him,
followed by the emotional man of family and friendship and last the
practical man.

Now Valery knew that a man is divided, uneven in his abilities,
and above all, unable to sustain his capabilities for very long at a
time. The fact of attention, its weakness and short life, how it might
be improved, was a tepic of interest to him. There came a certain time
in Valery's life when, as he says, he "was intoxicated with his will"
and experienced "strange excesses of selfeconsciousness."

Je faisais done ce que je pouvais pour augmenter un peu les
duress/dc quelques pensées. Tout ce qui m'était facile m'était
indifferent et presque ennemi. La sensation de l'effort me semblait
devoir etre recherchée, et je ne prisais pas les heureux rgsultats
qui ne sont que les fruits naturels de nos vertus natives.

Andy-always--the dominant theme of his life and work:
C'est dire que les resultats en general,--et par consequence, les
oeuvres,--m'importaient beaucoup mains que l'énergie de l'ouvrier,--
substance des choses qu'il espere.

For this reason, Valery, the stationary thinker at his desk, liked to

compare himself to dancers and athletes.

 

3Paul Valery, Oeuvres, édition etablie et annotée par Jean Hytier,
v. II, Bibliotheque de la Pléiade, (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 11.
Henceforth abbreviated as Oeuvres II.

“and;

57

L'acte me semble plus precieux que le resultat. L'athIEte

‘fait des mouvements inutiles, mais ses muscles pourront servir

a l'occasion.
But his ideal man, Edmond.Teste, was a man.much like himself--solitary,
making a living at a mediocre futureless job, making a life out of his
thoughts. Where Paul Vale’ry leaves off and the fictional Edm0nd Teste
begins is in M. Teste's incredible ability to think, to seek his truth
all the time. M. Teste is an impossible man, and as Valery pointed out,
this is what makes him interesting. For it is necessary to ask: why is
M. Teste impossible? Every thinker contains a M. Teste for at least
part of the time. But he never lives for more than minutes before we
are distracted by some bodily need or practical thought or simply the
natural fatigue that comes from the nervous system itself. Edmond Teste
is an original and brilliant concept, and his Pensees (e. g., "11 faut
entrer en soi-meme arms jusqu‘aux.dents.") contain insights which
illustrate Vale’ry's whole thought. For now, though, it will not be
necessary to give a resume of the Teste cycle, for what matters is the
basic concept: A figure made of one faculty of man, extended to its
logical (though not realistic) conclusion, this being a man who was
wholly concerned with his thoughts, with.his research into the nature
of mentality, and who had no concern with communicating his results to
other men, who thought in fact that such communication would be posi-
tively harmful to the research. The fantastic Monsieur Teste is Paul
Valery's alter ego.

voléiy found it necessary to invent a Teste, but Leonardo da

Vinci, in many ways a more fantastic being than Edmond Teste, was a real

k

5Lettres‘a Qgelgues-uns, 106.

58

person. Nevertheless, the Leonardo of Valery's essay emerges as much
as Teste from‘Valgry's self-analysis; Leonardo becomes a kind of
vehicle for some of Valery's ideas on intelligence. He begins with an
exercise in criticizing the critic: certain problems arise when one
mind tries to understand another, as for example, when Paul Valery
tries to understand and reproduce the thought of Leonardo da Vinci.
What one is attempting is to furnish the law or laws of continuity
among the diverse monuments which may remain from a career. ‘What we
actually do, perhaps, is to furnish our own kind of continuity.

Parmi les actes indifferents qui constituent l'exterieur de

son existence, nous trouvons la meme suite qu 'entre les n6tres;

nous en sommes le lien aussi bien que lui, et le cercle d'activitg

que son etre suggere ne deborde pas de celui qui nous appartient.
There is no way out of this difficulty; but it should be recognized.
At any moment, the mind of the man who has gone before may surpass his
critic's capabilities. If the one being scrutinized is excellent at
one point only then perhaps only there will he exceed.understanding,
but if, like Leonardo, he is superior in many ways, the difficulty is
increased, and the unity of the figure will tend to escape us. It may
seem that there are huge distances between the things in the universe of
a genius. In this case it is simply necessary to try harder, perhaps
taking a different vantage point to get a better view of the landscape.
Gradually a hypothesis will form. Characteristically, how this hypo-
thesis comes into being is as much of interest to Valery as the result.
For it leads us to the heart of the matter: the generation of the work
in question. No matter what one is seeking, he always finds the same

thing: himself. This too is central to the work of Valery.

 

6Oeuvres I, 1153.

59
Valery's hypothesis on Leonardo simply drives back to the

beginning of the problem: ‘what makes Leonardo great (and it is the
same principle that makes a Bonaparte as well) is that he can see
relations between things whose law of continuity escapes us, things
that do not fit into any pre-existing systems. A man like Leonardo
sees things that we do not see because, for one thing, we tend not to
acknowledge phenomena for which we have no name.

La plupart des gens y voient par l'intellect bien plus souvent que

par les yeux. Au lieu d'espaces colores, ils prennent connaissance

de concepts. Une forme cubi ue, blanchatre, en hauteur, et trouée

de reflets de vitres est 1 diatement une maison, pour eux:
1a Maison!

Bt; comme ils regettent & rien.ce qui manque.d;une appellation; .

1e nombre de leurs impressions se trouve strictement fini d'avance!7
In a note to this section, Valery added that this was an expression of
his doubt as to the value of the words of the common language, for they
shift meanings. The concept of language will come into focus as poems
such as L5;Jeune Parque and La Eythie are discussed. For the essay on
Leonardo the important point is that great thinkers have the power and
the courage to step into unexplored territory.8 This is a definition
too, of course. Somehow they must find the means of advancing further.

This, then, is the center of Valery's life-work: rigorous

thought, and self-analysis. Poetry, while not exactly peripheral,
was only one of the fruits of his labor. To Valery, poetry was a

technique, and it was a kind of accident that poetry happened to be his

 

7Paul Valery, Oeuvres, fidition etablie et annotée par Jean Hytier,

v. I, Biblloth‘eque de la Ple’iade, (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 1165, 1166.
Henceforth abbreviated as Oeuvres II.

/
8Edmond Teste had the same faculty. Madame Emilie Teste's priest
said of M. Teste: "C'est une ile deserts que son occur... ... Peut-Stre,
certain jour, trouvera-t-il quelque empreinte sur le sable... Quelle
Heureuse\et saints terreur, quelle epouvante salutaire, quand 11 con-
naitra a ce pur vertigo de la grace, que son‘ile est mysterieusement
habit 9‘00." (Oeuvres II, 3’4).

6O
particular means of artistic expression. For another the natural tech-
nique might be music, painting, or architecture; these things are surface.
What really matters is the foundation, the depths of the mentality. He
was also to use poetry as a feedback system; setting himself tough
rules of technique and choosing a difficult subject-matter, he would
then observe himself in his struggles, thus adding to his store of
knowledge of himself, and of human intelligence, and, incidentally,
producing a poem.

There is not sufficient place in this brief chapter for a
complete emsition of Vale/ry's poetics. Among the many studies
available are Jean Ibi'tier's,9 W. N. Ince's,10 and Herbert Road's
introduction to Vale’ry's aesthetic texts.11 W subject is the theme
of poesis in Vale/ry's poetry. For this introductory chapter I shall
mhonmonmehMmminwmhwpmuonm,ushmwt
poem, ageing Parque.

No matter how much one knows about Vale/ry's life, (not that
there is a great deal to know, Valery being very nearly a man without
a biograpl'w), no matter how much commentary on his poetry one may have
read, the poetry still at last must be faced on its own. La Jeune
223$. is notoriously obscure. It was four years in the writing, and
its author is a man who was unstinting in his drive toward whatever

9Jean I-hrtier, La Poe/tigue gs Paul Vale/ , (Paris: A. Colin, 1953).

”Walter Newcomb Ince, The Poetic Theory of Paul Vale/31:
Ins iration and Techni ue, (Ieicester: Leicester University Press, 1961).

11Horbert Read, Introduction to Paul Valery, Aesthetics,
translated by R. Manheim, Collected Works, v. 13, edited by Jackson
Mathews, Bollingen Series, 145, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956).

61
goal of knowledge or creation he had set for himself. Its subject is
as cerebral as any in the history of poetry, and its language and style
as rarefied as any that can be imagined. Yet somehow it leads one on,
rapidly acclimatizing the reader to its universe in the same way as a
piece of music. This is a poem which one apprehends aesthetically
long before arriving at a systematic understanding of it.

The dedication tells us nearly everything about the circumstances
of the poemfis composition. In brief, Valery, having written and
published several poems as a young man, abruptly renounced,poetryzwriting
as a consequence of a night of mental crisis spent in Genoa, 1892. Some
twenty years later Andre’Gide broached the subject of a collection of
his old poems. At first reluctant to involve himself in the process,
Valery found.his poetic faculties awakening as he went over his poems,
and he began composing a long work of which one gloss is the poet's
own re-awakening. Four years later the poem was revealed. He dedicated
it to Andre/Gide: "Many years ago I abandoned the art of verse; trying
to submit myself to it again, I made this exercise which I dedicate to
you.” After it was done, he called it an "autobiOgraphy in form.”

Not too much should be made of the title, La Jeune Parque.

 

Vale’ry had also considered entitling it "Psyche’." Thus, the identity
of the mytholOgical figure, one of the sister Fates who spin the thread
of mania destiny, is probably not of central importance in the poem.
gaung is probably a noun rather than an adjective (this on the authority
of Alain, as well as the form of the capitalization). An apprOpriate
English translation might be "The Fate as a Young Girl," but “The

YOung Fate” is not too far off.

The setting is typical for Valeryz-a wild place. As in many of

62
his poems there is a suggestion of.Edenpmyth, in keeping with Valery's
mental habit of reasoning from first principles. The time is no
historical time, but mythptime. Alain points out that it is a reversed

time, a re-folded time.12

I would describe it as a time that buckles.

Before dawn, when the stars are still shining contrastingly in
the black sky, a Being arouses, stirred into fretful half-consciousness
by what she thinks is the sound of weeping nearby. 'Who weeps? she
demands. The question is the irritant that awakens her attention;
awakening, she becomes aware of the sensual data of her consciousness.
But in this simplified circumstance, there is nothing to see except the
stars. Her disembodied hand.explores her face, searching for the tear
that might be there, but is not there. Already we see the strange
dividedness of this spirit: the consciousness that demands ”who cries?",
can feel a hand (her own) feeling a face (also her own) and be
uncertain whether it was she who wept. ‘Where is the center of this
consciousness? Thought cannot persist without some core of indivi-
duality.

Out of all her destinies, all her potential selves, one (lg_plu§
pug) crystallizes and reveals her broken heart. Now she is conscious.
She has a center--like the grain of sand that irritates the oyster
into forming a pearl, or the bit of matter that enables a rainpdrOp to
form out of fog--and it is misery, a snake in the heart. She is alone
in nature; the pain can.have come only from.herself. She wants to know:

J'interrOge mon coeur quelle douleur l'éveille,
Quel crime par moi-meme ou sur moi consommEI...

(9.821203 I. 97)

 

. 12Paul Valery, La Jeune Pargue commentee par Alain. (Paris:
Gallimard, 1953), P° 60-

63
Now that body and consciousness are one, now awakened, the Fate wants
to go back into the forests of memory, dreams, and her unconsciousness.
This involved self-analysis is the premise of the poem. Perhaps, she
Speculates, it is only some malaise left over from a dream, and she
goes back to the previous evening, when she had wrapped her head around
with her heavy arms, and looked into herself.

Je me voyais me voir, sinueuse, et dorais
De regards en regards, mes profondes forgts.

J'y suivais un serpent qui venait de me mordre.
(09, u_____vr93 1: 97)

In the imagery of this first section of 37 lines the erotic component

is obvious, and typical of Valery, at once the most sensual and the most
abstract of poets. But also noteworthy is the extreme difficulty of the
theme that has been presented. Such a poem would require the utmost from
a writer: intellect, sensibility, emotion, honesty, and long effort.
These two conditions of eroticism and sustained inquiry come together in
the thought of Vale’ry in the fragment entitled "Eros et Psyche." The
problem.of attention, its strength and its weakness in the human organism,
was a concern of long-standing in'Valery's investigations of the mind's
working. In."Eros et Psyche"n he said, ”Attention resembles love." He
was impressed by the resemblance in their beginnings, their development,
their completion. "Two comparable machines in two different nervous
mechanisms. Analogous excitability. Erection. Transitiveness.
Expenditure. Identical cycles." Further, "Attention and erotic erethism
are states of coordination permitting a growth of tension up to a limited
threshold."13 In other words, just as love-making is inaugurated by a

 

1’ 13Quoted in Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, Etudes pour un Paul
Valery, (Neuchfitel, Suisse: Editions de la Baconniere, 196h), p. 11.

64
purposeful irritation of the participants, so does the mind have its
own means of arousal. Arthur Koestler in.The Act of Creation also
brings out this more-than—analogy between sexual and mental tension.14
Be that as it may, in lines 32-36, our YOung Fate has produced in
/
herself a state of psychic-physical arousal corresponding to Valery's
erection stage of attentiveness.
... Mais toute a moi, maitresse de mes chairs,
Durcissant d'un frisson leur etrange etendue,
Et dans mes doux.liens, a man sang suspendue,
Je me voyais me voir, sineuse, et doraisA
De regards en regards, mes profondes forets.
(W I, 97)
Completely self-absorbed, aware of her interior self with a part of
that self, she enters the ”profound forests” of her unconscious self,
anchoring herself to awakeness and the body like Theseus entering the
Labyrinth. But once lured into the interior, she experiences a crisis
of self-discovery. “O ruse!“ cries the Fate, when she discovers herself
not so much ”wounded" as "known"--the ultimate violation. Selfeknowledge
doubles back and.back again on itself.
Au plus traitre de 1'Qme, une pointe me nalt
Le poison, mon poison, m'eclaire et se conna :
Il colore une vierge a sci-meme enlacée, ... (Oeuvres I, 9?)
Detached, the exploring self sees the body, a virgin wrapped up in
herself, ridiculous figure. She has discovered her "secret sister,"
another self who prefers herself to the obsessive extreme of self-aware-
ness, protecting herself from the prying intellect.
How many selves are there in the Ibung Fate? Useless to count

them, for with each new discovery of an aspect of self there is always

another to know that one. Thus the number of selves is an infinite

 

1’4’Koestler, 9p_. cit., p. 495-496.

65
number. (As one of the areas where mathematics and philOSOphy come
tOgether, the theory of infinite numbers must have been highly interesting
to Vale’ry. The paradox of infinity shows up again in "Le Cinetiere
Marin" in the stanza beginning "Zéhonl Cruel Zenon! Zehon dtéléet")
Nevertheless for the present there is one center of consciousness.
Awakened in reSponse to an injury, it now uncovers two more latent
characteristics--independence and pride. She no longer needs the
serpent, she claims. Her own soul is enough guide. She has found that
her own will is sufficiently cruel to prod her on. Her thoughts are a
rich desert, shining dryly. They are not infinite; as she advances
she can see their limits. But with an infinite awaiting, anything can
happen. There are dangers--monsters, grief, insanitya-but the Fate has
intelligence, and with it she is more versatile and more deceitful than
they. Thus she scornfully chases out the serpent, sends him back along
the thread of return. Mbckingly she tells him to visit other beds
(with his "successive robes"), hatch the germ of evil on other hearts.
”I'm awake now,” she says. The serpent gone, she is sovereign and
free, alone with her visions. Since it is still dark, these visions
are "between the night and her eye," no external sense data as yet
being revealed by the sun.
Et brisant une tombs sereine,
Je m'accoude inquiEte et pourtant souveraine,
Tant de mes visions parmi la nuit et l'oeil,
Les moindres mouvements consultent mon orgueil.
(9.6212225. I. 98)
In the dialogue called "Colloquy within a Being," the process
of awakening takes a similar form. The two personae are called simply
"A" and "B,” where B is the sleeper and A is the awakener. "Come," A

begins, "Disengage who you are from the living mud which lies, in the

66
form of a man cast down and abandoned, in the disorder of the bed
linen . . . .” Lazy B pleads to be left alone. Impossible, he says,
since ”The least effort, the least essay of the spirit exceed the means
of this moment." B even feels tears coming to his eyes, but merciless
A replies "Weep, but live! . . . Emerge fromgyour larva-like state."15
B urges A to summon and assemble "all those little unfocused forces,”
to divide them.up, organize them, separate the true from.the false.
The crisis occurs:

B
What more do you want of me? Are you yourself distinguishing as to
whether you are resuscitating or murdering me?

A
That is not all, I tell you. Stir up your thought. Apply to some
point which begins to dawn in.your mind the prick of desire and the
power of duration through which the totality of similitudes, the
space for resonance, the quantity of possibilities infused in what
you are will dispose themselves so as to favor the complete
develOpment of this germ. . . .

B
Be still! . . . The mere recalling of my forces weighs me down.
Yen constrain me to measure the immense trouble one must take in
order to cease being half dead . . . Leave me, at least, all the
time I need to return without too much stress or regret from the
condition of a thing to that of a beast, and from beast to man, and
from.man to SELF, to the unique. . . .

A
I see tgat the hardest part is over. You are leaning on your
elbow.1

we note the many points of similarity between the "Colloquy within a
Being” and the first three parts of La Jeune Pargue, even to the point
of similar phrasing. A plays a role analogous to that of the serpent,

15Paul Valery, "Colloquy within a Being,” in Paul Valery,
Qialogges, translated'by‘W;.M. Stewart, Collected works, vs 4, edited
vy Jackson Mathews, Bollingen Series, #5, (New York: Pantheon Books,

16I‘oid., p. 19.

6?
gnawing, tormenting, pricking the consciousness until B fights back.
A point, focal point, is born in the soul; it is the germ of something.
Finally A is leaning on his elbow like the Young Fate in line 95: ”Je
m'accoude inquiete et pourtant souveraine” (Oeuvres I, 97).

As is well known, it was Valery's habit for fifty years, starting
at the age of twenty, to rise before dawn. He had thus a few hours to
himself every day before the daily routine had to begin. Valery never
complained much (in print, at least) about his situation in life which
reduced him to the state of "pgtit egployeh'with hours of boring and
trivial work every day to support his family of wife, children, sister-in—law,
and even part of Mallarmels family. Once he speculated on what he
could have done if he had had an income. There is the inference that
he could have gone far with his thoughts--but ”I have no right to
regrets,” he said. He did manage to have a second life in his pre-dawn
studies, but it must have cost him some effort, SS‘WB see from works
such alegflJeune Parque and ”Colloquy within a Being." What was
Valgm's serpent, or his “A" part? There is some indication in his
letter to R. P. Rideau of 1943.

Voici cinquante et quelques annees que ma tete avant l'aube
l'aube mflexerce tous les jours. Ce sont deux‘i trois heures de
manoeuvres interleures‘ggpt jig; 51010 i uement besgin. Si ce
besoin est contrar'éz toute ma jour e en est affectge: je ne me
sens pas bien ...1§

He felt it as a physiologic need, then. The time of awakening would be
difficult in such a case, but he would do it as a kind of therapy. It
would be entirely different for a person who rose naturally and happily

at an early hour; for him body, soul, and spirit would be all united

 

lzééttres‘§_Qu§lgues-uns, p. 245.

68

from the beginning. But we can imagine Valery'with an alarm clock,
fighting himself out of bed in the morning. First the external irri-
tant would pierce his sleep, then he would become aware of his body in
the dark. Temptation to fall back asleep, but already some ambitious-
ness, the human part, begins to gnaw at him. Finally the whole being
comes awake, and the higher need comes into being. From thing to
beast to man to SdLF, as he said. The recurrent experience has become
a form in the mind, and this abstraction is equally capable of metamor-
phosing into a diaIOgue, a poem, or a letter, or whatever art the artist
might be capable of.

So far we have covered only the first 100 lines of a 500 line
poem, but it was necessary to establish that the poem represents a
journey into the self, the self of memories, dreams, and the various
phantasmagoria of the sub-conscious. we left the Young Fate as she had
confidently chased the serpent away, but after it was gone she evinced a
little unsureness, even some regret. Even so she bravely says goodpbye
to her invented myth of the serpent as inspiration, and good-bye too to
her image of the self as mortal body. Now she will walk in the difficult
atmosphere of the disembodied spirit, memory without recourse.

Harmonieuse MOI, differente d'un songe,
Femme flexible et ferme aux silences suivis

D'actes purs! ... (Oeuvres I, 99)
She recalls a day in the past when she was perfectly united with nature

and the day. She offered herself as a ripe fruit. But beautiful as the
memory is, it is not without irony. "Nothing murmured to me that within
that blond pulp a desire for death could ripen in the sun (IDS-6).” She
dances in the sunlight, among the flowers. But even the memory has a
flaws-her own shadow.

69

Si ce n'est, 8 Splendour, quci mes pieds lVEnnemie,

Mon ombre! la mobile et la souple momie,

De mon absence pointe effleurait sans effort

La terre cu je fuyais cette légere mort. (Qggxggg I, 100)
The dramatic irony of this passage is made possible by shifts in tense
from present to past. In the past she Speaks from a time of nostalgia
when, still wholly innocent, she had not yet seen the fatal flaw in her
universe, the ugly abyss of death. But now she knows the secret of
mortality, and the self of the present paints onto the memory of better
days another dimension.

Throughout this poem the present is a thin shell into which the
Young Fate is continually breaking. She looks around in the contents
and then re-emerges. The contents of this universe, this egg, are
memories (because in memories lie the existence of the past), dreams,
and the unconscious, all the submerged content of the psyche. Some of
the obscurity of the poem is clarified if the subtle and sometimes abrupt
modulations of the tenses are followed carefully and taken literally;
This procedure presents some difficulty, since often two or three
different tenses will occur within twice as many lines. The first dip
into the past comes at line 30 (though that very sentence begins in the
present) when the Fate begins to speculate>on the possibility of her
anxiety arising from.some remembered dream. Between line 28 and the
end of section 1, the tense changes from.present to past to imperfect--
from.now to a specific event to a general remembrance. Again, in the
passage quoted above the present tense enters briefly in line 141, but
lapses back. Then in line 145 we are back to the present with the
line, "Between.the rose and myself I see it sheltering; ..."
And thus it was that the Fate had her first inkling of death:

as her body received the life-giving rays of the sun, immediately and

7O
inescapably a shadow was formed: absence. To understand this tragic
fact is to live on a higher level, but in Pt. 6 we see how the Fate
has paid for knowledge.
Et moi vive, debout,

Dure, et de mon neant secretement armée,

Mais, comme par l'amour une joue enflammee,

Et la narine joints au vent de l'oranger,

Js ne rends plus an jour qu'un regard etranger ...

(Oeuvres I, 100)

How different is the Fate of the present from that unknowing Sister
of some indefinite yesterday. Then she was a daughter of the earth,
in no sense alien from nature. How she looks at the world with a
stranger's glance. She herself is half appalled at the growth of that
dark part of herself during the night. Now her eye is a kind of thres-
hold, a sill where day and night, life and death are likely alternatives.
She can even conceive of ”a taste for perishing." But she pushes
forward with renewed determination to pursue her problem to the end.

Her first discovery is gppui, that bete noire of the SOphis-
ticate. Too many too-predictable days have dawned for the mind's eye,
and this too is a kind of advance notice of death. Let mornings
subside, then; the Fate begs Time to revive an evening from her
childhood.

Earliest dawn in this poem is a time of day without colors.
Evening, on the other hand, is drenched in rose, emerald, and purple.
Likewise, the statue of marble that is her present body so alienated
from.the soul is pale and cold, bloodless. But memory can inflame,
color, and make the blood rise by bringing in other times of day,
other times of life. Lines 190-203 are an intensely realized emotional
exhortation and command to memory, and the result is so successful as to

produce a vertigo in the Young Fate. It is here that the real voyage

71
into the Self begins, for the Fate will for a time not be conscious of
anything other than the memory that she relives, and here too that the
real obscurity of the poem begins, for the YOung Fate now undergoes a
series of metamorphoses, transformed by imagery into a tree, a status,
a rose, a cloud. Things happen here which could only happen in a poem.
And these metamorphoses from one image to another are the poetic
equivalent of modulation in music. Valery had said:
La Jeune Pargue fut une recherche littoralement indefinie, de ce
EETon pouEFait tenter enlgoésie qui analogue a ce qu'on nomme
modulation“ en.musique.
A handbook on music defines "modulate" as "to change from one key to
another in the course of a composition--such a change being accomplished
by 'continuous' musical means (i.e., not simply by starting afresh in
another key) and.baving a definite validity in the structural organi-
zation of the music."19 The idea of modulation helps to clarify some
of the difficulties as a deliberate attempt to change from one "key” to
another, the equivalent of keys in.poetry being perhaps various emotional
pitches or planes, involving different structures of imagery. One more
quotation on the subject of Valery's obscurity, and which also pertains
to the passage on the Springtime at which we have now arrived:
Quant'! l'obscurité: mon cher ami, comment n'y serait-elle pas?--
Vous avez parfaitement vu que ce n'était pas l'obscurité'mallarméenne.
Cells-ci tient‘i un certain systEme. La mienne results do
l'impuissance de l'auteur. -- Le sujet vague de l'oeuvre est la
Conscience de sci-meme; la Consciousness de Poe, si l'on veut.

