Wallace Stevens

One of the difficulties with 20th century American civilization is that it's the first occurrence of this particular insightful matrix in human history and therefore is the most invisible element in world history. We have seen so far that in the 20th century the American intelligence has been strained to the utmost that figures like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot who went to Europe to try to recapture a European stance were soured. They were soured by the very amplification that they underwent. But we saw that an individual who stayed in the United States like E. E. Cummings even though he had traveled to France, traveled to Europe and came back had a vision that the transformability of the individual was in fact the key to the American experience, and that in the transformation of the individual the most important element is an absence of thought. We're used to thinking in terms of form so much that for us to conceive of the absence of thought we immediately take to formlessness as a polarity. But we saw with E. E. Cummings that this is not necessarily the case.

With Wallace Stevens we now come to the other major poet in 20th century American civilization and we see in Stevens a more discursive presentation of what American civilization had come to, to understand. And the keynote for understanding Wallace Stevens is a poem of his written very early. In fact in The Collected Works which runs over 500 pages, it's on page 9 and it's called The Snow Man and it presents Wallace Stevens’ vision very early on. It is the closest thing I can think of to an American Taoism, or an American Zen, or an American Prajnaparamita. Here's The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

This is an exquisite being. It is not an aesthete mentality; it is not a sophisticated emotional development; it is not a superannuated intuition. This is a positioning as we discovered with E. E. Cummings that an ultimate dynamic produces a sense of center. Now with Wallace Stevens we will find that the stillness of a single point of view which vanishes even from its point of view produces also that tremendous spiritual presence.

Now, Stevens is born in October, October 2nd, 1879. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania which of course is Pennsylvania Dutch territory. And it wasn't until late in his life until he was in his 60s that he was even interested in the kind of background that his people had. And he found out late in life that the Pennsylvania Dutch that he was descended from had come in the 17th century. And the 17th century immigrants were all religious visionaries in that part of Pennsylvania. They were all from the Rosicrucian occult lineages in Germany, especially, and in Holland. And when they came to the United States they brought with them a mentality that was based upon two wonderful thinkers in the, religious thinkers in the 17th century. One was a Dutchman, John Amos Comenius, whose whole life’s work was to design educational programs which would draw out the complete spiritual individual not just to develop the human being for a skill, not just to develop the person to join a community, but to bring out the entire spiritual capacity of a human being. The other figure who lived early in that time was Johann Arndt who was second only to Martin Luther in the Protestant Spiritual Reformation history. And Johann Arndt was famous for his book called True Christianity. And in order to back it up he wrote a huge book called Paradise of the Heart. In the True Christianity and the Paradise of the Heart one has almost a German presentation of Amitabha Buddhism - extremely similar to it.

These two Influences produced in the people of this area of Pennsylvania a sensitivity which was so integrated into the culture into the communities into the families into the persons that it simply dropped from view as an intellectual content because it was a part of life it was the tradition that was there. The place that it shows up is in the language of the people because it is the language, the living language of the people, that records their spiritual pace. And in this part of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Dutch is famous for on purpose mixing up words. “Throw momma from the train a kiss.” That sort of mixing up of words in order to deliver the precision of the moment, not the sense of the ordinary. Again, it's a mentality which is spiritual which is based upon presence rather than a mentality which is psychological which is based upon a precedent, a grammatical correctness. Wallace Stevens inherits this quality of language; inherits this need to develop the entire person. When he was grown enough to go to university he went to Harvard. He went for three years as a special student. He was fairly well-to-do. He was urbane. He was an editor for the Harvard Advocate. He published a lot of poems at that time but he was a dilettante.

