Wallace Stevens, Poet and Insurance Executive

...Two golden gourds distended on our vines, We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed, Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost, Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque...

...Yet there's a revealing urgency in, for example, Helen Vendler's version: Perhaps future biographers will tend to find Stevens's daughter the more reliable witness of her father's last days...

...What is difficult is to like the many minor figures who do not communicate any theory that validates what they do and, in consequence, impress one as being without validity...

...This view of Stevens was thrown into confusion by Peter Brazeau's 1983 "oral biography," Parts of a World, which asserted, based on interviews with a priest and two close Catholic friends, that Stevens had been baptized a Catholic on his deathbed...

...read to me from that well-thumbed copy of The Man with the Blue Guitar...

...It's unimportant in that Stevens, born to precarious middle-class comfort in Reading, Pennsylvania, was not some kind of Rousseauian Rotarian suddenly mugged by the muse...

...He also enjoyed a martini or four—an appetite that provoked one of the few interesting literary anecdotes of his life, in which he broke his hand in a barroom fist-fight picked with Ernest Hemingway in Key West...

...Or these seven doom-laden lines from "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle": Our bloom is gone...

...More than any poet except Rilke, Stevens is invoked as the leading apostle of the great commonplace of modernist poetry: that the quest for beauty (or sensation) through poetry is an appropriate substitute for the religious faith that once ordered the imagination, and that no intelligent person can any longer sustain...

...It's an easy mistake to make, given the lavish litanies of food, drink, and luxury accessories that are strewn about the longer poems as if they were so many sideboards...

...Wallace Stevens, Poet and Insurance Executive The Idea of Order at Hartford, Connecticut By Christopher Caldwell The Hartford Courant noted last year that the list handed out by the city's Cedar Hill Cemetery of the famous people buried there did not include Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)—this at a time when academic consensus holds that Stevens is the greatest American poet of the twentieth century...

...Stevens went through half a dozen legal jobs, before being named vice-president in Equitable Insurance's New York office...

...Helen Vendler and other academics need it because it allows them to lay claim to the role of a vanguard or even a priesthood...

...It was an idea that Stevens not only evoked in his poems but explicitly embraced in the commonplace books he referred to as his Adagia: "After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption...

...Second, Stevens on principle abjured coming to any conclusions...

...Aesthetic system-building was a proper role for an artist, Stevens thought, even a necessary one...

...And the scoffers at modern poetry need it too, for it provides them an easy target: an admission that for all its arrogance, modern poetry is essentially a second-best, a stand-in, a sham...

...In his lyric mode, he could use highly compressed grammar to dazzling effect, achieving an almost classical clarity and concision, as in "The Emperor of Ice Cream," a sixteen-line description of a wake that doubles as one of the twentieth-century's great carpe diem odes...

...The most noticeable thing about the style in Stevens's first book, Harmonium (1923), was an outlandish vocabulary (assembled by sending office underlings to the Hartford public library for dictionary definitions) that would have been migraine-inducing were it not so artfully marshaled...

...He spent four decades as a lawyer at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., a specialist in one of the driest areas of that profession, and so excelled in it that his colleagues dubbed him "the dean of surety claims...

...In the six volumes that followed, Stevens kept adding words to Black-mur's list: jubilas, bethou, solitaria, roy, gilderlinged, finikin...

...Frank Kermode, who along with Stevens biographer Joan Richardson edited the Library of America's beautiful new Collected Poetry and Prose, calls Stevens the author of the "greatest modern poems in English about death and old age, and possibly about anything...

...Even in his longer poems, most of them in perfectly cadenced blank verse, the lyrical talent is extraordinary, as in the haunting line from the autobiographical "Comedian as the Letter C" about "hearing signboards whimper on cold nights...

...Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow...

...Stevens's daughter Holly disputed the claim until her death in 1992, asserting that she had been with her father every day of his last hospital stay and challenging the archdiocese of Hartford to produce a certificate of baptism...

...Run out into the street, stop the first hundred people you see, and ask them to recite "The Motive for Metaphor...

...Those critics who look for a larger message in Stevens have been nearly unanimous in identifying what that message is...

...For all his francophilia, Stevens never even got to visit Europe...

...With his income of $25,000 a year at the height of the Depression, Stevens may be the only enemy of the graduated income tax in the American poets' corner...