Je 1e disais assez nettement dans des fragments que j'ai’supprimes,
faute de savoir les fairs... Trap difficile: les vers etaient

 

18Paul Vale/ry, ”Fragment desMe’moires d'un Po‘eme," Oeuvres I, p. 1473.

19 Arthur Jacobs, A New Dictionary of Music, (Chicago: Aldine
Publishing com, 1961), p. 243'

72

impossibles, secs, cassants comme des squelettes, ou plats et sans

r°m53?;a meme ete'force, pour attendrir un.peu 1e poems, d'y

introduire des morceaux non revus et faits aprES coup. Tout ce

qui est sexuel est surajoute. Tel, ls passage central sugole

Printemps qui semble maintenant d'importance essentielle.

Enclosed in quotation marks at the beginning of the ninth move-

ment of L§;Jeunegfiargue is a couplet with the speaker explained (in a
fashion) in the next line. There is no preparation in the preceding
lines for this strange speech by some stone being who is not explained
either, except as it recalls the lgit mgtif of the marble status which
appears from time to time (s. g., in line 159). The lines in question
follow:

I
"QUE DANS LE CIEL PLACES, MES IEUX.TRACENT MON TEMPLE!
ET QUE SUR MOI REPOSE UN AUTEL SANS EXEMPLE!"

Criaient de tout mon corps la pierre et la paleur...
(Oeuvres I, 102)

I find no explanation for this outcry in La Jeune Paggue itself, but
it can be explained as an echo from another poem of Valély's, the ”Air
de Semiramis" from glbum do Vers Agciens, which is of course the volume
he was editing when he began writing La Jeune Pgrgug. The "Air de
56miramis" begins with the coming of the dawn, the first rays falling
on an eye which sleeps ”Sur la marbre absolu" (once again, the status
which is a sleeping body). In strOphes 2-6 the Dawn speaks, whipping up
Semiramis into herself in such terms:

"Exists! ... Sois enfin toi-msme! ...

Et debarrasse-toi d'un déeordre de drames
Qu'engendrent sur ton lit les monstres de ton sang!

(Oeuvres I, 94)

20Lettres'E Quelgues-uns, p. 124.

73

86miramis, queen of Babylon, rises and mounts the tower which she
herself has commanded. From this vantage she surveys her empire, the
bustle and noise of the workers who are constructing new temples for her.
Semiramis had the cruel custom of dispatching her lovers, as is
depicted in Valery's poetic drama, Semiramis, and in the "Air de
Semiramis” she reflects:

Mes plus doux.souvenirs batissent des tombeaux!

Qu'ils sont douxda mon coeur les temples qu'il enfante, ...
(Chuvres I, 9"")

It is difficult to prove that lines 209-210 of La Jeune Pgrgue are an
echo from the "Air de Semiramis," since there are no two specific lines
in the latter poem that conform very closelyt (Lines from the poetic
drama Séhiramds come even closer.) Nevertheless I submit that these
lines are spoken by the persona of‘Semiramis, since as the Fate revived
her own memories so vividly Valery's poetic memories also came to the
surface. Once this line of inquiry, echoes from Album.de Vers Anciens,
is begun, other echoes become noticeable, such as in lines 216-217 of
La Jeune Parque.

La mort vsut reSpirer cette rose sans rix

Dont” la douceur imports 3 sa fin tenebreuss!

(Oeuvres I, 102)
Recalling that the memory called into being by the Fate was an evening,
consider the following lines from."Profusion du Soir, Poems abandonne;”
O Soir, tu viens epandre un delice tranquille,

Horizon des sommeils, stupeur des coeurs pieux,

Persuasive approche, insidieux reptile,

Et rose que reapire un mortsl immobile

Dont l'oeil dore's'engage aux promesses des cieux!

(Oeuvres I, 86)

Again, in lines 185-186, of La Jeune Parque, the Fate has said:

Osera-t-il, le Temps, de mes diverses tombes,
Ressusciter un soir favori des colombes, ...(Oeuvres I, 101)

74
echoing even more closely the first line of "Episode"--"Un soir
favorise de colombes sublimes, ..." (quvzgg’l, 83).

What does it prove? Was Valery plagiarizing himself, did he
run out of inspiration, or fall in love with the sound of his own
words? It seems to me that in writing _I_g Jeune Parggie Valery has
waked.himself up from a long night's sleep gg g pggt. Now clearly
Vale/ry had not been intellectually asleep, because some of his most
important works date from the period of silence, e. g., "L'Introduction

‘a la Methods de Leonard de Vinci," and La Sqiree avech. Teste. He
can be said only to have put his poetic faculties to sleep. New
Valery is known to have said that he valued.La Jeune Parque less for
what it finally turned out to be as a product or artifact than for what
it had.taught him about himself. Here is a more general statement
dating from later in his life:
To produit est, sans doute, la chose qui se conserve, et qui a
on qui doit avoir un sens par soi- me, et une existence inde-
pendants; mais les actes dont il procede, en tant qu'ils reagissent
sur leur auteur, ferment en lui un autre produit qui e3} un homme
plus habile et plus possesseur de son domains-memoirs.
This memory-domain of the poet is his interior self, peopled, on the
poetic level, by his own creations and thoughts of the past. Probably
a neweborn baby does not reflect; there are no memories, and no accumu-
lated contents of the psyche. But the older a person grows, the more
experiences he collects, and.the fuller the mind becomes. Now for a
poet, or an ex-poet, the memories would include these psychic experiences
that were the poems he had created. And thus does Valery the poet enter
himself into his own poem. More will be said on this subject when the
end.of the poem is reached.

 

21Paul‘VaI5ry, "Calepin d'un Pdete," Oeuvres I, p. 1450.

75

For now, though, the Fate in the form of an overbloomed rose
has just been saved from her own death-wish, the reverse image of her
will to live, by the unexpected appearance of the Springtime. A thaw
occurs--frost gives up its "last diamonds,“ and Spring bursts apen
sealed fountains. The trees have burst into leaf, and their breeze-tossed
canopies are themselves a floating forest. This springtime is in-
eluctable, violent, undeniably life-affirming, and yet still is there
not the presence of death,

Un fleuve tendre, 3 mort, et caché'sous les herbes?
(Oeuvres I, 103)

was this, then, the serpent of the Opening? The Fate had dreamed of
her own mortality, the knowledge of death.which was there all the time
waiting to be invented, waiting to be discovered, both death and the
knowledge of death, the same thing really, since this fore-knowledge is
all we ever have of death. If to know of death is to fear it, then fear

is a death. The Young Fate is terrified at what she has invented and

discovered:

Oh! parmi mes chsveux peso d'un poids d'abeills
Plongeant toujours plus ivre au,baiser’plus aigu,
Ie point delicieux de mon jour ambigu...
Lumierex... Ou toi, la mort! Mais le plus prompt

me prenne!... (Oeuvres I, 103)

Next comes the inevitable question: Why, then, do I exist?

les dieume'ont-ils forme’ce maternal contour
Et ces bords sinueux, ces plis et ces c lices,
Pour que la vie embrasse un autel de delices
Ou malant l'Sms etrange aux eternels retours,
La semence, le lait, le sang coulent toujours?

(Oeuvres I, 103-4)
recalling the epigraph to La Jeune Parque, a quotation from Corneille.

Le Ciel a-t-il forme’cet amas de merveilles
Pour la demeure d'un serpent? (Oeuvres I, 96)

As in Eden, love and death and knowledge all have come together.

76
Horrified, she rejects the notion of making her body "an altar of
delights." On the other side are phantoms, her night visions, who
beckon her to give them light and life. This too she refuses. This
is the climax of the poem, where the Young Fate is pulled and nearly
torn between conflicting possibilities--life and death, light and
darkness, the life of the body and the life of dreams or the imagination.
Of the last alternative she rejects both.
Je n'accorderai pas la lumiere‘i des ombres,
Je garde loin de vous, l'esprit sinistre et clair...

(Oeuvres I, 104)
At last the tear appears. Slowly it seeps up from the labyrinth
of the soul, from some fearful grotto in her innermost depths. The
Fate iggwounded--now--and the tear is in some measure a cure or at least
a salve. But still at the heart of it all is an unanswerable question:
Why? 'Why wound, sobs, dark trials? There is no answer. The tear
itself is not an answer, coming as it does from the body, and above all
inadequate for the great spiritual progress made by the Fate in her
meditations. If the mind creates the sense of jeOpardy, it is the
body that will bear the signs or symptoms of impending death. ‘Where will
it turn, this body, still lost in black night? Twice now the body will
implore earth to be its ally, in lines 304 and 324:

Terre trouble, et melée'i l'algue, ports-moi!
(Oeuvres I, 105)

Guided only by the feel of solid ground beneath her feet she comes to the
edge of the sea. The sea-sounds are like a noise from hell. She is
near to suicide, and deepairing over her isolation. If anyone finds her
footprints, she wonders, will he stOp for long from.thinking only of
himself? In realizing that others might exist, she understands loneli-

ness. She has knowledge not, but nothing else--except a contact

77
between herself and solid earth. The Young Fate has made much of her
circumstance; the price she has paid is happiness. Thus, at the limit
of knowledge, the farthest reach of self-knowledge, is a question:
what is the meaning of it all? Why live, for what purpose suffer? For
the poet—creator, this question is: what are the fruits of this labor,
and are they worth the trouble? For Valery the answer once was no;
now he has shown himself that perhaps the affirmative is the better
answer.

Finally in the eleventh movement, the Fate returns to the scene
and the time of the Opening lines. There is still a body waiting for
dawn. Nothing has happened, really. Nothing, that is, except the
terrible revelatory journey into the self. Nothing has changed; every-
thing has changed. The sun rises, and it is still a smile on the world,
but an ironic smile. Now the world revealed by the sunrise is a prison
"where the ring of the only horizon will float." It will be a dawn
like any other dawn; the YOung Fate will be "crimson with new desires."

Tout va done accom lir son acts solennel

De toujours repara tre incomparable et chaste.

Et de restituer la tombs enthousiaste

Au gracieux stat du rire universel. (Oeuvres I, 106)
How sad and weary is the enlightened spirit, and yet how eager is the
young body to reSpond to the natural world.

The twelfth movement, consisting of lines 348—360, is a kind of
hymn to the islands which become visible as the sun goes up over the sea.
Her attitude of ambiguity is shown by the attractive imagery, but with
the jolting description of their fathomed reality. "Ever-virginal
mothers," she calls the islands, "nothing equals the flowers you place
in the air. But in the depths, your feet are icy!" Valery commented,

"This passage is just to express lassitude, the certainty of seeing

78
again that which one knows too well one will see again. "22 In the
same letter he also stresses the importance of the use of future tense
in this twelfth movement.

In Alain's view, the line "_S_a_l_1_lt! W; p_a_r_ 3.5 £332 9.1".

Is sel, ..." (Oeuvres I, 106) is one of Vale’ry's "miracles of rhyme.“
"Here we can see," he says "like everywhere in this poem,that prose has
no way of discovering, in two little words, the earth and the sea."23
This comment may be something of an over-reaction to a section which is
in m Opinion not well integrated into the poem, but it is an apt way
of saying what I said above, that things happen in Lg, Jeune Parque that
could only happen in a poem.

In part 13 there is a second look at the events of part 10, the
climactic movement when the Fate seemed to be so near to death. The
bochr was a structure, a stretched-out naked torso, where the soul nearly
fainting with its own memory, hOpefully listened to the heart beating at
its walls. But she is mature enough to mock herself, thus:

Attente vaine, et vaine... Elle ne peut mourir
Qui devant son miroir, pleure pour s'attendrir.
(Oeuvres I, 107)
Death, then, is seen in its prOper perspective, as "a secret child,
already formed,” like an embryo.
The fourteenth section was Vale’ry's favorite.
Fairs un chant pmlonge’, sans action, rien que l'incoherencs
interns aux confins du sommeil; y mettre autant d'intellectualiteI
que j'ai pu le fairs et que la poesis en peut admettrefisTu—s ses

voiles; sauver l'abstraction prochaine par la musique, ou la racheter
par des visions, Voila ce que j'ai fini par me resoudre} essayer,

 

 

22Lettrss‘a Quelgues-uns, p. 124.
23min. 22. 9.1.12.» p- 112.

79
et je ne l'ai pas toujours trouve’facile... Il y'a de graves
lacunes dans l'exposition et la composition. Je n'ai pu me tirer
de l'affaire qu'en travaillant par morceaux. Cela se sent, at j'en
sais trOp sur mes defaites! De ces morceaux, 11 en est un qui,

seul, reprehente pour moi le pdeme que j'aurais voulu fairs. Ce
sont les quelques vers qui commencent ainsi: O n'aurait-il

fallu, folle, etc.

In part 13 the Fate had arranged herself like a sacrifice and
awaited death. Likewise in part 11, the dawn brought about "Oh rude
awakening of an unfinished victim." Here in.part 14 there are two
victims, one bleeding to death, paleness gradually overcoming the
purple of blooded flesh, the other going up in smoke, ”promised to the
happy clouds." The first victim represents bodily death, the second
represents the fate of the soul, or spiritual self after death. Physical
death is the real death. The soul does not die, but rises from.the
body to merge with the universe.

L'Qtre immense me gagne, et de mon coeur divin

L'encens qui brfile expire une forms sans fin...

(Oeuvres I, 108)

But suddenly she cries, “NO!" Don't think of this suicide, this
self-imposed slow death. The body is a "precious vessel" which a
yearning alone could not break. For there was a greater power whose
interest it was that the Young Fate should live.

--Mais qui l'emporterait sur la puissance meme,

AVide par tes yeux de contempler le jour
Qui s'est choisi ton front pour lumineuss tour?

(Oeuvres I, 108)

But even if death cannot be chosen, the Young Fate still has enough
dominion over herself and her world to ask--at least--why she among all
the dead was the one to be tossed up upon the shore of life? She now

sees her present self as equal to one of those phantoms that she

 

zgggttres‘a Quelgues-uns, p. 124—5.

8O
perceived in part 10, lines 258-278. If this poem has a theme that
can be briefly stated, it is in the following lines from part 14:

Souviens-toi de toi-meme, et retire a l'instinct
Ce fil (ton doigt dore le diSpute au matin),

Ce fil, dont la finesse aveuglément suivie

Jusque sur cette rive a ramenérta vie...

Sois subtile... cruelle... ou plus subtilet... Mensl...

kais sachet... (Oeuvres I, 108)
Any means is justified by the goal of self-knowledge. Trick yourself,
lie to yourself, be cruel or subtle. But--at long last--know yourself.
And here, as the Fate has come full circle, the serpent re-enters the
picture, as temptation, stimulus, and motive, man's fatal weakness and
immortal strength.

One truth the Young Fate now admits--it was her body that
betrayed.her. Furthermore, she was neither seduced nor raped, as she
had indignantly assumed in the beginning. The Swaanod of line #29
is probably Leda's attacker who engendered so much myth. But it was not
he who appeared to the Young Fate. She takes all the resPonsibility
onto herself; in her divided self, one half was taken advantage of by
the other half. Unfortunately, her rational self had found it necessary
to sleep, just as a bird must sometimes rest from its flight. Jacques
Charpier calls it a ”coup d'etat." He asks, 3A la faveur de quelle
inattention de la soeur rationnelle ce coup d'etat subjectif a-t-il

25

pu avoir lieu?" But she pardons her body, and as she gives in she

sinks down once again into the pleasures of sleep.

Je me remets entiere au bonheur de descendre,’
Ouverte aux noirs temoins, les bras supplicies,
Entre des mots sans fin, sans moi, balbuties.
(oeuvres I g 109)

 

25Jacques Charpier,.Essai sur Paul.Va1e&y, Poetes d'aujourd'hui
51, (Paris: Pierre Seghers, 1955), 127.

81
Note that she is now entire; note too that she now enters into a realm
where she is among words, endlessly babbled, at last independent of her.
The final lines are hypnotic, the alexandrine of line 460 seemingly
endless.

Dors toujours! Descends, dors toujours! Descends, dors, dors!
(Oeuvres I, 109)

This is the end of the Young Fate as dramatis personae, but the poem
continues.

The traditional analysis of the final movement is as another
stage of the Young Fate's alternation between sleep and awakening. For
example, Charpier says, "Plongée dans ce desordre tiede, la Parque ne
s'aneantit pas. Elle continue d'y lutter pour en obtenir encore plus
de conscience.n26 Alain comes somewhat closer to my view of things with
the following explanation. "Et puis l'éveil (465-090) que l'on.peut
dire double eveil, car mon.songe ici est le songe du songe."27 In my
Opinion, these next lines are not Spoken in the person of the YOung Fate
at all, nor any of her selves, but of a being that subsumes all that has
gone before; I mean the person of the poet-creator, the awakening Valery.
The Opening lines of part 16 are so crucial for this interpretation
that I shall quote them at length.

Delicieux linceuls mon desordre tiede,

Couche ou je me repands, m'interroge et me cede,
j 'allai de mon coeur noyer les battements,

Presque tombeau vivant dans mes agpartements,

Qui re5pire, et sur qui l'eternit s 'ecoute,

Place pleine de moi qui m!avez prise toute,

0 forme de ma forms et la creuse chaleur

Que mes retours sur moi reconnaissaient la leur,

Voici que tant d'orgueil qui dans vos plis se plonge
A la fin se melange aux bassesses du songel(0euvres I, 109-110)

 

26Charpier, ibid., p. 128.

27La Jeune Parque commentée_par Alain, p. 130.

82
He is talking about his own bed, his own sheets, in his own flat.
Proudly and in possession of himself he had allowed himself to sleep,
only to find himself possessed by lowly dreams. Furthermore, that
"Lasse femme absolue, et les yeux dans ses larmes" is a real woman,
perhaps even his actual wife. It was she who cried out by his side
and woke him in the night. He calls her an "idol"; that night in 1892,
it will be recalled, Valery had resolved to give up women along with
poetry. He called them.both "idols"--objects of false worship.

Alain called Valery the Dante of modern times.28 He was
referring to the way in which Valery advanced into the nether regions,
but the comparison is a good one in other ways as well, for just as in
Dante's case his Beatrice and his poetic inspiration somehow merged,
for Valery the notion of women and.poetry as iggls became fused in the
rejection of them. They re-surface still merged twenty years later as
Valery realizes that just as a woman was there through the night, so
was the poetry. When.he says

Arche toute secrEte, et pourtant si prochaine,
Mes transports, cette nuit, pensaient briser ta chaine;...
(Oeuvres I, 110)

'whom.or what is he addressing? The bed, the wife, the absence from
poetry itself? He thought to cast off in a secret ark and break its
chains, but

Je n'ai fait que’bercer de lamentations
Tes flancs charges de jour et de creations! (Oeuvres I, 110)

Valéfiw'had.thought to make an ark in which he could renounce the old
*worid.and perhaps find a new clean world. But if after all he came

lmack to the same world, he was a bigger and a deeper man for having

 

281mm , p. 122.

83
attempted the voyage.

I am aware that to enter the poet-creator directly into the
poem is not a "safe“ interpretation, and indeed the closing lines are
once again Spoken in the person of the Young Fate. Nonetheless in lines
065—080 a place is composed which is found nowhere else in the poem, and
since the entire poem is an allegory, or in the words of Valery an
"autobiography in form,“ then I find it quite plausible for such an
island of firmament to surface out of the sea of meaning.

Valery would not have wanted to pretend that the composition of
a poem could take place in a moment between darkness and dawn, and thus
as the sun rises the Young Fate will come into being again, and have her
second birth, as a literary creation. The poem ends at the sea, with the
YOung Fate standing with.her face in the wind. Now there is no fear of
the sea comparable to that in lines 310-321. There the sea was a
fearful darkness, howling with the noises of wrecked dreams and lost
fates. Now the Young Fate is confident that she will be a survivor;
she will return from the chaos of imagination, a lucky figure to come
into full existence, thanks to her creator. She is grateful and full
of self-love, a favored daughter.

At the end of LéiJeune nggue the reader is irresistibly thrown
back to the beginning, always with the feeling that one more reading
'would.produce a better understanding. and.perhaps this is true; one
more reading would always yield something in a poem of such size and
complexity. But of what is this an indication? Does the feeling of
imperfect comprehension mean that the reader has failed or that the poet
has failed? Valery held that obscurity came from a gap in mentality
between the poet and his audience. But there is an argmient on the

81:
other side. Here is aldmund Wilson on Vale/ry's obscurity:
The things that happen in ”La Jeune Parque" and in Paul Vale/ry's
other mythological monolOgues--the Narcissus, the Pythoness and the
Serpent of the rich period of poetic activity which followed
immediately upon "La Jeune Parque"-—are never, on the one hand,
quite imaginable as incidents which are actually taking place and
never, on the other hand, quite reducible merely to thoughts in the
poet's mind. The picture never quite emerges; the idea is never
formulated quite. And for all the magnificences of sound, color, and
suggestion which we find in these poems stanza by stanza, it seems
to me that they are unsatisfactory because they are somehow not
assimilable as wholes.29
A provocative criticism, because of the more than grain of truth in
it. I shall not defend.L§_Jeune Parque by saying that Valery intended
to make a poem which was not assimilable as a whole. This would be no
excuse if it turned out to be axiomatic that assimilability is a
necessary virtue in art objects. But such is not the case: there are
mam? acknowledged classics of world literature which are really too
complex for immediate total understanding. For example, Hamlet, Kafka's
The Castle, and perhaps Joyce's glysses, are among the works which do
not yield to intuition alone.
0n the other hand, I object to Valery's defense in ELeLPhilosOphe
et la 'Jeune Parque',” the poem which he published in conjunction with

Alain's commentary on .19.; Jenna Pamue.

Tentez d'aimer cette jeune rebelle :
"Je suis noire, mais je suis belle"
Comme chante l'Amante, au Cantique du Roi,
Et si 3' inspire quelque effroi,
Poeme que je suis, a qui ne peut me suivre,
Quoi de plus prompt que de fermer un livre?
(Chums I, 165)

This is no good, for it could be said equally well about a poem of no

value .

 

29Edmnnd Wilson, Axel's Castle, A Study in the Imaginative
Literature of 1870-1930,(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, Scribner
Library edition, 1959), p- 71-

85
I prefer Valery's remarks in his ”Premiere legon du Cours de
P05tique," as he attempts to define the category known as "works of art."
hais si l'on porte le regard sur les effets des oeuvres faites,
on decouvre chez certaines une particularite qui les groupe et qii
les oppose‘l toutes les autres. Tel ouvrage que nous avons mis
part se divise en parties entieres, dont chacune comporte de quoi
créer un desir et de quoi le satisfaire. L'oeuvre nous offre dans
chacune de ses parties, a la fois l'aliment et l'excitant. Elle
eveille continuellement en nous une soif et une source. En,récompense
de ce que nous lui cédons de notre liberte, elle nous donne l'amour
de la captivité'qu'elle nous i ose et le sentiment d'une,sorte ‘~
delicieuse de connaissance i diate; et'tout ceci, en depensant, a
notre grand contentement, notre prOpre energie qu'elle evoque sur
un mode si conforme au rendement le plus favorable de nos ressources
organiques, que la sensation de l'effort se fait elle-méme
enivrante, et que nous nous sentone possesseurs pour‘etre magnifique-
ment possédes. (Oeuvres I, 1355)
A work of art has the prOperty of furnishing both the appetite and the
food. Unlike any food, it nourishes without ever surfeiting. It raises
a question and gives an answer, but the sort of answer which enhances
rather than dismissing the question. For its audience it produces a
state of creative dissatisfaction.
Now that certain tendencies of Valery have been discussed, it
is time to return to ”Le Vin Perdu,” the short poem offered in Chapter
One as an example of a poem which seemed clearly to relate to creativity
but which did not fit the pattern of the creative process. The outline
of the poem is simple. He (the 'je' of the poem) threw a little wine
into the Ocean one day. Why did he do it, he asked himself? The wine
made a pink smoke in the water, then disappeared. It was lost. But he
saw leaping in the air profound figures. Obviously the poem makes a
fanciful analogical use of the effect of alcohol on the human mind. A
small amount is drunk; the thoughts that ensue may be extremely

imaginative--but always shadowy. Thus when the wine is drOpped into the
water, the great ocean is intoxicated and releases fantasies.

