The reception and interpretation of Stevens's poetry have been widespread and of diverse orientation. In their book The Fluent Mundo Leonard and Wharton define at least four schools of interpretation, beginning with the prime advocates of Stevens found in the critics Harvey Pearce and Helen Regeuiro, who supported the thesis "that Stevens's later poetry denies the value of imagination for the sake of an unobstructed view of the 'things themselves'".[51] The next school of interpretation Leonard and Wharton identify is the Romantic school, led by Vendler, Bloom, James Baird, and Joseph Riddel. A third school of Stevens interpretation that sees Stevens as heavily dependent on 20th-century Continental philosophy includes J. Hillis Miller, Thomas J. Hines, and Richard Macksey. A fourth school sees Stevens as fully Husserlian or Heideggerian in approach and tone and is led by Hines, Macksey, Simon Critchley, Glauco Cambon, and Paul Bove.[51] These four schools offer occasional agreement and disagreement of perspective; for example, Critchley reads Bloom's interpretation of Stevens as in the anti-realist school while seeing Stevens as not in the anti-realist school of poetic interpretation.[52]
Maturity of poetry
Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came largely only as he approached 40 years of age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence titled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry)[53] was written at age 35, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with Santayana. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned 50. According to Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time,[54] no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius. His contemporary Harriet Monroe termed Stevens "a poet, rich and numerous and profound, provocative of joy, creative beauty in those who can respond to him".[55] Vendler notes that there are three distinguishable moods present in Stevens's long poems: ecstasy, apathy, and reluctance between ecstasy and apathy.[46] She also notes that his poetry was highly influenced by the paintings of Paul Klee and Paul Cézanne:
Stevens saw in the paintings of both Paul Klee—who was his favorite painter—and Cézanne the kind of work he wanted to do himself as a Modernist poet. Klee had imagined symbols. Klee is not a directly realistic painter and is full of whimsical and fanciful and imaginative and humorous projections of reality in his paintings. The paintings are often enigmatic or full of riddles, and Stevens liked that as well. What Stevens liked in Cézanne was the reduction, you might say, of the world to a few monumental objects.[56]
Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium, was published in 1923, and republished in a second edition in 1930. Two more books of his poetry were produced during the 1920s and 1930s and three more in the 1940s. He received the annual National Book Award for Poetry twice, in 1951 for The Auroras of Autumn[57][58] and in 1955 for Collected Poems.[59][60]
Imagination and reality
For Thomas Grey, a Stevens biographer specializing in attention to Stevens as a businessman lawyer, Stevens in part related his poetry to his imaginative capacities as a poet while assigning his lawyer's duties more to the reality of making ends meet in his personal life. Grey finds the poem "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" useful to understanding the approach Stevens took in separating his poetry and his profession, writing: "The law and its prose were separate from poetry, and supplied a form of relief for Stevens by way of contrast with poetry, as the milkman (portrayed as the realist in the poem) relieves from the moonlight, as the walk around the block relieves the writer's trance like absorption. But the priority was clear: imagination, poetry, and secrecy, pursued after hours were primary, good in themselves; reason, prose, and clarity, indulged in during working hours, were secondary and instrumental".[61]
In the Southern Review, Hi Simons wrote that much of early Stevens is juvenile romantic subjectivist, before he became a realist and naturalist in his more mature and more widely recognized idiom of later years.[62] Stevens, whose work became meditative and philosophical, became very much a poet of ideas.[54] "The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully",[63] he wrote. Of the relation between consciousness and the world, in Stevens's work "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness, nor is "reality" equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world; reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry, philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning. Thus Stevens wrote in "The Idea of Order at Key West":
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.[64]
In Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, "After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption."[65] But as the poet attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost gods, he immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality is not possible.
Stevens suggests that we live in the tension between the shapes we take as the world acts upon us and the ideas of order that our imagination imposes upon the world. The world influences us in our most normal activities: "The dress of a woman of Lhassa, / In its place, / Is an invisible element of that place / Made visible."[66] As Stevens says in his essay "Imagination as Value", "The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them."[67]
Supreme Fiction
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction is a lyrical poetic work of three parts, containing 10 poems each, with a preface and epilogue opening and closing the entire work of three parts. It was first published in 1942 and represents a comprehensive attempt by Stevens to state his view of the art of writing poetry. Stevens studied the art of poetic expression in many of his writings and poems, including The Necessary Angel, where he wrote, "The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have."[68]
Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that notions of religion no longer suffice. His solution might be summarized by the notion of a "Supreme Fiction", an idea that would serve to correct and improve old notions of religion along with old notions of the idea of God of which Stevens was critical.[69] In this example from the satirical "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman", Stevens plays with the notions of immediately accessible, but ultimately unsatisfying, notions of reality:
Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms Like windy citherns, hankering for hymns. We agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began.[70]
The saxophones squiggle because, as J. Hillis Miller says of Stevens in his book Poets of Reality, the theme of universal fluctuation is a constant theme throughout Stevens's poetry: "A great many of Stevens's poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement."[71] In the end, reality remains.
The supreme fiction is that conceptualization of reality that seems to resonate in its rightness, so much so that it seems to have captured, if only for a moment, something actual and real.
