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Wallace Stevens
Terms | Life | Times | Class Discussion | Group Questions | Links | Pictures | Quotes from Critics
Terms to KnowSymbolism, symbolists (Symbolisme, les symbolistes): a group of French writers of the 19th cent. The term is widely applied, but in its most useful and restricted sense refers to the period c.1880 – 95 . The movement may be seen as a reaction against dominant realist and naturalist tendencies in literature generally and, in the case of poetry, against the descriptive precision and ‘objectivity’ of the Parnassians . The symbolists stressed the priority of suggestion and evocation over direct description and explicit analogy (cf. Mallarmé's dictum , ‘Peindre, non la chose, mais l'effet qu'elle produit’), and to the symbol was ascribed a pre-eminent function in the effort to distil a private mood or to evoke the subtle affinities which were held to exist between the material and spiritual worlds. Symbolist writers were particularly concerned to explore the musical properties of language, through the interplay of connotative sound relationships, but were deeply interested in all the arts and much influenced by the synthesizing ideals of Wagner 's music dramas. Other influences on the movement were the mystical writings of Swedenborg , and the poetry of Nerval , Baudelaire (see the sonnet ‘Correspondances’), and Poe .
Generally associated with the symbolist movement are: the poets Mallarmé, Verlaine , Rimbaud , and Laforgue; the dramatists Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (Axël, 1890) and Maeterlinck , whose Pelléas et Mélisande (1892) was the source of Debussy 's opera of that name; and the novelists Huysmans (A rebours, 1884) and Édouard Dujardin, whose Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888) influenced Joyce . The movement exercised an influence on painting (Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau) and on a wide range of 20th-cent. writers, including Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. Stevens, Yeats, Joyce, V. Woolf , Claudel, Valéry, Stefan George, and Rilke. It was the subject of A. W. Symons 's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) and played a part in the development of the Russian symbolist movement and of the modernista movement in Latin America.
"Symbolism, symbolists." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Ed. Margaret Drabble. Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Ocean County College. 29 March 2009.
Symbolists: An important group of French poets who, between the 1870s and the 1890s, founded the modern tradition in Western poetry. The leading Symbolists— Paul Verlaine , Arthur Rimbaud , and Stephane Mallarmé —wrote in reaction against realism and naturalism , and against the objectivity and technical conservatism of the Parnassians . Among the minor Symbolist poets were Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière . The Symbolists aimed for a poetry of suggestion rather than of direct statement, evoking subjective moods through the use of private symbols , while avoiding the description of external reality or the expression of opinion. They wanted to bring poetry closer to music, believing that sound had mysterious affinities with other senses (see synaesthesia). Among their influential innovations were free verse and the prose poem . Their chief inspiration was the work of the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 67), especially his theory of the ‘correspondences’ between physical and spiritual realms and between the different senses; Baudelaire had also promoted Edgar Allan Poe's doctrine of ‘pure’ poetry, which the Symbolists attempted to put into practice.
As a self-conscious movement, French symbolism declared itself under that name only in 1886 , forming part of the so-called decadence of that period. It appeared in drama too, notably in the works of the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck in the 1890s; and some of its concerns were reflected in novels by J.K. Huysmans and Édouard Dujardin. The influence of symbolism on European and American literature of the early 20th century was extensive: Paul Valéry in French, Rainer Maria Rilke in German, and W. B. Yeats in English carried the tradition into the 20th century, and hardly any major figure of modernism was unaffected by it. See also hermeticism, impressionism, poète maudit. For a fuller account, consult Charles Chadwick, Symbolism ( 1971 ).