86

In the light of our knowledge of Valery's habit of subsuming all
the world into himself, of taking the data of himself as the available
universe, and furthermore remembering that Valery liked to perform a
kind of experiment on himself, using the problems he gave to his mind to
observe his psychic machinations, we may now obtain a further understanding
of the poem. It is sometimes possible to get the impression that Valery
wrote poetry much as a psychologist gives a box and a stick to a
caged chimpanzee, just to see how he will get at the bananas. This is
the situation in "Le Vin Perdu," with the intoxicated ocean representing
the sea of memories and emotions and psychic phenomena that is the mind
of the poet. Stimulate that nythopoetic mind, and the stimulus may at
first seem to disappear, to blend completely with the contents. But
unexpected results can spring from this wine of the spirit; the "figures"
that rise from'the sea seem.incommensurate with the simple cause. These
figures are profound and subject to interpretation. Thus begins the
creative process.

It would be possible now to say that this poemldoes after all fit
the basic pattern of creativity in its earliest stages. From.the
birth-deathprebirth scheme, only the stage of birth has been used for the
poem. But it would not have helped our understanding of Valery to
accept this from.the beginning.

* * It It It It It It It It It *

In conclusion, what was poetry to Paul Valery? He liked to
understand the word ”poietique" in its etymological sense of making,
constructing. For Valéry a poem was a structure in which sound made

:its demands on sense; as the poet made the poem he discovered what
its meaning was to be. In addition, the poem was not only an end in

87
itself, but also a means to self-discovery. And discovery of the
self, as we have seen, was Valery's major pre-occupation.

Thus, out of Valery's understanding and experience of the
creative process, we have seen certain patterns develOped as an
expression of the process. He invented a fiction, M. Teste, to express
an image of an impossible man.who lived almost entirely in a realm of
thought, in whom the body had almost disappeared as an object of
concern. Further, he adapted a historical personage, LeonardONda
Vinci, as an object of inquiry; but his research, following the
Valeryan rule, served mainly to explain himself. And finally, Lg
Jeune Parque, his longest poem, is a re-creation of an actual journey
into an interior self, and a record of the findings that were made.
Interestingly enough, the "plot" of La Jeune Eaggue evinces a clear
enactment of the birthpdeath-rebirth scheme presented in Chapter I, as
the young Fate awakens from a sleep, deliberately allows herself to
wander in the dark regions of her unconscious memories, and then once
again emerges as a second dawn'breaks out over the world. La Jeune
232332 is also the most elaborate of Valery's experiments on himself;
as he wrote, and observed himself in the process of creating, his
r93ponses entered into the poem. Thus are poem, poet, and process

'woven into whole cloth.

CHAPTER IV

"SUNDAY l-DRNING" AND "L3 oil-MERE mam":

THE MOTHER OF BJAUTY

Both Valery and Stevens have been shown to be poets with
distinctive attitudes toward and approaches to poetry. In Stevens'
case, the poetic life was a life of endless questing for encounters
between imagination and reality, or between the poet and his world.

For Valéry, poetry grows out of the life-long endeavor for maximum
knowledge of self. The aim of Chapters Two and Three was to present
the poets' views of the creative process as a whole, and to present
them separately. In this chapter and the following chapters, poems
will be thematically compared on the basis of certain aSpects of the
poetic process.

Clearly, to say that Stevens and Valery have "attitudes toward,"
”approaches to," and "views of” poetry and the creative process is but
a manner of speaking. The relationship between the poet and his poems
is perhaps expressible only metaphorically and poetically, for his
version of poesis is exemplified in and contained in his poetry in a
nonediscursive, nonppr0positional way. It is a commonplace to say that
a work of art is the child of its creator; this is true if we think of

the poet as both father and mother of the poem. The poet contains all

the genetic elements of his canon; it should be possible to subsume

88

89
all his poems under one organic law or principle. It then follows,
that although each individual poem does not necessarily exemplify the
whole of the poet's nature, any poem should relate in some integral way
to the whole of the poet's work.

The poems discussed in this chapter are, primarily, "Sunday
horning" and "Le Cimetiere marin." Neither poem is concerned, on its
surface, with the creative process. "Sunday Morning" is a meditative
poem in which a woman expresses a craving for some permanence in a world
of change and death. "Le CimetiEre marin," also a meditative poem,
deals with the same themes from quite a different attitude. Here the
persona of the poem is transfixed by the static state of the scene before
him. He too thinks of death, but death's finality and lack of change is
what he sees. Even though the two poems are quite different, each
relates to its creator in the same way. For Stevens would attempt to
solve the womanfis problem in his habitual way of fusing the forces of
imagination and reality, in "Sunday morning" represented by a union of
blood and sky. Likewise, Valery's pervasive habit of mind, an excursion
into himself and the final re-entry into the world, informs ”Le
CimetiEre marin." 'within himself Valery finds a mental anguish that he
compares to the worms that feed on the dead. The end is a burst of
energy, as Valery chooses the party of life, and the waves break.

Significantly, both of these poems solve their separate problems
in themes of death and.tine in,a discharge of poetic energy. For Stevens,
the union of blood and sky results in an "orgiastic chant"--a song, or
a poem. For Valery, the choice of the active life and the casting

away of contemplation represents an accommodation with the world of men.

The result is the poem itself.

90

Thus, though we shall not see enactments of the entire process
of creation in this chapter, there is a fragment of poesis presented in
each of the two poems--a motive for creation. For Stevens, poetry,
considered as symbol of the entire aesthetic realm, is engendered by a
desire for immortality. In Valery, poetry is engendered by the poet's
rejection of the consolations both of death and of philosophy.

In."Sunday morning" an entire ideology is evolved out of an
idle woman's dayedream. Although she is of the Christian era, she is
not in church this day. But her disbelief is only a veneer, for when
she dozes the real contents of her mind are revealed. "Complacencies
of the peignoir" (9g, 66)? This is surface. The prOperties of this
stage setting--oranges, a green bird woven on a rug, sunshine--are
transformed into wilder things, just as the lady's complacency becomes
a basic metaphysical disturbance. In her unease as quasi-atheist in a
theist society, the ”pungent oranges and bright green‘wings” of her
sunny comfort become a ritual funeral procession in her dream. Spirit-like,
she passes over water to Palestine, the site of catastrophe, sacrifice,
and sepulchre.

But she is not given over completely, for resentment appears
in Stanza II. "Why should she give her bounty to the dead?” she
demands (CP, 67). In Stanza I religion appeared only after she had
loosened her grip on day and rationality. Can't there be a god of day,
life, and waking thought? Perhaps it might have been necessary in
previous ages for men to hold thoughts of heaven, 1. e., some existence
after death, most dear. But she wants to cherish the things of the

earth.

Divinity must live within herself: (9g, 67)

91
This is stated firmly--a conclusion, or demand. Joseph N. Riddel calls
this "a latter-day Emersonianism without its transcendental rationale.
It is at once a discovery and a premise . . . ,”1 reflecting the ambi-
guity of the auxiliary “must." But a further distinction can be made
between the existence of this divinity and.the Emersonian one. Emerson's
over-soul is something of which man is a part, and.which has an
existence not exactly independent of man, but larger than man. Looking
at the line quoted above out of its context, it does match Emerson's
"within man is the soul of the whole,"2 but the succeeding lines of
"Sunday morning” show that the difference is quite basic, a matter of
the immanent structure of the thought. For Stevens the divine thing is
the encounter between the woman and the world, the emotions that she
feels, be they

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; . . . (92, 67)

Emerson's kind of divinity involves successive divisions in which any
part equals that of which it is part and that which is a part of it, in
the same way as an atom and a solar system are models for each other.
Whereas in Stevens divinity, creativity, all important things are
analogical to the spark that flashes when a flint strikes hard steel.
Elsewhere Riddel discusses Stevens' essay "Effects of Analogy," bringing
in the name of.Emerson where Stevens did not. In regard to Stevens'
theory of poetry, Riddel concludes, ". . . repudiating the romantic,

it repudiates the transcendental and makes poetry central in the struggle

 

1Joseph N. Riddel, The Clairvoyant Ego; The Poetry and Poetics
of Wallace Stevens, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,

1965;, p. 810

2Ralph‘W'aldo‘Emerson, "The Over-Soul,” in The Selected Writings
of Ralph'Waldo Emerson, ed. by Brooks Atkinson, The Modern Library College
editions, (New York: The modern Library, 1940, 1950), p. 262.

92
of the self to know its world."3

To continue, then, the woman's natural penchant is to cherish
things of the earth, and to find divinity in her pleasures and pains,
these-~especially the painful moments--being concrete rebuttals of
solipsism. Her meditation on man's various religions continues.

Her objection to Christ, a human god, was that his religion
exalted death and sacrifice (the crucifixion). Jove, on the other
hand, was inhuman (and he is always referred to in the past tense),
never suckled by any mother. Thus the peOple who were his worshippers
felt entirely on another plane from their divinity. Jove was a king,
and they were hinds (peasants).

He moved among us, as a muttering king,

Magnificent, would move among his hinds,

Until our blood, commingling, virginal,

With heaven, brought such requital to desire

The very hinds discerned it, in a star. (9g, 67-68)
These lines from stanza 3 broach a theme which is repeated to be
resolved in stanza 7. This theme is the union of blood with heaven,
or sky, or the Spiritual plane. Blood is human, the body's food, warmth,
and coloring. (Elsewhere Stevens speaks of “an abstraction blooded.")
In our blood there is a religious impulse. modern man may think he can
be an atheist with impunity, but the atheist is denying a part of his
nature. Indeed, a determined atheist like Stevens is really acting
out of his religious impulse, the desire to unite his humanity with
divinity. He can subsume god into himself; thus the desired.union will
be complete. In the time of belief in Jove, the hinds' desire to

possess god's spirit sometimes became transformed into god's desire

 

3Riddel, The Clairvoyant Eye, p. 30-31.

93

to possess a mortal—-Jove eSpecially was a rapist of women. Some-
times the victims are changed into stars, as in Ovid's hetamorphoses,
II, "Jove in Arcadyu" hen.saw the stars, sensed something divine about
them, and their yearning for a union with something permanent caused
them to invent myths which project their blood (heredity, race) into
the heavens. Jesus was a human baby whose birth was acknowledged by
the heavens by the sign of a great star shining on the town of Bethlehem.
This tOO‘WaS a "requital to desire,” man's desire to be united with
heaven, that ”dividing and indifferent blue.” But what if there is
no god, either of the Christian half-human type, or the ancient
droit_de seigneur type. How then shall we find our atonement?

Shall our blood fail? 0r shall it come to be

The blood of paradise? And shall the earth

Seem all of paradise that we shall know? (9g, 68)
Here is an answer: say man is god, say earth is paradise. Our blood
ig the spirit of god. This is Stevens' radical humanism, and as an
answer to the religious perplexity it does suffice for many peOple.
But the woman of the poem is not satisfied: she is repelled by the
image of death, and this is of course the hard cold question which all
atheists must face, a crux for existentialism. She is content with
natural things; no paradise could be better than.the fields of the
earth. But these things fade; the birds have their seasonal migration,
and the fields are destructible.

Stanzas IV and V deal with this question of impermanence. The
point of stanza IV is that these fading and perishable things leave
tracings that last as none of the promised eternities have lasted. No
happy hunting ground, or “golden underground," not the ”heaven's hill”

Of Christianity has ever endures "as April's green endures" (92, 68).

9h
The woman's remembrance, her desire, the consummation she gets from the
swallow's wings, above all the recurrent cycles like Spring, are the kind
of thing that lasts. This is, of course, a hedonist's paradise, and
the gggpg diam theme does enter into the phiIOSOphy. It is death that
causes the maidens to "stray impassioned in the littering leaves"
(93, 69). Their dread of death seduces them, urges them to the
experience of love, one of life's beauties. And so the talismanic
phrase:

Death is the mother of beauty. (92, 68)
repeated in stanzas V and VI. ”Without death there would be no fulfill-
ment. If, as in stanza VI, there should be a world in which the trees
were always ripe and full and never changed, then many of life's wonder-
ful moments would never occur.

Alas, that they should wear our colors there,

The silken weavings of our afternoons,

And.pick the strings of our insipid lutes! (CP, 69)
This acceptance of renunciation goes beyond hedonism. A pure
pleasure-seeker, even though driven by fear of death, tries to forget
death. Stevens remembers always that death will follow, death of the
moment, of the beloved, of the lover, and he accepts.

Stanza VII presents the ritual of Stevens' religion of earth and
day, an orgiastic chant and dance to the sun, now a "savage source"
(CP, 70). Once again the union of blood and sky is introduced, but with
a difference. It is their chant that rises to the sky, and the chant
comes out of the blood.

Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,

Out of their blood, returning to the sky;

And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,

The windy lake wherein their lord delights,

The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward. (QB, 70)

95
It seems to me that it will not be stretching a point to say that in
this resolution of the religious-eschatological problem raised by the
poem the three basic elements hypothesized are formally present: self,
the world, and poetry. The blood, the SW, and the chant. The chant
grows to encompass nature, and delight in nature. In the poem as
first published in 2322 1 magazine, stanza VII was the concluding
stanza, and the poem does have its logic when arranged that way, the
order being I, VIII, Iv, VI, VII.” In the Collected Poems of'wallace
Stevens, "Sunday Morning" is printed in the arrangement as originally
submitted to Harriet Monroe. Thus, there is another stanza which is
a reprisal of the whole poem. The first four lines are a rejection of
the idea of a world of spirits separate from our known world: Jesus'
tomb is a grave, nothing more. Next, our world is an "island solitude"
from which there is no escape; we are trapped, but free. And finally,
a celebration of our natural world, our paradise, the prescribed chant
of stanza VII, with wild birds, wild berries and green mountains being
the outgrowth of the artificial indoor atmosphere of a carpet cockatoo
in the beginning.

This is a brave poem, for from a religious point of view, Stevens'
platform must seem small consolation as an exchange for personal immor-
tality. In the woman's rejection of Jesus there is a certain wistful-
ness, for it is death that she dreads. It requires a larger, stronger
consciousness to persuade her, the abstract narrator of the poem. In
an unpublished dissertation by.Edward Grosvenor Powell, there is a

provocative assumption:

 

“Riddel, The Clairvoygnt Eye, p. 85.

96

The principal subject of Harmonium . . . is nostalgia for the
consolations of traditional religious experience. Since Stevens
is heavily influenced by a tradition having a kind of mystical
experience for its objective while holding views which deny the
possibility of such experience, he is reduced to writing poems which
express the desire for something more than normal human experience,
or to writing poems which generate the illusion of direct
experience as a kind of surrogate mysticism. The poems of
Harmonium.do not really resolve the problem; they simply obscure
its true nature. Only some implicitly mystical doctrine, even

‘ though denied by the solipsism which Stevens derives from his
philOSO§hical assumptions, could have led him to continue writing

poetry.
Although I would quarrel with some of these conclusions, they do lead
to a later statement with which I am in substantive agreement:

The doctrine deveIOped in Harmonium provides room.for few

consolations. The earth is lovely but it perishes, and beyond
it is the bleakness of the universe:

A number of poems deal with the nothingness behind the comforts

of the sun and the cgmforts of the imagination which are made to

parallel each other.
This is true; as I have pointed out before, the rock is always present
underneath.the foliage in Stevens. But this basic uncertainty or
insecurity is not as I see it a flaw; it is part of the truth of the
poems. As for the mysticism, can there be a mystic without god?7
Stevens is persistently an atheist, eSpecially in “Sunday morning.”

Stevens' poetic preoccupation with a union between the imagin-

ation and reality, with poetry as a redeeming act akin to an.§utg'dg‘fg,

does place him in the Romantic tradition. 0n similar grounds, J. Hillis

 

5Edward Grosvenor Powell, "Romantic.Mysticism and the Poetry
of Wallace Stevens," Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University,
19659 P‘ 111‘

6Ibido , p. 950

I 7Similarly, the idea of a "mystique sans Dieu" cr0ps up in
Valery's Teste cycle when.hadame Emilie Teste describes her husband in
those terms. But the priest calls the idea an impossibility.

97
Killer places Stevens in the tradition:
The creation, after the death of the gods, of new fictions,
based on fact and not pretending to be more than fictions, is
the act of poetry. "After one has abandoned a belief in God,
poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption"
(92, 158). In defining poetry as a substitute for religion
Stevens is joining himself to a tradition extending f m the
romantics through Matthew Arnold down to our own day.
Stevens craves union, not with God, but with the world. This would
be mysticism if the world were God, as in transcendentalism or pane
theism. But the world is not God; the world is the worlde-reality.
And beyond the world, there is nothing.

Death and art intermingle again in "Peter Quince at the
Clavier," a poem which is vexatious because its central conclusion,
in lines 1-4 of stanza IV, appears to be self-contradictory.

Beauty is momentary in the mind--

The fitful tracing of a portal;

But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body's beauty lives. (92, 91-92)
It seems illogical, and to say that poetry is not the same as logic
is to beg the questions leaning is meaning, and should be all of a
piece. If the body dies, then how can the flesh be immortal? Perhaps,
then, it is not flesh that is immortal, but beauty. But line 1 says
that beauty is momentary. One re-reads the poem, this time asking a
question, actively stimulated by a problem whose solution comes in a
poem. Surely this is the archetypal aesthetic experience; as the
meaning evolves, as form grows out of chaos, the reader gradually

becomes aware that he is exemplifying the message of the poem. The

subject of the poem is the mode of existence of the aesthetic dimension,

 

. 8.1. Hillis hiller, Poets of Reality; Six Tmntieth-Century
Writers, (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1985;, p. 223-”.

 

98
not Susanna or Peter Quince; they are, respectively, parable and
pretext.

Briefly, Peter Quince is a character in W
M who directs, produces, and perhaps writes a play within a play.
Thus he is a kind of understated fragment of Hamlet. Susanna is the
character from the Apocrypha. Spied upon in her bath, blackmailed and
accused of adultery by two elders, she is cleared when the two elders
give contradictory evidence. (When the elders were taken aside
separately by Daniel, one said Susanna's immoral act had taken place
under a mastic tree, and the other said a liveoak tree. Thus, Susanna's
story was shown to be the truth.) Her virtue in the eyes of men is
restored. Taken by itself, the Apocryphal tale is a contribution to
the law; its meaning is in a clever way of taking evidence, of distin—
guishing where the truth lies when two conflicting statements are given.
The truth will be something that is in harmony with the natural world,
that correSponds to reality. A lie is a fiction that denies what is; in
the world of things.

Peter Quince, playing the clavier, uses Susanna's story to illus-
trate something that he is saying about music. Where is music? The
performers' fingers on the instrument make music; and the sound in his
mind makes music too. The music lies in the relation between the mind and
the sound, between the spirit and a physical event.

Music is feeling, then, not sound: (CP, 90)
The idea of music is extended to include other relations, other feelings,
such as a man's desire for a woman. Susanna is an example: the sight

of her body produced a certain kind of music in the elders, represented

99
by imagery of throbbing bass pizzicati. Susanna also eJqJeriences
her own body, and the music she hears is in the form of intense
melody.9 When the elders try to rape Susanna, the music is cymbals
and horns, crashing and roaring. The aesthetic element lies not in
the mind of the beholder alone, but in the relation between them,
and this leads on to the crucial lines from stanza IV quoted above.
Beauty is immortal because it outlives both the beholder and the
object. The elders are dead now, and Susanna is dead too, but her
beauty is immortal, since it lies in e relation which can outlive its
source and its discoverer. In the twentieth century we read a poem
about beautiful Susanna, immortalized once again in poetry. Her
beauty lived again as the poet discovered the Apocryphel tale, and we
see it too as we experience the poem. Thus in the poem's ultimate
meaning we are not dealing with contradiction, but with paradox.

The body dies; the bow's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green gains,
A wave, internimbly flowing- (£2. 92)

There is no need for religious or msticel doctrine to produce this
kind of poetry. Artistic creation has its own, purely aesthetic

motive e

It It * it It i t I! * It It

Vale’ry celled Le e us an "autobiograpl'w in form," but
he might well have applied the same label to other poems, the dawn
poems, 'L'Aurore" and “\A L'Aurore" for example, and especially to
”he Cinti\ere maria.” Lg ,[eune Eggue is removed from the person of

 

9A1: eutoerotic episode according to Neil D. Isaacs, "The
Autoerotic Euphor in Joyce, Sterne, hwrence, Stevens, and Whitman"

W. XV. 92-106.

Po:
tea
the

and

18!

p'9

100
the poet by the introduction of a fictional Mr” the poem;
the events of this poem are acts. “Ie Cimetiere marin," on the other
hand, is spoken in Vale’ry's own person, and the cemetery is geograph-
ically locatable (Valery, in fact, was to be buried there); but the
content of the poem is abstract and generalized. The twenty-first
stanza, in fact, with its Opening line, «ze'non: Cruel ze'non: ze’non
d-Eléeu represents an allusive habit of mind frequently found in
scholarly essays but rarely in a poem, symptomatic of Vale’ry' s nature
as universal thinker first, poet second.
The poem begins in an atmosphere and setting which are utterly
basic to the mind of Vale/ry. He states, in W,
Pour parlor des origines, je dirai simplement que je suis ne’dans
un petit port--pas trop petit-- du Midi de la France, et que, par
consequent, men enfance a ete entierementncomment dirais-je?--
inte’resse’e aux choses de la mer. J'ai toujours frequente’ un port;
les spectacles du port, 198 differents travaux auzquels on s'y
livre m'ont toujours assez impressionne--non pas que j'ai eu
l'imtention de faire une carriers se rattachant directement a la
mer, mais enfin, 11 y a quelque chose de particuli‘erement important,
pour la formation de l'esprit, d'atre en presence de ce paysage
de la mer, qui a ce caractere remarquable d'etre intangible; les
homes n'y ont rien apporte. En re ard des constructions d'une
ville et des constructions particulierement marquges qui font un
port, les males, les quais, les phares, etc., vous avez cette
etendue qui est toujours la meme deBuis que la terre endste,
du mains depuis que la mer exists.1
For others the sea might represent aboriginal chaos, or perhaps the
teeming source of life, but for Vale/ry the sea is usually a surface,
the visible skin of things upon which islands are visible and boats
and ships float. From the graveyard, looking out from among the trees
and the tombstones, the sea is a roof where doves are walking. It

is noon, blazing Mediterranean noon. The scene is not so much

 

9.10 10Paul Vale/ry, Souvenirs ’ti ues, (Paris: Gallimard, 19%),
p. e

101

described as evoked. Flashes of light reflect off the calm sea. The
sun is at its zenith, neither ascending nor descending. The tide is
between ebb and flow. Even the wind is still, the time being between
the morning land breeze and the afternoon sea breeze. It is an
extraordinary time of day, one which makes the poet meditate on
Tim itself, and eternal causation.

Quand sur l'abime unisoleil se repose,

Ouvrages purs d'une eternelle cause,

Le Temps scintille et le Songs est savoir.

(Oeuvres I, 1148)
The entire scene Valery treats as a temple, "temple simple}. Minerva,"
goddess of thought, and "Temple du Temps.“ He is in the scene but not
of it, and the relationship between poet and place is epitomized as
"un didain souverain" (Oeuvres I, 1148).
Time seems to be at rest here, but this is only an illusion.

He knows that he is as impermanent as those who fomerly walked the
earth but now lie beneath his feet. The dead disintegrate; their sub-
stance is changed to smoke. In this place he breathes his own future
smoke. But that is for the future; he is aware also that even now
under the sky of noon he is changing. An autobiographical passage
follows:

Apres tant d'orgueil, apres tant d'e’trange

Oisivete’, mais pleine de pouvoir, ...

