Jarrell’s “Reflections on Wallace Stevens”

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Jarrell is unapologetic in both his praise and his criticism of Wallace Stevens.  Praise for the early work.  Criticism for the turn much of Steven’s later work takes towards the abstract.

A few of his critiques seemed like generally worthwhile statements to bring into a creative writing class.  (For example, useful when trying to explain to a student that a poem “reading like an essay,” or “being really abstract” is not necessarily a successful poem.)

Here’s Jarrell on the pitfalls of “philosophical” poetry:

“Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano”(140).

And quoting Goethe about the importance of the universal within the particular:

“But surely a poet has to treat the concrete as primary, as something far more than an instance, a hue to be sensed, a member of a laudable category – for him it is always the generalization whose life is derived, whose authority is delegated.  Goethe said, quite as if he were talking about Stevens: ‘It makes a great difference whether the poet seeks the particular in relation to the universal or contemplates the universal in the particular… [In the first case] the particular functions as an example, as an instance of the universal; but the second indeed represents the very nature of poetry.  He who grasps this particular as living essence also encompasses the universal” (140-141).

In addition to high praise for his early work, Jarrell did point me towards Stevens’ poem “Esthetique du Mal” as a late poem with some shiningly successful sections.  Hauling Stevens Palm at the End of the Mind off the shelf, I was particularly drawn to the following section of “Esthetique,” (which I’d not read before):

IX.

Panic in the face of the moon – round effendi

Or the phosphored sleep in which he walks abroad

Or the majolica dish heaped up with phosphored fruit

That he sends ahead, out of the goodness of his heart,

To anyone that comes – panic, because

The moon is no longer these nor anything

And nothing is left but comic ugliness

Or a lustred nothingness.  Effendi, he

That has lost the folly of the moon becomes

The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty.

To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,

As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,

To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,

As if the paradise of meaning ceased

To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.

This is the sky divested of its fountains.

Here in the west indifferent crickets chant

Through our indifferent crises.  Yet we require

Another chant, an incantation, as in

Another and later genesis, music

That buffets the shapes of its possible halcyon

Against the haggardie… A loud, large water

Bubbles up in the night and drowns the crickets’ sound.

It is a declaration, a primitive ecstasy,

Truth’s favors sonorously exhibited. (258)

I’m adding this poem to so many of Stevens’ poems that are worth returning to time and again: “The an on the Dump,” “The Snowman,” “Sunday Morning,” “Disillusionment of Ten O’clock,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” “The Plain Sense of Things” (hmm, would Jarrell agree or disagree on that one?), “Of Modern Poetry”… and the list goes on…

Jarrell concludes by saying that “a good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two times and he is great” (148), and even amidst the criticism we can tell he thought Stevens was a lightning rod during significant periods of his writing life.

Jarrell, Randall.  “Reflections on Wallace Stevens.”  Poetry and the Age. NY: Octagon Books, 1972.  pp 133-148.

Stevens, Wallace.  The Palm at the End of the Mind. NY: Vintage Books, 1990.

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Filed under Contemporary Lit., Modern American, Poetry