WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL最新文献

{"title":"In Memoriam Robert Buttel (1923–2023)","authors":"Peter Hanchak, John N. Serio, Milton J. Bates, George S. Lensing","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910932","url":null,"abstract":"In Memoriam Robert Buttel (1923–2023) Peter Hanchak, John N. Serio, Milton J. Bates, and George S. Lensing Editorial note: Our Editorial Board Member Robert Buttel passed away on April 20, 2023, at the age of ninety-nine, at his home in Providence, Rhode Island. Bob had been the longest-serving Board Member of this journal: he started out in 1984, thus serving for nearly four decades. Below we would like to honor him with four personal testimonies by Wallace Stevens’s grandson, Peter Hanchak, our Honorary Editor John Serio, fellow Board Member Milton Bates, and former Book Review Editor and Board Member George Lensing. In the world of Stevens criticism, Bob’s name is remembered especially for two major books that have continued to be used by subsequent generations: his monograph Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium (Princeton UP, 1967), whose title we will italicize in its entirety below to make for easier reading; and a volume of essays, edited together with Frank Doggett, Wallace Stevens: A Celebration (Princeton UP, 1980), which not only showcased the work of a range of stellar critics at the time but also included important personal recollections by Holly Stevens and a variety of previously unpublished poetic and prose writings by Stevens himself. Personal Recollections I am privileged to have had the pleasure of Robert Buttel’s company over a significant span of years and in a variety of settings. He and his wife, Helen, were some of the most naturally gracious people I have ever known. They also maintained a wonderfully warm friendship with my mother, Holly Stevens, until her death in 1992. In the 1960s, after two trimesters at Beloit College, I visited Bob and Helen over the Christmas holiday and they asked me if I would recommend Beloit for their son, Jeffrey, who was one year behind me. Jeff liked his visit to Beloit and decided to attend, where, in fact, he also met and married a classmate of mine. After a year in San Francisco, I then transferred to Temple University, where I was able, once again, to spend more time with the Buttels. In the early 1970s, my first wife and I decided to flee the urban chaos of Philadelphia and join the “back-to-the-land” initiative by moving to rural Maine. After a nine-year stint, I returned to Philadelphia as a journeyman electrician and renewed my friendship with Bob and Helen. They had moved from their large home in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, to Front Street [End Page 262] in South Philly, where they had converted an old mattress factory into a spiffy modern home. I soon discovered Bob’s enthusiasm for tennis and I set up a spot and date and we bashed away for several hours, during which I received a precious tutorial. I later found out Bob had a national ranking in singles for his age class(!). In one of our wonderfully easy conversations, he confided to me that he was thinking of taking up golf, even though he was at an advanced age. I had played golf all through my youth and picked it up again in m","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"143 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nuances on a Theme by Stevens, Things Off Season, and: Seven Scenes of Riverdale, New York, and: Shabbos","authors":"Rachel Aviva Burns","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910913","url":null,"abstract":"Nuances on a Theme by Stevens, Things Off Season, and: Seven Scenes of Riverdale, New York, and: Shabbos Rachel Aviva Burns Nuances on a Theme by Stevens The wind speeds her,Blowing upon her handsAnd watery back.She touches the clouds, where she goesIn the circle of her traverse of the sea. I Wherever she goes,she touches the cloudsand the tips of her fingersgrow soft with cumulus. II She never turns her touch into a grasp;clouds wetly elude a tempted clasp. III Wind-sped, she traversesthe whale-road.Above, clouds envyher sea-touching toes. IV Gallic nuages dot the plages.Where she passes,touching lovers bask. V When she touches the clouds,where does her mind go?They settle as a gentle crownhaloing about herlofty weather. [End Page 144] Things Off Season The confused daffodils emerge in Februaryonly to be brittled by frost,disrupting calculationsof the floral actuarywho cries for the anthers’ loss. Panthers prowl in the darkpeddling zoo-goers dreamsof dank, humid summer night.Circling the zoo-glass, toddlers scream“A cat! Big cat!” with skittish delight. Give me the life of a greenhouse mousestuffing her cheeks with orchid blooms!She gluts her wee rodent gutson priceless Gold of Kinabulu.What a feast of botanic doom! [End Page 145] Seven Scenes of Riverdale, New York I The Irish childrenare playing in the street.Two ride bicycles,pedaling with bare feet. II The man with two hatshops every third step. III On the hot pavement,eleven cats sprawl.The lady who feeds thempeeks through her window.She sees their waving tails. IV Listen to the man at the delion the phone:“Tuna on rye,turkey on white,roast beef on a roll.” V The bell rings at St. Margaret’s.Children emerge,sporting smilesand uniforms. VI At the Yeshiva,the day ends at Five.The boys wear yarmulkes,the girls, long skirts. VII The gates of the Russian Missionare high.Security cameras watchwith mechanical eyes. [End Page 146] Shabbos Let my hale fatness declare itselfwith the strong tongue of a young rabbisinging her barachas on a Saturday night! What body boggles the imagined eye but I!These are my sultry salutationsto the congregation passing by. Do not pass over my pulchritude of plumpness!I prefer the rabbi to the divine.My fatness sways and hails Adonai! [End Page 