(Oeuvres I, 111-8)

He is speaking of his own past history, all pride and disdain for the
Opinions of men. He had tried to make of himself something static
and absolute as the sun at its zenith. But physical nature has
somehow brought him to abandon his ambition. He is taxed by the

fragile movements of his own shadow passing over the graves.

102

How much conclusion can be drawn from this passage? Was
Vale’ry motivated to change himself, to soften his idealistic stance
of complete "absence” by thoughts of death and passing time? According
to his own philosoww, he should have had no desire to justify himself,
to write for others. But to write poetry for himself--that might be
another matter entirely. Theodora Bosanquet does take this literal
biographical interpretation of ”Le oimtiEre marin," the poem
presenting in her view a dilemma: ”He can identify his spirit with
the everlasting Nirvana and lose himself in ecstatic union with the
absolute, or he can renounce the purity of his consciousness by
plunging into the turbulent movement of creation.” His choice:
”Vale/ry has decided to create again. ind he describes the moment of
quickening which has always been for him the prime interest of the
creative act, the moment when the conscious mind first becomes aware
of the movement of an idea formed somewhere in the silent depths of
the soul, the moment when the miracle of birth is Just about to
happen. ~11 Thus Bosanquet finds "Le Cimetiere mrin" to be an
extended metaphor for Vale/ry's inner conflict of perfection in with-
drawal versus imperfection in creative production. The end of the
poem, when the wind rises up again and the poet plunges into the sea
and re-emerges to live, is the moment when the conception of a poem
occurs. Without a doubt, this is a valid interpretation of this
poem, and very convenient indeed for the purposes of aw thesis,
consenting as it does upon the creative process. But at least two
difficulties are present, which force one to delve further into the

 

11Theodore Bosanquet, W, (London: Hogarth Press,
1932). P' 67-690

103
poem. One is Vale’ry's own statement that to assume that a poem has
one unique, true meaning is a fatal error. 12 Another is the significant
remainders in the poem which do not seem to fit into the Bosanquet
hypothesis. This poem is a meditation on death and time even more
than on creation. Poetry is there, definitely, for concrete references
occur in the eighth and twenty—fourth stanzas. But Just as death and
time are evolved from the setting, so must poetry be evolved out of
the given situation. It will be a tautology to say that Vale/ry' s
response to the stimulus of noon and the cemetery was to write a poem;
for us, the poem is the given.

Vale/ry had presented the scene as a Temple of Time, a solid
edifice coalesced for a moment into a static state. Within the structure
he is a kind of flaw, the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, or the one
live thing in a world of absolutes.

Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regards-moi qui change!
(Oeuvres I, 1148)

he shouts, raising the question of whether flux is artistically
realisable or not. Changing things are dying things; to experience
them “in delight" is to witness their dissolution. To hold a moment of
tim fixed in art is to destroy the truth of the moment. Indeed, when
dealing with fleeting things, the harder we try the less we succeed.
But this has been a.dilema of science, too, one of the century's most
pervasive questions.

Valery is a mirror on the world; he reflects back all that
”pitiless armed light." But Just as a mirror is backed with silver

 

12Cited by Charpier, Essai sur Paul Vale/r1, p. 151+.

 

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and blacking, so there is darkness to the mirror of Valery. ("l-his
rendre la lumfere / Suppose d'ombre une morne moitie/J) This is a
mirror with depth; as the consciousness shifts to the back of the
mirror, the light disappears. Now the scene is darkness and empty
caverns, where all was light before.

0 pour moi seul, a moi soul, on moi-meme,

Aupres d'un coeur, aux sources du poems,

Entre le vide et l'evenement pur,

J'attends l'echo de ma grandeur interne,

Amere, sombre et sonore citerne,
Sonnant dans l'ame un creux toujours futur!

(09 mg I, 1&9)

The source of a poem has much to do with the dark side of a mirror,
with the scene viewed from a certain vantage point. Elizabeth Sewell
finds the mirror theme to be crucial to any understanding of Vale’ry.
His poems, she points out, were not written for their own sake so much
as for their effect upon his mind. Thus the poems themselves were a
kind of mirror. Sewell's image of Vale’ry's entire universe is as a
spherical concave mirror with him at the center. The effect of a
concave mirror is to shrink, to concentrate inmges, and thus, "The
final image is not the haunted face reflected in the looking-glass.

It is the self concentrated inside the diamond of its universe and its
mind, a concentration of ice and fire, and in the middle, the play of
light and reflection and beyond that--nothing."13 A glorious con-
ceptionindeed, but quite contrary to my view of Vale/ry's universe.

To take the mirror theory, I would say that Vale’ry himself was the
mrror, a sphere with the reflecting surface on the outside. Inside
there would be darkness, with an occasional bit of image from outside

13Sewell, Elizabeth, Paul Vale/ . The Mind the Mirror,
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952: P. 15, %.

 

 

 

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105
piercing in, perhaps through flaws in the silvering, but the medi-
tations (reflections, to use a bit of metaphor that has passed into
definition) would be carried on as much as possible in isolation.
Some part of the world must be admitted to this closed system in order
to write a poem, some common ground must be found for conmmnication to
occur. A window will be Opened into the interior, and the world
gets in.
To continue the discussion of the stanza quoted above, if the
reflecting side of the mirror, that which is turned toward the sun,
is all scintillation and reflection of light, the inside contains the
reverberations of sounds.
... aux sources du poems,
Entre 1e vide et l'evénement pur,
J 'attends l'echo de ma grandeur interne,

Andre, sombre et sonore citerne,
Sonnant dans l'ame un creux toujours futur!

(Do me I, 1h9)

At the source of the poem is not light and visible imagery but sound.
In one poem (”La Pythie") the most rabid exorcism of the soul's
contents produces finally words, “gig; laggag ." Not that Vale’ry
wrote his poems in a frenzy--quite the opposite was true--but he knew
that language was quite basic to what he found on his explorations into
the self.

On the subject of poetic creation he referred specifically to
”Le CimetiEre marin,” comparing the creative state to a taut string. A
slack string, he said, will produce no sound when plucked, . but a taut
string has the energy to produce a sound. In himself, Vale’ry has
discovered a prOperty which he called rhythmic effusion, the prOperty
of feeling himself a producer of rhythm: "It has happened that I have
written certain poems out of a simple rlvthm, without knowing what would

 

9!:

3t

106
be the subject of the poem, in particular a poem . . . which is
called 'le oimetiere marinfl It was made out of a certain rhythm that
came to my mind and which, little by little, was somehow nourished by
certain words, whose coming together itself seemed to form a text.”1u’
As he worked on the poem, he saw meaning develOping, and he was
reminded of the process of developing a photograph, the way fragments
of a picture appear one by one when an exposed plate is placed in the
revealing bath. ”I believe that I have assisted at this very pheno—
menon myself; I only discovered it on subsequent reflection, when I
made certain poems. I saw appearing as though on a rlnrthmdc apparatus
(digpositif), which perhaps served as revealing bath, certain verbal
elements that came to a meaning; this meaning little by little became
more precise to give a sort of potential virtuelle definition of a
poem. On top of this, naturally, a much more considerable labor had
to follow, a labor which utilized this point of departure, the rlnrthmic
image of this object, and permitted me to work in a certain sound
while conserving as much as possible the initial rhythmic energy."15
This statement must be considered in any discussion of the poetic
stimulus of "Le Cimetiere marin.“ But as Vale’ry wrote the poem,
composing the place and meaning out of the fragments given to him by
means of thisprOperty of rhythmic effusion of which he speaks, he
observed himself writing it, and observed himself observing himself.
And if the sum or result of all this convoluted thirking is only
emptiness, nothingness, then this only shows that Vale’ry in 1920 is

still the same as the man who had rmounced poetry as vain idolatry

 

1“l’aul Valery, Souvenirs poe’tigues, p. 19 (my translation).
15Ibid..

107
in 1892.
But he loves the scene; it pleases him and satisfies him.
The very air seems filled with invisible flames, and

Tout est erle’, requ d/ans l'air
A je ne sais quelle severe essence ...

(Oeuvres I, 149)
Even the dead here are comfortable in this hot earth that warms them
and dries them. The static noontime scene seems as serene and
self-sufficient as a Buddha, or a diamond crystal. There is only
one flaw:
Midi l\a-haut, Midi sans mouvement
En sci se pense et convient } soi-QOe...
Tote complete et parfait diadsme,
Je suis on tel 19 secret changement. (Oeuvres I, 1&9)
Vale/ryuthinking man--is the one inharmonious element. If the scene
is all “absence," he is the one bit of whatever is apposite: being,
existence, imperfection. like a tree in a thunderstorm, he attracts
all the potential energy in the situation. He is made of something
different from those three great incontestable deities: the sun, the
sky, the sea. But what of the dead, here under the earth? To which
party do they belong? They are humans, made of Valgry's own stuff-«and
yet--he finds that they are really closer to the absence of noon. It
is decomposition that makes them one with plwsical nature: they are
clay now, not the "white kind" of bones and the W, but red earth.
Whatever part of life they ever possessed has now passed from them into
nature's general reservoir.
"m §_up_t_," sings the poet, “Where are they now, the familiar

sayings, the personal ways of the dead?" But it is Just what is most
individual that is most perishable. For them there can be no more

personal griefs. All the burgeoning effervescent life in flirtatious

108

young girls with their conflicts, bodily submissions and withdrawals,
at once offering and refusing,

Les derniers dons, les doigts qui les de’fendent,

Tout va sous terre et rentre dans le jeu!

(Oeuvres I, 150)

With intense iromr now, he turns on himself, “great soul.” Did he
for a moment hOpe to be exempted from nature's inexorable laws, hOpe
to find something real and lasting within the human sphere? Even
"holy impatience," his contribution to noon's temple, dies. Immortality
he depicts as a woman frightfully decked in black and gold and
laurels. It is a beautiful lie, a pious ruse, to make a mother's
breast of death. He rejects all. ideas of immortality: death is
final. And so the dead are truly at rest. Their dissolution, the
consumption of the body by the organisms that transform flesh into
earth, is nothing to them. It is we the living who truly are gnawed.

1e vrai rongeur, le ver irrefutable

N'est point pour vous qui dormez sous la table,

I1 Vit de vie, 11 no me quitte pas! (Oeuvres I, 150)
What is this inner tormentor? He cannot call it self-love or
self-hatred: it is so near to him that all names can fit. The
name doesn't matter: it is something that lives, and Valo’ry belongs
wholly tO it. It is the same question as the stimulus Of La Jeune
3.2292. in another form. There the question was ”What woke the Young
Fate, what thing violated her virginal sleep?” Put another way ”Why
was there a Serpent in the Garden of Eden?” Philos0phers have always
found a gnawing anguish in man: it is original sin, it is basic
anxiety. From this stance of mental anguish, Vale/ry turns to Zeno's
paradox, for reasons which have not in my Opinion been understood.

Here is what Bartrand Russell has to say about the questions

E
penises“

109
raised so long ago by Zeno of Elea. Each of these questions, it may
be recalled, presented a paradox, a situation contrary to common
sense, but nevertheless philosOphically truthful. But as Russell.
says, in mathematics, " . . . familiarity with truth eliminates the
vulgar prejudices Of common sense."

Zeno was concerned, as a matter of fact, with three problems,
each presented by motion, but each more abstract than motion,
and capable Of a purely arithmetical treatment. These are the
problems of the infinitesimal, the infinite, and continuity.

To state clearly the difficulties involved, was tO accomplish
perhaps the hardest part Of the philosOpher's task. This was
done by Zeno. From him to our own day, the finest intellects

of each generation in turn attacked the problems, but achieved,
broadly speaking, nothing. In our own time, however, three
mere-Weierstrass, Dedekind, and Cantornhave not merely advanced
the three problems, but have completely solved them. The
solutions, for those acquainted with mathematics, are so clear
as to leave no longer the slightest doubt or difficulty. This
achievement isprobably the greatest Of which our age has to
boast; and. I know of no age except perhaps the golden age of
Greece) which has a more convincing proof to offer of the
transcendent genius of its great men. Of the three problems,
that of the infinitesimal was solved by Weierstrass; the solution
Of the other twc was begun by Dedeking, and definitively
accomplished by Cantor (my italics).1

 

The exact nature of these problems is not within the scape Of this
study. What is important is their significance for Vale’ry the poet,
and the fact that the paradoxes of Zeno had been grappled with in
their times by Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz and Gauss--without result.
If they also tormented Vale’ry, then he was in excellent compary.
Perhaps only the best disciplined, farthest-reaching minds could
realize the importance of these problems.

Thus, vale’ry had been struck by the overwhelming philOSOpher's
question. Not really equipped to handle it'with the tools of logic

 

16Bertrand Russell, "Mthematics and the Metaphysicians,‘ in

fig Wong 0; mtgmatics, III, edited by James R. Newman, (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 19 ), p. 1580-1-

110
immobilize him completely. This, of course, is the worm, the
”secret tooth”: it is man's desire to know. To know what? It
matters not. If there is no question, he will make or find one. If
he solves his question, he will find another one. The one universal
in man's mentality is this undirected curiosity, this fatal itch.
When she stole the fruit in the Garden Of Eden, Eve had no particular
question to answer, no object for her wondering. She was seduced by
the serpent, symbol of man's tomenting curiosity. What would stolid
Adam have been without weak Eve and her alluring friend? He would have
been raised above the other animals only by his moral superiority. It
was luclq for him that his irresponsible rib had been removed to lead a
separate life.

Vale’ry's seaside meditation had begun when sun and wind had
seemed immobile and time stOpped for a mment. in unnatural state;
in the physical world, it would be impossible. In Valery's internal,
metaphysical world, though, there is some danger of standing forever in
an immovable wind, rapt in contemplation Of the (for him) insoluble
problem.

Vale/ry would not have known that Zeno's problem would be solved
by the develOpment of a new axiom, a new theory Of infinity. For him
the crux may well have lain in the incommemurability of philosOphical
truth--incontrovertible--with observable common sense eXperienceualso
incontrovertible. Of course Achilles would overtake the tortoise. And
yet, to understand the problem is to grasp that he would not, in the
realm Of philosOphical truth. There lies the paradox. And Vale’ry is

lost in wonder; he could make a god out of this idea which seems to be
larger than man. But he refuses. Bodily, he forces himself out of

 

 

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111
static thought.

Brisez, men corps, cette forms pensive!

(Oeuvres I, 151)
He must stir himself. Finally the wind rises off the sea, returning
to him his soul. In this poem, the philosopher's realm is the realm
of mind only, soulless and bodiless, closer to death than.to life.
Contemplation is on death's side; action is on the side of life.
For the man of action and the body, the sea is something
entirely other than the

Stable tresor, temple simple a Minerva,
Masse de calme, et visible reserve, ...(m sI, 1h8)

of the third stanza. Now the sea is a howling delirium.
Gui! Grands mer de delires douee,
Peau de panthere et chlamyde trouee
De mills et mille idoles du soleil,
Hydra absolue, ivre de ta chair bleue,
Qui te remords l'étincelante queue
Dans un tumulte au silence pareil,

1e vent se IBvet... il faut tenter de vivre!
(Oeuvres I, 151)

In the last stanza, the scene is breaking up. The rising of the
dashing waves is interspersed with the careless tossing of‘Valéry's
book. (Presumably the book is a blank book for writing in, because
“pages tout gblouies' implies a whiteness of the page.) The scene is
breaking up, and he urges it to break, even to the point of destroying
metaphor.

I
Rompez, vaguesl Rompez d'eauerejouies
Ce toit tranquille ofigpicoraient des foes!

(Oeuvres I, 151)
The final lines shows a rapid deterioriation: ”toit tranquille” is

identical with the first line, but 'picoraient,' a word which applies
to birds hunting their food, is already in the past tense, almost the

112
first use of this tense in the poem. Finally in "foes" the metaphoric
doves have disappeared; they are sailboats after all.

Vale’ry exclaimed ”I must try to live!” If he does intend to
turn away from a life of pure contemplation, does he mean to take the
extreme Opposite way, the life of pure action? Where does poetry fall
in this spectrum? For most peOple poetry would be somewhere in the
middle, perhaps falling on the side of contemplation. But Vale’ry took
poetry to be part of the active life. Poetry was literature, something
which made one a public man. Poetry's existence was in a realm where
other men existed. A Leonardo might write poetry; a M. Teste, never.
Poetry and the active working-out phase of the creative process are
part of what it means to live. Vale’ry was accepting poetry, then. But
he was renouncing his attempt to be a twentieth century Plato. The
epigraph to ”Le Cimetiere marin" is as follows: ”Seek not, my soul,
the life of the immortals; but enjoy to the full the resources that are
within thy reach."17

It * It * It it t It It It III *

In the preceding analyses of “Sunday Morning" and "Le Cimetidre
marin" I have considered each poem entirely without regard to the other.
It is striking to see how similar are the paths taken by these two
meditations. In a world of conflict, the great diversity of human
thought is what we tend to see; the unity of man's mind may well be the
greater truth.

It is a commonplace of the twentieth century that man's worst

 

17Translation in The 2e9gu_in Book of French Verse, 4, The
Twentieth Cent , Introduced and edited by Anthony Hartley, (Baltimore:

Penguin Books. 1959). p- 64-

9X

113

dissatisfactions begin amid plenty. This is true on several levels.

If a man has nothing (and has always had nothing) he dreams only of
food and a roof; if he has everything in the way of bodily comfort, a
mental anguish begins. When hunger is appeased, then a higher hunger
is born.

Stevens' poem begins with a luxurious woman. All around her are

food and warmth and the trappings of a well-furnished life. She is
content-complacent. But this feeling of surfeit gives way to thoughts
of unattainable things, the search for some eternal verity. And this is
exactly Vale’ry's situation in the Opening of ”Le Cimtiem marin." In
the presence of his beloved segment of nature, the seashore, Vale’ry at
first seems to believe that he can be content merely to endoy. In "0
re’coupem apres une pensge / Qu'un long regard sur le calms des dieux.”
(Oeuvres I, in?) Vale’ry has the air of a man who thinks he is about to
have a vacation from thought. But he is quickly surfeited with beauty;
his thoughts return to nothingness, and the metaphysical concerns of
whichthe sun, the seaandthe skyknownothing. Inthe midst ofan
ideal life, to think of black death; whit iron. Is this perversity,
an abnormality, or a truth of the human spirit? let me invert Stevens'
phrase, and say that

Beauty is the mother of Death

or at least, a taste of beauty makes men think of death. To understand
this fully we shall have to know more about the aesthetic emotion than
we now kmw. But most people will accept at least that an experience of
beauty in art is nearer to grief than to joy. When we are moved at the

symphony we are moved to tears, not laughter. Perhaps part of the
explanation is this: the aesthetic emotion is wonder, is man faced

 

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with something he yearns to capture, but yet cannot fully grasp. Thus
it reminds him of his limitations, and chief among those limitations is
mortality. “Had we but world enough, and time . . ." we muse. There
is world enough, alas, but not time.

Now death enters Stevens' "Sunday Morning" in the first stanza,
but as part of the religious theme, when the woman finds Judaeo-Christ-
ianism to be a religion of death and the dead. Death taken directly,
as a theme in itself, enters in stanza IV and runs through stanzas V
and VI; In ”La Cimetiere marin" the meditation on death enters at
almost exactly the same place, or approximately stanzas thirteen to
nineteen, the transitions from and into other themes being less abrupt.18
By stanza thirteen, Valery has already declared himself to be something
other than the scene in whose presence he stands. Noon, the sea, the
sky, all are of the non-human, unchanging as a great diamond. 86,
life, is change, with complexities, difficulties, and mistakes and
wrong turnings because there is the possibility of choice. There is a
feeling of triumph, if not of damnation here. ”I am I, life, perhaps
not above the scene because not outside it, but capable of things which
inanimate nature can never know.” But he is now forcibly brought ”down
to earth” by simply continuing the meditation on the dead of the
cemetery beneath his feet. The difference between himself and Noon is

 

18Coincidentally, the two poems are almost exactly the same

length, ”Sunday Mondng" having eight stanzas of 15 lines each, or 120
lines, and "Le Cimeti‘ere marin" being composed of 24 stanzas of six lines
each, or 1% lines. As for versification, Stevens uses his customary
blank verse, iambic pentameter unrhymed, and Vale’ry uses a decasyllabic
line, each six line stanza having a feminim couplet, a masculine line,
another feminine couplet, and a masculine line rhyming with the preceding
masculine line. While the decasyllabic line is not unusual in French
poetry, it is not as classical as the alexandrine or 12-syllable line.

115
not absolute after all; for the dead, those formerly part of life,
are gradually making the transition into the other party. And of
course this fate awaits him too; to die, to disappear, to become
earth. Where stands Paul Vale/ry, unique being, will be absence. And
he turns his back on this fate, rejects it absolutely. One must live;
there is no death.

Stevens' poem and Stevens' philosova are simpler. His is a
world in which contentment is possible, whereas for Vale/ry to live is
to feel discontent. For Vale’ry nature was the realm of absolutes like
Noon and the Sea. For Stevens, nature is birds flying in “misty
fields,” fleeting things sunmed up in "April's green." These
changing things are also eternal; there is a sense of the world in
Stevens in which April's green endures, as no hypothetical paradise of
immortals has ever done. Which is the truth of the sea: tides, waves,
turn and overturn, in short, change? Or is it basic sameness, all
motion dictated by immutable law, all change only apparent within the
real constancy of the whole body extended in time? There is no answer
to this question; it is entirely a matter of point of view. Stevens,
seeking his version of the truth always in the world, seeking as much as
possible to eliminate the barriers between himself and the world, finds
his meaning in the perishable details of the scene. Valery, who sought
to turn his back on the world, to find what truth there might be in
himself, takes an outsider's view of nature. Poetry is written out of a
man's immediate apprehension of the world, his intuition of the world.
Thus for Stevens the actuality is change, perishability. For Vale/ivy

the emphasis is reversed.
It is interesting that both Stevens and Vale/ry use the image of

116

a mother's breast when speaking of death. Here are the two passages:

Maigre immortalite’ noire et done/e,

Consolatrice affreusement lauree,

0111 de la mort fais un sein maternel,

1e beau mensonge et la pieuse ruse! (gem I, 150)

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,

Within whose burning bosom we devise

Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. (92, 69)
To make a maternal breast of death is a lie, in Vale’ry's view. Death
does not nourish us; quite the contrary, it is we who m food when
we die. The dead are only dead, buried under the ground. Stevens'
attitude toward death is accepting, positive. Death as absence, as a
limit to our time on earth, stimulates our productivity. But death does
not only engender in this abstract way; by a leap of the imagination we
transform the abstraction into “our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplusly."
Thus the idea of a kind of non-specific life after death, or life in
death, is deveIOped.

It may be that our earthly mothers, our ancestors, live on only
in misery, like Susanna. After all, the ground of our everlasting life,
Jesus, was specifically rejected:

“The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay... (Q, 70)
In the end, I would say that Stevens' attitude toward death is equi-
vocal, like the ‘ambiguous undulations“ of the pigeons who fly down-
ward to darkness in the end of the poem.

Each poet, in his separate, characteristic way, has evolved
a motive for artistic creation. Vale’ry was led to reflect on time's
inability by a static state in the scene before him. When he found

in himself an axnlOgous point of motionlessness he was in danger of

11?
never coming back from it. A wind from the sea reminded him of his
physical bochr and the need to live with it. The poem ends in a burst
of creative energy. Likewise for Stevens the traditional meditations
of a "amday Morning" would be transformed into a ritualistic chant
in response to love of the physical world. What might have been a
religious emerienee has become an aesthetic emerienee.

In Stevens' quest for reality, poetry--the true conjunction
between the poet and the worlduis a moment out of time, released from
the relentless cycling of birth and death. Beauty is imortal. But
at the same time the truth of the poem unist correspond to reality, and
flux and change are part of reality. This is a paradox, and as such
it is a stimulus in itself, to further questioning and to the beginning
of a quest for aesthetic realization of the idea.

Valer too is struck by paradox, and finds his stimulus in a
curious synecdochical relation to the scene of his neditation. The
”perfect” noon contains but one flaw, the secretly changing man. The
seemingly changeless dead too are actually being decomposed all the
while. Valé'ry equally is the victim of an inner torment; while
outwardly serene, rapt in contemplation, within he is goaded by the
fatal desire to know that is man's _i;_e_l_i_:_: c_u_1_p§_. For Vale’ry, both the
source and the material of the poem are within, where he lives.

