Literary critics don’t agree on much about Wallace Stevens, but the poet’s latest biography proves at least this much: Stevens’ spirit animal was an elephant.
The image, crafted by critic Randall Jerrell, is appropriate for Stevens. The big, blond, bumbling poet and businessman’s quiet life and obscure poetry have remained enigmatic even as his reputation continues to grow. Readers don’t know what to make of an insurance salesman who composed some of the 20th century’s most challenging poetry in his head on the way to the office.
With meticulous research and perceptive interpretation of Stevens’ poetry, biographer Paul Mariani attempts to enter the mind of this evasive poet in “The Whole Harmonium,” published April 5.
Mariani fails gloriously. But in the end, his shortcomings show that biographers and poets can only catch a glimpse of that cagiest of animals: the true work of art. Ultimately, this gap between reality and poetry emerges as the driving theme of Stevens’ work.
Mariani’s reputation as a poet and biographer of poets qualifies him to take on one of the literary giants of the 20th century. The Boston College English professor has written the lives of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, and Stevens’ friend and rival William Carlos Williams, as well as seven poetry collections of his own.
Mariani’s style of biography is more poetic than didactic, taking on his subject’s voice and personality through his art and letters. Thus, the reader’s first encounter with Stevens, a poet known for his obsession with the imagination, is a reflective one: “The Whole Harmonium” opens with Stevens’ return to his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania.
By all appearances, the young professional has traveled an easy path to success. Raised in a Pennsylvania Protestant household and educated at Harvard in the early 1900s, his parents have successfully discouraged him from his foolish dream of writing poetry for a living. By 1913, he has acquired a loyal wife, a mild drinking problem, and a steady job at an insurance company. Life is going according to plan.
But this prosaic reality fails to measure up to the dream inside the poet’s mind. Stevens is dissatisfied, and his poetry shows it. Early in his career, Stevens created his own universe out of colorful images and obscure language in poems like “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “The Comedian as the Letter C,” and “Le Monocle de Mon Uncle,” struggling to reconcile his lackluster daily life with his fertile imagination.
Mariani gains a window into this hidden world by relying heavily on Stevens’ own words. In fact, Mariani’s fondness for partial quotes makes some passages look like he took a pair of scissors to Stevens’ journal and glued together “A Whole Harmonium” using quotations alone. Though this sometimes bogs down the narrative, Mariani’s careful citations and explications of Stevens’ poetry are invaluable in drawing connections between Stevens’ life and art.
And though Mariani may indulge himself in rhetorical flourishes like “death by bullet or bayonet or bombardment,” readers who appreciate Stevens’ grandiose language can allow the biographer-poet the occasional Stevens-inspired embellishment.
If Mariani’s commentary revitalizes Stevens’ poetry, the poet himself comes to life in his (sometimes fiery) friendships with literary figures, including William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Marcel Duchamp, Henry Church, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost.
It is perhaps not surprising that the cold, brash, often tactless businessman shone primarily through the written word, but friends and critics alike found the intensity of his defenses of poetry remarkable. Stevens seemed to be writing a passionate apologia for poetry through his correspondence, waging a war for art amid — and arising from — the mundane experiences of life.
For editor Walter Arensberg, Stevens was “that rogue elephant in porcelain,” the practical businessman who transformed and immortalized himself through his words.
Yet despite the transformation that both Stevens and Mariani seek in poetry and biography, the man behind the profound poetry remains obscure, as even Stevens’ closest friends attested.
“Wallace Stevens is beyond fathoming,” his friend and fellow poet Marianne Moore said. “As if he had a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose.”
Yet in response to such complaints about his poetry, Stevens provided a simple answer: read more closely.
In “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” the well-known poem composed on his walks to work, Stevens sketches the relationship between life and poetry:
“In the end, in the whole psychology, the self,
The town, the weather, in a casual litter,
Together, said words of the world are the life of the world.”
For Stevens, trying to understand the poet behind the work is beside the point. This apologist of the imagination created his own world out of his words, describing his view of life in works like “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” and “Harmonium,” his first and most popular poetry collection.
“New Haven” is both love song and elegy, reconciling Stevens with a world that both frustrated and inspired him. Much of his later work, for all its philosophic flourishes, is grounded in a nostalgic love for his home in Hartford, Connecticut, his job, and his family before his death in 1955.
Until the end, the ineffable always loomed large for Stevens. “The Whole Harmonium” is the story of a man with a great spirit and a greater imagination who lived in the shadow of the inexpressible.
If Mariani was attempting to capture the spirit of Stevens for his readers, “The Whole Harmonium” falls short. But if this incompleteness points the reader to Stevens’ poetry, the glimpse Mariani gives his readers will be enough.