HIS WAY OF SAYING

THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA'S EDITION OF THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WALLACE STEVENS

Author: By William H. Pritchard

Date: SUNDAY, December 28, 1997

Page: L1

Section: Books

Hitherto Stevens's writings were scattered here and there: The Library volume presents, in its 1,000 pages, first the ``Collected Poems'' of 1954, with a few ones Stevens omitted from that volume restored to their original places. There follow 29 ``Late Poems'' previously available in ``Opus Posthumous,'' published after Stevens's death, then 100 pages of previously uncollected poems, beginning with his earliest, most conventional efforts (written while he was a special student at Harvard) and concluding with the lovely ``As You Leave the Room.'' There are also three short plays; ``The Necessary Angel,'' his essays ``on reality and the imagination''; and a large swatch of uncollected prose, ranging from editorials in the Harvard Advocate about how or whether Harvard Yard should be fenced, to various short speeches in response to awards he received late in life. A brief final section consists of entries from the notebooks, journals, and letters. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (Stevens's biographer) have edited the volume with bibliographical expertise; as with other volumes in the Library, the notes are not extensive, but notes to Stevens's poems seldom help much anyway.

Perhaps a reviewer like me, who read the volume from one end to the other (not always wth equal attentiveness), should be mistrusted if he agrees with Frost and finds plenty of bric-a-brac not only in Stevens's poems but in the plays and prose reflections as well. The plays -- ``Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise,'' ``Carlos among the Candles,'' and ``Bowl, Cat and Broomstick'' -- declare by their very titles that nothing very serious is going on in them. Nothing all that humorous, either: At the beginning of ``Three Travelers,'' whose dramatis persona are ``three Chinese, two Negroes and a girl,'' a character identified as ``Second Chinese'' says ``All you need, / To find poetry / Is to look for it with a lantern.'' The stage direction that follows is ``The Chinese laugh,'' though I found it easy not to. As for the essays from ``The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,'' they have their eloquent moments, especially in the title essay when Stevens insists, by way of concluding, that poetry, ``the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.'' There is a deft discussion of Marianne Moore's poem ``He Digesteth Harde Yron,'' which shows Stevens could be a good practical critic when he put his mind to it.

But all too often, as in the title of one of his poems, the pure good of theory animates these and the other ``philosophical'' essays from the uncollected prose. I put the word in quotation marks, since I presume Stevens's procedures would drive most professional philosophers to annoyance, even rage. His method typically, as in ``A Collect of Philosophy,'' an essay about poetry and philosophy, is to assemble quotations from philosophers and theorists -- Leibniz, Paul Weiss, Whitehead, Jean Wahl, Jean Paulhan -- and hope that somehow by the end of the essay they will fall together into a coherence. That didn't happen for me; indeed, many of the essays I understand very imperfectly -- a failure attributable to their woolliness rather than profundity. Consider these sentences: ``Another thing not intended is a poetic way of writing. If thinking in a poetic way is not the same thing as writing in a poetic way, so writing in a poetic way is not the same thing as having ideas that are inherently poetic conceptions. This is an accurate statement in the sense in which I mean it.'' (The last sentence is particularly quixotic.) Generally, Stevens reiterates his desire, in poetry, for ``freshness and strangeness,'' announces, in 1946, that ``This is a time for the highest poetry'' (but why then?), or (in ``A Note on Poetry'') addresses himself to the relation of freedom to form: ``The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used. A free form does not assure freedom. As a form, it is just one more form. So that it comes to this, I suppose, that I believe in freedom regardless of form.'' I suppose, too, but want to ask -- as so often with these essays -- what exactly is the point? Where have you gotten us by these murky lucubrations? Frost's uncollected prose, in the Library volume, is full of fertile and humorous statements and questions about the writing of poetry; Stevens, by contrast, seems placed on a pedestal, going on and on, gravely, endlessly. When he steps down from the pedestal, he can be affectionately, slyly humorous, as in the portrait of ``John Crowe Ransom: Tennessean'': ``They say that there are more Ransoms in Tennessee than Tates in Kentucky. However that may be, the more there are of you, the more you possess and the more you are possessed.''

But of course it is the poems that matter. Two earlier critics of them, Yvor Winters and Randall Jarrell, much admired the brilliance of Stevens's first book, ``Harmonium,'' but for different reasons felt that something had gone wrong in his later work. (Later, after Jarrell had read ``Collected Poems,'' with its great concluding section, ``The Rock,'' he rightly judged Stevens to have ended in triumph.) Over the last few decades, and especially because of the powerful efforts of Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom on his behalf, Stevens's reputation soared and shows no signs of declining. The long poems especially -- ``Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,'' ``Esthetique du Mal,'' ``The Auroras of Autumn,'' even the to me unreadable ``An Ordinary Evening in New Haven'' -- have been canonized, as if it weren't a dubious and dangerous venture for a poet to essay, repeatedly, the long form. Reading through, yet once more, the poetic oeuvre, my response is thoroughly mixed. Is it my obtuseness or laziness that continues to find a large part of the poems after ``Harmonium'' impenetrable, elusive to the point of incomprehension, their gorgeous structures of sound not put to the service of illuminating ``subjects'' -- human beings -- nor often marked by vital, complex ideas about life, death, and the rest of it?

In one of the letters included here, Stevens wrote to Alice Corbin Henderson, ``My poems seem so simple and natural to me that I am never able to understand how they may seem otherwise to anyone else. . . . Whatever can be expressed can be expressed clearly.'' Assuming this is not a piece of sublime disingenuousness, we may ask whether he was kidding himself. Indeed his own willingness, in letters to correspondents, to ``explain'' particular poems, what this or that line meant -- explanations that bear seemingly little relationship to the lines and poems themselves -- is of a piece with his notions about how simple and clear his poems were. Repeated readings of Stevens's poems don't necessarily lead to clarification of them -- as, in my opinion, they do with those of Yeats, Eliot, Frost. The poems and lines that baffled me in 1954, when I was given a copy of the ``Collected Poems'' for Christmas, are still baffling. Furthermore there is the fact, not enough commented on, that Stevens's poems seldom rhyme and that increasingly he settled into the comfortable, mechanical mold of unrhymed pentameter tercets. Nor did he attempt complicated, challenging stanza forms. How much does the great outpouring of poems from him in the 1940s and '50s have to do with the facility and fluidity coincident with not having to rhyme or bother much about stanza? It's not exactly (in Frost's quip about free verse) playing tennis with the net down, but it may have encouraged garrulity and avuncularity in Stevens.

These reservations -- which would be qualified though not erased if I listed 30 or 40 of Stevens's poems that are superb, and irreplaceable -- may be understood (and rejected) as emanating from a reader who thinks Frost's poetry, as well as his prose reflections, to be the most satisfying and life-changing of any produced by an American poet of this century. I note that neither Vendler nor Bloom -- nor Kermode, who wrote an important early book on Stevens -- has written at any length about Frost. It is at least possible that, although of course there is ``room'' for both geniuses, one's heart and head can't be fully committed, equally, to both. ``The fact remains that we are always fundamentally interested in what a writer has to say. When we are sure of that, we pay attention to the way in which he says it,'' Stevens once wrote to William Carlos Williams. Yet there is no poet more than Stevens for whom ``the way in which he says it'' remains, first and last, our prime object of attention. Readers of his work as it is displayed in this fine volume, may measure the bric-a-brac it contains, by way of judging how much, and how many of, the poems help us to live our lives.