When he left Harvard he became a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune for a while and didn't seem to be able to carry that through. And so he went to law school, graduated from the New York Law School and went into the state bar there and practiced as a lawyer. Five years later he married a woman who was very quiet all of her life, in fact almost paranoiac in her lack of participation in social life. Elsie was her name, and Stevens and she lived together for all of their lives. They were to have one daughter fifteen years into the marriage. They almost never invited friends in. One maid in an interview said that in three years there was one dinner party. That even the child had no playmates that came in. In this monastic ascetic quality of external life was a dynamic inner quality in both Wallace Stevens and his wife Elsie. They lived a flamboyant interior life almost as if they were inmates in a monastery; almost as if they were sealed off from the rest of the world. Stevens, in fact, taking the traditional ascetic mode joined the Hartford Insurance Company and eventually became the vice president of the company. And eventually bought a huge three story mansion in Hartford with a fantastic garden. And almost never went anywhere except on business trips. Externally Stephens was boring but the internal life of Stephens was purely spiritual, almost to the level where we would consider the man is on the verge of being a sage, that poetry raised that fine and that high becomes sage-like.

We have in his early poems. One of his most famous early poems called Le Monocle de Mon Oncle. He loved French style puns on words, dandyism and so forth. The Monocle of My Uncle. Here's the first section. Notice the religious imagery.

“Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,
O scepter of the sun, crown of the moon,
There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,
Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.”
And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.
Or was it that I mocked myself alone?
I wish that I might be a thinking stone.
The sea of spuming thought foists up again
The radiant bubble that she was. And then
A deep up-pouring from some saltier well
Within me, bursts its watery syllable.

What he has seen is that he has seen a human being who was vibrant and vivacious for him covered with elements that had come up and welled up from within herself. I would think it was his wife. I would think it is an insightful man who in marrying his wife, in being the kind of an insightful man that he was - handsome, Godlike in many respects - drew out from her these deep archetypal elements that covered her and she was never in her lifetime able to have them settle and precipitate. And Stevens, never leaving her, learned from that experience that one must raise consciousness differentiably above and beyond the experience of this world but that only the experience of this world is the proper base. Nature is the only real base for this. And that what one wants is not happiness but reality. For him the road to reality was to understand that the imagination does not deceive. That what we think we see we do in fact see. It is not only that we need to see clearly what is there, we need to see clearly what is not there, which is imaginative. And that the imagination then becomes the problematic for man. He can return to nature but he cannot return to his imagination because it's always shifting always changing. In one of his famous poems, The Comedian as the Cetter C, it begins:

Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of pears, principium
And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig
Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,
Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea
Created, in his day, a touch of doubt.
An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,
Berries of villages, a barber's eye,
An eye of land, of simple salad-beds,
Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung
On porpoises, instead of apricots,
And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts
Dibbled in waves that were mustachios,
Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.
…
How many poems he denied himself
In his observant progress, lesser things
Than the relentless contact he desired;
How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds
He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts,
Like jades affecting the sequestered bride;
And what descants, he sent to banishment!
Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave
The liaison, the blissful liaison,
Between himself and his environment,
Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight,
For him, and not for him alone. It seemed
Elusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse,
Wrong as a divagation to Peking,
To him that postulated as his theme
The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight,
A passionately niggling nightingale.
Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not,
A minor meeting, facile, delicate.

Thus he conceived his voyaging to be
An up and down between two elements,
A fluctuating between sun and moon,
A sally into gold and crimson forms,
As on this voyage, out of goblinry,
And then retirement like a turning back
And sinking down to the indulgences
That in the moonlight have their habitude.

All through his life, Stevens would be completely caught up in how man may free himself to the real by a judicious use of imagination through language - poetry. He became very serious about poetry and while he was working in the insurance company, after he had been there six or seven years, he finally sent a few poems into a magazine edited by Harriet Monroe called Poetry, and some of them were accepted and published. And Stevens began to then go through a routine which became a lifelong habit with him. They never owned a car - when they had to go somewhere they rented one - but he commuted into his office in Hartford by walking. And on the walk he would compose the poem for the day and when he got to the office he would dictate to his secretary. First order of business. Take the poem of the day. And when he would go home at night he would take that poem with him. And after having left the space of a day's work a day's ascetic practice in the fields not thinking about it but giving oneself up to life to the commitment that one must also work as well as study. Then when he would arrive home the poem, circulating again in his mind, and after supper his wife sitting down to read the house quiet Stevens would begin working through the language. How can the habitual language be broken, fractured so that it will not fit into habitual forms ever again? How can this poem be a reshaped syntax that delivers not the form of what is alone but the form of the real?

