Thank you for your labor on this! I especially like the daring of the close which hints that an indictment of Steven’s might be “got up.” Really it’s long overdue because Stevens is perennially the one true American “genius” with an appeal cited over and over and yet not one in a thousand can read him and only a handful is ever moved by anything he writes as much as by his “genius.” He is a kind of church. He is cited. How absolutely well-observed are your descriptions of his brilliance, subtle textures of his lines—these are absolutely true—and he makes us almost believe that art is about that feeling of not feeling anything nearly as strongly as our conviction of his genius. Forgive me. Putting forth Stevens has a fortress-like quality. He withstands all assaults like a classic chess opening, and within the American “high modern” tradition, which is not yet done doing its damage to the art in general, he is rightfully unchallenged. But can you not see how anemic and bloodless is his vision? More grown men writing about little girls? I have not read much about it, but I greatly admire his acceptance of his life as an insurance man—it always seemed to add to his stature as an aesthete. I suppose it is not his place in the canon I want to challenge—that is certain—but the way his art is a kind of currency of exchange in the poetry world. The hushed silence that accompanies the close of his poems. Did no one write about his weaknesses? Did Trilling write about Stevens? Is there a critic who is critical in a useful way?
If Stevens is a church then Harold Bloom is his pope. And this, of course, is a disaster - much for the reasons you described. Bloom was, in my view, a terrible critic. He spent the major part of his career writing about Stevens and never said an interesting word about him. Vendler was better but I always came away from her books with a feeling that the poems had been sort of pasteurised. But back to Bloom, not only did he have nothing to say about Stevens, he would not be gainsaid by anyone. His big book on Stevens, Poems of our Climate, is every bit as bad at the title suggests, and in written in Bloom’s own private language. By the end Bloom barely bothered, he just made these shocking pronouncements of value. Kermode is better but he really uses Stevens more than analyses and evaluates him - e.g. in The Sense of an Ending, which is in its own way a very interesting book, but fails to add much of value about Stevens’ poetry. I mentioned Blake - if anything the perfect critic for Stevens would have been someone like Northrop Frye, and the book we need is a study of Stevens as good as Fateful Symmetry. Stevens is good enough - his body of work is substantial and connected enough - to sustain that sort of analysis. Which is not to say he’s necessarily as great a poet as Blake! But he does have his moments!
Completely agree with you about Bloom. "I had memorized the poetry of Hart Crane in its entirety by the age of five." You grew up in the Bronx--or some such place--get outside and play stickball, Harry. Trust me, you'll be a better literary critic for having done so. I think of what Marianne Moore said about Crane's poetry: "It reeks of brains." It's unpleasant to encounter someone who lacks humility. It's equally unpleasant to encounter someone who lacks any sense of levity. With Mr. Bloom, we have that delightful specimen: A man lacking in humor and humility. Indeed, his specialty is "shocking pronouncements of value." You nailed it. As far as Stevens is concerned, I think his real impact was not so much in the development of poetry, as in the development of flippancy (the two fields overlap). For poets after him, no degree of silliness is--well, too silly. Thank you, Wallace!
Yes, you’re right about Stevens being good enough to sustain that kind of analysis. I have been meaning to reread Fearful Symmetry. Frye had the right stuff. What you seem to be saying is that my exasperation with Stevens has a lot to do with his critical reception and I think that’s true. Thanks again!