For both poets, death is only death; there is no other world.
To be fully human is to live, to die, to change, and to create.

CHAPTER V

NARCISSUS AND marmalade DU MAL”:
calms OF THE SPIRIT

In the preceding chapter on "L6 Cimetiere marin" and "Sunday
Morning," we saw the two posts finding aesthetic solutions to problems
essentially philOSOphical or religious. While the theme of the poems
was death and time and was deeply serious, nevertheless the poems
ended on a note of hOpe, as the poets found their creative powers
adequate to the situations before them. Now, in a longer and more
complicated pair of poems we will see Vale’ry and Stevens turning their
poetic methods to questions which are not, in the end, answerable at
all. Thus, we see the poets and their symbolic figures involved in
crises of the spirit, poetic and creative blocks.

”Esthe’tique du Mal" is Stevens' attempt to plumb the meaning
of the existence of pain and evil in the world. If poetry to Stevens
lay in a relationship between the imagination and reality, an analogous
mode of existence might be posited for pain. For evil is part of
reality, and pain is man's experience of the evil in the world. Thus,
with his poet's perception, might he not also be equipped to appreciate
and understand pain, and present it in a way acceptable to all mankind?
Perhaps he felt that if he could manage this great tour de force he
would be fulfilling the poet's duty to mankind that he had called the

118

119
defense against “the pressure of reality.”

Vale’ry's poetic e2q>loration of the myth of Narcissus relates
in an equally cohesive way to his own version of creativity. It will
be shown that creative writing is an essentially narcissistic activity,
but that narcissism in its psychoanalytic meaning results not in a
diminishing of the meaning of ”self,” but in an expansion of the ego.
The Narcissus-nyth is rich in its implications for the poetic process
as well as for self-analysis.

In "Esthgtique du Nal,” Stevens uses his poetic, metaphorizing
faculty to tackle the knottiest problem of metaphysics. Ultimately he
faces the insolubility of it, with his own special ”sense of the world,"
as he would have put it. Vale’ry uses his capabilities as writer and
intellect to explore a myth which has deep meaning for his self-analysis,
and finally exposes the dangers in his withdrawal from the world.

Like some of Vale’ry's other poems, particularly La Jeune P us,
the Narcissus poems seem to call for a semi-allegorical treatment, so
suggestive, so rich in implications are they. But--again like La Jeune
muVale’ry's Narcissus evades a final solution into one meaning. As
an archetype of human experience, Narcissus will continue to yield his
own meaning for each age, if not each reader who is willing to dedicate
himself to a hunt for meaning. In the way of a true artist, Vale’ry did
not begin with a preconceived notion of what Narcissus was to be. He
discovered his own intentions as he wrote; the poetry develOped out of
itself, out of the nyth, out of the language, out of Val€ry as an indivi-

dual and as a man in touch with universals.

let me briefly summarize this myth of Narcissus which was so
appropriate to the anguished thought of Paul Vale’ry both as budding

120
poet and mature academician. Narcissus was the child of a naiad and
a river-god, and he was most beautiful in appearance. Tiresias told
Narcissus' mother that the boy would live to a ripe old age only if he
"never knew himself.” Although Narcissus was extremely attractive to
both boys and girls, he had no interest in other peeple. Echo was one
of those who loved him unrequitedly. He caused such frustration that
one of his spurned lovers begged for a vengeance in which Narcissus
should love himself and not win himself. And so one day it happens
that Narcissus, tired from hunting in the forest, comes upon a quiet
pool not frequented by animls or birds, not even disturbed by falling
leaves. As he leans down to drink, he catches sight of his own
reflection, and becomes infatuated by his own beauty. When he tries
to embrace or kiss his image, nothing is there but himself. And yet
if he leaves the reflecting pool then even the insubstantial image
is gone. At first Narcissus does not understand, but at last the truth
comes home to him: what he loves is himself. He grieves, knowing
that there is no end to his yearning. He dies there at the edge of
the pool, and is transformed into a flower. But in Hell he still gases
at himself.

Now since Narcissus did die, he met have fulfilled the pro-
phecy of Tiresias, that is, he must have known himself. It was enough,
evidently, ts rec0gnize the beloved image in the water for what it was,
and to understand that the only face aui body that could so perfectly
respond to his fleeting impulses was his own. Narcissus marvelled at
how understanding and responsive the figure in the water was to him; but
soon he understood that it could not do what he most desired: ' be another.

121
What I want is with me,

Mr riches make me poor. If I could only..-

How curious a prayer from arw lover--

Be parted from my love.
When Narcissus realized that he had in a sense created his beloved
the affair was ended, just as the realization that one's absolutes
are fictions is always fatal to absolutes. No church can survive the
knowledge that its gods are creations of men. This is one meaning of
Narcissus.

Vale’ry's meaning has more to do with his own dilenma of
writing for the delectation of other minds vs. a cloistering of all
that he thought. The first of the poems in question, ”Narcisse
parle,” was one of a burst of poetic production occurring around
1891-1892 and conning to a definitive close with the night in Genoa of
October 1892. It is possible to see the germ of an attitude of
worlds-renunciation in the Narcissus-theme even this early (Narcissus,
the most beautiful boy on earth, could not love one less beautiful;
Valo’ry had similar difficulty in finding a wortlw audience.), but it
is also possible to conclude that Valer did not fully plumb the
subject in "Narcisse parle,” and only really deve10ped it in the later
work "Fragments du Narcisse.” Nineteen lines from ”Narcisse parle"
are used either verbatim or nearly so in ”Fragments du Narcisse I."
For enmple, here are lines 5-9 of ”Narcisse parle.”

Un grand calme m'e’coute, ou j'e’coute l'espoir.

La voix des sources change at me parle du soir;

J 'entends l'herbe d'argent grandir dans l'ombre sainte,
Et la lune perfide eleve son miroir

Jusque dans les secrets de la fontaine eteinte.
(Oeuvre______s_ I, 82)

 

10vid, ”The Story of Echo and Narcissus,” Metamorphoses, III,

Egghted by Rolfe Humphries, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
a P' 72'

122
Here are lines 35—39 of "Fragments I":
La voix.des sources change, at me parle du soir;
Un grand calms mfiécoute, oh.j'ecoute l'eSpoir.
J'entends l'herbe des\nuits crditre dans l'ombre sainte,
Et la lune perfide Gleve son miroir /,
Jusque dans les secrets de la fontaine eteinte...
(Oeuvres I, 123)
But whereas in "Narcisse parle" the subject is immediately drOpped,
in ”Fragments" some further develoPment occurs with lines h0~h28
Jusque dans les secrets que je crains de savoir,
Jusque dans le,repli de l'amour de soi-mSme,
Rien ne peut echapper au silence du soir...
(92mg I. 123)
Thus "Fragments du Narcisse I“ may be considered as a revised version
or a later edition of "Narcisse parle,” except that "Narcisse parle”
was reprinted in Album de Vers Anciens and.does of course contain many
lines not found at all in the later poem.

Clearly, though, "Fragments I” is much.the superior poem, for
irony, depth, complexity. In "Fragments” there is, relatively speaking,
an impression of detachment from.the subject, with the irony resulting
from.such.an attitude, and at the same time a greater realization by
the post that Narcissus is part of him, part of mankind in fact, and
that he is part of Narcissus. In addition, in."Narcisse parle” valeiy
is still very much the disciple of Mallarme’, with the silvery atmosphere,
the music of flutes in the air, and in ”Fragments du Narcisse" he has
moved.into another era of poetry. One set of quotations will illustrate
both of these points. Although it is impossible to prove it seems to
me Vale’ry was probably thinking of the first when he wrote the second,
since both contain this idea of ”breaking the crystal,” allowing

Narcissus a requital to desire. First, "Narcisse parle?!

123

L'espoir seul peut suffire } rompre ce cristal.

La ride me ravisse au souffle qui m'eJcLle

Et que mon souffle anime une flute gracile

Dont 1e joueur 16ger ms serait indulgentl...

(Oeuvres I, 83)
Next, ”F'I‘agments du Narcisse I”:
Mais ne vous flattez pas de la changer d'empire.
Ce cristal est son vrai sejour;

ms efforts némes de l'amour
Ne le sauraient de l'onde extraire qu'il n'expire...

(Oeuvres I, 121+)

First, a word such as ”monstre" and even a concept such as "Is monstre
de s'aimer" would be out of harmomr with "Narcisse parle”; and yet
this is very much a truth of Narcissus, where self-love is both the
crime and the punishment. Further, the idea of indulgence, of a
possible release from fate, is not a part of ”Fragments"; it is a
tougher poem. Last, that "flats gracile“--"Narcisse parle” is a
musical poem, a symbolist poem, and the music is its conclusion. In
'Fragnemts du Narcisse” there is no music, only language; the critic
Alain finds in Echo's appearance (line 93) the birth of rhyme.2

Thus I shall take ”Fragments du Narcisse I" to be a superior
version of the earlier poem and base my discussion on “Fragments."
But Vale’ry's Narcissus is not simply a re-telling of the Narcissus
north. Rather, it seems to me, that as Valery explored the hidden
springs of the archetypal figure, meanings were released that made
Narcissus a personal matter for the poet Valery in his own situation.
Further, this allegorizing tendency leads to recognition of a truth
in Narcissus which is applicable to all men, that self-love is love,

 

2Paul VaKry, Charmes commente’es ar Alain, (Paris: Gallimard,
1952), P' 86

1214
but that the self must be emanded. This second, larger meaning will
be dealt with later. For vile’ry specifically the situation of Narcissus
is a metaphor for the life of the mind. A writer is always a nar-
cissist; writing is basically a narcissistic, self-loving activity.
When a poet begins to write he is like Narcissus comixg down to his
beloved pool in the middle of the alien forest.

Narcissus runs to the water's edge with the avidity of a
thirsty animal, but in order to quench this peculiar thirst the water
must not be disturbed-«not, that is, by ary outside influences, not
even by a stirring of the very mmphs that are the body of the water.
flow fragile a situation is this:

Votre sommeil imports 3. mon enchantement,
Il craint jusqu'au frisson d'une plume qui plonge:

(Oeuvres I, 12;?)

For Narcissus can imagine what his life would be like without the
pool; his drive for love intact, he might have been attracted to some
other. He can even imgine the pool without him; it would be accustomed
to reflecting only tranquil scenes, clouds and the slq. He begs the
water to endure his tearful face. For anguish and sadness are constant
with Narcissus.

It is difficult to say enctly what ”happens” in this poem.
Does Narcissus at first see his reflection by the fading light of day,
only to have day disappear and then have his image revived by the rising
of the moon? Or is the pool actually in darkness throughout, forcing
him to create a mirror image out of imagination alone? Or, finally, does
he begin by staring into a dark pool and witness a gradual lighting up
by moonlight? Perhaps the actual sequence of events is not so important
as the fact that the light does change: at one point Narcissus is

125
admiring his image, at another point he is staring horrified into
the bottom.of the pool, and in.yet another instance a figure seemingly
coalesces into being before his eyes. And.thus does self-knowledge
progress: at times lovingly, joyfully, with pride, and at other
times with self-loathing. For Narcissus loves only the surface,
only the visible bodyz When.he looks intg_the fountain rather than
23 its surface he sees the contents of his soul.

He did.not look willingly into the water, but was in a sense
tricked.by the moon, ”la lune perfide.' Still he is attracted to the
water, continues to look, but finds in it not the calm, the fulfillment
he was seeking, but only gnggi and.unrest. He sees not the eyes of
his face, but the very eyes of’his soul in the black pool.

Que je deplore ton eclat fatal et pur,

Si mollement de moi fontaine environnee,

Ou puiserent mes yeux dans un.mortel azur,

Les yeux.memes et noirs de leur ame etonnee.

(Oeuvres I, 124)

What is more, these eyes see him; Narcissus is gazed.upon by himself,
but another self, perhaps a self of memory or a self of dreams. Here it
is as though Narcissus has discovered his subconscious, and wonders what
this fragment thinks of its fellow'fragment, the physical Narcissus, so
unhappy and mmladapted.to the world he lives in. Narcissus seems to know
that he has reached a form.of the self whose continuing existence is
perhaps as large in preportion to his being as the submerged part of an
iceberg is to the whole. He pleads

Cessez, sombres esprits, cet ouvrage anxious:
Qui se fait dans l'ame qui veille; ...

(Oeuvres I, 12h)

126
Vale’ry once called himself "the least Freudian of men,"3 but a couplet
such as the one just quoted is strikingly in rapport with Freudianism,
even to the language used. Perhaps Vale’ry never read Freud, but Freud
liked to point out that poets had been the first discoverers of the
subconscious.

Narcissus has begun to entangle the deeper parts of his psycho
into his web of self-love, always conscious that he, and thus the love,
must die, when he is interrupted by an echo.

Mais no vous flattoz pas do lo changer d'empire.
Ce cristal 88E son vrai sejour;
Les efforts m mes do 1 amour
Ne 1e sauraient de l'onde extraire qu'il n'expire...
Pll'tE.
PireY...
Quelqu'un rodit Fire... 0 moqueur!
(Oeuvres I, 1214)
It is only pitiful Echo, one of the unfortunates who had fallen in
love with Narcissus, but he is driven into a frenzy of denunciation,
imagining that the very trees and rocks are bandying about his most
private thoughts. And we begin to understand why Narcissus is impossible,
and against nature. If oven Echo can disturb him, then the conditions
for self-love are too rare for arwthing but the most ephemeral
existence. Even more, it will be seen in mm g; Narcisse; that
gifts from the gods such as beauty or talent are meant to be shared.
Narcissus cannot bear to share; thus it is-:docrood that he cannot exist.

Finally the beloved image Narcissus has been craving to see

forms there in the water, and Narcissus admires himself. New beautiful

are aw arms, he says, and my silky hair, and ny mouth. He loves the

 

3Iett_1;es\a Quelgues-uns, p. 225.

127
whole body of himself, but hardly has be spoken the words when the
curtain of night threatens to divide him from the vision. He realizes,
too, that even his voice is deadly, for his breath disturbs the surface
of the water, causing Narcissus' double to tremble and distort.

Even without Speaking he can get the image to respond, for
every fleeting thought or emotion that passes through his mind is
subtly reflected in the water. (Perhaps, just as this quality of subtle
expressiveness in Narcissus' face was what produced the impression of
overwhelming beauty, the quality in poetry which leads us to Speak of
beauty is a like expressiveness of fleeting states of mind.)

Jusqu'd ce temps charmant je m'e’tais inconnu,
Et je ne savais pas me cherir et me joindrol

(Oeuvres I, 126)
And with those words, of course, he has pronounced his own death

sentence. But he evidently feels that he has received something
valuable in return, and perhaps death can be a kind of reward as well.
Narcissus has benefited from his insight into hitherto uncovered
layers of himself. He has known himself, realized himself as never
before, and can now think of himself as fathomless, inexhaustible,
ine’puisable Moit... (Oeuvres I, 1226)
Without being too literal, what have we learned for our inter-
pretation of the poet or writer as Narcissus? 0f great interest was
the moment when, unawaros, Narcissus stumbled across his hidden self,
the unconscious (or, that part of the mind which is not ordinarily
aveilablo to conscious thoughts). At first he was horrified at what
he saw, but as he tentatively explored he began to accept. At last he
was glad that he had found an ineldlaustible spring into which he could
dip, but still he knew that his discovery could not save him from his

128
fate. Poets and writers too discover the unconscious as hidden
source; indeed it may be said that they must make this discovery in
order that the imagination may be liberated from the requirements of
simple day-to-day living. But the revelations may not be pleasant;
weaker souls succumb to the horrors of chaos before they perceive
the underlying order.

If Narcissus is a figure for the writer as explorer of the
self, then what is the fountain in the allegorical scheme? The
fountain is external to Narcissus and yet so instrumental to his
meditations. For it is expressly stated that without the pond as
reflector, Narcissus would be unable to live out his role.

’ Sans vous, belles fontaines,
Ma beaute, ma douleur, me seraient incertaines.
Jo chorcherais on vain ce que j'ai de plus cher,
Sa tendresse confuse etonnorait ma chair,
Et mes tristes regards, ignorants do me charmos,
A d'autres que moi-m9m adressoraient leurs larmes...
(Oeuvres I, 122)
The Opening lines of ”Fragments II” (lines 1-23) re-open the theme
of the nature of the fountain. The stress is on the fountain's
qualities of passivity and eternal purity. Never experiencing
awhhing directly, the fountain only receives impressions from those
who do. Narcissus calls her "tranquil sister of Fate," so accepting
is she of everything that comes within her scape, complacent oven
toward humans who, "tempted by themselves follow death to the end."
There is nothing that the fountain will not accept, and equally, nothing
that has the slightest real effect on her.
0 pre’sence pensive, oau calms qui recuoilles
Tout un sombre tresor do fables at de feuillos,
L'oiseau mort, 1e fruit mar, lontement descendus,

Et les raros lueurs des clairs annoaux pordus.
Tu consommos on toi leur porte solennollo;

129

Mais, sur la purete/ do ta face eternelle,
L'amour passe et perit... (Oeuvres I, 126)

Is the fountain, then, the writer's audience? I would say no, for
Vale/ry' s attitude toward his audience, even when be supposed that one
night exist, and he did not by axw moans always do this, was always
disdainml. Never would an audience reflect clearly what the artist
had produced for it. Never could a public be so pure, so clear as to
accept unquestioningly new forms of artistic expression. Thus the
fountain- symbol simply could not stand metaphorically for the poet's
audience.

But it might be closer to the truth to say that the fountain
symbolizes that part of the writer which is audience or critic as the
creative process proceeds. It is well known that Vale’ry used his poetry
as a kind of eXperimont for making observations on the workings of his
own mind. Surely the answer to the moaning of the fountain lies some-
where close to this: the fountain is poetry itself in all its stages
from the m 33.35 or white page of potential creation, into the first
lines set down in haste or meticulously and then scratched out, revised
beyond recognition, all the way to the finished printed official poem,
so regular on the page, so inevitable-seeming. In the privacy of the
poet's own notebooks, amrthing is permitted. The white pages of paper
accept all that come within their bounds and are affected by none of
it. This is what poesis does for the Narcissus-writer, the writer who
creates for himself first and for others only second.

Narcissus is a story of love, and the Narcissus poems already
dealt with, “Narcisse parle" and ”Fragments du Narcisse I,” are love
poems. But there is a strange lack of sexuality in these poems; if it

130

was not especially noticeable before, it comes out strikingly in
contrast to the middle portion of ”Fragments II," where Narcissus
‘witnesses a love affair between a man and a woman. They meet and
couple in a scene which is in.the tradition of eroticism among the
Symbglistes such as Mallarmg and Baudelaire, but so much more
downato-earth than Nhllarme and more normal than Baudelaire as to make
one think of‘Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. But hardly have the lovers'
heartbeats slowed when a thousand evils, hurts, and lies are conceived
between them. Their conflict is such that ”Le caresse ot 1e meurtre
hesitant dans leurs mains” (Oeuvres I, 127). So they separate, and
their torments are those both of the dying and the bereaved. A living
body paces the bank of the fountain who witnessed all, but buried
within.the visible body there is another being of memory:

Et dans ce corps cache’ tout marque’ do l'amour,

Que porte amerement l'fime qui fut heureuse
un secret baiser qui 1a rend furiouse...

(Oeuvres I, 128)

Narcissus compares himself: he is so constituted that he
will never penetrate the body or mind of another person, never love.
Even his love for himself is infantile, being attached to the whole
body. Normal adult sexuality holds no attraction for him. Once again,
the motive is stated:

Le plus beau des mortels ne peut cherir que soi...
(Oeuvres I, 128)

Can he accept a lover who is less beautiful, less desirable than
himself? Likewise, can a poet who is far advanced beyond all his
fellow men write poetry for others? If he writes for an audience,

then he must be conscious of their needs, and.bis work will be affected,
not a bad situation in most cases. But what if the potential audience

131
is simply unworthy of the poet: if he wishes to be appreciated, or
even understood, he must diminish his work, produce something which
requires less than his full capabilities. Or he can write his best
and his fullest and have the words fall as though on deaf ears. In
the first case he is understood, but he is not a whole man; in the
second case, he maintains his integrity, but lives in a kind of
vulnerable imprisonment. He can also give up trying for arw audience
other than himself; write poetry for no one's eyes other than his
own. Then he is a Narcissus. But of course real men never have the
essential purity of mythological figures. Pressures bear on them from
outside; someone will know that the poet is writing and demand to see.
He will be Open to charges either of dilettantism or of false pride.
Too, it is hard for a man to maintain himself economically in an ivory
tower. If neither of the first two alternatives appeals to him, he can
give up writing altogether. There is no ideal solution to the problem
of being far in advance of all other minds. Some small consolation
may be found in hoping that future generations may be ready.

Although Narcissus had chosen not to share his goods with arm
other, and to find his lover in himself, there are signs in"Fragments
II" that he has perceived his lack. After he witnessed the sexual
union between the two lovers beside the pool, he had a desire for
something similar, or at least anaIOgous. What kind of child could he
beget on himself? Here a sort of rarefied reproduction takes place:

Naisse done entre vous que la lumiBro unit

De grace et do silence un e’change infini:
Je vous salue, onfant do monfine et de l'onde, ...

(Oeuvres I, 128)

Married by light, Narcissus indulges in an abstract intercourse,

”Infinite exchange of grace and silence,” with the water. His/their

132

child is his image. Tenderly he will attempt to caress his child,
but it is too fragile--he disturbs the water. Checked, disappointed,
he finds his sterile love for the first time not sufficiently carnal,
"... une amour trop pareille a la faible amitie" (Oeuvres I, 128).
He begins tO‘WiSh for the impossible: that his reflection will become
incarnate and diVido itself from the water, still without somehow
becoming other. He imagines their love-making in terms which are
more similar to the scene between the two lovers than.to Narcissus'
transparent and rudely disruptiblo frustrations with the water.
Narcissus has been.corruptod.

Quitte enfin lo silence, ose enfin me re’pondre,

Bel ot cruel Narcisse, inaccessible enfant,
Tout orno do mes biens que la nympho defend...

(m We I, 129)

He has begun.to speak more as a man.than.a myth.

Part III of ”Fragments du Narcisse” contains the death of
Narcissus (but does not go so far as his transformation into a clump
of daffodils). There is a final sense that Narcissus has chosen his
death, rather than simply living out his fate like a puppet of a god’s
will. Death.for Narcissus involves an.escape from Self through the
means of an.infinito enlargement of the Self, thus at once freeing
himself and remaining within the demands of his mythical personality;

I have already pointed out that this later Narcissus has
sufficient detachment and awareness to know that alternative
life-patterns exist in the world. His comparison of himself with
”normal” men goes oven.further when he realizes

Et qui done pout aimer autre chose
Que 301-W7eee (09 was I, 129)

Once again, how strikingly close to Freudian theory is such an

133
m. At this point I should like to introduce what has been
lurking in the background of all this discussion of Narcissus, i. e.,
Chapter IV of Norman 0. Brown's Life against Death, "The Self and the
Other: Narcissus.” Brown begins with Freud, uses Freud, and ends
with Freud. But he also is able to show connections the meter did
not himself make between fragments of his own writings. Norman 0.
Brown does what Freud did not do: construct a theory of Narcissism
which rests solidly on the Freudian foundation and at the same time
goes beyond what was written.

It is necessary to recapitulate somewhat in order to come
abreast with the theory of Narcissism. First, somality (defined as
“the energy or do sire with which the human being pursues pleasure,
with the further Specification that the pleasure sought is the
pleasurable activity of an organ of the human body”)? arises in
infancy; the infant finds pleasure in all his bow. In normal adult
sexuality, the "polymorphous perversity" of the child has been
repressed; but infantile sexuality is forever part of the subconscious

memories. Second, the sexual instinct seeks a union with objects
in the world; it is basic for love to reach out. This tendency

arises from the infant's basic economic need for sustenance. He
loves/needs his mother. The primordial pattern of the love relation-
ship is the infant at his mother's breast. Thus, a human being has
originally two semal objects: himself and his nurse (not necessarily,
of course, his biological mother).

But to an infant there is no distinction between the

 

”Norman 0. Brown, Life a ainst Death' The Psychoagggflic

W, Vintage Books, New York: Random House, n.d.),
P- 25- .

134
narcissistic love of self and the reaching out for the mother. He
knows no subject-object dualism; the pleasure of sucking includes
within it the desire for the breast, and vice versa. For in.infancy
the Ego is large--the mother, source of pleasure, is part of the
infant's perception of himself. Here is Freud on the subject: "The
ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a
far more extensive feeling--a feeling which embraced the universe and
expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external
world."5 So that all love is narcissistic. All our desire for
pleasurable psychic activity is narcissistic.

J'aime... J'aimet... Et qui donc pout aimer autre chose
Que sol-meme'r... (Oeuvres I, 129)

Nan is born to love. The choice of an.ebject and the shrinking of

the self come later. "Love thy neighbor as thyself"--this is the
ideal which is the foundation of all moral behavior, if adult humanity
were only capable of it.

Fer Narcissus the only possible escape from.the prison of the
self is in death. In.death, as in.love, the walls of'the ego are broken
down and the circle of self-interest is widened. To a certain extent
an adult can re-croate his infantile paradise of love by providing
himself with a mate--and a child. But none of this is within.Narcissus'
reach; maimed beyond the capacity to love another, he nevertheless is
able to yearn for release.

0 mon corps mon cher corps, temple qui me sépares
De ma divinite, je voudrais apaiser
Votre bouche... Et bientdt, je riseruis, baiser,
Ce peu qui nous defend do l'extreme existence,
Cetto tremblante, er'le, et pieuse distance

Entre moi-meme et l'onde, et non fine, et les dieuxi...
(Oeuvres I, 130)

 

5Quoted by Brown, Life against Death, p. as.

135

Narcissus' body was the visible symbol of the Self he loved; but once
he perceived its limitations he was eager to penetrate visibility and
physical beauty into the mysteries of the dark nether soul that he had
seen first with.horror in ”Fragments I.” Now he accepts the dark water,
passing from.his own deep formless soul into communion and finally
union with death.

Non Qme ainsi so rd dans sa prepre foret,

OB la puissance chappe 3 ses formes supremes... A

L'fime, l'fime aux yeux noirs, touche aux tenebros memes,

Elle so fait immense at no rencontre rien...

Entre la mort st 501, quel regard est le sien:
(Oeuvres I, 130)

Narcissus drowns himself in the pool, thereby achieving the only
possible kind of contact with his captivating reflection. The death
is not an accident, but welcome to Narcissus. To break the surface of
the water and absorb its fluidity and formlessness was self-destructive
for Narcissus, but not self-defeating. In death he became larger, no
longer out of harmony'with the universe but a part of it.

Narcissus met death willingly, because he had come to sense
his inadequaqy (which is in part the inadequacy of all of us). But he
was doomed to die because of Vengeance and the enmity of the gods. ‘What
was the reason for this hostility? Ostensibly Narcissus' punishment
came about because he caused too much frustration; his body arouses
love, but his spirit refused to accept the lovers. Cantata du Narcisse,
the one-act libretto which completes the Narcissus cycle, goes further
into the meaning of Narcissus in this one roSpect: 'why Narcissus had
to die, could not persist.

The action of the libretto is furnished by an attempted
seduction of Narcissus by a nymph. As he is admiring his reflection
in the pool, a figure slowly coalesces out of the mists. It is a Nymph,

136
and so beautiful is she that Narcissus at first thinks she is himself,
that the impossible wish that Narcissus shall be at once himself and
separate from himself has been granted. The Nymph tries to take
advantage of his evident desire, but he rudely spurns her, in the
following exchange:
in mm. 92m $9222 simple-

Non paroille, Narcisse... Admirez d'autros charmes
Que ceux dont vos soupirs n'obtiendront que vos larmes.

LE NARCISSE
Jo les vois. Jo les hais... Maudite soit l'errour
Qui me fit presque aimer ce qui me fait horrour:
(Oeuvres I, 409)

Cruel words for one who had shown herself (in Scene I) to be quite
a narcissist herself, if not on an absolute basis like Narcissus. She
tries the persuasions of lagic next: even.if she is not precisely
Narcissus, there are resources in their very differences. Furthermore,
unlike Narcissus' reflection, she is not restricted to the water, and
what is more, lasts through the night. She has a real practicality:

Vous n'aimioz que do l'onde, et je suis certitudo.
(Chums I, “09)

She promises him much pleasure, but he finds her odious. Finally in
her wrath she reveals the real reason why Narcissus cannot exist: he
has broken a law of nature, the fructifying renewing principle whereby
an individual shares his traits with the fellows of his Species in order
to strengthen his kind.
LA NYMPHE
Insensgl... Tu oux donc aimer contre les dieux,
Vouor 1 ton supreme et dgtostablo inceste

1e pr‘sont qu'ils t'ont fait/do ta beaute’ funoste,
Et tristement corrompre une otornolle loi...

(Oeuvres I, l+11)

137
This is Narcissus' crime: he refuses to share his goods, the gifts
of the gods. In nature the only purpose of outward beauty is to attract,
in order that insemination may occur. Narcissus, in committing a
particularly sterile form of incest, wastes his beauty, and the gods
will reclaim their gifts. He could save himself by loving the thumb,
but this would be an immolation for him; there would be nothing left
of the essence of Narcissus--he would be saving another.

Narcissus' purity is that of the deliberately alienated artist
who divides himself from all others. If such a poet chooses simply
never to reveal a line of his making to anyone, then he is not in the
position of Narcissus, for he does not attract. But the artist who
produces a beautiful and provocative surface while obscuring the true
meaning beyond the reach of any audience is committing an unnatural act.
For the only justification for art lies in dissemination, a commi-
cation of forms that are new and valuable because they come from what
is unique in the artist, a sharing of what a man has found on his voyage
into himself.

A poem like La Jeuno Pmue is a likely candidate for this kind
of charge: its beauty attracts, but the meaning escapes. Vale’ry had
faced the charge and given a sort of answer in "Le Philosophe at La;
Jeune Pmue." This was a poem for the few, not the may; she wanted
to be grasped, but not easily. Her very difficulty would have to be
part of her nature.

Mon coeur veut qu'on no force, at vous refuse, Amants,
Que robutent les noeuds de ma belle cointuro.

(Oeuvres I, 161+)

This is quite different from Narcissus, who wanted neither seduction nor
rape.

138
Narcissus, like La Jeune ngque, and also "Le Cimetiere marin,”
is part of Vale’ry's «autobiography in form.” The death of Narcissus,
alluring but unfruitful, is the birth of‘Valery the living poet.

It II t t t It # $ t i t *

Once again, as in the preceding chapter, a hiatus must now occur
as the discussion shifts to wallaco Stevens' long and seemingly dis-
continuous poem, !Esthétique du Mhl." lEsthetique du Mal" is no more
an artistic entity than the Narcissus cycle of Valery; conversely, it is
no less. flEsthetique" is a cycle, a loosely connected group of poems
through which several themes run, no one poem containing all the themes,
except as they are subsumed under the great tepic of an.esthetic response
to the world. Any listing of the themes is bound to be provisory for
they are all inter-related and shifting; another reader might make
another equally valid list. In.my Opinion there are three major themes:
(1) the validity or authenticity of an aesthetic response to evil, and
the nature of that response, (2) the failure of myth, and its aftermath,
(3) Stevens' deeply conservative political outlook.

The Opening of this meditative poem is rich in atmoSphore and
allusion. A world.will be constructed out of man's morning preoccupations.

He was at Naples writing letters home

And between his letters, reading paragraphs

On the sublime. Vesuvius had groaned

For a month. (92, 313)
Vesuvius and the sublime: the destruction by volcano of a city full of
people, and an ancient work of literary criticism. These two events

are juxtaposed; is there a further relation? Yes, Longinus probably
wrote On the Sublime around the year 80 A.D., and the destruction of

Pompeii occurred in 79 A.D. Not much of a coincidence, except that

139

Stevens has chosen to bring them together as two of the elements in a
character's meditation. He thinks about pain and terror, also the
sublime, that which is at a drastic remove from earthly pain and
terror. The only links between them are their historical contemporaneity
and the man's mind. One event might be said to be wholly in reality,
the catastrOphe producing an undeniable pressure of external events
on the victims. It would not be possible for a Pompeiian to imagine
himself out of the situation. The other event is classifiable wholly
as imagination; ”On the Sublime” is no imitation of an action, but
discusses literary forms and arrangements. Nothing in it is real.
What significance, what value can such a work--a book of philosophy,
and aesthetic philoSOphy at that--have compared to a real event which
alters peOple's lives? The question is unavoidable, and leads to a
statement of the first and largest theme of this poem: can there be an
aesthetic resPonse to pain and evil? Is it apprOpriate to respond
aesthetically to catastrOphic events? These arequestions which met
be answered in our democratic and violent age. It may be that there is
no need for men to use their energies for works of the imagination such
as poetry and criticism. But poetry continues to exist; perhaps, then,
there is a need.6

An answer is beginning to come even in the first stanza, with
the idea of perception. A volcano alone does not produce pain; men must
be present. In this second part of stanza I are two relations involving
pain, first the people of Pompeii in relation to Vesuvius, and second
the man in Naples (pgrsona of this poem) in relation to the ancient

 

6It seems pertinent to interject at this point the fact that
"Esthetique du Mal" was first published in October 19%.

140
pain in Pompeii. "This is a part of the sublime from which we shrink,"
he says, probably making reference to our enjoyment of tragedy.

And yet, except for us,

The total past felt nothing when destroyed. (Op 311),)
....9

Culturally we furnish the past with a continuing existence. At the
same time, history humanizes us if we pay attention to it.

Pain exists, then, in a relation between man and his world, or
in Stevens' scheme of things, between the imagination and reality. Thus
it is part of the same general faculty as poetry, and music too as shown
by Peter Quince at the clavier: “Music is feeling, then, not sound.”

And yet if forgotten pain is really abolished, might it not be
better to forget? Do we owe arything to the past? Later it will. develop
that we do indeed have a duty to remember everything, to know all the
truth of reality that it is in our power to know. In the second stanza
the thinker of the poem, continuing his troubled examination of the
questions he has raised, tries to eliminate a prime source of error-"pure
deduction.

As he drifts into sleep, some of the elements of the setting
(*warblings") enforce themselves into his thoughts. His thoughts will
come into harmomr with his environment, under such an influence, and he
will have a sense that he has grasped the truth. But all this is too
inward, too much a process in which the self's wishes are served, and
not the truth of reality.

Warblings became
Too dark, too far, too much the accents of
Afflicted sleep, too much the syllables
That would form themselves, in time, and comunicate

The intelligence of his despair, agrees
What meditation never quite achieved. (92, 31h)

11+1
The moonrise points up this problem of right thinking: how to be sure
that one's answers correspond to some truth of reality. lI‘oo many
philosophers have pursued labyrinthine arguments deep into a realm
whose existence proved to correspond to nothing outside their own minds.
And strangelyumeaningfully for Stevens' mission of inquiryupam is
like this too, all inward, not interested in the reality which is above
it. "It is pain that is indifferent to the sky" (_C_P, 315). For pain
there is no external reality. Nothing is, except that which directly
impinges on it. Here Stevens discusses pain as something which has an
existence of its own, an entity, without thinking of it as scathing that
perpetrates itself in or on a humn body. As such, like all things
that exist, it has a certain will to perpetuate itself. Pain does not
wish to die. But if it rejects, and is rejected by, external reality,
here symbolizes as sky, moon, and night, it is this very side of things
that ”saves it in the end" (_C_P, 315). Reality allows pain to exist;
but pain, wrapped up in itself, cannot acknowledge this.

Stanza III opened with Stevens' antinyth theme, very similar to
that which is found in ”sunday Morning." The elements are familiar:
Heaven and hell are here on earth now. Jesus failed as a god because
he was overly human, too much a brother; our need for a god is a need
for a parent. And then, he weakened us with pity. No, Jesus was an
end to religion, a tapering off of belief, a half-way point between
theology and humanism. But all this is familiar ground, and Stevens
does not linger on it.

Once we had an eiqzlanation for pain which, if it did not provide

comfort, at least might point toward a fatalistic acceptance; pain was
God's will. Or, it was in the nature of the gods to inflict pain. But

142
now we have no myths; our grief must now contain.an anguished ques-
tioning. Once God punished his children, and if they seldom understood
the reason, they nevertheless thought that there was a reason, that God
understood. But now the only god is chance. In our statistical
universe, evils fall where they fall. Understanding this, it seems that
man might take it upon.himself not to inflict any unnecessary pain. If
this is the only world we have,

It seems
As if the health of the world might be enough.
(9.13. 315)

It seems that men.might work together for this health, because of this
health. But of course this has not happened. Stevens drOps the subject
and goes on to another.

Stanza IV abruptly shifts from the generalities of stanza III
into Stevens' gaudy surrealistic mode. There is no logic, no continuity
to the lines that follow. He is cataloguing a few different forms that
an aesthetic of evil might take. First there is "Livre de Toutes Sortes
de Fleurs dfiaprEs Nature" (92, 316). One could simply list all the
“flours.” (Fleurs du mal? If this is a reference to Baudelaire, it is
an oblique one.) A compendium of evils would be sentimental because
such a matter-Of-fact ”listing” frame of mind somehow evades the evil
in the subject. One evil becomes equal to another. Riddel points out
in regard to these lines, "The sentimentalist like the Platonist negates
evil by deming the significance of individual things of this world."7
In this case we would have not an.aesthetic of evil, but rather a banal

sociology of evil.

 

7Riddel, The Clairvo nt E , p. 207.

118

The next approach (lines 3—9) is the phiIOSOphical. Could we
analyze evil as we analyze the mode Of existence of a work of art? The
questions asked here about music are fruitful in that good answers might
arise from them. The same, or analOgous, questions might be asked
about pain, taking it as something which is performed or produced in the
same way as a work of art. Man can inflict pain, just as he can inflict
music on a bearer.

Third there is a "Spaniard Of the rose,” a cultivator of the
rose ”itself / Hot-hooded and dark-blooded" (92, 316), an image loosely
allusive to Don Juan. Here is a kind of attention to the flowers which
leads yet closer to a valid response. The feeling, so necessary to a
good aesthetic, is present, but without sentimentality. And the rose,
symbol of passion and blood, herein readily transfers its associations
to pain and evil; evil is a "hot-hooded and dark-blooded" rose. There is
vitality in such an approach.

Finally, what is the genius, or the tutelary inner Spirit, of
misfortune? Realistically we must conclude that it is something in
ourselves. But why can we not drive it out, once we know of this? The
answer is that evil is not in the mind, but in the body, in our clay.
Consciousness, rationality have access to the mind; if evil were only
a mental illness then there might be hOpe. But Stevens concludes that
it is in our clay, the physical stuff of which we are made. Evil is

The genius of the body, which is our world,
Spent in the false engagements of the mind. (Q2, 31?)

But lost this grimness color the whole world gray, we are immediately

reminded Of the power which redeems us from the miseries of the self:
10%.

For the world presented to us by Stevens, and indeed by all

1141+

atheists, has a double disadvantage: it makes us feel naked and
unsheltered in an alien world, basically insecure amidst a perceptual
disorder which one is forced to conclude is a true underlying disorder,
as well as wearing a poverty-stricken, aesthetically unpleasing
aspect when compared to religion's world of festivals, decked-out
churches and priests, and rich implements, the "damasked memory of the
golden forms” (Q2, 31?). Once we lived in a palace of gold, protected
and even loved by a father-god. But we have cast away this heritage
for a poverty of pride and freedom. The kind of aesthetic pleasure once
furnished to us by religious practices and their concomitant ready-made
forms is no longer permitted. Likewise the comfortable feeling of
relating to the world as a child to his father's house is gone. What is
left? Some very great recompense is necessary to give us psychic satis-
faction. Stanza V Offers us brotherly love, the love between two equals.
This kind of relation is “within what we permt"--a phrase which is
used twice in stanza V, once with regard to love, once with regard to
beauty. It is an important idea, since it makes us wholly responsible
for the new world we inhabit. The love we are able to feel now, now
that we are ”wholly human“ is ample reward for courage.

Be near me, come closer, touch aw hand, phrases

Compounded of dear relation, spoken twice,

moo by the lips, once by the services

Of central sense, these minutiae mean more

Than clouds, benevolences, distant heads.

These are within what we permit, . . . (92, 317)
The Stevens coinages “in-bar” and “ex—bar“ make this poem appear more
opaque to understanding than it really is, as in ”in-bar / Exquisite in
poverty against the suns / or eat-bar, . . .- (_cg, 317). The idea of
these words is in a kind of barrier, the “-bar." What we do not permit
(e. g., sentimentality, the supernatural), because it might cloud or

M5
distort our perception of the true aesthetic we seek to substitute for
the old false one, is ”en-bar." What we permit, things strictly human
and natural, is ”in-bar."

Although Stevens will later, in the eighth stanza, lament that
”the death of Satan was a tragedy / For the imagination” (pg, 319), in
stanza VI he makes a first, elqierimental attempt at producing a poem,
of exercising his metaphorizing faculty, within what is permitted,
within his hoped-for new aesthetic. He re-creates a poetic sun which
is neither a god nor the creation of a god, but an explicable sun, part
of a scientific world. It is strange that so few poets have made use of
the enormous lore of natural knowledge that has been develOped in the
scientific investigations of the last two centuries, particularly the
last century. There are many gaps in knowledge: those who know the
science are not writing the poetry, and zi_c_e_ m. But every echlcated
man must know some science in this age; the intellectual atmosphere is
permeated with it. There may also be a problem of recognition; how
many readers, even professional critics, can recognize a scientific
allusion when they see it? Or they may see it and not be able to fit it
into the customarily high-toned and immaterial language of criticism.

At any rate, Stevens in stanza VI writes a poem in the mode of
his calledpfor non-traditional aesthetic. The sun is ”clownish yellow,”
not the noble "golden” (a word used three times in the preceding five
lines). Maxw attributes of the sun are captured in metaphor; the sun's
orbit, how the sun causes the lunar month we watch from our planet, and

the unceasing atomic reaction which is the energy, light, and heat of

the sun.

146
A big bird.pecks at him

For food. The big bird's bony appetite

Is as insatiable as the sun's. (92, 318)
And then the necessary leap into poetry occurs, for it is not enough
to furnish accurate new metaphors based on science. Poetic apperception
must also occur. The sun is a furnace which feeds on itself. The
poet's metaphorizing faculty feeds on itself, on.the poet's psychic
contents, on data from.the world. It too is a voracious bird, as
omnivorous as the energy that feeds on the sun. Beginning with line 10
the bird is gradually transformed from something cosmic into something
earthly, and something which even harks back to the "ambiguous undu-
lations" of the final lines of ”Sunday Mbrning." There is no repose,
no contentment for the restless birds-energizing factor of poetry, the
desire to express what has not been expressed before in.the words of
our language.

The yellow grassman's mind is still immense,
Still promises perfections cast away. (9:, 318)

There is much in the mind, much.not yet gotten out, and higher and
higher degrees of expressiveness, always leading toward the perfect
way of saying.

WOunds, soldiers, wars and death must inevitably find their way
into an aesthetic of evil. Stanza VII is a lament and memorial for
"the soldier of time," who is all the soldiers who have ever fallen, and
who in.the course of the poem becomes enlarged into a quality which is
in all of us and thus is deathless. The soldier of time is deathless--
why? Because there has always been a soldier, always is a soldier to
fight time's battle. All common men are soldiers of time, and not on

the side of death, for death is the enemy, and those who are subject to

11+?
death are soldiers Of time.
If it had seemed that Stevens was marching into the new era
of true perceptions with all self-confidence and courage, then stanza
VIII corrects this impression.
How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. (9:, 320)
The phantoms are all the deities, spirits, ancestors, explanations
and what-have—you, who once were supposed to live in an underground
supernatural realm. But now they exist no more, not so much killed or
assassinated as simply denied. ‘we said a ”mortal no," and there was no
immortality. No to Satan, and he was gone too, "And, with.him, many
blue phenomena" (CP, 319), that is, happenings which depend on
imagination.
Stanza VIII marks, too, a turning back toward imagination,
as though some corrective was necessary. There were no's, negations,

denials; but underneath, all the while, there was a yes because

under every no
Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken.

(92, 320)
Stevens' kind of quest for an underlying reality is above all a
positive act, requiring a basic temperamental.yes. Negation had led
to the point Of reality's bare rock, and the cycle back to imagination
begins again. There is a momentum which requires that the cycle swing
back; the momentum is poetry.

There is much talk Of "poverty" in the ninth section, but the
emphasis is very different from section v, with its "in-bar / Exquisite
in poverty against the suns / Of exebar, . . .” The momentum.of V was
all in the direction of the pole of reality; now by stanza IV the

148
farthest point has been rounded, and the force is toward imagination.
Now we will get a look directly at the moon, as at the sun before (VI).
And the key word is "panic" (93, 320)--when we look at the moon, we
feel panic. Because now we have no myths, no meanings for it.

And nothing is left but comic ugliness
Or a lustred nothingness. (g, 320)

We are "destitute," "divested," "pure poverty" (CP, 320). Something is
needed, evidently, but what? For we cannot--absolutely cannot--
return to Old beliefs once we have thrown them off.

Like T. S. Eliot, Stevens avails himself of images of drought
and water to describe the demythologizing of the west.

This is the sky divested of its fountains.

Here in the west indifferent crickets chant

Through our indifferent crises. (92, 321)
Our need is for another chant, but Stevens is too intent on his brave
new self to accept any Eliotic re-mythologizing. Simply to take up new
beliefs from another culture would be to sully the honesty of his new-
found way of looking. Where can man turn, then, if not to belief?

The desire for the world we saw through the eyes of belief,
without faith to shield us from true perceiving, is like an adult's
desire to return to home even though he cannot return to the childhood
feeling of belonging as a child belongs to home. It is, in short, a
nostalgia, a natural and prizfitive feeling. The most basic of all
nostalgias is of course the return to the mother, to the time when all
needs were met (because the needs were few and simple); some say there
is a nostalgia for the womb. Stevens subsumes all these forms of
nostalgia within the category of mothers in stanza X.

11+9

He had studied the nostalgias. In these

He sought the most grossly maternal, the creature

Who most fecundly assuaged him, . . . (99, 321)
He finds home, his true re-beginning, in birth, and he re-makes himself
as a child who is "fierce,” ”savage,“ ”merciless.” All this is for
the purpose of "accomplish Eng] the truth in his intelligence” (92, 321).
And he finds that this mother is, after all, reality. The beginning
Of the cycle between imagination and reality has at last been located
at the pole of reality. Imagination comes later; and recall that we
saw that the rock of reality is also the end.

Reality explained.

It was the last nostalgia: that he

Should understand. (9;, 322)
And what of suffering, what of death? They simply are; they have no
meaning.

That he might suffer or that

He might die was the innocence of living, if life

Itself was innocent. To say that it was

Disentangled him from sleek ensolacings. (92, 322)
Here there is balance, a satisfying downturn after so many questions. But
it is not the end, even though it might have been a likely stOpping
place. There is an acceptance of suffering and death, but Stevens does
not wish to leave it at acceptance. Stevens is temperamentally not one
to rage and rail at the human condition. Even without biographical
evidence, such as certain notorious statements made by Stevens in letters
posthumously published, it is Obvious that he stands politically with
those who know that, say, poverty exists, but who m. He is the
Opposite of a revolutionary; this idea will come in stanza HV. He does
not end the poem with the resignation, the acceptance of stanza X.

Apparently it seems necessary to him to say that he is bitter. Still,
when the poem does end, after fifteen stanzas, he accepts.

150

Stanza XI, like VI, VII, and IX, is an example, a poem which
has been written as a demonstration of the kind of aesthetic Stevens is
talking about in the other stanzas, which are philOSOphical and program-
matic. When he says ”Life is a bitter aspic. We are not / At the
center of a diamond” (913, 322), he means we do not live in a rigidly
structured, perfectly crystalline and clear world of order (like a
diamond), but rather in a substance that is relatively cloudy,
jelly-like, unstable--an aspic, in short, and one that is bitter to the
taste. Thus he proclaims himself a man of bitter appetite, capable of
this kind of poetry: no sentiment, no false nostalgia.