Baldick, Chris. "Symbolists." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Ocean County College. 29 March 2009.
epistemology (Greek, epistēmē, knowledge)The theory of knowledge. Its central questions include the origin of knowledge; the place of experience in generating knowledge, and the place of reason in doing so; the relationship between knowledge and certainty, and between knowledge and the impossibility of error; the possibility of universal scepticism; and the changing forms of knowledge that arise from new conceptualizations of the world. All of these issues link with other central concerns of philosophy, such as the nature of truth and the nature of experience and meaning. It is possible to see epistemology as dominated by two rival metaphors. One is that of a building or pyramid, built on foundations. In this conception it is the job of the philosopher to describe especially secure foundations, and to identify secure modes of construction, so that the resulting edifice can be shown to be sound. This metaphor favours some idea of the ‘given’ as a basis of knowledge, and of a rationally defensible theory of confirmation and inference as a method of construction (see also foundationalism, protocol statements). The other metaphor is that of a boat or fuselage, that has no foundations but owes its strength to the stability given by its interlocking parts. This rejects the idea of a basis in the ‘given’, favours ideas of coherence and holism, but finds it harder to ward off scepticism. The problem of defining knowledge in terms of true belief plus some favoured relation between the believer and the facts began with Plato's view in the Theaetetus that knowledge is true belief plus a logos. For difficulties see Gettier examples. For further issues see confirmation theory, empiricism, feminism, naturalized epistemology, protocol statements, rationalism, relativism, reliabilism. Blackburn, Simon. "epistemology." The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2008, Oxford Reference, accessed 8 Apr. 2019. |
The Life
See the textbook and this list of scattered reflections on Stevens from his contemporaries.
Like Eliot, heavily influnced by the French symbolists.
The tropical flora and fauna of Florida was a key influence on Stevens.
Stevens famously walked to and from work every day (two miles each way), composing poems in his head as went along. You can follow his route through the Wallace Stevens Walking Tour page.
Short and engaging New York Times essay on Stevens' habits of walking: interesting way of seeing how to incorporate a literary sensibility into journalism (by Jeff Gordinier).
Class Discussion
Stevens offers a tentative definition of the purpose of poetry in his letters: "the desire to contain the world wholly within one's own perception of it" (Stevens 501)
Wrote in a letter to a publisher which requested a biography and statement of the major themes of his work
"The author's work suggests the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized as a fiction, in which men could propose to themselves a fulfillment. In the creation of any such fiction, poetry would have a vital significance. There are many poems relating to the intersections between reality and the imagination, which are to be regarded as marginal to this central theme" (Stevens 820) letters
"the point of that ["Emperor"] is not its meaning. When people think of poems as integrations, they are thinking usually of intergratino of ideas: that is to say, of what they mean. However, a poem must have a peculiarity, as if it was the momentarly complete idiom of that which prompts it, even if that which prompts it is the vaguest emotion. This character seems to be one of the consequences of concentration" (Stevens 500) letters
"If poetry is limited to the vaticinations of the imagination, it soon becomes worthless. The cognitive element involves the consciousness of reality [. . . .] I have no doubt that supreme poetry can be produced only on the highest possible level of the cognitive" (Stevens 500 Letters)
"Disillusionment of Ten O'clock" (1443)
"Idea of Order at Key West "
"In THE IDEA OF ORDER AT KEY WEST, life has ceased to be a matter of chance. It may be that every man introduces his own order into the life about him and that the idea of order in general is simply what Bishop Berkley might have called a fortuitous concourse of persaonl orders. But still there is order. [. . . .] But then, I never thought that it was a fixed philosophic proposition that life was a mass of irrelevancies any more than I now think that it is a fixed philosophic proposition that every man introduces his own order as a part of a general order. These are tentative ideas for the purposes of poetry" (Stevens 293) from his letters.
"Like many of his works, the poem takes place largely in the head of the narrator and is a meditation on the idea of thinking, on the process of perception, on the faculty of the imagination. From his earliest days as a poet until the end of his life, Stevens' most persistent concern remained the interaction of mind and world. Is the world out there real? Does it have a material existence apart from humans perceiving it? Or is the world as it is seen, heard, and felt just a projection of human imagination? If not, is imagination somehow organizing or ordering the world for humans?