Nic: Many thanks for getting this poem out into the substack universe. I have for the past sixty years been an evangelist for this particular arrangement of words and in my efforts to promote it have been shamelessly hyperbolic. Hyperbole is a time tested rhetorical tactic that has always had its place in vigorous discourse, as you obviously know, claiming the poem as “possibly the greatest American lyric of the twentieth century.” You then go on to show how this urn titled “The Idea of Order at Key West” is wonderfully “wrought,” exposing an affection for the (now old) New Critics who trusted the poem, not the poet or the poet’s biography. In my efforts to confirm your high estimation, I would like to indulge in analytical behavior some of those now quaint critics would consider cringeworthy: understanding a poem by memorizing it. Of all the poems in the universe (hyperbole), the one benefiting most is Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Don’t quibble. Just memorize the damn thing. It will take time of course, and there is no quick way to memorize poems, despite what the book “Moonwalking with Einstein” says. Once in the head, the poem will be instantly available, and offer much better company than that you presently keep. Your analysis of the “figures on the urn,” thoughtful, articulate, and convincing as they are, are no substitute for your giving voice to the words, as you walk through the park, “She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice.” And then comes the killer line: “like a body, wholly body, fluttering its empty sleeves.” You will turn heads, no doubt, but one of those heads will ask to hear more, and you will say to them: “She made the sky acutest at its vanishing. She was the single artificer of the world in which she sang, and the sea, whatever self it had, became the self that was her song. For she was the maker.” Unable to constrain yourself, you will intone: “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.” Pause. Long Pause. And then the NAME: “Ramon Fernandez” It won’t occur to her (your auditor) to ask “Who the hell is Ramon Fernandez?” It doesn’t matter. She has been caught in the coils of enraptured bliss. And then on to the poem’s conclusion using words the smartest of old fogey critics Northrop Frye thought suspect because they sounded suspiciously “masculine”: “mastered” “fixing,” “arranging,” “portioned,”, terms associated with a “rage” rather than, say, a “need” for “order.” Yet a rage qualified by the term “blessed.” No wonder Ramon goes pale. (“Pale Ramon” is now an LA “noise rock” duo). “Words of the fragrant portal dimly starred and of ourselves and of our origins, in ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.” I defy you to find a better idea of what order is, and we had the trick not just to read but to hear it.
This must seem a pitiful effort at confirming the hyperbolic notion that this poem is the best of the best. But don’t trust me. Or Nic. Take the walk. Listen to the music of the sea. And the music of the “she.” And don’t get too concerned about which is best. That’s mere “rhetoric.” —-Michael Sexson
Thank you Michael, interestingly Stevens' got a lot fo grief about his choice of Ramon Fernandez - there was a francophone critic by that name who he claims not to have met but moved in similar circles. You can find an article in the NYT archives about Fernandez, though it's not clear whether he's pale or not. (I'll add a note with it for reference in my feed). As for memorizing - nothing beats it, I have most of Hopkins and a chunk of Stevens roughly memorized. Both poets stand up very well to the test of multiple repetition and recitation.
Some poems seem to commit an excess of energy trying to impress the reader. Stevens wrote a lot of them, though it’s hard not to believe he did it innocently. I’m almost sure that reticence was completely in his nature. But I would take old Ben Jonson a hundred times over. His ear was better, and he was not afraid of being seen by the reader.
My own take on this is that he was trying to impress the Muse, a harsher mistress than the reader, and more demanding. And more cruel in her judgement. His failure to do this is indeed “exemplary” in the sense that Nic uses the term. -MS
Thanks for that. It's the first piece of yours I've read, so I may be getting this wrong, but it seems from your last paragraph that the failure or "tragedy" of the poem, and by extension Wallace Stevens's entire project, is that "it does not save," doesn't "reconcile, harmonise, deliver, save, redeem." This is a modernist hope, and it makes me wonder how you think about postwar art and fiction, excepting the great Jeremiads of Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, George Steiner, and, in my field of art history, T.J. Clark. Ever read his "Farewell to an Idea"? It has an analogous lyric melancholy, and he continues to write elegiacally despite all his inimitable and entangling analyses. What about Celan, or Beckett, or Oulipo -- by which I mean, writers who do not wish for reconciliation, harmony, or redemption?
Your last line is especially interesting, and I am particularly likely to be misreading it without a larger context, but when you say "In short, the poems do not perform what they desiderate, because to do so would take us beyond language and vision, to that which no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived" — you're invoking the history of sublime encounters, meaning outside of language, the failure of words, the history that includes the "Letter of Lord Chandos." (jameselkins.substack.com/p/a-very-late-romantic-book-on-language)
Why not leave all that aside? It's leaden — meaning sweet, but poisonous. Or perhaps I've entirely misread you.
