The Map: From a Review of "Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecticut," held at the University of Connecticut, April 8-10, 2004" by Ravi Shankar:
Enter Christian Wiman…When his turn came to speak, he cleared his throat and slowly, in carefully enunciated syllables, began with this proposition: if Wallace Stevens is influential in 50 years, then the break between American poetry and the world will be complete. Much of the crowd, a bit confused by this comment, leaned in attentively. Was Stevens a great poet? Yes of course. But, was he a companionable poet? No, not at all. In fact - Wiman continued in measured tones - he was almost inhuman, uprooted, impenetrable, unpenetrating, a self-indulgent effete, a hyper-cerebral poet with raw talent blazing but little sense of how to convey something a reader might enter into, something born of blood and emotion and the shared commonalities of lived life. He was a destructive influence on modern poetry. By now there was palpable and shocked hush in the air. Stevens' poetry has abjured the world, Wiman continued, he lived in a bubble of the mind so that he might not be infected by life. His poetry corrosively and obsessively studied itself and was utterly unconcerned with the specificity of things and with relationships to people. There was coldness or distance that Wiman sensed in Stevens' poetry and it turned him off, way off, didn't arrive at the root of him as a reader. The early poems thought in sounds, not in ideas, and throughout Stevens' career, all he could see were busy associative surfaces with very little depth. The greatest poet of the next 50 years, Wiman offered as a way of summing up, might be completely repelled by Wallace Stevens, which is, in the end, tantamount to great influence.
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From "Influential Poets" by Christian Wiman:
As poetry retreated into the academy, Stevens emerged as the dominant figure of the twentieth century. His influence is at once very deep and very narrow. Scholars and poets know his work inside out, but many educated people haven't even heard of him. The poems are dense, highly wrought, and full of otherworldly beauty, a necessary corrective to the Williamsesque plain style. But his work also has a hothouse, overintellectualized quality, which has endeared it to the academy and which contemporary poets would do well to purge. - Christian Wiman
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From Notes on Poetry and Religion by Christian Wiman
But there are times when the very splendid insufficiency of art—its "sumptuous destitution," in Emily Dickinson's phrase — can point a person toward the peace that passeth understanding: George Herbert, Marilynne Robinson, T. S. Eliot. . . .
Art needs some ultimate concern, to use Tillich's phrase. As belief in God waned among late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth- century artists, death became their ultimate concern. Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Samuel Beckett, Camus—these are the great devotional poets of death.
"Death is the mother of beauty" is a phrase that could only have been written by a man for whom death was an abstraction, a vaguely pleasant abstraction at that. That's not really a critique of Stevens's "Sunday Morning," one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. Death is an abstraction for all of us, until it isn't. But for the person whose death is imminent and inescapable, nothing is more offensive, useless, or wrongheaded than phrases like "Death is the mother of beauty."
Death is the mother of beauty? No, better to say that beauty is the mother of death, for it is the splendor of existence that so fires the imagination forward and backward into our own unbeing. It is the beauty of the world that makes us more conscious of death, not the consciousness of death that makes the world more beautiful.
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The Territory:
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
Wallace StevensPoetry 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. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
supreme - from M.Fr. suprême, from L. supremus "highest," superlative of superus "situated above," from super "above".
fiction - from L. fictionem (nom. fictio) "a fashioning or feigning," from fingere "to shape, form, devise, feign," originally "to knead, form out of clay," from PIE *dheigh- (cf. O.E. dag "dough;").
nave - main part of a church - from Sp. or It. nave, from M.L. navem (nom. navis) "nave of a church," from L. navis "ship."
haunt - from O.French hanter, "frequent, resort to, be familiar with." Probably from O. Norse heimta, "bring home."
palm - O.E. palma, O.Fr. palme, both from L. palma "palm tree," originally "palm of the hand; the tree so called from the shape of its leaves, like fingers of a hand. The word traveled early to northern Europe, where the tree does not grow, via Christianity. In ancient times, a leaf or frond was carried or worn as a symbol of victory or triumph.
cithern - A 16th-century guitar with a flat, pear-shaped body. Perhaps blend of Latin cithara, cithara and obsolete English gittern (from Middle English, from Old French guiterne, from Latin cithara).
purge - from O.Fr. purgier (12c.), from L. purgare "cleanse, purify," from Old L. purigare, from purus "pure" (see pure + root of agere "to drive, make").
peristyle - in Greek and Roman Architecture a columned porch or open colonnade in a buildingthat surrounds a court that may contain an internal garden.
mask - from M.Fr. masque "covering to hide or guard the face," from It. maschera, from M.L. masca "mask, specter, nightmare," of uncertain origin, perhaps from Arabic maskhara "buffoon," from sakhira "to ridicule." Or via Prov. mascarar, Catalan mascarar, O.Fr. mascurer "to black (the face)," perhaps from a Gmc. source akin to Eng. mesh. But cf. Occitan mascara "to blacken, darken," derived from mask- "black," which is held to be from a pre-I.E. language, and Old Occitan masco "witch," surviving in dialects; in Beziers it means "dark cloud before the rain comes."
epitaph - from O.Fr. epitaphe, from L. epitaphium "funeral oration, eulogy," from Gk. epitaphion, neut. of epitaphos "of a funeral," from epi- "at, over" + taphos "tomb, funeral rites.
sublime - from M.Fr. sublime, from L. sublimis "uplifted, high, lofty," possibly originally "sloping up to the lintel," from sub "up to" + limen "lintel."
muzzy - 1. Mentally confused; muddled. 2. Blurred; indistinct.
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