For all of his continuing fascination with lush tropical landscapes and fecund nature, Stevens is not even sure that the world outside of his mind even exists." (Barnhisel)
Greg Barnhisel, Critical Essay on "The Idea of Order at Key West ," Poetry for Students , Vol. 13, The Gale Group, 2001.
"Sunday Morning"
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Think William Carlos Williams here.
"This group of poems is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but of sensations" (Stevens 251) letters
The point of XII "is the compulsion frequently back of the things that we do. I cannot say that the translation of XIII fails to convey despair; perhaps it does. What was intended by X was that the bawds of euphony would suddenly cease to be academic and express themselves sharply: naturally, with pleasure, etc." (Stevens 340) letters
"The Snow Man"
"an example of the necessity of identifying oneself with reality in order to understand it and enjoy it" (Stevens 464 letters)
Discussion on "Snow Man" on NPR by Jay Keyser
"The Emperor of Ice Cream"
- What's the setting here? What's he describing? (end of poem)
- What's "concupiscent"
- What's a "curd"?
- "fantails" refers to fantail pigeons (Stevens 340 Letters)
- Regarding a French translation of "Emperor," he believed "Des laits libidineux" was better than " Des crèmes delectables " (Stevens 340 Letters)
"This wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain something of th essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason I like it" (Stevens 263) letters
"This poem an instance of letting myself go [. . . .] This represents what was in my mind at the moment, with the least possible manipulation" (Stevens 264) letters
"The words 'concupisent curds' have no geneology; they are merely expressive: at least, I hope they are expressive. They express the concupiscence of life, but, by contrast with the things in relation to them in the poem, they express or accentuate life's destitution, and it is this that gives them something more than a cheap luster" (Stevens 500 letters)
"The last battlement before us is the line, 
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. 
There are two going interpretations of this line, one that the emperor is life, the other that he is death. When Stevens was informed of this difference of critical opinion, he said, in effect, 
So much the better! 
and refused to judge between them. If we take the emperor to be life, and the poet's whole sympathy to be with the living, then why does the poem deal so precisely and deliberately with the corpse in the second stanza? Why not push it out of the way instead of displaying it? And can a wake, even an ice-cream wake, be completely detached from death? On the other hand, if the emperor is to be identified with death, why bring in the cigar-rolling, ice-cream-mixing muscular man? Is concupiscence desirable at funerals?" (Ellman)
"The imagination is constantly reshaping and reforming reality; it is not the poet's exclusive preserve everyone has it but the poet uses it more steadily and powerfully and with more recognition of its value. It is the imagination, like the sun, which keeps the world from being black. Memory and reason can aid instead of impeding it, by confirming the imagination's felt bond with all existence."
"We can see why Stevens' poetry is so different from that of Eliot. Although Stevens occasionally takes note of our age as a leaden time, this is not at all a principal theme. In no sense does Stevens sigh for lost beliefs; rather he is elated that old hallucinations are over now so that the imagination can get a fresh start. They have prevented us from living in the physical world, and the great poverty for man is not to live there. The major manStevens' modest version of the supermanis the man who brings most sunlight to most rock, most imagination to most reality, and is closest to the primal force."
Richard Ellmann, 
Wallace Stevens' Ice Cream 
, in The Kenyon Review , Vol. XIX, No. I, Winter, 1957 (and reprinted in Aspects of American Poetry , edited by Richard M. Ludwig, Ohio State University Press, 1962, pp. 203 
22).
"Anecdote of a Jar"
Roy Harvey Pearce says this was the source for the poem, but he only has circumstantial evidence for it.
- Why a lowly jar? How could it induce such a change in perception?
- What's the wilderness's (nature's) reaction to this jar? Why?
- What is "dominion"?
- On "Sunday Morning:" Religion, death, and nature: how do images of these three "things" function in the poem? What do they signify? After getting these straight in your head, how do these images cohere into a reading of the poem? What is the theme? What is the poem "saying"?
Links
Wallace Stevens link at the Modern American Poetry site,
Quotes from Critics
© David Bordelon 2009