This is one of the most insightful and USEFUL pieces of criticism I've read in a while. You have taught me a way to think about Stevens that unlocks the pasture gate so that I might walk beyond. Thank you.
"The Idea of Order at Key West" is one of my favorite poems, and this is by far the best thing I've read about it. I share you disappointment with Bloom, and with Vendler as well. And any time I've tried to write about Stevens I fail completely. But I love him and reread him endlessly.
The analysis of the rhythm and rhyme in the second stanza, the noticeable change from the more -- lyrical? -- first stanza -- is really on point. And I'm intrigued by your notion of Stevens' failure -- examplary, yes, but necessary, and, surely, all our failure?
Isn't there one more piece of "making" in the poem -- the observation of the lights in the fishing boats:
"Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night."
Man-made things, turning nature's disorder into order (even though that ordering is in the viewer's eye and brain, not something actually done by the boats.)
Speaking of paraphrase, a couple of decades about I rewrote "The Idea of Order at Key West" in words of one syllable. In many ways a useless thing (and not really a paraphrase), and done, essentially, as the result of a challenge. But it did force (another) close reading. (And the result of course was an utter failure in poetic terms.)
With regard to Stevens’ failure to redeem or save us, I side with James Elkins’ post which suggests that Stevens might belong with those who seek not perfection or redemption or harmony or being saved. Elkins cites among others Samuel Beckett whose two word credo has achieved the status of a genuine “meme” these days. Those two words appear at the end of this sentence from “Worstward Ho”: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” In this context, Nic’s title seems to make more sense. And makes us understand that it is possible to think that Stevens’ poem is both the greatest of all poems and an “exemplary failure.” If we are doomed to fail, we should aim to be good at it. Being good at failing is no mean achievement. —MS
Thanks for your reading! This poem unlocks so much in Stevens. He's an anti-Platonist who wants to redeem the loss of the transcendent with art. I'm touched because he doesn't want to give in to the void, because he wants to conduct a fighting withdrawal rather than surrender. It's an old move in philosophy, from Epicurus to Kant to James. Once you make the particular humanist move from discovering meaning to *making* it, though, I think you've probably lost, despite "maker" being such a wonderful word for Stevens in the poem because of how it works with "maker" as "poet" going back to Middle English.
I think Steven acknowledges that he comes up short at the end. Mastering the night is not enough to glean meaning from the night, and the rage at the very end shows that art hasn't reached what it aspired to. (I didn't originally intend the Stevens-friendly "spiritus" pun with "aspired" but will keep it.) The "ghostlier" at the end is a hat tip to the metaphysics, or Platonism, that Stevens would like to leave behind. He wants to dispel his ghosts and be haunted, too.
I sometimes think he wavered and half believed in transcendence. "The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" contains some language that seems to cut against the Stevens of "Sunday Morning": "we collect ourselves . . . into one thing," "a single shawl," "the miraculous influence," "an order, a whole," "[a] knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous." I want to see an acceptance of something beyond matter and mind in how "high that highest candle lights the dark." That might be foolishness on my part, though, because the paramour is introduced as "Interior." Stevens usually doesn't make it easy on us.
Thank you for your perceptive comments; the rearguard/fighting withdrawal is very well put - I’d include Arnold as well in that company. I am planning to write a companion piece on Stevens’ poetics which will try to address this strange ambivalence over platonism - Stevens is full of images from Plato, both in the poems (Notes) and the prose (Nobel Rider), but he’s also doubtful about the extra-poetic reality of his platonic motifs. Of course the other poet who showed the same ambivalence was Blake.
Thank you for your labor on this! I especially like the daring of the close which hints that an indictment of Steven’s might be “got up.” Really it’s long overdue because Stevens is perennially the one true American “genius” with an appeal cited over and over and yet not one in a thousand can read him and only a handful is ever moved by anything he writes as much as by his “genius.” He is a kind of church. He is cited. How absolutely well-observed are your descriptions of his brilliance, subtle textures of his lines—these are absolutely true—and he makes us almost believe that art is about that feeling of not feeling anything nearly as strongly as our conviction of his genius. Forgive me. Putting forth Stevens has a fortress-like quality. He withstands all assaults like a classic chess opening, and within the American “high modern” tradition, which is not yet done doing its damage to the art in general, he is rightfully unchallenged. But can you not see how anemic and bloodless is his vision? More grown men writing about little girls? I have not read much about it, but I greatly admire his acceptance of his life as an insurance man—it always seemed to add to his stature as an aesthete. I suppose it is not his place in the canon I want to challenge—that is certain—but the way his art is a kind of currency of exchange in the poetry world. The hushed silence that accompanies the close of his poems. Did no one write about his weaknesses? Did Trilling write about Stevens? Is there a critic who is critical in a useful way?
If Stevens is a church then Harold Bloom is his pope. And this, of course, is a disaster - much for the reasons you described. Bloom was, in my view, a terrible critic. He spent the major part of his career writing about Stevens and never said an interesting word about him. Vendler was better but I always came away from her books with a feeling that the poems had been sort of pasteurised. But back to Bloom, not only did he have nothing to say about Stevens, he would not be gainsaid by anyone. His big book on Stevens, Poems of our Climate, is every bit as bad at the title suggests, and in written in Bloom’s own private language. By the end Bloom barely bothered, he just made these shocking pronouncements of value. Kermode is better but he really uses Stevens more than analyses and evaluates him - e.g. in The Sense of an Ending, which is in its own way a very interesting book, but fails to add much of value about Stevens’ poetry. I mentioned Blake - if anything the perfect critic for Stevens would have been someone like Northrop Frye, and the book we need is a study of Stevens as good as Fateful Symmetry. Stevens is good enough - his body of work is substantial and connected enough - to sustain that sort of analysis. Which is not to say he’s necessarily as great a poet as Blake! But he does have his moments!
Completely agree with you about Bloom. "I had memorized the poetry of Hart Crane in its entirety by the age of five." You grew up in the Bronx--or some such place--get outside and play stickball, Harry. Trust me, you'll be a better literary critic for having done so. I think of what Marianne Moore said about Crane's poetry: "It reeks of brains." It's unpleasant to encounter someone who lacks humility. It's equally unpleasant to encounter someone who lacks any sense of levity. With Mr. Bloom, we have that delightful specimen: A man lacking in humor and humility. Indeed, his specialty is "shocking pronouncements of value." You nailed it. As far as Stevens is concerned, I think his real impact was not so much in the development of poetry, as in the development of flippancy (the two fields overlap). For poets after him, no degree of silliness is--well, too silly. Thank you, Wallace!
Yes, you’re right about Stevens being good enough to sustain that kind of analysis. I have been meaning to reread Fearful Symmetry. Frye had the right stuff. What you seem to be saying is that my exasperation with Stevens has a lot to do with his critical reception and I think that’s true. Thanks again!