...The same impulse may have spawned his bizarrer titles—"Anec-dote of the Prince of Peacocks," "Colloquy with a Polish Aunt," "The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade," "Botanist on Alp (No...

...Stevens wrote two kinds of poems: short, sharp, lyrical ones, and long philosophical ones...

...he had planned to be a poet all along...

...All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch...

...For instance, in projecting a supreme fiction, I cannot imagine anything more fatal than to state it definitely and incautiously...

...First, The Necessary Angel draws an explicit polarity between Reality and Imagination for what seems the express purpose of allowing the two to bleed into one another and become indistinguishable...

...If they doubt such claims, they are in accord with most academics, for whom Stevens's baptism either didn't happen or doesn't matter...

...Sunday Morning," in which an unidentified woman sits in her Stevensian luxury of carpets and coffee and oranges while not going to church, is generally read as the greatest poem ever to confront explicit-ly—and resolve affirmatively—the predicament that results: Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven...

...The laughing sky will see the two of us Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains...

...If Stevens distrusts philosophy, then to what are his more contemplative poems tending...

...Happiness is an acquisition," Stevens wrote in his notebooks, and he meant it in every sense...

...It's from this rare combination—of hard-earned remorse over life and a naif's faith in the ability of poetry to heal it—that Stevens drew his allure: He is the only American poet to have "burst onto the scene" in the middle of his "late period...

...But almost as soon as he left Harvard, Stevens was stopped in his roundelay-singing tracks...

...Just what kind of system he thought he was building is hard to tell...

...Harvard University's Helen Vendler, the most widely published writer on poetry in the country, shares Bloom's assessment of such better-known poems as "The Snow Man," "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "Anecdote of the Jar," even while admitting that some of Stevens's work is "baffling to the ordinary reader...

...His onomatopoeic nonce words— At night an Arabian in my room With his damned hoobla-hooblahoobla-how, Inscribes a primitive astronomy or The lacquered loges huddled there Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay —create delightful euphonies, but led some readers to dismiss him as a nonsense poet...

...Say what you will...

...The central section of Stevens's great "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" begins, "We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango chutney...

...He had to: His job wouldn't allow him to travel...

...That's why, if you want to find Wallace Stevens's tomb in Hartford, you'll have to go with a literary critic and a good map...

...The importance of Stevens's non-poetic career was logistical...

...Stevens's work does not really lead anywhere," Stevens wrote: That a man's work should remain indefinite is often intentional...

...It is easy to like Klee and Kandinsky," he wrote a friend...

...Unfortunately for those looking for more of this kind of lyric writing, many of Stevens's poems are highly complicated and dedicated to arcane philosophical propositions...

...Not that he was without politics, only that the politics he had were neither wide-ranging nor particularly presentable...

...Kermode and Richardson, in this new Library of America volume, don't allude to the claims of Stevens's conversion...

...R. P. Blackmur, the patient critic who launched the vogue for Stevens with several appreciative essays in the 1930s, compiled a list of some of his oddities: "fubbed, girandoles, curlicues, catarrhs, gobbet, diaphanes, clop-ping, minuscule, pipping, pannicles, carked, ructive, rapey, cantilene, buffo, fiscs, phylactery, princox, and funest...

...Then there is the obtrusive use of French, which Stevens in an immoderate moment called part of the same language as English, and of which "The robins are la-bas . . ." is only his most annoying example...

...And those were the least of his tricks...

...The literary critic Harold Bloom, who only half-jokingly dismisses T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound as "the Cowley and Cleveland of our day," describes our times as "the Age of Stevens...

...The archdiocese replied that it had not wanted to leave the impression that patients in Catholic hospitals were routinely pressured to convert...

...It was around this time that he began writing poems again...

...We are the fruit thereof...

...Stevens, however, is far more than a hedonist, and is after something far more subtle than being a national poet in the Whitman vein...

...That he held such an unpoetical job is both important and unimportant...

...These poems are more highly esteemed within the Stevens oeu-vre than they should be, however congenial they may be to the kind of college course entitled "The Modern Temper...

...The generous selection of juvenilia gathered by Kermode and Richardson in this new collection shows that as a student he worked ambitiously in a representative 1890s vein: I sang an idle song of happy youth, A simple and a hopeful roundelay That thoughtlessly ran through a sweet array Of cadences, until I cried, "Forsooth, My song, thou art unjewelled and uncouth...