At dawn,
The paratrOOpers fall and as they fall
They mow the lawn. (93, 322)

A town is being attacked and wiped out; a ship skins. It's war, and
Stevens likes to write it just this way (111165 1-9) and not that way
(lines 12-17). "The gaiety of language is our seigneur" (CP, 322),
our lord and guiding force. We are the way we write; the metaphors we
use, eSpecially unconsciously, are the best key to our nature. A bitter
man writes a bitter scene. But there is enjoyment even in the bitterness,
just as, perhaps, he was trying to show us that there was some bitterness
in the enjoyment. A further corrective is applied in stanza XII; if
Stevens was having difficulty finding a comfortable attitude toward a
world which contains evil in its very fabric, he will now rationalize
himself into no attitude at all, "a third world without knowledge"
(C_P, 323). He postulates a realm neither peopled (imaginative) nor
unpeOpled (realistic), a world of no perceptions, no will, and, thus,

no pain. Is it possible? This is the world in which he is utterly
alone, the only possible mode of existence for this third world. If
he can only become sufficiently detached from the world and the peOple

in it, then the problem of pain will be solved. Solipsism has always

151
been a danger for this poet. Noticeably in stanza XII, image and
metaphor almost disappear as this condition of thought is reached.
Poetry depends on the tension between the worlds of imagination and
reality. To rise above the fray will be to deny the poetic energy
which is his raison d'gtre. There is no quest and no goal in this
nirvana-like condition. The price is too high.

It may seem.by now that the poem (and my discussion) is winding
hOpelessly, and even contradicts itself as idea doubles back on idea.
But this is part of the fiber Of Stevens the thinking poet, and
should not be thought of as a flaw in Stevens. “As we read the poems
we are so continually aware of Stevens observing, meditating,
creating, that we feel like saying that the process Of creating the
poem is the poem. Surprisingly Often the motion of qualification, of
concession, Of logical conclusions-a dialectical motion in the older
sense of dialecticals-is the movement that organizes the poem; and in
Stevens the unlikely tenderness of this movement--the one, the not-quite-
that, the other the not-exactly-the-other, the real one, the real
other--is like the tenderness of the sculptor or draftsman [shg],
whose hand makes but looks as if it caressed."8 At somewhere past
the halfway point of "Esthe/tique du Mal” the reader is nearly lost in
the tangle of qualification, concession, and dialectic. But the central
thread of thought has never been lost: How is one to respond aesthet-
ically to evil? In stanza X, he was almost ready to give the answer
of hedonistic acceptance, but it seemed immoral and.unpleasantly smug

 

BRandall Jarrell, "The Couectgg Poems of Wallace Stevens,”
in The Achievement Of'Wallace Stevens, edited.by Ashley Brown and
Robert S. Haller, (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962), p. 185.

152
coming from the well-fed.unwounded American poet. In stanza XII,
he escapes into an overly purified realm of Nirvana-like Oblivion,
where the contemplating self is utterly removed from the world. This
marks an extreme Of Stevens' thought.

The utopian alternatives are pure introspection and pure
abstractions-knowledge of pure act as against knowledge of pure
substance. In the one mode, we would know ourselves as knowing;
in the other, we would know the ”object" so completely that we
would not be aware of ourselves as knowing. The radical disjunction
is, as I have said, between act and substance and.marks the
extreme development of Stevens' abiding concern with the
relationship between "imagination" and “reality.'9

Affirmation, acceptance-~Stevens can.find no other answer.

Is he then unalterably trapped by temperament? This is the import
of stanza XIII:
The son

And the father alike and equally are spent,

Each one, by the necessity of being

Himself, the unalterable necessity

Of being this unalterable animal. (92, 32h)
And if there is "evil in the self” (stanza IV), there is no cure for
it. Just as all are victims, so do all participate in the evil of the
'world. "The longest meditation” (9:, 324), that is, the largest possible
overview of the scene invariably will reveal the presence of the
assassin. Though we are locked in human nature, ineluctably objects
of knowledge, we have a degree of freedom in what we choose to see.
To put it another way, insofar as we are part of realitye-and man‘with
his certain nature is part of realitye-we are trapped in destiny, not
free to choose our being; but insofar as we are imaginative, we

increase our freedom, for the imagination can to a degree choose what

 

9Roy Harvey Pearce, "wallace Stevens: The Last Lesson Of the

Master,” E_I_._H_, 3; (March 1964), p. 69—70.

153
it sees and what it does with what it sees. The man of stanzas I
and II who began these meditations on evil established a point of
View; the poet established the mu__nd_g of this poem, as he has done for
his entire canon of poetry. Each of us may have his own spectrum Of
visible light, ”a zone of blue and orange / Versicolorings” (_C_P_, 321+).
At a certain time, within a certain zone of sight, what he sees may
be good. Within this limited scOpe, he sees what he sees; the poet
is free within the poem-world he creates. 0n the other hand, Stevens
stressed time and time again that the imagination must never lose
contact with reality. Perhaps it is only a question of the scOpe of
a man's vision. Today he might see good, tomorrow evil. In the long
run, “the maximum," he would see both. And we must endure it all, both
as spectators and as participators.

A political stanza now intervenes. Stevens was anti-Marxist,
of course, for nary reasons. If man is unalterable, then there can
be no point in revolution. Evil does not lie in forms of society, but
in each individual. Further, if governments are allowed to grow
naturally mary forms will be born, and a great variety Of forms is
desirable. Konstantinov, on the other hand,

would be the lunatic of one idea
In a world of ideas, who would have all the peOple
Live, work, suffer and die in that idea
In a world of ideas. (Q. 325)
True, it is a logical idea. But logic is not what's needed. Too much
logic is equivalent to lunacy, if applied too strictly. There can be
may right paths of lOgic, because logic is inward. But reality

resists and evades logic. The danger is the same as in stanza II,
that a man's thought will communicate to him only "the intelligence of

154

his deepair." ‘William Van O'Connor believes that Stevens had no
liking for politics, in Spite of the fact that the subject does
creep into his poetry time and time again. "The number of those poems
that touch on political questions and the social order should not be
taken'to indicate that Stevens believes, as do some of his contem-
poraries, that politics must play a necessary part in the role of the
poet. . . . In fact, for Stevens the preoccupation with politics
forced upon us by the develOpments of our time is a part of the
'pressure of reality' against which the poet's imagination must press
back."9

As I said above, Stevens is profoundly conservative in his
political phiIOSOphy, and the final outcome of his aesthetic of evil
is simply another branch from the same root. He accepts and affirms
and endures all that he sees. The next step is to delight in the sight.

This is the thesis scrivened in delight,
The reverberating psalm, the right chorale. (9g, 326)

Evil and.pain are part of living in a physical world; the "non-physical
people, in.paradise" can experience only the minor of what we feel,
living physically. For Stevens, life is worth the living, and worth
the suffering and dying too. He would not choose to recreate another
world without evil; there is so much richness in this world.

One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the 111 it sees? (gg, 326)

For the poet of reality, richness is enough.

* t * * t * It It It It * It

 

9William Van O'Connor, The Shaping Spirit; a Study of Wallace
Stevens, (Chicago: Regnery, 1950), p. 7u.75.

155

In this chapter we have seen two poets in crises rooted in
the nature of their habitual ingrained patterns of thought. For Vaie’ry,
the poet of the journey into the self, danger lies in certain forms of
inwardness. Stevens, on the other hand, sought a new and complete view
of reality; he too stood the risk of being overwhelmed by what he dis-
covered. How they faced their respective perils will be interesting to
trace, as the struggle feeds back into the poetry.

Stevens' highly ambitious project began extremely well. He was
in a sense calling into question the continuing existence of poetry, and
indeed all forms of art, in a world which seemed to contain so many
evils that a man might properly be ashamed to claim a common humanity
with some of his fellows. We may well not yet have reached a point in
the develOpment of mankind where we can afford art; especially after a
devastating war, it seems arguable that we should all become farmers
or physicians. Everyone involved in work which is not necessary for
economic survival must occasionally ask himself whether he might not
be more useful to his fellow man in some other way. In short, it is
not only Philistines who ask whether art is necessary.

Stevens began with a situation as far removed from his own
possible involvement or moral guilt as possible. He set the scene with
a modern man contemplating ancient pain. To get even further away from
sharing any blame or interest (in order to be perfectly objective), he
chose pain that was not inflicted by man at all, but by blind physical
forces--Pompeii, LB. 79. Allusion is also made to a work of aesthetic
philosophy, On the any, A. D. 80. Is the latter utterly trivial.

when compared to the former, or can there be some relation between
them? The idea that Nero fiddled while Rome burned is repellent, it

156
is true; but there may be some justification for a serious work of
philosophy to overlap a catastrOphe.

Slowly the answer begins to come. We remember and comemo-
rate the sufferings of the dead because of our perceptivensss. We
sharpen our perceptions and try to understand everything for greater
empathy. For the develOpment of this faculty of perception, we even
create objects to perceive: tragedies, epic poems, plastic and
pictorial representations of actions. Art is the materials of
emperience, arranged meaningfully. Here, with meaningful arrangements,
enters the aesthetician. "And yet, except for us, / The total past
felt nothing when destroyed" (92, 314).

Thus man enters the argument first of all as pure perceiver,
witness to evil. But later it will be seen that man is also a causer
of pain, and that evil is in man. Indeed, far from being a power of
Satan, a deity in whom we no longer believe and who therefore no longer
exists, evil is in the fiber of man. It cannot be gotten out of us or
out of the world, ever.

Thus, starting from the inevitability, if not the necessity of
perceiving well and truly all that is, and taking into account the
inevitably and necessity of evil, we come into the realm of Stevens'
poem, where the goal is the ultimate perception of reality, the point
where the maximm mind is brought to bear on the manmum view of things
as they are. Through Stevens' poetic method of "visibility of thought,”
we are able to witness the questions-and-answers, the push-and—pull,
in short, the dialectic that holds the poem tOgether. But toward the
end it begins to be obvious that Stevens was in some sort of trouble.
We know that he was dissatisfied with the outcome of the poem. In a

157
letter regarding the publication of "Esthe’tique du Mal" in m
figgigw he wrote the following:
The last poem ought to end with an interrogation mark, I suppose,
but I have punctuated it in such a way as to indicate an abandonment
of the question, because I cannot bring myself to and.the thing with
an interrogation mark.
Is the last line of "Esthetique du Hal” a question or not? Is it an
end or not? It seems to me that this ambiguity reflects an.insecurity
toward the conclusion of this aesthetic. Stanza XV might better have
been placed at the end of some other poem; there is a jarring gap
between.the assassins and soldiers and lunatic reds of the first it
and the green corn fields of the fifteenth stanza. 'We have come back
to the final resting place of "Sunday Merning,” but after what a
different journey! But if a poet is eupeptic, has a sanguine tempera-
ment, what other kind of conclusion can he draw?
I do not prepose, not have I thought of, another conclusion
to "EsthEtique du Mal." I do say that Stevens was near a sort of
poetic breakdown, where he was unable to cepe with the aesthetic
problems he had set himself--and yet was unwilling to admit it.
What would another poet do in similar circumstances? Valery
also faced a creative crisis, in which it seemed that he was unable
to meet the demands of his own poetry. Valery's solution was drastic,
dangerous, and effective.
BiOgraphical data show that Valery contemplated suicide; in
addition, he killed the poet in himself, or thought he had killed the
poet. But it was only wounded by the knife of self-immolation, hid

 

10Wallace Stevens, Letters, selected and edited by Holly Stevens,
New York: Alfred A. KnOpf, 1963, p. “'69.

158
itself away to heal and re-appeared at the first Opportunity (when
Gide sent Valery the galley proofs of Album de Vers Anciens). It is
a commonplace that unsuccessful suicides are insincere; so be it.
Having nurtured itself privately, the gift of poetry was stronger
than ever.

Valery's Narcissus was Valéiy as he might have been, Valery
on one pathway of creative develOpment. Narcissus is a concrete
representation of certain aesthetic problems: how far is it possible
to go with this particular form of inwardness? How long can a poet
live in utter self-sufficiency, using himself as audience, as erotic
outlet, as proving ground, as the whole circle of aesthetic meaning?
Valely had his Narcissus discover that his pleasure was not reason
enough to exclude all others, that indeed the more he pleased himself
and did not need the others, the more he attracted them. Narcissus
devotedly and not at all coyly tried.to turn his back on the world;
but the world intruded nonetheless.

Even more importantly, the Narcissus reveals a risk of blocked
creativity in his life pattern. For Narcissus, the real crisis
occurred not when.death or injury threatened, but at the moment when
he looked too deeply into himself, into the blackened.pool of "the
anxious work of the waking soul" (Oeuvres I, 12h, my translation).
Unknown to Narcissus, this less beautiful level of his mind had been
functioning all the while. He was truly in danger of "knowing himself,"
and his narcissistic self-esteem could not survive the knowledge.
‘What is Narcissus without self-love? He dies. But, I stress, this
death is a suicide; Narcissus is transforming himself into something
larger.

159

Mgn Qme ainsi 59 rd dans sa prOpre fore/t,

Ou la puissance chappe a ses formes supremes...

L'ame, l'fime aux yeux noirs, touche aux teerres memes,

Elle se fait immense et ne rencontre rien...

(Oeuvres I, 130)

Narcissus represents a double crisis for the poet Vale/ry; the
necessity of living in the world of others, and the breaking of the
hard-surfaced mirror of self-esteem in exchange for a plunge into the
demoralizing formlessness of the innermost self. Thus he continues
his journey into his creative soul.

And yet-almost no new poetry will follow the publication of
Charmes. There is an enormous outpouring of essays, dialogues,
colloquia, writings about poetry and poetic production. But very
little new poetry is published. If Valery, by amputating his Narcissus-
self, had overcome an obstacle to creativity, then why did not more
poetry ensue? First, the history represented by "Fragments du
Narcisse” did not necessarily occur at the same chronological point in
Vale/ry's poetic life as its order of publication. Vale/ry's "auto-
biograpmr in form" is not the same as Stevens' ”visibility of thought."
Autobiograva is written after the fact. Second, the first sketch or
plan of Narcissus was made early in the career, with “Narcisse parle,"
part of the first burst of poetic creativity. Third, Vale’ry' s creativity
was not for the greatest part expended on his poetry; nor even on the
essays, dialOgues, etc. Vale/ry wrote himself into his notebooks, to
the very end of his life.

Stevens, on the other hand, produced another book of poetry,
plus a book-length section for his Collected Eoems, after the book
which contains 'Esthe’tique du Mal." (After this, there was not much
time remaining in his life; otherwise there is no reason to assume

160
that he would not have written more.) Perhaps this is an indication
that the imperfections in his poems served as irritants, stimulating
him to create more. Transports to Supmer was published in 1947; thus
in his sixties Stevens had been threshing out problems that in their
knottiness and over-ambitiousness were characteristic of much younger
men. If ”visibility of thought” is one's poetic aim, then an.unanswer-
able question will serve better than an answerable one.

In this chapter I have presented, from the poetry of Stevens
and Valery, examples in support of my thesis that the pattern of
poesis finds its way into the poem. ”Esthetique du Mal" is Stevens'
attempt to reach an accommodation between the poet's imagination and
the evil in reality. Early in the poem.(stanza II) Stevens expresses
a warning about conclusions based too little on reality, and too much
on the workings of the mind and imagination. In the end, he relies
not so much on the power of metaphor as on his sense of the world to
find his atonement and peace. To Stevens, the evil in reality is a
necessary part of life in a physical world. And delight in the
physical world is an integral part of Stevens' sense of the world.
That he is aware of the limitations of his approach is part of his
theory. Imagination is not enough; reality must be adhered to.

Valery's treatment of the myth of Narcissus and the fountain
is infused with the conception of the poetic process as a voyage into
the self. Narcissus uses the fountain to study the beloved image of
himself, just as the artist uses his work to examine the side of
himself that he most admires. But just as Narcissus inadvertently

looked into--rather than at--the pool of water, and was frightened,
the writer may accidentally go beyond what is pleasing in his

161
self-examination. In addition, Valery's Narcissus reveals the dangers
and weaknesses in an excess of inwardness: sterility, lovelessness, and

selfishness.

CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSIONS

This thesis may be somewhat unusual among comparative litera-
ture theses for the reason that there is no direct connection such
as influence between the two poets involved. They are linked only
by a theme, a preoccupation throughout their productive careers with
poetryemaking both as subject and as activity. Though their lives
span approximately the same years--Valery lived from 1871 to 1945
and Stevens from 1879 to 1955--they never met, since Stevens never
travelled to Eur0pe, and Valery never travelled to America. ‘What is
more, I have never seen a word to indicate that Valery had ever heard
of wallace Stevens, or read any of his poetry. 0n the other hand,
Stevens knew of Valery, owned some of his works, and wrote ”Two
Prefaces" to dialogues of Vale’ry in the fifties. But I am fairly
certain that there is no question of influence from Valery to
Stevens either. Here are some excerpts from.Stevens' letters:

I have read very little of Paul Vale’ry, although I have a
number of his books and, for that matter, several books about
him. If there are any literary relations between.my things and
those of other writers, they are unconscious. Such a thing as
adopting the method or the manner of another writer is incone
ceivable. Granted the strong effect of literature, it is an
effect derived from the mass of things that I have read in the
past. Of course a man like Velery emerges from his books
without a close reading. ,Some months ago I received from Hr.
Vidal a cepy of Valery's Etat de +la Vertu, beautifully printed
by Leon Pichon, and I have had it in.my room.under my eye ever
since, but I have not read a line of it. If there is any relation

in my things to Valery's, it must come about in some such way'
as this:

162

163

It is difficult for me to think and not to think abstractly.
Consequently, in order to avoid abstractness, in writing, I search
out instinctively things that eiqiress the abstract and yet are not
in themselves abstractions. For instance, the STATUE about which I
am doing a great deal of writing now-a-days was, . . . a symbol for
art, art being a word that I have never used and never can use
without some feeling of repugnance. . . . I repeat what I said
recently that my object in all this is simply to write poetry,
keeping it as true as possible to myself and as 1near as possible
to the idea that I have in mind (Nov. 5, 1935).1

Thus, at the time of writing the letter quoted above, Stevens was hardly
acquainted with Vale’ry at all, in any very specific way. Even by 1945,

Stevens apparently knew no more of Valgry, as is shown by the following

excerpt from a letter.

What you say about Vale’ry is interesting. He was not a very
attractive looking person. While I have a number of his things,
there has always been too much to do to get round to him. I don't
feel so badly about that now that I have read what you say. I hope
that someone wi think it worthwhile to do an article on him
(“18' 27a 1945).

Finally, even as near the end of his career as 1952. he is still
professing ignorance of Vale’ry. In the following letter, Stevens refers
to his reading of the book by Elizabeth Sewell, Paul Vale’gz: The Mind
in the Mirror, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952).

When I had finished I thought it was a wonderful work and felt
relieved that it was over. In an case, I know even less about
Valery than I thought I knew (June 30, 1952).3

The general impression is that Stevens knew Valer mainly by reputation,
from some assorted biographical data that might have been picked up
from literary magazines, until the fifties when he began reading some

of Val'e’ry's prose, and was asked to write the two prefaces for a volume

1Wallace Stevens, letters, p. 290.

22213.. p- 510-
3M” P0 757-

164
of the Bollingen editions of Vale/ry. At this time, Stevens was
obliged to acquire a c0py of these dialogues W and w
the Soul) and to read them for the first time. Nevertheless one remark
in the preface to Eupalinos shows Stevens to be utterly in sympatm'
with the Vale/ry he read:

It follows that for Eupalinos and for men like him what they
do is their approach to the divine and that the true understanding
of their craft and the total need that they feel to try to arrive
at a true understanding of it and also at an exact practice of it
are immeasurably the most important things in the world, through
which the world itself comes to the place of the divine. The
present work has to be read with all this in mind. Amr rigorous
intellectual discipline in respect to something significant is a
discipline in re5pect to everything significant. Valery's own
discipline appears in every page of the dialogue. The need to
understand uncommon things and to manifest that understanding in
common things shows itself constantly. The modeling of the cluster
of roses is an instance. The comparison of the object found on
the shore of the sea, a natural object, with an object made by
man is another. The parable of the Phoenician and how he went
about making a ship is a third. It is the parable of the
artist (9g, 27?).

An approach to the divine through one's craft and through understanding
of the comnon things of the world--Stevens might have said the

same thing about himself.

Elsewhere in the same preface, Stevens refers to the dialOgue
as "the apotheosis of aesthetics” (_OP, 2714), a phrase which very
neatly sums up the life work of both Valé'ry and Stevens, eSpecially if
the meaning of the word ”aesthetics" is allowed to include its etymolo-
gical sense of perception. Aesthetics is the study of the beautiful
and of man's perceptions of the beautiful. I had at first thought of
entitling this thesis "The Apotheosis of Poesis," but later decided to"
make a less emphatic point of the fact that for Stevens and Valery

poetry-making as a paradigm for all sorts of makinguintellectual,
artistic, physical in the instance of dance or sportuin short, poesis,

165
became a value, as the best if not the only approach to the thing
that did matter most in the world, reality or the mind. A man is
born into this world, and he must somehow pass his days of life.
How shall he live? For Wallace Stevens and Paul Vale/ry, the answer
was the life of the mind, to spend their days engaged in the creative
process.

I have tried to avoid making much references to Valery's and
Stevens' work habits, but the subject has been broached (in Chapter III)
with the discussion of Vale’ry's habit of daily pro-dawn rising.
Stevens' work was quite another matter. By his own testimony, in the
letters, he was very often so preoccupied with other matters that he
had no time for poetry. In 1938 he wrote, "I cannot believe that I
have done amrthing of real importance. The truth is, of course, that
I never may, because there are so many things that take up my time and
to which I am bound to give ny best. Thinking about poetry is, with
me, an affair of weekends and holidays, a matter of walking to and
from the office. This makes it difficult to progress rapidly and
certainly.” Again in 1954:

I have no set way of working. A great deal of nw poetry has
been written while I have been out walking. Walking helps me to
concentrate and I suppose that, somehow or other, my own movement
gets into the movement of the poems. I have to jot things down as
I go along since, otherwise, by the time I got to the end of the
poem I should have forgotten the beginning. Often, when I reach the
office, I hand ny notes to my stenographer who does a better job
frequently at deciphering them than I should be able to do myself.
Then I pull and tug at the typed script until I have the thing
the way I want it, when I put it away for a week or two until I

have forgotten about it Ind can take it up as if it was something

entire fresh. If it satisfies me at that time, that is the end
of it.

 

“Stevens, Letters, p. 333.
abide, p0 8141‘.

166
Perhaps it would be overly fastidious to feel that there is something
incongruous about an insurance company stenographer being an integral
part of the poetic process. But that of course is the great crux of
the life of Wallace Stevens--that he was a highly successml businessman,
and yet remains one of our finest poets, rated with increasing
frequency in the topmost rank, along with T. S. Eliot and Whitman.

How tempting it would be to explain Stevens' job away. In his
chapter on Stevens as a ”legend," O'Connor theorizes, ”In his own person
he dramatizes the Opposition between the world of business and the
alienated artist. In his poetry the careful craftsmanship of the
symbolists, who most strongly Opposed the values of the bourgeois
world, finds its best American expression."6 I am forced to conclude
(from publication dates if nothing else; the letters of Stevens
appeared in 1966, O'Connor's The Shaping @irit in 1950) that O'Connor
did not have access to knowledge of Stevens' character. Far from being
Opposed to bourgeois values, Stevens was imbued with them. Homeowner,
upper-bracket martyred taxpayer, beautifully clothed and fed, Stevens
loved material possessions, contort, and yes, money. Instead of being
an alienated artist, he was--if anything-4n alienated businessman. He
was never comfortable in literary gatherings. He kept his job long
after the normal retirement age, even refusing a year of Harvard's
Charles Eliot Norton chair of poetry when it was offered. All this may
well demonstrate nothing more than the ultimate irrelevance of biography
to poetry; but the idea that Stevens' position as insurance executive
chafed him should be laid to rest.

 

6O'Connor, The Shaping Spirit, p. 21.

I a I ‘Iltl I'TJI'I "II‘ I l]

167

It is the prOportion that poetry occupied in the lives of
Stevens and Vale/ry that has greatest relevance here. A comparison
of the relative importance of poetry in the lives of the two men leads
to a somewhat contradictory double conclusion. Vale/ry took his
creative-intellectual work far more seriously than Stevens, giVing the
best part of himself to it. He was obliged to make a living, but he
took a job that left plenty of time and energy for his real work of
thought. On the other hand, the actual poetry produced in all this
vast labor was almost the smallest part (the drawing and sketching
I take to be the smallest part, although I assume that Valery approached
this with the same seriousness as he did everything else), the essays
and the notebooks which were like a scientist's daily log of his
research into the workings of his mind being hy far the largest. Thus
we may be left with poetry having approximately the same relative
importance in the lives of the two men.

