A Man in His Thoughts

...Only he was careful to keep such explanations from dissipating the air of mystery that surrounded many of his poems...

...there are few minds in all of modern literature one felt one knew so thoroughly and intimately...

...yet about the man himself one knew nothing but the few facts-and principally the fact of his life as an insurance company executive in Hartford, Connecticut-that seemed to be posted like "Keep Out" signs wherever one looked for further information...

...it loses whatever potency it had...

...If you explain a poem, you are quite likely to do it either in terms of the man or in terms of the shadow, but you have to explain it in terms of the whole...

...Francis wearing bells around his ankles so that, as he went about his business, the crickets and so on would get out of his way and not be tramped on...

...It is a stout volume, numbering 992 separate items-there are entries from an early journal in addition to the letters-which have been selected from a total of almost 3,300...

...It was Stevens' triumph to have produced an art that handsomely vindicated that statement...

...A poet who once seemed hostage to the beguilements of poetic artifice shows himself, in retrospect, to have dealt with the role of poetry in the economy of consciousness as if the subject were a branch of natural history...

...Philosophic disquisitions which once seemed to dwell on highly circumscribed issues of esthetic definition turn out to have a marvelously clear-eyed grasp of experience-and of the fate of experience, whether in small matters or large, as it enters the devious terrain of private consciousness...

...The people I met were the nicest people in the world, but how they keep alive is more than I can imagine...

...October 31, 1935: "The Italians have as much right to take Ethiopia from the coons as the coons had to take it from the boa-constrictors...

...After offering Latimer some information on "The Comedian as the Letter C," he added: if you refer to the role of the letter C in this poem, do, please, refer to it as your own explanation and not as mine, although it is mine...

...Stevens' life is an oddity to the literary observer not only because of the incongruous image it presents of the poet spending his days in the boring routine of the insurance business, but because the poet is Wallace Stevens, who brought a tone and an esthetic fastidiousness to his literary vocation that seemed to leave no place for anything so indigestible as a life spent at a company desk...

...But then, we know now what he thought of academic life...

...Now, as Crispin moves through the poem, the sounds of the letter C accompany him, as the sounds of the crickets, etc...

...As soon as people are perfectly sure of a poem they are just as likely as not to have no further interest in it...

...Not that this will prevent it from being written...

...But to Stevens, it appears, such a life was completely digestible, even necessary, and this is the real biographical revelation of the Letters...

...I thought of it this way this morning: a poem is like a man walking on the bank of a river, whose shadow is reflected in the water...

...But the most important letters are, not surprisingly, concerned with his poetry, and this volume is, in fact, the single most illuminating guide to Stevens' verse we now have...

...To Simons he wrote: "Obviously, it is not possible to tell one what one's own poems mean, or were intended to mean...

...Numerous deletions are indicated in the published material, and the reader is left in no doubt about the care Miss Stevens has taken to reveal as little as possible about her father's personal -as distinct from his literary-affairs...

...On the other hand, it is not the simplest thing in the world to explain a poem...

...I didn't like the idea of being bedeviled all the time about money," he wrote in 1937, "and I didn't for a moment like the idea of poverty, so I went to work like anybody else and kept at it for a good many years...

...We are all busy thinking things that nobody ever knows about," he wrote Latimer in 1936...

...There are other biographical illuminations in the Letters, some of them curious indeed (e.g., his correspondence with the Paris bookseller who supplied Stevens with paintings...

...Even in 1954, the year before he died, he declined the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at Harvard because accepting it might have obliged him to retire from the company...

...Here is Stevens, again on "The Comedian as the Letter C," writing to Simons in 1940: "You know the old story about St...

...Less importantly, the Letters gives us a glimpse of Stevens' political views-for the most part, the typical views of the conservative businessmen of his generation...

...But the thing and its double always go together...

...If a woman in her room is such an exciting subject of speculation, a man in his thoughts is equally exciting...

...In May I went down to Princeton and read a paper," he wrote to Hi Simons in July 1941...

...By his poems, and by his poems alone, one knew his distinction...

...When I said recently that a poem was what was on a page, it seems to me now that I was wrong because that is explaining in terms of the man...

...It was, of course, precisely of such complexities that Stevens fashioned his own poetry, and the Letters give us a wonderfully ample view of his entire universe of discourse...

...These deletions tease the reader's curiosity, yet there is so much that is interesting in this volume that it seems almost perverse to wonder what has been omitted...

...But they are no worse, really, than the views of Eliot or Yeats at their worst...

...I have the greatest dislike for explanations," he wrote a favorite correspondent-Ronald Lane Latimer -in 1935...

...One felt one knew what sort of objects, what (expensive) pastimes, what pleasures of the body and the spirit commanded Stevens' allegiance and stimulated his fancy, though the evidence was circumstantial and oblique...

...It was worth doing (for me), although the visit to Princeton gave me a glimpse of a life which I am profoundly glad that I don't share...

...Francis...

...This style disclosed a distinct taste-a taste for opulence, luxury, and pleasure-and wherever one allowed one's attention to wander from the strict course of the poem in order to linger over its luxuriant detail, as one might pause in examining a Bonnard interior to admire the felicity of particular objects contained within it, there was an engaging hint of personal revelation...

...This last was, of course, Stevens' abiding subject: the unpredictable metamorphoses that "reality" suffers in the realm of mind, and the pre-eminent role that poetry enjoys in redeeming the claims of the real in the interests of imaginative order...

...And as politics occupies a far less important place in Stevens' poetic universe than in either Eliot's or Yeats', one can assimilate even the most detestable sentiments to be found in the Letters though one does not finally forgive them...

...Yet, far from withholding explanations either from Latimer or from other sympathetic readers and critics of his verse, Stevens offered elaborate clues, ruminations, and outright explication in abundance...

...The intensity of Stevens' absorption in this subject was equaled by the consistency and singularity of his style-by what Morton Zabel once described as the "two elements in which he remained largely unrivaled among his contemporaries-the richness of his imagery and the sustained confidence of his rhetoric...

...In the work of no other modern poet is one made to feel so strongly that poetry itself occupies a place absolutely central to the structure of human intelligence...

...Nor was Stevens a man to keep his reputation sweet by encouraging disciples, advancing his own claims, or otherwise dancing the literary-political minuets that guarantee poets a place in the limelight...

...Still, one wonders...

...There is material here for an entire monograph on "The Man with the Blue Guitar," though the nature of the material precludes the necessity for such a monograph...

...Stevens brought this characteristically complex attitude to bear on the whole subject of explaining poetry...

...Images that once seemed mere elegance, a sort of verbal plum-mage designed to indulge and bedazzle the senses, prove to have an unexpected hardness and precision...

...The letters to Latimer and Simons are particularly valuable as a record of Stevens' intentions and strategies in a number of crucial poems...

...Now we have the Letters of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf, 890 pp., $17.50), selected and edited by his daughter, Holly Stevens...

...A stance thought to be dandyish and overly precious discloses an undeceived and remarkably tough-minded attitude to life...

...Far from being advertisements for his own personality, his poems seemed to make their personal disclosures almost against his will...

...I don't mean to say that there is an incessant din, but you ought not to be able to read very far in the poem without recognizing what I mean...

...You have to read the poem and hear all this whistling and mocking and stressing and, in a minor way, orchestrating, going on in the background, or, to say it as a lawyer might say it, 'in, on or about the words.'" And yet five years earlier he could write to Latimer: "I am very much afraid that what you like in my poetry is just the sort of thing you ought not to like: say, its music or color...

...But does it matter...

...must have accompanied St...