08-31-2023, 09:46 AM
About a week ago I bought a used copy of Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems. Of course, I've known about Stevens for decades and I have an old paperback of The Palm at the End of the Mind that I'd never opened. The Collected Poems was a Library of America edition and I couldn't resist getting it due my bibliophilic tendencies. And I started reading it almost immediately.
But a funny thing happened as I got deeper and deeper into Collected Poems. I enjoyed a few of the early poems in Harmonium, his first book of poems, but the more I read, the more baffled I became. It wasn't just the obscurity of his poems. I happen to like obscure poetry. But the further I got, the more impatient I became with Stevens' writing. I even bought a Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens, hoping that having a gloss available would ameliorate my understanding (it just made things worse). I got as far as Transport to Summer (1947), which is a little more than halfway through Collected Poems, when I decided something was very wrong. I was starting to positively despise his poems. I felt like I'd been tricked, I really felt like Stevens was some kind of massive hoax on the world of poetry.
I decided to do some research. Because I revere Ezra Pound, I decided to see if I could find out what Pound thought about Stevens. I started Googling. This is the first thing I came across:
"Are you Team Pound or Team Stevens? It’s a question that readers of modern poetry often end up asking themselves. All would agree that both Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens are important to the history of modern poetry; that, without The Cantos and “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” without “In a Station of the Metro” and “The Plain Sense of Things,” modern poetry would be a fundamentally different thing. But agreeing on a poet’s importance doesn’t mean agreeing on a poet’s value, and, as Marjorie Perloff and other critics have noted, lovers of Pound tend not to be lovers of Stevens and vice versa.
Moreover, choosing sides here seems to express something more than mere personal preference. Do you believe that poetry is about subjectivity and the imagination? That it speaks not so much to the world as to “the delicatest ear of the mind,” as Stevens put it? That, in other words, poetry is the self speaking to the self about the self? Then you’re probably on Team Stevens, along with Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, and others. Or do you believe that poetry is about hard surfaces and sharp angles, about particulars rather than essences or types? And that it should—indeed, must—include not just the self but also history and politics and economics? Then you’re probably on Team Pound—and a venerable team it is, counting Hugh Kenner and Donald Davie among its members. To love both Pound and Stevens is akin to loving both the Yankees and the Red Sox: it’s possible, but not particularly likely."
from "An Heir to Both Stevens and Pound" by Anthony Domestico, Commonweal Magazine, Oct. 20, 2015
This gave me my basic answer, but I wanted to know more, so I Googled Marjorie Perloff and was lucky enough to find her article "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?", which somone had kindly downloaded and posted on a blog. It can be found here:
https://blogs.princeton.edu/poeticsofhis...468795.pdf
It's a very good explanation of the Pound vs. Stevens divide, if anybody is interested. I was, so I read it through.
I'm going to keep reading Stevens. I don't think I'm going to change my mind about him, but I will try to give him a sympathetic reading and enjoy the poems as much as I can. At the end of the exercise, I can at least say I've read him, but he's not my cup of tea.
But a funny thing happened as I got deeper and deeper into Collected Poems. I enjoyed a few of the early poems in Harmonium, his first book of poems, but the more I read, the more baffled I became. It wasn't just the obscurity of his poems. I happen to like obscure poetry. But the further I got, the more impatient I became with Stevens' writing. I even bought a Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens, hoping that having a gloss available would ameliorate my understanding (it just made things worse). I got as far as Transport to Summer (1947), which is a little more than halfway through Collected Poems, when I decided something was very wrong. I was starting to positively despise his poems. I felt like I'd been tricked, I really felt like Stevens was some kind of massive hoax on the world of poetry.
I decided to do some research. Because I revere Ezra Pound, I decided to see if I could find out what Pound thought about Stevens. I started Googling. This is the first thing I came across:
"Are you Team Pound or Team Stevens? It’s a question that readers of modern poetry often end up asking themselves. All would agree that both Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens are important to the history of modern poetry; that, without The Cantos and “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” without “In a Station of the Metro” and “The Plain Sense of Things,” modern poetry would be a fundamentally different thing. But agreeing on a poet’s importance doesn’t mean agreeing on a poet’s value, and, as Marjorie Perloff and other critics have noted, lovers of Pound tend not to be lovers of Stevens and vice versa.
Moreover, choosing sides here seems to express something more than mere personal preference. Do you believe that poetry is about subjectivity and the imagination? That it speaks not so much to the world as to “the delicatest ear of the mind,” as Stevens put it? That, in other words, poetry is the self speaking to the self about the self? Then you’re probably on Team Stevens, along with Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, and others. Or do you believe that poetry is about hard surfaces and sharp angles, about particulars rather than essences or types? And that it should—indeed, must—include not just the self but also history and politics and economics? Then you’re probably on Team Pound—and a venerable team it is, counting Hugh Kenner and Donald Davie among its members. To love both Pound and Stevens is akin to loving both the Yankees and the Red Sox: it’s possible, but not particularly likely."
from "An Heir to Both Stevens and Pound" by Anthony Domestico, Commonweal Magazine, Oct. 20, 2015
This gave me my basic answer, but I wanted to know more, so I Googled Marjorie Perloff and was lucky enough to find her article "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?", which somone had kindly downloaded and posted on a blog. It can be found here:
https://blogs.princeton.edu/poeticsofhis...468795.pdf
It's a very good explanation of the Pound vs. Stevens divide, if anybody is interested. I was, so I read it through.
I'm going to keep reading Stevens. I don't think I'm going to change my mind about him, but I will try to give him a sympathetic reading and enjoy the poems as much as I can. At the end of the exercise, I can at least say I've read him, but he's not my cup of tea.