I am the angel of reality, seen for a moment standing in the door. Yet I am the necessary angel of earth, Since, in my sight, you see the earth again, Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set, And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings, Like watery words awash; A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man Of the mind, an apparition appareled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turn Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?[72]
In one of his last poems, "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour", Stevens describes the experience of an idea that satisfies the imagination and writes, "The world imagined is the ultimate good." Stevens places this thought in the individual human mind and writes of its compatibility with his own poetic interpretation of God, writing: "Within its vital boundary, in the mind,/ We say God and the imagination are one .../ How high that highest candle lights the dark."[73]
Poetic criticism of old religion
Imaginative knowledge of the type described in "Final Soliloquy" necessarily exists within the mind, since it is an aspect of the imagination that can never attain a direct experience of reality.
We say God and the imagination are one ... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same light, out of the central mind We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.[73]
Stevens concludes that God and human imagination are closely identified, but that feeling of rightness which for so long a time existed with that old religious idea of God may be accessed again. This supreme fiction will be something equally central to our being, but contemporary to our lives, in a way that the old religious idea of God can never again be. But with the right idea, we may again find the same sort of solace that we once found in old religious ideas. "[Stevens] finds, too, a definite value in the complete contact with reality. Only, in fact, by this stark knowledge can he attain his own spiritual self that can resist the disintegrating forces of life ... Powerful force though the mind is ... it cannot find the absolutes. Heaven lies about the seeing man in his sensuous apprehension of the world ...; everything about him is part of the truth."[74]
... Poetry Exceeding music must take the place Of empty heaven and its hymns, Ourselves in poetry must take their place[75]
In this way, Stevens's poems adopt attitudes that are corollaries to those earlier spiritual longings that persist in the unconscious currents of the imagination. "The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea ... It satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning / And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, / To an immaculate end."[76] The "first idea" is that essential reality that stands before all others, that essential truth; but since all knowledge is contingent on its time and place, that supreme fiction will surely be transitory. This is the necessary angel of subjective reality—a reality that must always be qualified—and as such, always misses the mark to some degree—always contains elements of unreality.
Miller summarizes Stevens's position:
Though this dissolving of the self is in one way the end of everything, in another way it is the happy liberation. There are only two entities left now that the gods are dead: man and nature, subject and object. Nature is the physical world, visible, audible, tangible, present to all the senses, and man is consciousness, the nothing which receives nature and transforms it into something unreal ...[77]
Influence of Nietzsche
Aspects of Stevens's thought and poetry draw from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Stevens's poem "Description without Place," for example, directly mentions the philosopher:
Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool Of these discolorations, mastering The moving and the moving of their forms In the much-mottled motion of blank time.[78]
Scholars have attempted to trace some of Nietzsche's influence on Stevens's thought. While Stevens's intellectual relationship to Nietzsche's is complex, it is clear that he shared Nietzsche's perspective on topics such as religion, change, and the individual. Milton J. Bates writes:
in a 1948 letter to Rodriguez Feo, [Stevens] expressed his autumnal mood with an allusion to Nietzsche: "How this oozing away hurts notwithstanding the pumpkins and the glaciale of frost and the onslaught of books and pictures and music and people. It is finished, Zarathustra says; and one goes to the Canoe Club and has a couple of Martinis and a pork chop and looks down the spaces of the river and participates in the disintegration, the decomposition, the rapt finale" (L 621). Whatever Nietzsche would have thought of the Canoe Club and its cuisine, he would have appreciated the rest of the letter, which excoriates a world in which the weak affect to be strong and the strong keep silence, in which group living has all but eliminated men of character.[79]
Literary influence
From the first, critics and fellow poets praised Stevens. Hart Crane wrote to a friend in 1919, after reading some of the poems that would make up Harmonium, "There is a man whose work makes most of the rest of us quail."[80] The Poetry Foundation states that "by the early 1950s Stevens was regarded as one of America's greatest contemporary poets, an artist whose precise abstractions exerted substantial influence on other writers."[81] Some critics, like Randall Jarrell and Yvor Winters, praised Stevens's early work but were critical of his more abstract and philosophical later poems.[82][83]
Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode are among the critics who have cemented Stevens's position in the canon as one of the key figures of 20th-century American Modernist poetry.[56] Bloom has called Stevens "a vital part of the American mythology" and unlike Winters and Jarrell, Bloom has cited Stevens's later poems, like "Poems of our Climate," as among his best.[81]
In commenting on the place of Stevens among contemporary poets and previous poets, his biographer Paul Mariani stated, "Stevens's real circle of philosopher-poets included Pound and Eliot as well as Milton and the great romantics. By extension, E. E. Cummings was a mere shadow of a poet, while Blackmur (a contemporary critic and publisher) did not even deign to mention Williams, Moore, or Hart Crane."[84]
Racism
There is various evidence of Stevens's contempt for people of African descent, e.g., his use of the phrase "nigger mystics" in his poem "Prelude to Objects", and the title of his poem "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery". This attitude is further illustrated by the following anecdote: "It happened during the meeting of the National Book Award committee that gave the poetry prize to Marianne Moore. [F]ive [judges, including] Wallace Stevens ... passed the time looking at photographs of previous meetings of National Book Award judges. Gwendolyn Brooks appeared in one of these. On seeing the photo, Stevens remarked, 'Who's the coon?' ... Noticing the reaction of the group to his question, he asked, 'I know you don't like to hear people call a lady a coon, but who is it?'”[85]
