The poet as theologian of secularity

...the permutations of the relationship of guitar and reality are manifold: The battle between the two is a permanent one...

...Is it true, as J. Hillis Miller has argued inPoets of pieces the churches do not have life and vitality...

...That was his self-appointed poetic task...

...Stevens did not want the poem to be merely a mental construct independent of the outside world...

...It was one thing basic questions that have haunted the modern theologian and for Eliot to sing paeans to a royalist traditionalism but what the modern philosopher alike: what suffices for human activity does one make of a poet who was a Taft Republican who and human worth when the old absolutes are gone...

...S TEVENS ~ade a supreme effort to "see the very thing" in his long and difficult poem' 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (1949...

...Those two couplets merely state the relationship between the b!ue guitar and "things as they are" in the most basic form...

...After one has abandoned a belief in god," Stevens once wrote, "Poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption" (Opus Posthumous, New York, 1957, p. 158...

...They have their right to exist as part of a David Traey should entitle his seminal work Blessed Rage for cultural heritage but their primary function has been abrogated Order, echoing a line from the Stevens poem "Idea of Order at by the change in the intellectual status of things...

...There is a sense (or, at minimum, a desire) of union in Roethke...

...Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction" is a collection of thirty-one poems (each poem composed of seven stanzas) that are exceedingly dense and complex...

...TILese two poets reflect quite different perceptions of reality...

...9 we live in a place/that is not our own and, much more, not ourselves/And hard it is in spite of blazoned days" ("Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction...

...they exhibit quite diverse sensibilities...

...There is almost a platonic energy that moves Stevens from the res to the idea...

...The world itself signified nothing beyond itself save what the imagination could bring to it...

...Why should Nathan Scott, Jr...

...The real curiosity is that Stevens, in one sense, was not Wallace Stevens's attitude towards religion can be summed terribly well informed about theology or the study of religion, up in three statements, of which the third is the most crucial...

...The theme is announced, with all of its inherent ambiguity, in the opening lines of the poem: "The eye's plain version is a thing apart,/ The vulgate of experience...

...contrariwise, aloneness in Stevens...

...and his many stu- Secondly, and following closely from the first premise, the dents study the poetry of Stevens with such devotion and churches are now museums that only bear testimony to the past thoroughness...

...one becomes the other;, they unite and marry...

...In the poem, "The Old Lutheran Bells at Home," Stevens perfectly captured the nostalgia, the tradition, and, finally, the impotence of the old ecclesiastical tradition...

...The poetic vision of Wallace Stevens reflects a deep-felt sentiment that is common in the modem experience, an experience that goes back at least as far as Frederick Nietzsche...

...One example must suffice...

...It is a noble undertaking...

...Wallace Stevens was convinced that poetry was the obvious replacement for religion...

...The order produced by the poet could well be an illusion, as Stevens himself admitted, but, nonetheless, it elevates people because it provides a "freshening of life...

...dreary asceticism, mechanical ritualism, Puritanical primness, and an attenuated ghostliness which makes them seem to drift rather than stride, to exist rather than live" (Wallace Stevens: Imagination and Faith, Princeton, 1974, p. 51...

...It could be argued, of course, that a poet modem imagination is the movement away from the idea of can reflect all manner of intellectual and social gaucheries and God...

...The blue guitar is the poetic faculty of imagination...

...seoularity...

...Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) should attract the attention The general reputation of Stevens rests on the fact that the Iof large numbers of the theological community in this contemporary critical consensus about his work is that his country...

...The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar...

...it is no longer a thing apart...

...Commonweal: 622...

...Stevens was, as William York Tindall appeared at an early date in Stevens's longpoetic careerand he observed, passipnately devoted to poetry but an "amateur of never deviated from it...

...According to Kauffman, Stevens's keen awareness of the non-sacral character of the world where the gods no longer reside precluded a basic trust in the beneficence of life which would permit him to start with the common things...

...377-8...

...Roethke's poetry, unlike that of Stevens, accepted the possibility of hierophany...

...It is the theme of his justly celebrated ideas" (Wallace Stevens, University of Minnesota Pamphlets "Sunday Morning" (published in his earliest volume of on American Writers, XI, p. 11...

...Those who have most lucidly faced the estrangement of the self and the world exhibit, more often than not, 9 November 1979:621what Jean Paul Sartre has called a "stem optimism...

...It is the imagination's alchemical power to project the multiform possibilities of life...

...Indeed it has been a common criticism of Stevens's poetry that his poetry moves Commonweal: 620almost compulsively from earthly realities to abstract adumbrations of that reality...

...He set out this task in succinct lines in" Credences of Summer": "Let's see the very thing and nothing else./Let's see it with the hottest fife of sight...

...The poetry that created the idea of God will either adopt it still compel the attention of the literate public...

...He moves instinctively, as it were, from nature to mind: "It is not an empty clearness, a bottomless sight,At is a visibility of thought,An which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once...

