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Wallace Stevens: The Life of the Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Extract

One thing we can now surely say of the achievement of Wallace Stevens: He has written, over some thirty years, a whole and continuing poetry whose subject is the life, the form and function, of the imagination. In the recently published Transport to Summer that subject receives its broadest, most complex treatment, yet remains essentially as it was in his first volume, Harmonium: in his language, a problem in the relation of the imagined to the real; in more general language, of the world as known to the world as outside knowing. From beginning to end what has been basic is the predicament of the man who would know. If, read in and of themselves, the poems in Transport to Summer contrast vividly with those in Harmonium, the contrast is as much an aspect of continuity as of difference and opposition. It is a continuity that represents the growth and achievement which, for good and for bad, make the total of Stevens' work greater than the sum of its parts. Viewed thus, the poems in Transport to Summer are inevitable precisely as they show Stevens trying to finish what he began in Harmonium.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 5 , September 1951 , pp. 561 - 582
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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Footnotes

*

Quotations are from Harmonium, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Ideas of Order, Parts of a World, and Transport to Summer, all by Wallace Stevens, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., copyright 1931, 1936, 1937, 1942, 1947 by Wallace Stevens.

References

Note 1 in page 561 See particularly Marius Bewley, “The Poetry of Wallace Stevens,” Partisan Review, xvi (1949), 895–915; Bernard Heringman, “Wallace Stevens: The Use of Poetry,” ELH, xvi (1949), 325–336; Louis L. Martz, “The World of Wallace Stevens,” in B. Rajan, ed. Modern American Poetry: Focus Five (London, 1950), pp. 94–109; and William Van O'Connor, The Shaping Spirit: A Study of Wallace Stevens (Chicago, 1950). AH of these, however, are most concerned with iteration and reiteration of subject and theme in Stevens, rather than with continuity and development, as I am here.

Note 2 in page 561 This was written before the publication of Stevens' Auroras of Autumn in Sept. 1950.

Note 3 in page 566 Here I follow Hi Simons, “ ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’: Its Sense and Its Significance,” Southern Review, V (1940), 453–468.

Note 4 in page 570 “The Realm of Resemblance,” Partisan Review, xiv (1947), 248.

Note 5 in page 580 “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” in Allen Tate, ed. The Language of Poetry (Princeton, 1942), p. 125.