Stevens in his seeking for some way to understand what he was after wrote a short work in prose called The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words. And it begins with a quotation from the Phaedrus by Plato, one of the great dialogues by Plato. The Phaedrus of course concerns itself with the origins of language. In the Phaedrus, it takes place in remembrance that in ancient Egypt that the sage Thoth had brought to Pharaoh the invention of writing and had said this will be in help to men. They will now be able to write down what they know and the Pharaoh and his wise kingship said this is a horrible thing. For now that we write wisdom down it will be stored away and everyone will think that someone knows and no one will take the trouble to learn it by their livingness, for man is only capable of discerning the real when he has lived his knowingness. If it is something only posited on a shelf which he consults only with his mind. He receives only a duplicity which he himself has set up. He receives only a tautological blank and life cannot deliver to him the real. But the figure that Stevens brings out is one of the myths in the Phaedrus about the chariot. And in the myth of the chariot it reads,

“Let our figure be of a composite nature - a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteer of the gods are all of them noble, and of noble breed, while ours are mixed, and we have a charioteer who drives them in a pair, and [every] one is noble and of noble origin, and the other is ignoble one of ignoble origin; and… there is a great deal of trouble managing them. I will endeavor to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal creature. The soul or animate being has the care of the inanimate, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing, - when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and is the ruler of the universe, while the imperfect soul loses her feathers, and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground.”

And Stevens then writes that something here is very strange. He writes, “We recognize at once, in this figure, Plato's pure poetry, and at the same time we recognize what Coleridge called Plato's dear, gorgeous nonsense. The truth is that we have scarcely read the passage before we have identified ourselves with that charioteer, have, in fact, taken his place and, driving his winged horses, are traversing the whole heaven. Then suddenly we remember, it may be, that the soul no longer exists and we droop in our flight and at last settle on the solid ground. The figure becomes antiquated and rustic.”

“What really happens in this brief experience? Why does this figure, potent for so long, become merely the emblem of a mythology, the rustic memorial of a belief in the soul and in a distinction between good and evil? The answer to these questions is, I think, a simple one.”

And then he goes on to say, “we have a difficulty about unreal things, since the imagination accepts them, and since the poetry of the passage” - the myth in the Phaedrus - “is, for us, wholly the poetry of the unreal, so it is not an emotional difficulty. Something else than the imagination is moved by the statement that the horses of the gods are all of them noble, and of noble breed or origin.” He says, what happens to us is that, “We do not feel free.” We have an existential moment in reflection where we are no longer free to believe this, to flow with the imagination. And, “In trying to find out what it is that stands between Plato's figure and ourselves, we have to accept the idea that, however legendary it appears to be, it has had its vicissitudes. The history of a figure of speech or the history of an idea, such [that] the idea of nobility, cannot be very different from the actual history of something else.” The question is, “The specific question is partly as to the nature of the change and partly as to the cause of it. In nature the change is as follows. The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.”

It's difficult, I know, to come in off the streets of LA and come into this, this kind of thing. He's talking about the difference between joy and euphoria. Joy builds; euphoria is what it is and declines and leaves the negative, finally. The imagination is a life process, it's a life quality. And when it contacts the unreal it seems momentarily that this is so substantial. And then there's a decline that immediately sets in. And in order to keep the vitality, the imagination then keeps moving from unreal to unreal to unreal - keeps seeking the habitual bursts of affinity. But as long as the imagination does not contact the real there is no joy, there is no building, there is no sustaining it, so that man the longer he lives the more progressively he becomes bored by the world that he inhabits and seeks to poke it to make it behave to make it be interesting to do things to go places to make plans. All of this to churn up and stir up the world so that it will be freshened so that the euphoria will keep on going and nothing like this works. This is in fact the dead end. And Stephens says,

“As to the cause of the change, it is the loss of the figure's vitality. The reason why this particular figure has lost its vitality is that, in it, the imagination adheres to what is unreal. What happened, as we were traversing the whole heaven, is that the imagination lost its power to sustain us. [for] It has the strength of reality or none at all.”