...Beyond a bank clerk and, later, an executive jn the publishing world, that, Stevens is of further interest to the theologian because his Not even curious because Stevens seemed so completely and vast poetic output reflected over and over again some of the unapologetically the upper class Republican...

...Not curious because Stevens was a vice-president of a poetry is not only first-rate but one of the benchmarks of high large insurance company in Hartford...

...Stevens saw the imagination as the sum of human faculties) stays in this world, all becomes one with the pale world: "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" ("An Ordinary Evening...

...He seems to have read very little theology...

...Five years later in"Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction" (1942) Stevens was still concerned with the relationship of the poet to the world...

...A poet like Theodore Roethke (died 1963) labored valiantly to sense the presence of God in, through, and beyond the poetic experience of this world...

...ON THE CENTENARY OF WALLACE STEVENS The poet as theologian of se'cularity I Ill I I I LAWRENCE S. CUNNIN GHAM Reality (Harvard, 1965) that Stevens firmly anchored all of his poetry in the acceptance of the Nietzschean concept of the l iT SEEMS CUriOUS, even paradoxical, that the American poet demise of all the gods...

...poe.try, Harmonium- 1923) and undergirded poems published How is it that, with such meager credentials, Stevens could years later when his career as a poet was at its most mature be considered by Robert Bellah to be the poet of modern stage...

...As Adalaide , K. Morris has justly observed, the women who represent t.A~ s. ~rlAM is an associate professor m the Depart- Christianity for Stevens (e.g., the high-toned old Christian ment of Religion at Florida State University...

...woman, the woman who is dying of diabetes in "A Thought 9 November 1979:619Revolved" and Canon Aspirin's sister in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction") share the same characteristics as the churches they attend...

...Their differences also reflect a parallel diversity in contemporary theology...

...The poet describes this air until nature, is stripped and "cleanness has returned...

...Stevens came to recognize that excessive preoccupation witij the poem, as product of the imagination, could loosen the bond with reality...

...Finally, and most iynportantly, in this age when there is no direct contact with God(s) either in revelation or in nature we must ask what will replace religion or, better, what device or process is available to us to satisfy the human desire for meaningfulness and to supply an ultimate framework for living in a significant way...

...Despite his clear desire to remain close to "the very thing" hismind moves almost inexorably back to his own creation, the poem of the mind...

...If, as he once said about "The Man with the Blue Guitar," reality was a base, it was, nonetheless, the base...

...and so on...

...He wanted to circumscribe reality, appreciate its sanctions, and understand the relationship of the imaginative act to reality...

...The poetic muse is "the single artificer of the world/In which she sang...

...He stops upon this threshold,/As if the design of all his words takes form/And frame from thinking and is realized" ("To An Old Philosopher in Rome...

...Stevens did not want to be trapped in his own poetic imagination...

...Roethke's most complete statement of this sense of"reality beyond reality" is in the series of poems that make up the Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical...

...To compare the poetry of Roethke and Stevens is not meant to be invidious...

...Was it more than coincidence that Professor experience of belief...

...The entire poem sequence is an act of poetic faith in the ability of poetry to give a kind of peace to the poet through the medium of poetic truth...

...What is the correlation between this blue guitar and "things as they are" (the phrase echoes Matthew Arnold) in its manifold relationships...

...This sense of alienation from a grace-ful world has been articulated by writers as prominent (and diverse) as Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and Simone Weil...

...The Man with the Blue Guitar" was published in 1937...

...From 1946, when Stevens published "Credences of Summer" until the end of his life the poet tried to focus his attention more closely to the things of this earth...

...Towards the end of the poem (in stanza #30) the poet meditates ~n the passing of Summer as the "wind has blovi~n the silence of Summer/alone...

...The imagination can propose what Stevens has called "supreme fictions"-fictions that reveal the depth and the potentialities of human experience...

...Beyond all framed this problem quite succinctly in a letter to his old friend that, Stevens, if one can judge by his letters, was condescend- Henry Church: "The major poetic in the world is and always ing towards blacks, mildly anti-semitic, and a firm believer in has been the idea of God...

...F OR STEVENS, it is the duty of the poet to show that the workings of the human imagination are the primal source of human satisfaction...

...It is not a question of grim reality but of plain reality" (Letters, p. 636...

...Stevens grappled with the meaning of reality all of his poetic life...

...Nor did Ste- and a meaningful belief in God was no longer a possibility for vens have any profoundly original approach to the problems of vast numbers of modern people...

...the mind to rise above the world, must leave the plain reality of the world behind it...

...This poem was, as Stevens wrote to a friend, a development of ideas that he had expressed in "Credences of Summer...

...When the mind (or the imagination...

...Stevens was neither naive or titanic enough to think that the interplay of human imagination and reality could be described with ease and/or clarity...