Nic: Many thanks for getting this poem out into the substack universe. I have for the past sixty years been an evangelist for this particular arrangement of words and in my efforts to promote it have been shamelessly hyperbolic. Hyperbole is a time tested rhetorical tactic that has always had its place in vigorous discourse, as you obviously know, claiming the poem as “possibly the greatest American lyric of the twentieth century.” You then go on to show how this urn titled “The Idea of Order at Key West” is wonderfully “wrought,” exposing an affection for the (now old) New Critics who trusted the poem, not the poet or the poet’s biography. In my efforts to confirm your high estimation, I would like to indulge in analytical behavior some of those now quaint critics would consider cringeworthy: understanding a poem by memorizing it. Of all the poems in the universe (hyperbole), the one benefiting most is Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Don’t quibble. Just memorize the damn thing. It will take time of course, and there is no quick way to memorize poems, despite what the book “Moonwalking with Einstein” says. Once in the head, the poem will be instantly available, and offer much better company than that you presently keep. Your analysis of the “figures on the urn,” thoughtful, articulate, and convincing as they are, are no substitute for your giving voice to the words, as you walk through the park, “She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice.” And then comes the killer line: “like a body, wholly body, fluttering its empty sleeves.” You will turn heads, no doubt, but one of those heads will ask to hear more, and you will say to them: “She made the sky acutest at its vanishing. She was the single artificer of the world in which she sang, and the sea, whatever self it had, became the self that was her song. For she was the maker.” Unable to constrain yourself, you will intone: “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.” Pause. Long Pause. And then the NAME: “Ramon Fernandez” It won’t occur to her (your auditor) to ask “Who the hell is Ramon Fernandez?” It doesn’t matter. She has been caught in the coils of enraptured bliss. And then on to the poem’s conclusion using words the smartest of old fogey critics Northrop Frye thought suspect because they sounded suspiciously “masculine”: “mastered” “fixing,” “arranging,” “portioned,”, terms associated with a “rage” rather than, say, a “need” for “order.” Yet a rage qualified by the term “blessed.” No wonder Ramon goes pale. (“Pale Ramon” is now an LA “noise rock” duo). “Words of the fragrant portal dimly starred and of ourselves and of our origins, in ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.” I defy you to find a better idea of what order is, and we had the trick not just to read but to hear it.
This must seem a pitiful effort at confirming the hyperbolic notion that this poem is the best of the best. But don’t trust me. Or Nic. Take the walk. Listen to the music of the sea. And the music of the “she.” And don’t get too concerned about which is best. That’s mere “rhetoric.” —-Michael Sexson
Thank you Michael, interestingly Stevens' got a lot fo grief about his choice of Ramon Fernandez - there was a francophone critic by that name who he claims not to have met but moved in similar circles. You can find an article in the NYT archives about Fernandez, though it's not clear whether he's pale or not. (I'll add a note with it for reference in my feed). As for memorizing - nothing beats it, I have most of Hopkins and a chunk of Stevens roughly memorized. Both poets stand up very well to the test of multiple repetition and recitation.
Some poems seem to commit an excess of energy trying to impress the reader. Stevens wrote a lot of them, though it’s hard not to believe he did it innocently. I’m almost sure that reticence was completely in his nature. But I would take old Ben Jonson a hundred times over. His ear was better, and he was not afraid of being seen by the reader.
I'll try to persuade you Stevens is better than that! Which is not necessarily to say better than Jonson...
My own take on this is that he was trying to impress the Muse, a harsher mistress than the reader, and more demanding. And more cruel in her judgement. His failure to do this is indeed “exemplary” in the sense that Nic uses the term. -MS
Thanks for that. It's the first piece of yours I've read, so I may be getting this wrong, but it seems from your last paragraph that the failure or "tragedy" of the poem, and by extension Wallace Stevens's entire project, is that "it does not save," doesn't "reconcile, harmonise, deliver, save, redeem." This is a modernist hope, and it makes me wonder how you think about postwar art and fiction, excepting the great Jeremiads of Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, George Steiner, and, in my field of art history, T.J. Clark. Ever read his "Farewell to an Idea"? It has an analogous lyric melancholy, and he continues to write elegiacally despite all his inimitable and entangling analyses. What about Celan, or Beckett, or Oulipo -- by which I mean, writers who do not wish for reconciliation, harmony, or redemption?
Your last line is especially interesting, and I am particularly likely to be misreading it without a larger context, but when you say "In short, the poems do not perform what they desiderate, because to do so would take us beyond language and vision, to that which no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived" — you're invoking the history of sublime encounters, meaning outside of language, the failure of words, the history that includes the "Letter of Lord Chandos." (jameselkins.substack.com/p/a-very-late-romantic-book-on-language)
Why not leave all that aside? It's leaden — meaning sweet, but poisonous. Or perhaps I've entirely misread you.
This is one of the most insightful and USEFUL pieces of criticism I've read in a while. You have taught me a way to think about Stevens that unlocks the pasture gate so that I might walk beyond. Thank you.