Our sense of self, which needs to be developed, which needs to be unfolded, which needs to be cultivated can only be developed, can only be brought out in terms of reality. Other than that we're spinning our wheels all the time. Nothing happens. We just become clever at making surrogates. Nothing happens. So that the function of a poet, of an artist, is to bring us into contact with the real. Through changing language from its unreality, from its habitual locking of things into euphoric identifications into new forms that disclose rather than connotatively point. And it's the disclosure process that stimulates the imagination that creates the sense of reality. And it's only when human beings are able to disclose to themselves their lives, others, even themselves, that man is capable of attaining to his true nature. He writes,

“The enormous influence of education in giving everyone a little learning, and in giving large groups considerably more: something of history, something of philosophy, something of literature, [something] the expansion of the middle class with its common preference for realistic satisfactions, the penetration of the masses of people by the ideas of liberal thinkers, even when that penetration is indirect, as by the reporting of the reasons why people oppose the ideas that they oppose, - these are now normal aspects of everyday life. The way we live and the way we work alike cast us out on reality. If fifty private houses were to be built in New York this year, it would be a phenomenon. We no longer live in homes but in housing projects and this is so whether the project is literally a project or a club, a dormitory, a camp or an apartment in River House. It is not only that there are more of us and that we are actually close together. We are close together in every way. We [could] lie in bed and listen to a broadcast from Cairo, and so on. There is no distance. We are intimate with people we have never seen and, unhappily, they are intimate with us.”

If we are aware, “‘the widespread increase in the aptitude of the average mind for self-dissolving introspection, the generally heightened awareness of the goings-on of our own mind, merely as goings-on.’ There is nothing to the generally heightened awareness of the goings-on of other people's minds, merely as goings-on. The way we work is a good deal more difficult for the imagination than the highly civilized revolution that is occurring in respect to work indicates. It is, in the main, a revolution for more pay. We have been assured, by every visitor, that the American businessman is absorbed in his business and there is nothing to be gained by disputing it.” And he goes on, saying that in the United States, in America in fact, the perfect unreal paradise has been made and it’s just the first vanguard of what will cover the earth. He wrote this fifty years ago. That what had started out as an imaginative dream in the time of Franklin and Jefferson had devolved by this time to an unreal nightmare. And that in fact there was almost no way that anyone could bring themselves back. This is the difficulty.

Stevens was convinced that the high privilege and high honor of the American poet in the 20th century was to deliver a way out from this false paradise, from this euphoric junkyard with its constant amplification of deception; that there must be some way for the individual to slip out of the net that they had made. Not even that it was made before they were born and they were just born into it but, that they in their own selves keep it ongoing. That the way to break it - you can't go back in history and tell people who are long gone not to do this, you can't go into the future and tell people not to continue this, you can't in the present tell others that you're doing this. You're doing this. The only way out is for the individual human being to find some way to slip out of the net. And the net is based upon language because the sense of language is the expressive vehicle by which the mind has its effectiveness. So that poetry then has a spiritual purpose to reveal the divine; that there is no other purpose for it. It is not to be cute, it's not to be pretty, not to be clever. It is not to be learned or unlearned but is a spiritual process. And that in fact, one of his short poems called Anecdote of the Jar.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round and upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The simple placement of an artistic presence constellates the precipitation of the real. And that if this is left to be, all of the wilderness organizes itself around the one real object. Because the one real object only can occur in its reality when there is a real person whose imagination is affined to its nature. And the relationship between an imagination that is able to conceive of the exact nature discovers in that relationship the real So that the artist is a savior of civilization; is important beyond any other function, and that the most important thing is not to develop a politics but to develop an aesthetic. An aesthetic which allows for the cultivation of the sense to where the poem becomes a vehicle of discovery that one's imagination is not profane but is a part of the divine process of making the real with the natural. This is an extraordinary development.