...Unlike Whitman, however, Stevens had little interest in his country's political yearnings...

...In such poems as "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," he repaints a vignette many times to show the contingency of perception...

...The ordinary reader...

...To Randall Jarrell—a biased witness, for he distrusted the philosophical poem as a genre, viewing it an unwieldy "sewing-machine that also plays the piano"—this philosophical preoccupation doomed Stevens by freighting his poems with a subject matter incompatible with his lyric talent: All his tunk-a-tunks, his hoo-goo-boos—those mannered, manufactured, individual, uninteresting little sound-inventions—how typical they are of the lecture style of the English philosopher, who makes grunts or odd noises, uses homely illustrations, and quotes day in day out from Alice in Wonderland, in order to give what he says some appearance of that raw reality it so plainly lacks...

...When the firm went bankrupt the following year, the Stevenses moved with great reluctance to Hartford...

...Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms...

...So he lived through his purchases...

...gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights...

...When he began turning out his adult poetry, he brought to it an undergraduate enthusiasm and desire to shock...

...He is explicitly a philosopher, and the most consistent philosophical preoccupations of his career were aesthetic ones...

...These are the measures destined for her soul...

...In any case, the lifework had been brought to a close before Stevens's last days in the hospital, and any judgment on Stevens's work must find irrelevant those events occurring after it was complete...

...The idea of art as a substitute for religion is not only a great commonplace of modernism, but the bedrock on which rests the way poetry is read today...

...This extraordinary piece of obscurantism brings us close to the reason everybody in the academy loves Wallace Stevens but nobody visits his grave...

...So Stevens sought to build a (largely self-justifying) system for himself, particularly in the series of essays collected as The Necessary Angel...

...Insurance men, for instance...

...In New York he worked for nine months as a journalist, until an assignment to cover the ghastly funeral of Stephen Crane, dead of consumption in his twenties, seems to have instilled in him the fear of meeting a similarly friendless and desolate end...

...At 250 pounds, Stevens was one of America's great literary fatties...

...The last thing in the world that I should want to do would be to formulate a system...

...Stevens is never more philosophical, abstract, rational, than when telling us to put our faith in nothing but immediate sensations, perceptions, aesthetic particulars...

...To the extent that he is dismissing the Stevens credo as a hedonistic one, Jarrell is not alone...

...Their first married years were hard ones...

...Stevens doesn't fit the tradition-al—or even the radical—American idea of a poet...

...He had cultivated a series of pen pals around the world, largely for the purpose of asking them to send him handicrafts from far-flung locales...

...Elsie was so pretty that in the early years of their marriage she sat as the model for the Mercury dime, but she was also shrewish and unliterary, and the two were notoriously incompatible...

...man who, gasping on his deathbed, has whispered to the nurse to . . . please...

...Yet Stevens was by then almost forty, and in some ways much older in spirit...

...In an angry letter to the young poet Robert Pack, who had written that "Mr...

...Enrolling in New York Law School, he passed the bar in 1903, and a year later met eighteen-year-old Elsie Viola Kachel, whom he would marry in 1909...

...But we are dealing with poetry, not with philosophy...

...If by ordinary readers, Vendler means those neither enrolled in nor employed by universities, Stevens has no ordinary readers...

...Certain of his poems are practical aesthetic studies that match the general modernist—and, in painting, specifically Cubist—preoccupation with multiple perspectives...

...The battle over poetry-as-religion has been narrow, intolerant, and (for that very reason) reassuring...

...Stevens was constructing a personality as one builds a collection, and it is tempting to read him as Walt Whitman asked to be read: as a poet who, by virtue of experiences absorbed and sensations felt, had made himself into "a kos-mos...

...He spent three years studying European literature at Harvard, where he was president of the undergraduate literary magazine, the Advocate...

...Around the time Harmonium appeared, Stevens became an almost fanatical collector of rugs, books, exotic wallpaper, paintings, folk art, and flowers...

...Name me a dying Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard...

...A believing Stevens would trouble the consensus we've all grown way too comfortable with, academics and philistines alike: that poetry belongs to people who devote their careers to it and is no business of those who don't...

...His level of engagement in current affairs is fairly well summarized by his infamous aside, after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, that "the Italians have as much right to take Ethiopia from the coons as the coons had to take it from the boa-constrictors...

...Gather your children around the fire and read to them "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction...