Stevens’s Soil: Intelligence, Conceptual Affordances, and the Genius Beyond

Abstract

Stevens’s Soil: Intelligence, Conceptual Affordances, and the Genius Beyond Andrew Osborn HEARKENING BACK to Harmonium at a hundred, one comes to “The Comedian” at the numeral C. Although the long poem’s transatlantic odyssey has now circled the sun a century, its bounds remain two notes-to-self: “man is the intelligence of his soil” and “his soil is man’s intelligence” (CPP 22, 29). The latter, Crispin confides, is “better,” “worth crossing seas to find” (CPP 29). But how so? And why soil? From the opening lines of the first and fourth of six cantos—that is, from the poem’s very beginning and its midpoint—the two claims demand to be contrasted and often are. Few of the many scholars who have offered readings of Harmonium’s longest poem over the century since its first publication fail to juxtapose them. Glosses have often been minimal or demonstrably inaccurate, however. Helen Vendler set a precedent for permissible brevity when she classified both as “epigram[s]” among the occasional “simplicities” that punctuate the poem’s “erratic gothic harmonies” and “coruscations” (On Extended Wings 39). While the maxims may appear less in need of explication than most of the poem’s surrounding language, the revised version defies simple restatement, and attempts to paraphrase it differ substantially. Because Stevens confined his use of soil as a noun to Harmonium—excepting two trivial instances in later-excised cantos of the very limited edition of Owl’s Clover published in 1936 by Alcestis Press—the word offers itself as ready ground for digging into how his first book’s forms of intelligence introduce yet differ from the genius that followed. Stevens’s soil is also a fertile site for exploring the extent of his materialism. Proceeding for the most part chronologically, I will show that soil for Stevens is importantly local and elemental, available for cultivation and settlement, a stable conceptual repository. As that last phrase suggests, because our reality is always phenomenal, mediated by the parts of speech we employ both to make sense of it and to imagine what may not be before us at the time, the images that we call world and the images that we call words intermingle. I take Crispin at his word when he equates “his soil” and “man’s intelligence,” and I seek to understand what this equation could mean, how it works, and what it implies for other matters of [End Page 164] Stevensian interest. Looking back from the early twenty-first century, I see my sifting of Stevens’s soil anticipated by the children of “A Postcard from the Volcano.” I find evidence that two decades before stating the “intimidating thesis” of “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” Stevens had all but convinced himself in “The Comedian” and another late Harmonium inclusion “that absolute fact includes everything that the imagination includes” (CPP 681). One may think of Crispin’s two maxims as tweezers pinching reality and the imagination together way back then. Related to this tensed conflation is the horizontal soil-intelligence relationship, which may seem to deflate intelligence. Doing so helps one to recognize that genius for Stevens differs. Poetic genius is more essential to human character than intelligence while the genius of another element, be it land or sea or air, is beyond our ken. Although his poetry is characterized by what John Serio has called “Stevens’ ‘Affair of Places,’” the author of Harmonium is not one to personify the spirit of a place as a genius loci. I Within many of even the most compelling accounts of “The Comedian as the Letter C” arise two commonplaces regarding soil that, it seems to me, should be less common. First: soil is often read as a synecdoche for all matter, Crispin’s environment or milieu, the external world, reality at large. Second: Crispin’s revised maxim is often described as a reversal such that soil assumes the agency (as a determining factor or source of imagination) that intelligence had initially seemed to have. It is not evident that the former reading is wrong; it is merely questionable to a degree that I have been surprised to find no one...