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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Wallace Stevens noted in his journal that while aphorisms are never believed for very long they help us make brief, intensely felt discoveries about ourselves; there he made a connection between his love of aphoristic expression and his theory of human perception of reality as a perception of fragments, never the whole. Exploring the nature and variety of his aphorisms as a manifestation of this concept is important to the understanding of his poems. The tendency to experience life as fragments is, on the one hand, a centripetal tendency akin to aphoristic expression, since in each case one momentarily pulls experience into a self-contained unit. But such moments invariably give rise to a centrifugal tendency, an encompassing of the plenitude of experience in all its contradictory fullness. The juxtaposition of these opposing tendencies lies at the heart of Stevens' aphoristic technique and of the tension in much of his poetry.
1 Doggett See Frank, “Stevens' Later Poetry,” Critics on Wallace Stevens, ed. Peter L. McNamara (Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1972), pp. 118–20; Helen Vendler, On Extended Wings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 65-67; A. Walton Litz, An introspective Voyager (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), p. 233.
2 “ ‘To Abstract Reality’: Abstract Language and the Intrusion of Consciousness in Wallace Stevens,” American Literature, 45 (1973), 88-89.
3 Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 143. Hereafter cited as L, with page reference.
4 Morse, ed., Opus Posthumous (New York: Knopf, 1957), p. xxxi. Hereafter cited as OP, with page reference.
5 Stevens had written and published some poems in the late 1890's while a student at Harvard. But that period was followed by over a decade of almost no poetic activity other than the notes and comments about poetry in his letters and journal. Thus, the year 1914, when he began publishing again, is considered the official start of his poetic career.
6 Vendler, p. 67. Vendler cites the Letters, p. 240, for Stevens' later “intellectual remarks” to Henry Church: “that the last section was 'intended to convey despair,' that section xii existed to convey the 'compulsion frequently back of things that we do.' ”
7 Poetic Closure (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 35–36. 45.
8 The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1957), pp. 92–93. Hereafter cited as CP, with page reference.
9 See Smith's general discussion of “predetermination” in poetry, pp. 154–57.
10 Smith (p. 163) cites Kenneth Burke and his notion of phonetic cognates and concealed alliteration.
11 See Robert Buttel, Making of Harmonium (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 188–90, for the entire letter from Williams and Buttel's discussion of it.
12 Stevens wrote to William Rose Benet, who wished to include some of Stevens' poems in an anthology, “I think I should select from my poems as my favorite the Emperor of Ice-Cream” (L, 263).
13 In addition to the bracketed numbers, 2 words of my own have been placed in brackets to indicate a turn of thought implied by the speaker.
14 See Josephine Miles's interpretation of the argumentativeness of the subordinate and coordinate conjunctions in sentence-making in Style and Proportion: The Language of Prose and Poetry (Boston: Little, 1967), pp. 1–21.
15 “Squamous,” according to Ronald Sukenick, means “covered with scales, sometimes with reference to a kind of armor and, also, part of the bone structure of the temple” (Musing the Obscure, New York: New York Univ. Press, 1967, p. 104). I am indebted to Sukenick for his close reading of the poem, which assisted me in my attempt to explain the relationship between the opening and closing aphorisms and the body of the poem.
16 Crispin is a character in the Harmonium poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.”
17 “Adagia” is a collection of Stevens' aphorisms published in Opus Posthumous.
18 “The Realistic Oriole,” Hudson Review, 10 (Autumn 1957), 353.
19 This aphorism from Canto ii, unlike the other examples, concludes rather than precedes the canto and thus does not function in an epigraphiclike way in this canto. But in proximity with the epigraphlike unit which opens the succeeding canto it can be seen as part of that epigraphic unit.
20 This last canto goes on to give examples of how plainness is the effect or cause of savagery. But the canto ends with a third example of how spring and autumn are the. plain effects of a savage or violent change, which, once it has occurred, has a soothing effect, as of desire satisfied. This ending to Canto iv ties together the conflicting perspectives in the aphorisms from the preceding three cantos—the uniqueness of the plain version, its inseparability from desire (or imagination), its being an effect of violent change.
21 I want to thank Melvin E. Lyon for the generous time he spent reading this paper and offering suggestions.