Here is another paradoxical conclusion: Although Valé'ry was
more the intellectual, standing in the tradition of Montaigne and the
philosoghes as much as or perhaps even more than in the tradition of
the Symbolistes, his poetry is less intellectual than Stevens'. Critics
are patronizing toward Stevens' philOSOphical essay, "A Collect of
PhiIOSOphy,” sniffing that he based it on a students' handbook. When
it is philOSOphy, they say that his concern with the dualism between
man and the world is "hackneyed." The same problem explored with the
poetic concretizing and verbalizing imagination is somehow acceptable.
Nearly all of Stevens' thought goes into his poetry, including what for

Vale’ry would have been essays, dialogues, paragraphs, etc.

Stevens' poetry is much more voluminous than Vale’ry's, and

168
it has a more provisory air, the famous "visibility of thought." When
dealing with Stevens, it is always important to read on. Very few of
the poems have the air of most of Valery's--that they are finished
products with all the loose ends wrapped up. It is tempting to compare
Stevens' irregular blank verse with Valery's flawless regular meter--
except that each is perfectly normal for its respective culture.
Valery descends from Racine, Stevens descends (linguistically at least)
from Shakespeare.

Although for Stevens writing poetry was an off-andeon
occurrence, even secondary to his occupation, and Valery had long
periods when he was unproductive as a poet, still they are poets. ‘we
may put aside the fact that they were something else as well in the
same way that we accept Rimbaud's short life in poetry without sub-
tracting for the latter part--almost half--of his life. The creative
life takes the form of a quest, directed outward always for Stevens,
inward always for Valery. Thus the scenery along the way is quite
different. But what of the end of the journey, something I have not
yet discussed. It should be surprising, and.yet is somehow inevitable,
that the long quest leads to the same destination for both: to language
and then beyond. That the end is not God, or even noble mankind, is
perhaps what makes the two poets modern. In the end is the word-~a
tautology as well as a truth--because that was the beginning too.

What I mean.by “language, and beyond” can be seen in La Jeune
23222;: The YOung Fate began her ordeal actually in her sleep,
although the poem begins as she wakens, or at the moment when she

awakens. ‘When at the end of the poem the Fate falls asleep again,
she sinks into a noneverbal level, a realm without words. Here is

169

the Young Fate falling asleep, descending into the underground like
an Orpheus or a Dante (both artists, of course):

Je me remets entiere au bonheur de descendre,

Ouverte aux noirs temoins, les bras suppligieh,

Entre des mots sans fin, sans moi, balbuties.

Dors, ma sagesse, dors. Forms-toi cette absence;

Retourne dans le germs et la sombre innocence.

(Oeuvres I, 109)

This, I stress, is not to evade the answer she sought in lines #19-20,
”Manet... / mais sachet... LEnseigne-moi...,' but in a direct manner
to find it. If what she finds is inexpressible in words, truly
ineffable, then.that is the paradox:of'poetryw The poet's impossible
dream is to express mutely. The Ibung Fate passes downward, inward,
through a stratum of words, "babbled," then no words, only an Open
throat where we may imagine that the sound emitted is meaningless.

(La porte basse c'est une bague... 6n la_gaze

Passe... Tout meurt tout rit dans la gorge gui jase...
L'oiseau boit sur ta bouche et tu negpeux.le voir...

Viens plus bas, pgrle bas... Mnoir n'est s s noir...)
Oeuvres I, 109)

 

And it is gone, but not finished. The subject matter, the referent,
has passed the limitations of poetryh
"La Pythie" ends with the following provocative stanza:

Honneur des Hommes, Saint LANGAGE,

Discours prephetique et pare,

Belles chaines en qui s' 6 age

Le dieu dans la chair 6g ,

Illumination, largesse!

Voici parler une Sagesse

Et sonner cc to auguste Vbix

ngtm quand elle sonne

re plus la voix de personne

Tant que des ondes et des boisl (Oeuvres I, 136)
These lines come at the end of a long frenzy in which the Pythoness,
a priestess of Apollo who was capable of foretelling the future, is

racked incredibly by a visitation from.the Gods, and finally by a

170

subtle alteration in her method produces the cryptic utterance given
above. It would.be natural to theorize that the Pythoness is a
representation of the poet at his work, first in the throes of in-
epiration, the recipient of a literal breath from.the gods, then
broken and desperate to a morbid degree, and finally undergoing
insight and understanding. The whole process fits remarkably well
into the classic scheme of the creative process. The first, or
irritant phase comes in the first thirty lines, when the Pythoness
is seized by the agony of the prOphecy which is coming to her. Her
suffering is intense, but she cannot turn away even if she wishes:

Si la folle tarde 2 hennir

Mime de noire enthousiasmes,

Hfite les dieux, presse les spasmes

De s'achever dans l'avenirI (Oeuvres I, 131)
She must bring the prephecy to bear if she is ever to be released
from.her agonies. So she labors on, digressing to remember her'youth
when before she was possessed she was a fresh virgin who felt in
harmony with her body (lines 78-100). But her world went bad, life
turned sour for her when "Un soir, de mon triste delire / Parut 1a
constellation" (Oeuvres I, 133). This was a new and.meaningful'way
of looking at the heavens. She received the stigmata of her calling,
and was forced by priests or gods to enter the cavern of prephecy
(where hallucinogenic gasses escaped from.a crevice in.the rock. The
Pythoness was mounted on a tripod directly over the fissure.) But it
was a cruel and.unjust fate.

Qu'aizje donc fait qui me condamne
Pure, a ces rites odieux! (Oeuvres I, 133)

Indeed, the cause is hopeless; she is inadequate to receive the gifts

171
of god. Thus she has undergone the second stage of creativity--
fruitless endeavor--and now she will turn away in despair. Tears come,
and she thinks of death (lines 172-180). Just at this very point of
lowest morale, the answer begins to surge up in the body, "Mes secrets
sonnent leurs aurores!" But the coming climax has a deathly feel:

Je sens dans l'arbre de ma vie
La mort monter de mes talons: (Oeuvres I, 135)

Finally, when the long-awaited prOphecy comes, with a bursting of
living doors, and cracking of seals, the prephetess is heard to speak
in ”me voix nouvelle et blanche" (Oeuvres I, 136). When wisdom speaks
it is in the voice of "no person as much as the waves and the woods."
Language is a set of "beautiful chains that ensnare the distracted god
within the flesh.” Syntax, grammar, the accepted definitions of words,
the rules of verbal reason: all these are obstacles to the non-verbal
or pre-linguistic kind of idea that poets, like all artists, try to
capture. To write poetry is to submit oneself to the disciplines of
languageuespecially when the poetry is as rigidly versified as Paul
Valery's. How to get at the hidden strings that will sound the desired
chords? In La Jeune Pargue he evoked the moment of passage from
consciousness to unconsciousness, through the stratum of basic words
and beyond. ”La Pythie" finds her gods of prOphecy not in any
Olympian heights but in her own body. Her words were at once hers and
not hers, a personal utterance and yet something she had not realized
before she spoke.

Although “La Pythie" obviously relates to the creative process,

it must not be taken to mean that Vale/ry's method of writing poetry was
to torment himself with incipient inspiration in order to produce a

 

172
cryptic and unexpected utterance. Theodora Bosanquet quotes Valery
in this regard, thereby laying this interpretation permanently to
rest--or so it would seems-but then within a paragraph revives the
very idea she had squelched.

”The hypothesis of inspiration reduces the author to the
role of observer"--the hypothesis, that is, of unchecked in-
Spiration.

"How shameful it is to write without any knowledge of language,
verb, metaphor, change of ideas and of tone; without any conception
of the structure of the length of the work or of the conditions of
its term: scarcely to know Why and not in the least to know How:
Blush to be the Pythoness...“

'WOrds which make it clear that the poem called La 213M 618
not, whatever else it may be, a picture of Valery in —the throes
of composition. This vigorous description of the invasion of a
reluctant body by an alien Spirit may be read in.more ways than
one. It is another account of creative energy breaking its way
through that pure virginity which is the unchanging order of the
primordial cosmos. But it has an additional reference to the
Special creation of poetry, a divine Spirit wandering in the flesh
of words, subduing them.to its purpose as the invading god
of the oracle subdues the rebellious flesh of the intoxicated
virgin to a new r hm.and uses her abandoned body to give voice
to his own Speech.

"La Pythie" is ”about" language. The Pythoness (like the poet)
is a being who is able to Speak truly because she has found the way
to the roots of language. Literature essentially is "a develOpment
of certain of those prOperties of language which are most active
(agissantes) in primitive peOples . . . .”

Plus la forme est belle, plus elle se sent des origines de la
conscience et de l'expression, plus elle est savante et plus

elle s 'efforce de retrouver, par une sorte de synthese, la

plenitude, l'igdivision de la parole encore neuve et dans son
etat createur.

Language at its origins, and even.more, our very consciousness at its

 

7Bosanquet, Paul Valé’ , p. 79-80.

70 8Paul Valery, quoted in Hytier, La Poetique de Paul Valé'
p. o

173
origins, is Vale/ry's ideal, the goal toward which his poetry strives.
For Vale’ry on his search for the self, poetry's goal of language
and beyond would necessarily be found inwardly, where language lives.
It remains to look at Stevens, to see where language lies on the road
of the reality-quest.

It will be recalled that in Chapter Two, the general introduction
to Stevens, I discussed his whole work as representing a life in
poetry which had passed through the seasonal cycle of the solar year,
from spring's variety and new leafiness to the barrenness of winter's
bare rock. At the very end there was a new hepe of Spring, but the
cycle would have to be taken up by some other creator, not the old poet
of "The Whole of Harmonium."

In ”The Rock," the last group of poems in Stevens' Collected
£3993, there is a sense of a poetry beyond words, insofar as that is
possible, i.e., a poetry without metaphor in which the intrusion of the
mind upon the thing perceived is as little as possible, and the words are
no barrier between the self and the earth. In "To An Old Philosopher in
Rome,” Santayana is dying in a room in Rome. He is in the room, and
he is also on a threshold to another world. How very concrete, physical,
and real are the objects in the room,

The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The 0313119 0 o 0 (Q, 508)

If poetry is present in this room--and it is present-“then it is in
these objects and their relation to the dying man, not in any words
about them. The candle's flame is a Spirit, burning to be part of

the Spirit world.

171+

A light on the candle tearing against the wick

To join a hovering excellence, to escape

From fire and be part only of that of which

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible. (_C_E, 509)
He begs the philOSOpher to speak into his pillow, to us, but "with
an accurate tongue / And without eloquence." The poetry he wants to
hear, or that is, to know, is the ”Profound poetry of the poor and of
the dead" (92, 509).

It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.

It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.

This is the tragic accent of the scene.

And you, it is you that Speak it, without speech,
The loftiest syllables among loftiest things (_C_Jfi, 510)

Ten more lines to show how all the power of the poem is based on the
actual content of the room. There are no leaps into incongruity as in
some of Stevens' earlier poetry.

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,

With every visible thing enlarged and yet

No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,

The immensest theatre, the pillared porch,

The book and candle in your ambered room,

Total grandeur of a total edifice,

Chosen by an inquisitor of structures

For himself. He stOps upon this threshold,

As if the design of all his words takes form

And frame from thinking and is realized. (92, 510-11)
What was a threshold for Santayana between his room in Rome and
another kind of existence which might even be non-existence was for
Stevens also a threshold between his poetry and either another kind of
poetry or something else that is and is not poetry. This other realm
is represented by the words "design,” "form," and "frame” in lines

79-80, and is the muteness of art. The next step in this line of
thinking might well be that it is the death of poetry (and perhaps

175
the birth of some other art more suited.to such expressions) except
that the poet's rebellious momentum carries him on.
In "The Rock" (a three-part poemuwithin the section entitled

“The Rock") the extreme of this phase of rejection of poetry is
reached and passed.

Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.

The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.

They never were . . . The sounds of the guitar

were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken
'Were not and are not. It is not to be believed. (CE, 525)

After this turning point the barren rock becomes something for which
man needs a cure, and.poetry is the needed cure. The rock is one

huge underlying thing--real, yes--colored in a monotone, shaped in
uniformity. By contrast Spring's leaves and flowers are multitudinous,
changing and subject to change. They renew the cyclical quest, and

poetry is part of them.

The pearled chaplet of spring,
The magnum wreath of summer, time's autumn snood,

Its cepy of the sun, these cover the rock.

These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.

These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves,

In the predicate that there is nothing else. (g2, 526-7)
That fearful predicate, the assertion that there is nothing else in the
'world but ourselves and the bare rock of reality must be and has been
overcome.

Poetry did not disappear for long from the Stevensian scheme of

things--only long enough for its absence to be felt as basic need. Even

so, poetry has been discussed as a generality; what was needed was a

theory of language, its place in the imaginationpreality dualism. For
that it is necessary to turn back to the penultimate book of the

176
ggllected Poems, the book called The Auroras 0L Autumn.

I should like to return to the important poem entitled "An
Ordinary Evening in New Haven" already discussed in Chapter Two as an
example of Stevens' primary theme, the quest for reality, and the role
of the perceiving self, or imagination, in that quest. The poem begins
with one prendse given, or at least accepted: "The eye's plain
version," our common experience of the world. ”I see, therefore
something is." But what is the nature of the thing that is? Leaving
our more essential prOpertieS, can the eye even be sure of what it sees
as surface, as coloration? This is a mature poem, and there is no
bold pacing off of the distance to reality, as in the manner of fig;-
W; it is more fitting to approach such questions in an inching,
sidling manner. And finally, the elusive goal may be immaterial.

It is not in the premise that reality

Is a solid. It may be a Shade that traverses

A dust, a force that traverses a shade. (Q3, 1489)
Within this general theme and approach are many smaller tOpics, one
of which is language. In order to deal with this tepic, w method will
be to extract the statements about language found in "An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven" and use them inductively in relation to all of
Stevens' poetry. The question is: in man's graping toward reality,
what is the role of language, how important is this role, and in what
stages is language present (or not present)?

Although terms such as ”words,” ”poem,” ”speeches," even the
letters "A and Z,” ”Alpha and Omega” are sprinkled into the poem from
the beginning, a full-fledged treatment of language does not occur
until the eighth stanza. Desire has been used as an analogy for vision
from the third stanza on, the motive for the seeker. We do not

177
actually choose to see; the will to perceive is built into the eye.
The poet's drive toward what is real is like the urge of a lover
toward his beloved. In this natural process, speech is a natural
occurrence, as much a part of the body's life as the breath Speech
requires. We inhale "a health of air " (stanza VIII) into the body,
fragrances of leaves enter; this is one way to apprehend the world.
Our breath is like a deeperate element
That we must calm, the origin of a mother tongue . . .
(.02. 470)
Here in this context language is a cry, a "syllable / Of recognition”
(C_P, 470), a primitive instinctive function like a conversation
between two bodies. We speak because we are capable of it. Speech
flows from the same kind of organic desire as vision.
But just as the philoSOpher's theory of vision is a long way
from instinctual seeing, the sophisticate's language is infinitely
far from primitive Speech. Although in its origin Speech may have
been a direct version of emerience like a cry of pain or joy, the
complex utterances of modern man often obscure more than reveal,
standing as a barrier before reality. Nevertheless we must try to
overcome the obscurantism and automatism of this overdeveloped speech.
This is the poet's job: "Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.”
We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trOpe or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself, . . . (g3, l+71)
Here is a clear indication of Stevens' habit of identifying word and
object. From a purely linguistic point of view it may confuse the
problem, but it may also be said to simplify it somewhat. If a word

178
could be truly said to equal an object exactly, or even universally
represent the object, then the purest and most direct poem would be
a manipulation of these truly meaningful words.

Recall that Stevens said "A poem is poetry in words"; the
poetry of the world is in the world, and not in the words about it.
But, in a typical Stevensian about-face, this assertion appears to
contain its own negation. Even in ”the poem of pure reality," ”the
word" was still there. This aSpect of the subject will grow and grow,
until the wordiness of whatever situation is at hand is part of that
situation. ”The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res
itself and not about it"(_C_If_, l+73). Indeed, the words of the world
are inescapable.

In the end, in the whole psychology, the self,

The town, the weather, in a casual litter,

Together, said words of the world are the life of the world.

(.02. “74)

IS there a contradiction here? Does Stevens want reality without
words, without any intervention, or does he want reality with the
words? In the role of "Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven" the subject
is attempted once again. On a rainy day the professor sits beside his
window listening to the sound of the rain falling into the Spout. Now
Professor Eucalyptus is a man who "seeks / God in the object itself"
(C_P, #75). This is axiomatic (and was always anomtic for Stevens).
But he has discovered something extremely significant-wan idea that
justifies his whole life in poetry. It is his description that creates
the divinity, creates the presence of god in the poetic encounter

between the man and his world. It would not be enough somehow to
reproduce the actual noise made by the rain as it falls: the crucial

179
understanding, the true perception or reception of the object has
not occurred.fi

Without the intervention of the poet with his lexicon of true
expressions of the world, a time of too much reality would ensue;
without the insistence on reality--”things as they are"--the poet's
flights of fancy would.have no meaning for the others of the world
with their simpler, less acute perceptions. Poetry is a cure for the
barren rock of reality; but that rock is all that is real in the world.
It remains barren.only if there are no poets.

Although it is possible to haggle back and forth endlessly
with the two Sides of the question, it should be possible to make some
final statement of Stevens' basic position on language in its relation
to the dualism of imagination and reality. I will state it this way:
‘What he seeks is realitye-ultimately, a reality beyond words, and
thus beyond man's comprehension. Up to this limit, this unbreachable
threshold, words are necessary as handles on the objects of consciousness,
ways to manipulate and.understand the data of the senses. In Stevens'
view, any understanding of the world that we have is possible only
because there are certain parallels between the self and the world;
perhaps we create the parallels. ‘When the words we use are truly exact,
they will actually disappear.

There is always an analogy between.mature and the imagination, and
possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel: a
rhetoric in which the feeling of one man is communicated to another
in words of the exquisite appositeness that takes away all their
verbality (EA, 118).

At this point it would be extremely convenient to conclude that Valery
and Stevens have come to a point where what they are driving at is the

180
same: that is, a realm beyond language, but which is approachable only
through.the medium of language. Stated thus, it is true. But the last
quotation from Stevens given above is very close to Valery's descrip—
tion not of poetry, but of prose.

La p05Sie n'a pas le moins du monde pour objet de communiquer‘a
quelqu'un quelque notion determinEe-JE quoi la prose doit suffire.
Observez seulement le destin de la prose, comme elle expire'i peine
entendue, et expire de l!3tre,--c'est:a-dire d'etre toute remplacee _
dans l'esprit attentif par une idée on figure finie. Cette idée, '?
dont la prose vient d'exciter les conditions necessaires et suf-
fisantes, s'étant produite, aussitot les moyens sont dissous, le
langage s'évanouit devant elle. C'est un.phénomene constant dont
voici un double controls; notre memoire nous repete 1e discours que
nous n'avons pas compris.9 I

For Valery it is not poetry but prose that performs a disappearing act

 

when it means something. This may be simply an aSpect of the technical
differences between'Valery's tight French verses and Stevens' free
English style; Valery's poetry is so much more an artifact. Too, we
have seen that poetry for Stevens filled nearly all his intellectual
needs whereas for Valery poetry was something much more specific in a
whole range of forms including essays and dialogues.

So a valid conclusion does remain. Language is necessary in
the life-quests of both Stevens and.Val§ry, both as a tool and as a
phase. The greatest goal, whether the self for Valery or reality for
Stevens, lies beyond language. In Chapter One I Spoke of a motive for
creativity. Here is another motive for poetry itself: language is man's
highest function; it is most fitting that it should be used to reach

his greatest goals.

* * it It * '3 III * It * It *

 

9Valery, ”Pr5face" a Charmes commentees_p§r Alain, p. 15-16.

181

Based on the explications and analyses of poems contained in
the body of this study, the questions raised in Chapter One can now be
answered. How does the poetic process figure forth thematically in
poetry? And, can poetry be said to fit the myth and ritual pattern of
birth, death, and rebirth? So involuted are the matters being dealt with
here, that the primary difficulty is in finding a lOgical beginning
for an explanation. For when we ask the question, how does poesis
express itself in poetry, we would like to present a mechanism as well

as a description.

 

To begin with the writer before his blank page is not soon :
enough; by the time he has mastered the linguistic and disciplinary E
tools necessary to begin a poem.he is already experienced in creatiVity,
influenceiby tradition, and bound by the rules of his language. ‘We
know that the creative process is described subjectively by workers in
all fields in almost the same terms: there is a stimulus or irritant,
there is a phase of work leading to frustration, there is a phase of
despair, and finally there is a flash of insight. The creative process
is not a prOperty of artists alone; scientists and mathematicians have
described it too. It is a prOperty of all to whom thinking and making
are familiar processes.
The most general statement that can be made about the process
is that it is extended in time. Although the crucial flash of insight
may occur in an instant, most creators acknowledge that it was preceded
by a period of incubation. Next, Since one moment is not like another,
the beginning of the process is not like the end. A simple analogy is

made between time and space, and already we have the elements of a

182
quest or journey: a starting place, an intervening pathway, and a goal.

Recall that the creator does not know what the goal or des-
tination is to be, but he recognizes it with pleasure when he reaches
it. Compared to the hardship of the way, the final vision is a positive
joy. Already it becomes difficult to speak of the process without
figurative language: the process is like day, night, and a fresh dawn;
like entering a dark place and re-emerging; or like dying and being
re-born. 'We have only to use our memories to think of a hundred stories
and myths that fit the pattern: Jonah and the whale, the resurrection
of Christ, complex.literary creations like the Divine Comedy. Indeed,
if we simply require that the plot have a hero who experiences doubt
and difficulty followed by an awakening to new and higher forms of truth,

‘we can include novels like war and Peace, and Camus' L'Etrapger.

Thus, we have in the first place a phenomenon which is sub-
jectively familiar to all of us. In the second place, we have a recog-
nizable pattern in myths and in literary works of art. What is the
connection between the process and the pattern? The answer given in
Chapter I (in the quotation by Herbert Weisinger) is that, in myth, the
mind describes itself in the process of creating.

But what of’poetry? The subjects of drama and fiction are
usually based on men's actions, and thus tend to have definite plot
lines, but poetry is about states of mind which are much harder to
delineate. In particular, what of the poetry of wallace Stevens and
Paul Valery?

I took La Jeune Parque as paradigm of all Valery's poetry;

as a story of an awakening, a voyage into memory, and then finally a

 

183
re—awakening as dawn breaks over the world; it fits the pattern of
birth, death, and rebirth very well. In "Ie Cimetiere marin" we
saw a poet almost lost to the world, so involved in contemplation was
he, suddenly Shake himself out of his trance crying ”Il faut tenter de
vivre!" This too could be interpreted as a symbolic rebirth.
"Fragments du Narcisse,” the third poem of'Valery's discussed at
length, ends with night and death, and thus does not in itself fit
the pattern. But the myth of Narcissus includes an after life in
metamorphosis, which is a rebirth. And my interpretation of Narcissus

was as a fragment of Valery killed off by himself in order to be reborn

 

into an active creative life.

On the other hand, no single poem of Stevens discussed in this
study fits the pattern of birth, death, and rebirth. Not "Sunday
morning," and not ”Esthetique du Hal,” unless we consider the fact
that each of those two poems begins with a question and ends with an
answer, a connection too vague to be really convincing. But I said
that Stevens' poetry has to be read as an entire volume from beginning
to end, and that such a reading manifests a cycle of the seasons. The
end of the work is at winter and the bare rock of reality, but the end
is a new beginning--a Springtime. A progress from spring to winter and
to spring once again, is of course one of the most universal of all the
versions of birthpdeath-rebirth.

So it is possible to say that Valery's voyage into the self
and Stevens' quest for reality are part of the pattern of myth. Further-

more, though this sort of statement is beyond.proof, I would say that
they re-enacted the pattern without knowing it. ‘What is the mechanism

184
for this kind of occurrence, then? The creative process furnishes
its own momentum. Primed by the memory of the moments when he was
most alive, most in possession of all his potentialities, that is,
remembering the moments when he experienced the flash of insight
which is the reward of poesis, the poet chooses a subject which will
figure forth this same experience. As he writes, he re-lives the
process, thus furnishing more memories to his store of poetic

materials. As he creates, the artist is created.

 

Mn:-

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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