One of his famous early poems is called, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Just a few stanzas. They're very short. They're almost like haiku. The first one,

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of a blackbird.
[Two]
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

[Number three]
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

[And Four]
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

One begins to sense that with Stevens the American intelligence had risen to a very high level and one of the qualities which Stevens noted without saying a word was that everyone thought that he was a little odd. What are you writing? These are weird poems. They must be artsy craftsy poems. They must be a part of some new surrealistic movement. They must be Cubist poems. They must be this, that, and the other. Everything except what they were. And Stevens, being somewhat of the sage as you can tell, realizes it doesn't do any good to say to people I know what I'm doing because the sage only does what he does. He doesn't write commentary. He doesn't footnote it. He doesn't explain it. He does what he does and moves on in his life.

Stevens collected all of his poems and in 1923 brought them out in Harmonium and it fell flat. Almost nobody cared for it. It just seemed to be one more production out of a whole raft of people. And Stevens was codified as one of forty or fifty American poets who were playing. But the strange occurrence of the work of a sage is that it doesn't move. It's there not only day in and day out but year in and year out. And after about a decade there started to be people who matured to the point to where they started to read Stevens and get a sympathy to get a kind of a resonance. And by the early 30s Stevens was ready in fact to bring out a second volume of poems. He had not published anything for more than five years. He had just done his work as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Insurance Company. He hadn't published anywhere. Hadn't read anywhere. No one talked to him. No one wrote articles on him. The second volume of poems was even more extraordinary. Stevens in fact said of the first volume it was pure poetry and that the second volume was a little less strict. Here's an example of the kind of poem that came in the second volume. It's a poem called, The Idea of Order at Key West. Key West is in Florida, right at the end, that's the last point in the United States before you slip off into the Caribbean.

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Very high level Dharma - let's take a break.

Somebody once caught Stevens in a situation, and Stevens gave out exactly what he was doing. He said to live in the world of creation, to get into it and stay in it, to frequent it and haunt it, to think intensely and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation, this is the only thing. This is the only thing. The singularity of the only. He meant, was serious about it, the marshaling of nature and imagination to experiences of disclosure of the real is the only thing. And yet many people thought Stevens was fooling around. A dandy, somebody who liked elegant weird words, wild phrasings just fooling around and very high level an aesthete, a dilettante. But not so, not so at all.

Stevens in his work occasionally wrote prose. And he wrote a short piece called, The Whole Man: Perspectives, Horizons - The Whole Man. And in it he gives us the most cogent statement of aesthetics of our time. He wrote, “The principle of poetry is not confined to its form however definitively it may be contained therein. The principle of music would be an addition to humanity if it were not humanity itself, in other than human form, and while this hyperbole is certain to be repulsive to a good many people, still it may stand. This is the life of the arts which the all-round man thinks of in relation to life itself.”

“You may say that I am going beyond the intention of this evening's general subject, that I am changing the man with more interests than one into a figure slightly fabulous and also that I am changing the specialist, who is, after all, a creature of necessity, into an illiberal bigot; and that the figures with whom we are really concerned are the educated, intelligent, widely experienced man on the one hand, and the educated, intelligent, less widely experienced man on the other. The trouble is that a man's scope may be independent of his education, intelligence, and experience. Furthermore, one may at least express uncertainty about this scope always having a relation to his effect on society. Notwithstanding this, I prefer my slightly fabulous creature of thought and my technician. As to the latter, it may be said that the ever-increasing mass of people could not live together in the world without the technician and that the elevating of the level of life for people in general is, in all except its concept, a technical problem. The all-round man was in his heyday, in this country, a hundred and fifty or even two hundred years ago. Looking back at them, many of our original political philosophers seem to have been just such all-round men: Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Madison. There were no technicians, or few. A city the size of New York today could not exist without technicians. We live here today by the aid of types living a century or more apart. What a many sided man Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia seems to us to have been. In what a leisurely, spacious city he lived. Did Dr. Rush have much choice about it? Could Philadelphia have been anything but what it was? Could Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Madison have lived different lives?”

