Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T13:38:58.552Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - Stevens and the lyric speaker

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2007

John N. Serio
Affiliation:
Clarkson University, New York
Get access

Summary

Because the lyric poem so often speaks in a first-person voice, we unconsciously expect to hear in its lines someone saying, “No, I am that I am” (Shakespeare) or “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (Wordsworth), or “I too dislike it” (Marianne Moore) or “Black like me” (Langston Hughes). Wallace Stevens sometimes writes poems of this openly personal sort: “

The exceeding brightness of this early sun

Makes me conceive how dark I have become. . . .

(108)

But Stevens' use of the naked first-person voice is relatively rare. The most frequent substitute in lyric for the first-person singular is the first-person plural: “Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, / So do our minutes hasten to their end” (Shakespeare); “Oh joy, that in our embers / Is something that doth live” (Wordsworth); “We outgrow love, like other things” (Emily Dickinson). Stevens is much attached to this first-person plural voicing, which serves him, as it has many poets, as a philosophic resource in asserting something true of all human beings:

We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night. . . .

(56)

But the capacious pronoun “we” can equally serve Stevens as the sign of collective American reference - “Deer walk upon our mountains” (56) - or as the sign of intimacy between two people - “Only we two are one” (118) - or as an indirect way of speaking of himself: “If sex were all, then every trembling hand / Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words” (14).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×