In honor of the 141st birthday of Wallace Stevens today, I've pulled from deep storage an exchange circa 1997(?) on a long-extinct "Wallace Stevens Society" list-serve, where I first tried to write about this strange insurance lawyer-poet. Who and what I was responding to after my bold introduction have not been preserved.
Hi! (as Stevens once wrote) - a garland of elephant ears and some perambulating zithers to all you brave, invisible others who constitute the loyal e-fandom of Wallace Stevens (hellohellohellohellohello).
What I bring to this dialogue (or is it soliloquy?) is the fact that I, like Stevens and perhaps unlike most of you, am a denizen of Corporate America. As such, I have become very interested in the way the “corporate mentality” permeates his work. I am not referring here to “Galled Justicia trained to poise the tables of the law” or those other rare allusions to the work world in his poems. I’m talking about the way a corporation “thinks.”
There is an organic “being” of a corporation that operates and makes decisions independently of the individuals who constitute it. For example, a corporate President or CEO rarely is allowed to make a decision, his or her role is to demand a consensus that has been filtered up through many channels, all of whom have been careful to couch their individual leanings in what is perceived to be the interests of the collective. It could be argued that this consensus forms itself out of the interest the corporation itself expresses, but, whether or not that is the case, it is pointless to object to this consensus once arrived at, for the President or for anyone involved in the process; the consensus has become the Truth.
It is also almost always False, in that this decision-making dynamic has completely smoothed away the ideas of individuals who are closest to a particular area and so have the most thoughtful approaches to a problem - these “opinions” are inevitably filtered out because they cannot be adequately communicated to others who are not at the same vantage point and the depth of feeling behind them cannot be allowed to be expressed. And this slow process whereby the edges of the self are destroyed by being unperceived in the collective whole is, I think, at the heart of Stevens.
This tension informs his anxiety over why we can’t perceive a flower, a work of art, another human being or God except within the cage of our own mind; after all, we define ourselves as a necessary part of a functioning being, yet we find that entity wholly unintelligible and distant even as we live within it. And so the world becomes a plaything to our isolated imaginations, except that the bottom line always shows the imagination to be a lie, however true it may appear.
The barren world that Stevens proposed bears an eerie resemblance to the business world, where all manner of fantasies, dreams and spiritual longings are allowed to exist but disappear at the final moment when “reality” takes over. Stevens’ work can be summarized, in fact, by the classic corporate cliché: “Perception becomes reality.”
My question to the inhabitants of this hive of a different order (hellohellohellohellohello) is: where can I go to further explore this? I’d like to know who else is looking at the link between corporate consciousness and that particular Stevensian angle on life. Does anyone want to delve in particular verses along these lines?
To Prof. Suberchicot-
Thank you for your gracious response. I wholeheartedly agree that Stevens is all about the dark side of the Emersonian eye - your cite of Hopkins’s self destroyed as his perception is destroyed being singularly apt. Certainly, the “why me/who me” dynamic in Stevens is as old as the lyric, and as old as religious experience itself. Stevens is properly related to a peculiarly American romanticism, which you identify, I think, as a stoicism towards the forces of history.
Still, I wonder if Stevens would ever, like Emerson or Hopkins, acknowledge his perception flowing out to the unities along with the rest of his “self” - it “sticks,” - like philosophy before breakfast - “to the eye.” It is this facet - of perception held back - unmoored - that prompts such Stevensian concerns as whether viewing a rose in his own “especial eye” would “muff the mistress for the maid” or of singers singing “beyond the genius of the sea.” And that is what, to me, makes Stevens so difficult to figure - imagination to him becomes a hollow-bored instrument of truth-making, yet it is displaced from the truth - much as a corporate “cog” would be oriented towards fealty to the corporate interest but would also be utterly alienated from it (and this, too, sounds like Hopkins, who also had a problematic relationship to his “career.”) Stevens’ spiritual isolation owes at least as much, I agree, to a pragmatic “Yankee” reticence as to the corporate experience, and perhaps both are symptoms of the American ethos toward art, ideas and spiritual longings - that they are meaningless unless measurable - by dollars, or number of converts, etc.
Stevens, more so than most American artists, seemed to have been torn by the twin mistresses of art and commerce, and he seemed to divide the difference by taking some sort of dandyish responsibility for art, as if by collecting it or binding it in gold leaf or justifying its uselessness in weighty philosophical terms he could protect it from the blind eye of commercial interest. That he was himself a representative of that commercial interest may explain those actions as over-compensating; it’s interesting that Stevens only published poems written while in a corporate environment, and in fact he was deathly afraid of leaving it, even to visit Paris or build his own theory of Poetry at Harvard. He took pains, in fact, to separate himself from the community of artists, even as he viewed himself as an aesthete of avant-garde art. Thoughts?
Roger-
Thanks for your thoughtful response. You make a number of sensible and compelling arguments. I agree that there is no easy answer with such a hidden and inscrutable figure as Stevens. I didn’t mean to suggest that being in a corporation “drove” Stevens to write, or made him into a different person than he was, only that it shaped his experience, and lent a unique quality to his poems. Specifically, I believe the disparity between a collegial “go-along to get-along” environment and Stevens’ extreme isolation (from business associates, other artists and even his family) fueled, in part, his need for the freedom of “imagination” and gave him the painful insight into a ”reality” stripped of illusion.