He's saying that there's something here. There's something that the human struggle has brought about and that there's something imaginative here that we are not understanding. That no one has settled into the actual situation with comprehension. That we're taking for models of comprehension that registered resonantly, quite accurately, different situations, different times, other peoples. That nobody has really registered now; this situation. He writes,

“It is possible to conceive of a neo-Platonic republic in which technicians would be political and moral neuters. In such a republic, one class would be the class of all-round men: the general thinkers, the over-all thinkers, men capable of different sights, the sturdy fathers of that very republic and the authors of its political and moral declarations. Since most of us are technicians on at least one side or, say, to some extent, those in whom we repose the profoundest confidence would actually be few, perhaps a group composed of men with minds like the rapacious and benign mind of Professor [Alfred North] Whitehead. To be ruled by thought, in reality to govern ourselves by the truth or to be able to feel that we were being governed by the truth, would be a great satisfaction, as things go. The great modern faith, the key to an understanding of our times, is faith in the truth and particularly in the idea that the truth is attainable, and that a free civilization based on the truth, in general and in detail, is no less attainable.”

Stevens is addressing a very poignant issue that almost no one believes anymore. That this is possible. That there is a way of ascertaining the real, and that the real may manifest itself in a condition of life for all. And he says, this is a problem which is the problem of our time. That the poet more than any other figure is the individual who is able to bring this into being.

Stevens, by the Second World War, was one of the great poetic figures. His reputation during the 30s blossomed and bloomed and the Second World War found Stevens extremely agitated about the future of man. Complimenting what I read to you from his essay is a poem that he wrote about this time called Asides on the Oboe. It runs something like this. This is one of the most delicate and introspectively devolving poems in the English language.

The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

That obsolete fiction of the wide river in
An empty land; the gods that Boucher killed;
And the metal heroes that time granulates -
The philosophers' man alone still walks in dew,
Still by the sea-side mutters milky lines
Concerning an immaculate imagery.
If you say on the hautboy man is not enough,
Can never stand as a god, is ever wrong
In the end, however naked, tall, there is still
The impossible possible philosophers' man,
The man who has had the time to think enough,
The central man, the human globe, responsive
As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,
Who in a million diamonds sums us up.

He is the transparence of the place in which
He is and in his poems we find peace.
He sets this peddler's pie and cries in summer,
The glass man, cold and numbered, dewily cries,
"Thou art not August unless I make thee so."
Clandestine steps upon imagined stairs
Climb through the night, because his cuckoos call.

One year, death and war prevented the jasmine scent
And the jasmine islands were bloody martyrdoms.
How was it then with the central man? Did we
Find peace? We found the sum of men. We found,
If we found the central evil, the central good.
We buried the fallen without jasmine crowns.
There was nothing he did not suffer, no; nor we.

It was not as if the jasmine ever returned.
But we and the diamond globe at last were one.
We had always been partly one. It was as we came
To see him, that we were wholly one, as we heard
Him chanting for those buried in their blood,
In the jasmine haunted forests, that we knew
The glass man, without external reference.

You can see the power of Stephens’ work just growing decade by decade. The comprehensiveness of his vision. And in Stephens’ work he found time to bring out what he felt was the basic ultimate aesthetic theory of poetry that needed to be delivered. And in 1941 at Princeton he delivered this statement:

“The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cezanne to say: ‘I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall’ or ‘Planes in color… The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.’ … It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: ‘But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space – which he calls the mind or heart of creation – determines every function.’ Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less.”

“This reality is, also, the momentous world of poetry. Its instantaneities are the familiar intelligence of poets, although it has been the intelligence of another ambiance. Simone Weil… has a chapter on what she calls decreation. She says that decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated. But that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness. Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers. The greatest truth that we could hope to discover, in whatever field we discovered it, is that man's [final] truth is the final resolution of everything.”

You can see from Stephens’ poetry and prose what a very high level of achievement by mid 20th century, American civilization had come to. You can see that it was so rapierly thin in its penetration that it slipped in between the clumsy mentality of the mundane world. That only upon having the experience of being repeatedly stabbed with subtlety does one realize that one is not injured by this but is made open permeated. That slow constant exposure to this kind of language makes permeable that mind, that sensitivity, which has blocked the very discovery mode.