...In an extremely perceptive but, alas, unpublished paper, Bruce Kauffman of Catholic University of America has argued that however much Stevens wanted to revel in "plain reality" -- as Gerard Manley Hopkins or Theodore Roethke could--the task was an impossible one for him...

...The def'mition of this task was ea#ier than its implementation as Stevens recognized...

...Stevens's basic thesis is stated in a pair of couplets at the beginning of the poem: They said, "You have a blue guitar You do not play things as they are...

...it unnecessary" (Letters, New York, 1966, pp...

...T. S. Eliot was, after all, culture in the English-speaking world of this century...

...There is no hierophany and, to be sure, no theophany...

...The bells of the church "are the voices of the pastors calling/And calling like the long echoes in long sleep./ Generations of shepherds to generations of sheep...

...The poem gives an assurance that once was reserved for the believer...

...flis intent in "Ordinary Evening" was to get "as close to the ordinary, the commonplace, and the ugly as it is possible for a poet to get...

...As Helen Vendler has shown (in On Extended Wings: Waltace Stevens' Longer Poems, Harvard, 1969, pp...

...R AUFFMAN'S observation helps us to see why Stevens's poetry is so congenial to the theologically literate...

...Stevens thought Eisenhower to be a dangerous radical...

...He was equally convinced that this poetic task 0f grasping the world was a quasi-religious act...

...And when she sang, the sea/ Whatever self it had/became the self/that was her song for she was the maker" ("The Idea of Order at Key West...

...The mind and the world confront each other as surface...

...In "The Man with the Blue Guitar" Stevens puzzled at length over the interplay of imagination and reality...

...It is not a sentiment that can be brushed aside as nihilistic pessimism...

...It could become a mental artifact...

...an effort to break through the barrier of rational experience...

...Roethke had no doubt about the pos-~ibility of this task...

...What Stevens once wrote of his old Hatvard mentor, George Santayana, can justly be applied to Stevens himself: "Total grandeur of a total edifice,/Chosen by an inquisitor of structures/For Himself...

...Roethke's eye could rest on the limited, on the ordinary thing while, at the same time, seeing in that limited thing, the unlimited which broke out of ordinary experience: "All finite things reveal infinitude:/The mountain with its singular bright shade/Like the blue shine.on freshly frozen snow,/The after light upon ice-burdened pines" ("The Far Field" from theNorth American Sequence...

...It was in that sequence that Roethke makes his final statement on the possibility of transcendent experience as one confronts the world...

...Stevens accepted that chasm between self and the world but labored all of his poetic life to bridge it...

...As museum Key West...

...Stevens possessed what Allen Tare has called an "angelic imagination"--a distaste for the real and the commonplace combined with a desire to reach out for the essential and the eternal...

...One of the visible movements of the the poetry of money...

...The interplay of the poetic imagination and the world-initself, as every student of epistemology recognizes, presents the old problem of just howwell the mind grasps the outside world, if indeed, it grasps it at all...

...Poor Ezra to a different intelligence, or create a substitute for it, or make Pound comes immediately to mind...

...However, he did not, could not, accept the sacramentality of the world...

...The world, to use the language of Mircea Eliade, did not show forth the Sacred for Stevens...

...His criticism of First, Stevens was convinced that the age of belief had passed institutional religion was conventional enough...

...As such Stevens was the heir to the tradition best enunciated in the last century by the British poet and critic Matthew Arnold and the American philosopher (and a teacher of Stevens at Harvard) George Santayana...

...This sense of agnosticism philosophical culture...

...The poem refreshes life so that we share, For a moment the first i d e a . . . It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginning And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end . . . . "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" is, in the last analysis, about the poem itself...

...Roethke did not conceive of the task as an easy one but he believed it was both possible and beatific "when opposites come suddenly into place,/I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see/how body from spirit slowly does unwind/Until we are pure spirit in the end" ("Inf'u'mity...

...The blue guitar/Becomes the place of things as they are,/A composing of senses of the guitar...

...Burn everything not part of it to ash...

...Reality, unlit by the imagination, is not enough, according to Stevens, but the real is the base from which one must start...

...These powerful images, rooted in nature metaphors, cannot hold the poet to the cleansing power of the oncoming Autumn...

...Ordinary Evening" is a long poem of thi~y-one stanzas--an extended meditation on the nature of reality and its perception...

...One thing that was clear, however, was that "the thinking of God is smoky dew./The tune is space...

...The poetic claims in "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction" are framed in religious terms...

...Stevens, by such a comparison, does not become "less" religions or, even, unreligions...

...Of this/A few words an and yet and yet and yet--/As part of the never ending meditation . . . . "It becomes apparent to the careful reader that, as the poem progresses, the reality of New Haven's architecture, citizenry, Urban grime and natural surroundings do not sufficiently anchor the poet's attention...

...It is through the Workings of the imagination that the world becomes alive and meaningfulness for us...

...Roethke himself once described the sequence as a "hunt, a drive towards God...

...127ff...