Featured White Papers
- PCI DSS therapy for the smaller retailer (McAfee)
- Enterprise PBX buyer's guide (VoIP-News)
- Webcast: Growing your business with CRM (BNET)
Content provided in partnership with
Wallace Stevens in Connecticut
Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993 by William Doreski
Because "Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven / Before and after one arrives" (XXVIII), because places are utterly implicated by our perceptions of them, it is difficult to sort out their reality from our continual processing of that reality, "This endlessly elaborating poem" that "Displays the theory of poetry, / As the life of poetry." Theory and life are not quite the same (though in an aphorism in "Adagia" Stevens asserts that "The theory of poetry is the theory of life" [Opus 202]), and yet a "More harassing master" can demonstrate that they are the same, that the process of linking the imagination and reality through the mind generates tropical worlds of luxuriance in which the theory of poetry is the theory of life. New Haven, however, is itself a severe master, and the poem keeps returning to it, edging and inching toward "final form" (XXXI), which will be a version of New Haven in which form is not a fixation but a tone or coloring, "a force that traverses a shade."
If the actual New Haven hadn't existed, some other shabby industrial town with a college would have done as well, perhaps. But New Haven is paradigmatic. It manifests the most commonplace reality and yet contains numerous distinguished versions of Professor Eucalyptus musing upon the ineffable. Stevens knew the city mostly from passing through it on the train from Hartford to New York. Because the train always stopped for a fairly lengthy period to change engines (from steam to electric) before the trip under Park Avenue to Grand Central, and again on the way back, Stevens must often have sat staring out at the dirty brown-brick station, the big plain hotel on the west side of the green, the Harkness Tower a few blocks beyond.
In progressing from a commonplace, brick-textured foreground to the hotel of reality to the reaching for the ineffable represented by Yale's neo-Gothic architecture, this view embodies the movement the poem works out, more or less, in its complex meditative drama. The perspective of the poem, then, derives from an actual situation, and imitates in its rhetoric the contemplating mind that is merely passing through on the way somewhere else, for which New Haven is "a sense in the changing sense / Of things" (XIX). Before reaching New Haven, a sense of its reality forms in the imagination. There, for a brief period, the sheer mundaneness of the scene overwhelms the imagination. Then, after the train has moved on toward New York or Hartford, the New Haven of the imagination returns in revitalized form. A lifetime's worth of trips to New York generated the complexities of this meditation, train trips Stevens described in terms conducive to self-renewal: "I went to New York last week.... Only to sit in the train and look out of the window gets one over these occasional periods of restlessness" (Letters 692).
For Wallace Stevens, then, Connecticut consisted of light and dark, a state of the real and a state of the imagination. No distinction between these is other than momentary, fluid, "imaginary poles," oppositions that last only as long as the perception of them. Transcendence, which renders the landscape and the mind as a single entity, and which maps metaphysical streets over real ones, is a difficult state to engender, impossible to maintain for long. Stevens, though a poet of place, does not commit himself to living in the hotel of reality; but when he requires the particulars of a place to manifest themselves he finds that the "gray bleached derelict" qualities of his adopted state are sometimes those that best serve him. More significantly, Stevens seems to find an aesthetic parallel in the Connecticut landscape to the plainness of voice that in the period of "The Rock" suits him better than the gaudier rhetoric of Harmonium or even "Of Hartford in a Purple Light." The plainest landscapes, human or natural, display the subtlest gradations of tone and coloring.