Stevens, in a poem called, Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight, late in his life:

Say that it is a crude effect, black reds,
Pink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are
To be anything else in the sunlight of the room,

Too much as they are to be changed by metaphor,
Too actual, things that in being real
Make any imaginings of them lesser things.

And yet this effect is a consequence of the way
We feel and, therefore, is not real, except
In our sense of it, our sense of the fertileest red,

Of yellow as first color and of white,
In which the sense lies still, as a man lies,
Enormous, in a completing of his truth.

Our sense of these things changes and they change,
Not as in metaphor, but in our sense
Of them. So sense exceeds all metaphor.

It exceeds the heavy changes of the light.
[and] It is like a flow of meanings with no speech
And of as many meanings as of men.

We are two that use these roses as we are,
In seeing them. This is what makes them seem
So far beyond the rhetorician's touch.

We have in this development Stevens, who by the early 1950s began to be almost one of the paradigms of modern poetry. He was being taught, along with Eliot and Pound, as one of the great masters of modern poetry. But what was peculiar was that Stevens’ reputation was only in the United States. That there was no European reputation of Stevens at all. That American lecturers would go to England for instance, and talk about Stevens and read his poetry and the English couldn't hear it. The rest of the continent couldn't hear it. Stevens began to receive awards. He was given the honorary doctorates, the Bollingen Prize for poetry, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and died in 1955. His wife outlived him seven years.

The difficulty with American civilization is that it has simply stepped outside of the history of the European mind. It has stepped completely by now outside of the registered affinities from which it supposedly sprang because the American civilization is not an extension of Europe. It was for a while seemingly a parallel, but as we have seen that as early as the life of Benjamin Franklin, a different character had stepped into world history. Someone who was not the tradition, but who was a human being unfolding himself dramatically and continuously and just using whatever traditions were there for him to have. And as time went on, increasingly, the United States tradition was infused with the entire culture of the world. The Native American Indians, the Africans, all of the various European countries, all of the Asian countries, South American countries, and its own élan. And what is peculiar now is that of all the major civilizations of world history American civilization alone is totally misrepresented, totally untaught in its spiritual reality. And our year-long course here has been only the first time that anyone has ever talked about it in its real unfolding pristine openness. If you can imagine such a thing. How can that be? Because one must have walked a mile in those moccasins in order to have understood that life. That's the only way. There is no way from the outside that you can identify it because it's not a thing. It's not an object. It's not a process which is amenable to the mind's assessment. It can be participated in, and when participated in, it discloses through its discovery the magical consciousness, which it is.

Stevens, at the very end of his life, the very last poem in his Collected Poems, has a poem called, Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself. It reads like this,

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow…
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier maché…
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry – it was
A chorister whose C preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

There is no objective way to hear, there is no metaphorical way to hear, that poem. There is only one entrance into that poem, and to this poet, into E. E. Cummings. And that is to focus the existential experience of oneself massively imploded into a singularity called the person. And only in the shape of a person, mobile beyond their mind, beyond their memory - just being there can create whatever life one lives. This is freedom. The difficulty that we have seen is that the American Dream has in fact come true. There is a new man on the face of the earth. There is a new civilization but is completely invisible because its manifestations are not the familiar badges of identification and equivocation that were there in the past. Why is there no particular eccentricity to the United States? Because its eccentricity is not to have any at all. And so people fall back on surrogates, polyglot combinations. All of that is false.

With Cummings and with Stevens American civilization comes to a grand maturity. A contemporary of theirs who also understood this quality, who also was there in this new reality was William Faulkner. And Faulkner, a contemporary of theirs, tried his hand at poetry and found that in his discovery mode it had to stretch the line out until it was a single line, that that was the only way that he could say what he had to say was in a single line. And so Faulkner becomes a great universal poet who does not write in quatrains or in lines but attempts to write the long poem over and over again in a single line. And we'll see next week the incredible magic of Faulkner who belongs with Cummings and Stevens at the very pinnacle of this new reality. It's not the metaphysicians who deliver this but the artists. They are always the saviors of civilization.

I hope some of you can make it next week. Thank you very much.