Thank you Michael, I really appreciate it
Looking forward to reading this. Obsessed with this poem - just reread it last night. How gloriously providential.
I'm here for you Sam
Thanks for opening the door to this for me.
"The Idea of Order at Key West" is one of my favorite poems, and this is by far the best thing I've read about it. I share you disappointment with Bloom, and with Vendler as well. And any time I've tried to write about Stevens I fail completely. But I love him and reread him endlessly.
The analysis of the rhythm and rhyme in the second stanza, the noticeable change from the more -- lyrical? -- first stanza -- is really on point. And I'm intrigued by your notion of Stevens' failure -- examplary, yes, but necessary, and, surely, all our failure?
Isn't there one more piece of "making" in the poem -- the observation of the lights in the fishing boats:
"Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night."
Man-made things, turning nature's disorder into order (even though that ordering is in the viewer's eye and brain, not something actually done by the boats.)
Speaking of paraphrase, a couple of decades about I rewrote "The Idea of Order at Key West" in words of one syllable. In many ways a useless thing (and not really a paraphrase), and done, essentially, as the result of a challenge. But it did force (another) close reading. (And the result of course was an utter failure in poetic terms.)
With regard to Stevens’ failure to redeem or save us, I side with James Elkins’ post which suggests that Stevens might belong with those who seek not perfection or redemption or harmony or being saved. Elkins cites among others Samuel Beckett whose two word credo has achieved the status of a genuine “meme” these days. Those two words appear at the end of this sentence from “Worstward Ho”: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” In this context, Nic’s title seems to make more sense. And makes us understand that it is possible to think that Stevens’ poem is both the greatest of all poems and an “exemplary failure.” If we are doomed to fail, we should aim to be good at it. Being good at failing is no mean achievement. —MS
Thanks for your reading! This poem unlocks so much in Stevens. He's an anti-Platonist who wants to redeem the loss of the transcendent with art. I'm touched because he doesn't want to give in to the void, because he wants to conduct a fighting withdrawal rather than surrender. It's an old move in philosophy, from Epicurus to Kant to James. Once you make the particular humanist move from discovering meaning to *making* it, though, I think you've probably lost, despite "maker" being such a wonderful word for Stevens in the poem because of how it works with "maker" as "poet" going back to Middle English.
I think Steven acknowledges that he comes up short at the end. Mastering the night is not enough to glean meaning from the night, and the rage at the very end shows that art hasn't reached what it aspired to. (I didn't originally intend the Stevens-friendly "spiritus" pun with "aspired" but will keep it.) The "ghostlier" at the end is a hat tip to the metaphysics, or Platonism, that Stevens would like to leave behind. He wants to dispel his ghosts and be haunted, too.
I sometimes think he wavered and half believed in transcendence. "The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" contains some language that seems to cut against the Stevens of "Sunday Morning": "we collect ourselves . . . into one thing," "a single shawl," "the miraculous influence," "an order, a whole," "[a] knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous." I want to see an acceptance of something beyond matter and mind in how "high that highest candle lights the dark." That might be foolishness on my part, though, because the paramour is introduced as "Interior." Stevens usually doesn't make it easy on us.
Thank you for your perceptive comments; the rearguard/fighting withdrawal is very well put - I’d include Arnold as well in that company. I am planning to write a companion piece on Stevens’ poetics which will try to address this strange ambivalence over platonism - Stevens is full of images from Plato, both in the poems (Notes) and the prose (Nobel Rider), but he’s also doubtful about the extra-poetic reality of his platonic motifs. Of course the other poet who showed the same ambivalence was Blake.
I'll be interested to read that, and thank you for this fascinating analysis. As it happens, a while back I wrote about Arnold's Dover Beach: https://substack.com/@snapdragons/note/c-100761616?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=9w4rx
Nik: Out of curiosity, what (briefly) have you memorized by Hopkins and Stevens, and what difference do you think it makes? —-MS