Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens: Of Modern Poetry

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The question of the appeal of modern poetry is a very big concern among modernists and a common question among readers new to the genre. Many prefer the aesthetics of the Elizabethan’s, enjoying the sing-song simplicity and rhyme. Often, when I tell people that I am passionate about modern poetry they ask, ‘Why?’ Some objectors of the place of poetry even use (in so many words) W.H. Auden’s line in his elegy to W.B. Yeats, seemingly unaware of the contradiction: ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’

When I consider what people call the difficulty of modern poetry I think of two things, T.S. Eliot’s essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ and Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘Of Modern Poetry.’ Eliot writes, ‘Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.’ Here modernists might discuss modernism’s tearing into pieces of the interiority of humanity as a result of some great event, and I do not deny that modernism consists of the ‘refined sensibility’ reacting to that (or those) events. However, the events and the emotions tied to the events are seldom new (though the events may be more monumental, the emotions more intense); the difficulty is in the projection of a subjective interiority that has always existed and has always been complex.

Modern art in PragueWallace Stevens’s ‘Of Modern Poetry’ begins with what I believe is a sense of Durkheim’s social Anomie. Modern poetry is the attempt to grasp and delineate something that cannot yet be understood by society at large. In this sense it is prophesying: modern poetry ‘has / To construct a new stage’ on which the norms of society will be played out after it is ruptured by anything: war, economic collapse, drought, etc. Stevens’s act of poetry, which is the act of the mind, is simultaneously solipsistic and intersubjective: it is for the self and the ‘invisible audience’ or collective consciousness of humanity. Stevens repeats what Keats wrote in ‘A Defence of Poetry’ [sic] : ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ (Anomie is from the Greek and translates to ‘without law’). In times of great variety and complexity, the mind will mirror that state. ‘The poem of the act of the mind’ is ‘difficult’ because it is the mapping of the intricacy of your (his, hers, theirs, our) mind. Poetry is there to recreate, to compose law, it is there to remind us of what it is that makes us human, and, more importantly, to remind us of what makes us a society.

Here’s the poem.

Of Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

A Mind of Winter: Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’

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snowA blizzard has begun. Their predictions were right but my vexation at having to reschedule a flight to Vermont subsided with that first sight of accumulation on the streets of Manhattan. I had hoped to experience the storm from some place of sylvan solitude; in lieu of drooping conifers and ivory fields, I turned to Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’ (1921) and angled an IKEA chair toward the northeast window.

Since yesterday afternoon I have been mulling over how on earth I might follow the ‘The Broken Tower.’ Now it seems the obvious choice is Stevens. Crane and Stevens are both great 20th century American mystic poets. Both struggled intensely with the ideologies of a Judeo-Christian God and seemed to have favored in the end a form of Gnosticism, or what Stevens called ‘The Presence of an External Master of Knowledge.’ Put simply (something Stevens—and for that matter Crane—would not favor) it is a Oneness, a Oneness with nature, consciousness, all that mystic, Whitmanian jazz.

‘The Snow Man’ presents this sense of the unified whole brilliantly through the complete cohesion between form and content. Usually I would avoid this trope, however it is so well done in this poem that noted linguist Jay Keyser says it is the best short poem in the English language for this very reason. Personally, I feel that’s a stretch but it does accomplish that particular characteristic of great poetry better than any I can think of.

Wallace Stevens

The poem is a single sentence divided into syntactical units by semi-colons. As the poem is read and we arrive at the end of each unit, the mind renders the unit a completion. However each persistent ‘and’ necessitates the reassessment (the re-view) of what was read before and so through the apprehension of the unit, we try to reach the whole. In this way, reading ‘The Snow Man’ is in fact like watching a snowstorm: the eyes follow a portion of flakes down until they reach their supposed journey’s end, the eye then lifts, gathering another segment in its gaze and repeats in an attempt to witness the power of the storm. It is a wonderful analogy for the process of reading and re-reading—a necessary part of loving poetry.

More than this, the poem is the invitation to view things as they appear to you. This poem is more pertinent than ever in a world in which we take in information ceaselessly, clicking the shiny hyperlinks and formulating our opinions based not on the content of the page but the ads that flicker beside them or the inane comments that sit beneath. In the mystic tradition, the ‘nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’ is the void, the presence of absence denoted by the snow that seems to blot out the world by creating one anew. It is the everything out of nothing. The Snow Man sees things as they are because he is constantly reevaluating his position in relation to what is observed. He is aware that he is literally made up of the world that surrounds him—he truly has ‘a mind of winter,’ being a snowman, and knows that his presence in the world is directly affected by that which is outside of him and vice versa. The form and the content of the poem are entreating the reader to stop, pay attention to what they are reading, truly understand every aspect through reanalysis, see what is there and what is not and what is there because it is not there. It is asking you to understand your personal relation to the world and formulate your own opinions accordingly.

Here’s the poem.

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.