How do we account for someone who dealt by day in the nether world of surety insurance claims, which is all about reading into the strictest form of contracts and knowing by numbers and statutes when to go to court and when to settle, and by night wrote with authority about Pompei before the volcano and soldiers waiting to die and the sunset on Chinese mountaintops? Why did this gap between “reality” and “imagination” only grow wider the older Stevens got? Why is there literally nothing about his working life in his poems, as opposed to, say, Williams, who used his pediatric practice as a continuous and direct source of inspiration?
Corporate life is not an unfulfilling and dreary existence, but it does not by definition allow for much independence or autonomy (and I would argue that applies to VP’s even more than for lower-placed workers!). Stevens’ later letters have a sense of enforced discretion about mixing poetry and work, as if he felt his career would be threatened in some way if he was “found out” as a poet. Compare this to Charles Ives, another artist-insurance executive, who owned his own business and actually acted as if he did not see a contradiction between his work and art: he wrote jingles to advertise his company, quoted Emerson and other “positive thinkers” to motivate his sales force, and saw his gift of writing creatively as his primary value to the business.
In a letter, Stevens comments how a businessman’s efforts are continually criticized and reshaped to fit the needs of the business and “one doesn’t think anything of it,” whereas artists seem to take the slightest criticism as a sign of betrayal. I read, I guess, more sadness and resignation into this than you may. (I think of him, after his cancer surgery, rushing back to the office, test-tubes sticking out, so they wouldn’t take his absence as an excuse to force a 75-year-old man to retire).
More than all that, I don’t believe literary antecedents such as Santayana (or Goethe, Nietzsche, Shelley, Pater, the Vagabond poets, the Chinese translations of Byner, etc.) prefigure the unique Stevensian perspective, at least in the same way that, say, Baudelaire cleared the way for Eliot or Shakespeare was the framework for Freud’s thinking. Stevens remains unique, and I think in part that’s because being a poet in the corporate world to him was like exile to Dante, it forced him to confront the fantasy at the root of his romantic self-image.
Roger et al (&Kudos to Tom for asking what has all this to do with the price of tea in Ceylon) -
You write about "reality and imagination being interrelated, and usually inseparable except for short, rather artificial moments...but he [Stevens] predominately treats them as interrelated and inseparable: 'eternal observer - man' combines subject and observer." I wholly agree that reality and imagination for Stevens are inseparable, but I differ on why that is so.
You quote Stevens as follows: "reality changes into the imagination (under one's very eyes) as one experiences it..." I do not read this to mean reality and imagination are separate realms that man the observer brings together, but that imagination inevitably replaces reality. I would argue that the brief moments of misalignment between the two realms are what Stevens' poetry is all about: the sudden flash of poetic awareness that the way one's perception constructs the world is entirely self-contained and thus "false." At the same time, "there is no other" world, only eternal observer man. I cannot read the vast majority of Stevens' poems without sensing the poignant gap between an imagined world where everything has meaning and value and a "real" one that feeds the imaginative one but is empty itself of any meaning we can perceive. In other words, we have only imagination to guide us.
The quote from Tom's post seems yet another reiteration of this central theme: "The pungent oranges and bright, green wings" are the sensuous pleasures of life enhanced by the perceiving eye, but they "Seem things in some procession of the dead," because their true essence is far away, hidden, to the observer. They, to the observer, are "Winding across wide water, without sound," wide water being something like the ocean that opens up to infinity and seems to connect everything but cannot be understood. "The day," itself "is like wide water, without sound, / Stilled for the passion of her dreaming feet." The ocean is keep at bay, silent, meaningless, so that the observer can build feeling through her imaginings, her dreams, "Over the seas, to silent Palestine," and imagine Palestine, the central Western myth, as a place of transcendent meaning, even though it is only an edifice, a "Dominion of the blood and sepulchre," the "all-too-human" court or repository of our religious yearnings.
Similarly:
Perhaps "We live in an old chaos of the sun," a seemingly random and meaningless existence, "Or old dependency of day and night," or we may be tied to what seems, the seasons and days, "Or island solitude, unsponsored, free," but we lively equally in our dreams, unmoored to the world that sponsors us. One cannot really say whether we are dependent on or independent from "reality": the unknowable secret is "Of that wide water, inescapable."
I don't know whether this is too confusing or too obvious, but it's boring either way, so I thank you for getting this far. It's a feeling, not a "thesis," and I hope I can inspire some more thoughts from y'all, for I'm amused by how Stevensian this little dialogue has become.
I think of this as essentially Eastern mysticism, the finding of God within oneself, within the imaginative reshaping of one's experience. How such a vision can arise in the context of Pennsylvania Lutheranism and fin de siecle aesthetic philosophy and surety insurance is like a koan we are all collectively trying to unravel, but I find it interesting how Stevensian our grappling is - we are both reading different things into the same materials and completing a picture our minds compel. Yet the reality remains as hermetic as Stevens left it.