147] Rachel Aviva Burns Dobbs Ferry, New York Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Graduate Seminar Roundtable: Introduction","authors":"Douglas Mao","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910919","url":null,"abstract":"A Graduate Seminar Roundtable: Introduction Douglas Mao IN FALL 2022, I taught a graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins called “1922 and Its Neighbors.” The course aimed to situate the most famous works of English-language modernism’s annus mirabilis—Ulysses, The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room—among other texts published between 1920 and 1924 (some canonical, some scarcely read today). In keeping with its title, the seminar also featured theoretical and historical writing on the question of the neighbor. One of the students in the course was Nora Pehrson, who had just accepted an appointment as new managing editor of this journal. Nora happened to mention to Bart Eeckhout—whose extraordinary helming of The Wallace Stevens Journal we also celebrate, and thank our stars for, here—that Harmonium was one of the texts we would be reading. Bart had the thought that members of the seminar might write up, for this anniversary number, a reflection on their encounter with Harmonium on the eve of its centenary. What would a group of young scholars, some well versed in Stevens but most coming with little prior acquaintance, find most noteworthy? The duo of short essays presented here is the result of that invitation. The seminar discussion, which took place in December 2022, was not structured in advance. It was a conversation, not a curriculum. The first poem the group lingered over was “Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges.” This was perhaps fitting given that “Cy Est Pourtraicte” was one of the earliest written of the poems eventually collected in Harmonium, but our seminar started with it out of an interest in the relation between storytelling and image in the volume. The subsequent discussion ranged over many poems (“The Snow Man” closed things out) and over questions of exoticism and epistemology, irony and intimacy, syntax and hypotheticals. What tied all these explorations together was a concern with how, in his first collection, this poet of solitaires attends to otherness. In the wake of the seminar meeting, six students from the course opted to sign on to the journal project. They decided to break into two groups of three, each of which would produce a short essay building up from elements of the seminar discussion. Each group drafted collaboratively, [End Page 228] received comments on its drafts from the other group and from me, and revised in response to those suggestions. One question on the table for our writers was how Harmonium ultimately engages with the idea of the neighbor—the central theme, again, of our larger seminar. Another was how to think about Harmonium a hundred years after its publication. The first of the essays inclines more to the former question, the second more to the latter. The two converge, however, on the crucial topic of Stevens’s address to everyday experience. For Julia Houser, Nora Pehrson, and Griffin Shoglow-Rubenstein, the Stevensian subject moves through a world populated with neighbors—not jus","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Some Surreptitious Sonnet","authors":"Jane Blanchard","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910927","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910927","url":null,"abstract":"Some Surreptitious Sonnet Jane Blanchard after a journal entry by Wallace Stevens Back in the office after days elsewhere,I find it very hard to concentrateOn corporate reports I must updateFor others who may be less laissez-faire.Adjusting, even swiveling my chair,Then sipping Starbucks at a steady rate,I focus on the work I could createIf only colleagues would stay unaware.I pause to speak to Sue, Renée, and Bob,Desiring breaks from projects of their own,And often check my email or my phoneTo keep up the appearance of a job.At quitting time, I have more than a draft,Not bad for merely practicing my craft. [End Page 250] Jane Blanchard Augusta, Georgia Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135504683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics by Yunte Huang (review)","authors":"Sara Laws","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910931","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics by Yunte Huang Sara Laws Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics. By Yunte Huang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. True to the goals of the “Thinking Literature” series in which the book is published, Chinese Whispers renders the difficult phrase “transpacific poetics” into a mode of reasoning in and about the world. Yunte Huang deftly moves between poetry, cybernetics, the insurance industry, linguistics, translation, calligraphy, computer science, nationalist cultural projects, and geopolitics, revealing how all these things have to do with the “transpacific” and even with “poetics.” The power of the book is its defamiliarizing effect. In Chapters One and Five, for example, Huang highlights the “transpacific” in contemporary definitions of “information.” In Chapter Four, in the course of relaying his tribulations in translating Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, he defamiliarizes Pound for an English-reading audience. As a result, the perhaps tired subject of Pound becomes interesting again as the story of a mentally ill mortal—not the giant modernist—who, confined in a psychiatric institution, is “obsessed with Chinese,” seeking out Chinese-English “family resemblances” in his unique mode of inquiry. Because of this obsession, Pound “points us in the direction of a world literature that is inherently translational and multilingual” (80). (Similarly, Huang rightfully claims to have defamiliarized Confucius for a Chinese readership in his 1990s translations of The Pisan Cantos.) These moments of brilliance are constellated throughout Chinese Whispers. Spaces between chapters feel like breaks in a series of excellent lectures, even if, like hearing a good lecture, the dazzle of a given chapter may leave some readers desirous of more precise conclusions. The book may not be ideal for an undergraduate audience, though I would recommend its inclusion in graduate seminars. Huang’s earlier work, notably his reevaluation of Moby-Dick in a Pacific context, made a huge impression by showing the innovative potentials of transpacific literary criticism. Since then transpacific studies has grown through the work of scholars drawn from various subfields. Chinese Whispers is a necessary addition to the field not because it corrects scholarly misinterpretations (even though Chapter Five does argue that “we have failed to see what is really at stake in Ernest Fenollosa’s seminal essay [‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’]” [116]) nor because the book reckons with American literary giants. Its contribution to the field of transpacific literary criticism is to show how integral the transpacific is—in the work of American poets like Wallace Stevens; in the life of esteemed scholars like Huang himself; and also, surprisingly, in the logics of the insurance industry. In Cold War America, the children’s game of Telephone was named “Chinese Whispers” because Chineseness at t","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth by John Koethe (review)","authors":"John Gibson","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910929","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910929","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth by John Koethe John Gibson Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth. By John Koethe. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. John Koethe is rare among philosophers. He is an accomplished poet who has also produced excellent work on issues to do with skepticism, metaphysics, and the nature of the mind and self. In other words, he has had two careers, an academic one as an analytic philosopher working on the problems that define philosophy in the Anglophone academy, and a largely extra-academic one as a poet of practice and not profession. This, he tells us, has been a healthy arrangement, since it has allowed his poetry to issue “from an impulse internal to the poetic act” rather than “from pressures external to it” (65). After reading this superb book, one is inclined to say that the same is true of his academic career, since as a philosopher he has worked largely outside the culture of professional aesthetics and philosophy of art, and one suspects that his relative indifference to the debates that animate academic work in these disciplines is in good part responsible for the immense success of Thought and Poetry. The majority of the book’s eighteen chapters were revised after publication elsewhere, and the appendix on the mind-body problem, written especially for this volume, usefully situates many of Koethe’s claims about the role of subjectivity in lyric poetry in a broader and richer philosophical context. The chapters touch on a wide range of issues in criticism, poetics, and philosophy. The most exciting discussions in the book are concerned with the legacy of romanticism and the picture of the self implicit in the strands of modernism that grow out of it; the nature of the sublime; the allure of philosophical realism; and the relationship between poetry and philosophy. While there is the kind of frequent repetition one would expect of a volume of collected essays, each retelling appears in a new context and functions to add definition to the core ideas in Koethe’s philosophy of poetry. Koethe is a Wittgensteinian at heart whose poetic sensibilities place him near the New York School and especially close to the Eliot-Stevens-Ashbery tradition. Most striking is Koethe’s view of the relationship between lyric subjectivity and the external, extra-poetic world. Koethe’s account of this relation flows from his decidedly modernist sense of the anxieties and interests of the variations of romanticism that interest him—that is, lyric poetry that involves “the enactment of subjectivity, and the affirmation of it against the claims of an objective natural setting which threatens to annihilate it” (73). It is this threat of annihilation that takes on particular significance for Koethe, since it prompts a form of lyric expression that seeks to define the self against an “objective” setting and thereby to assert a form of aesthetic and moral freedom from it. Wha","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition by Margaret H. Freeman (review)","authors":"Rick Joines","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910930","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910930","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition by Margaret H. Freeman Rick Joines The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition. By Margaret H. Freeman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Borrowing her title from Wallace Stevens’s “The Rock,” Margaret H. Freeman gives us a fascinating exploration of how poetry “enables us to cognitively access and experience the ‘being’ of reality, all that is and is not, both seen and unseen” (1). Freeman develops the case that the poem as icon is an activity or function more than it is an object or artifact. Poetic iconicity is what a poem does as it maps ways to free ourselves from abstractions and concepts structuring our usual rationality. Freeman contends the iconic poem is an affective response to reality by the poet and then to the same reality by the reader. Through it, both have immediate experience of the self’s existence in a primordial, preconscious, preconceptual world. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s definition of an icon, Freeman calls the iconic poem “an emergent structure” (20). It provides access to “something else” through its formal elements, which help bridge “the ‘gap’ conceived between mind and world” (20, 38). This ontological connection creates a semblance (not an idealist representation) of felt life. Thus, the iconic poem is “embodied subjectivity” (16). It “engages both artist and respondent in opening up potentialities inherent in all creative making” (32). Readers of John Dewey’s Art as Experience will find much to appreciate, but also question, here, as Freeman updates the terminology of many of his arguments, though his book is never directly mentioned. The poems by Stevens Freeman discusses at length are “Domination of Black,” “Of Mere Being,” and “The Rock.” The section on “Domination of Black” is a masterclass on cognitive literary criticism, her sense of how poems both are and create affective responses, and the complex genius of how Stevens puts a poem together. She describes the kinesthetic movement of Stevens’s prepositions, sounds, colors, archetypes, and images. She details the poem’s affective schemata: anxiety, fear, container, cycle, path, motion, boundary, intake, and resistance. These figure into the poem’s agonist and antagonist force dynamics to embody a destabilizing physical and psychological feeling of fear. In this reading, she is less interested in interpreting the poem’s meaning than in exploring “what the poem is doing” (119). She convinces us of the soundness of her critical mode as she persuades us about how the poem’s simple yet intricate elements capture Stevens’s emotional and intellectual transactions between reality and his sensibility. Freeman’s discussion of “Of Mere Being” furthers her argument about iconicity. She poses the question of “how poetry can, constructed as it is by means of language, that very product of the intellectualizing, conceptualizing self, nevertheless break through its own barriers to access the pri","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Stevens’s Soil: Intelligence, Conceptual Affordances, and the Genius Beyond","authors":"Andrew Osborn","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910916","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910916","url":null,"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 thi","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"143 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Still Whipping Hullabaloos among Spheres","authors":"Bart Eeckhout, Florian Gargaillo","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910912","url":null,"abstract":"Still Whipping Hullabaloos among Spheres Bart Eeckhout and Florian Gargaillo Allow,Therefore, that in the planetary sceneYour disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,Proud of such novelties of the sublime,Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,May, merely may, madame, whip from themselvesA jovial hullabaloo among the spheres. —Wallace Stevens, “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” WALLACE STEVENS’S first book of poems, Harmonium, was published by Alfred A. Knopf on September 7, 1923, less than a month shy of the poet’s forty-fourth birthday. It didn’t exactly make a splash. Though Mark Van Doren in The Nation predicted that someday a monograph would be written about it (and other contemporary volumes), and that Stevens’s work would be more “durable” than much of what “passed for poetry in his day,” he still called Harmonium “tentative, perverse, and superfine,” and wondered out loud, “What public will care for a poet who strains every nerve every moment to be unlike anyone else who ever wrote[?]” (40). Van Doren’s skepsis about the book’s ability to find an audience seemed to be borne out at first. Robert Rehder recalls how, “During the 1924 Christmas season, two young poets, Richard Blackmur and Conrad Aiken, found that the first edition had been remaindered in the basement of Filene’s, the Boston department store, at 11 cents a copy.” (The regular asking price was $2, the equivalent of $35 a century later according to the US Inflation Calculator.) Blackmur and Aiken recognized the book’s merit and bought all the copies to send as Christmas cards to their friends. The poet took a more ironic view of the book’s sales. Around July 1924, he wrote to Harriet Monroe: “My royalties for the first half of 1924 amounted to [End Page 131] $6.70. I shall have to charter a boat and take my friends around the world” (L 243). (Rehder 36) Recognition was slow to arrive, then, but it did arrive over time. Today, a first printing of Harmonium fetches anywhere between $2000 for a copy in not very good shape and $6000 if it’s in better condition and includes the rare dust cover jacket. Stevens’s friends around the world typically gather nowadays in countries he never managed to visit himself, though they usually forget to charter a boat. A special commemorative issue such as this can even find itself edited by a Belgian and a Frenchman collaborating across two continents. Then again, Rehder’s anecdote is telling not only for how it recalls the languishing copies of Harmonium in the belly of Filene’s: it also reminds us how Blackmur and Aiken, as fellow poets, already knew better than to leave the remaindered books on the table. Another up-and-coming poet who had just published her own first volume, Marianne Moore, was simply bowled over by Stevens’s idiosyncratic gifts. Her review of Harmonium, published in the January 1924 issue of The Dial, aligned Stevens’s artistry resolutely with Shakespeare’s “nutritious permutations” (51).","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Place of the Neighbor in Harmonium","authors":"Julia Houser, Nora Pehrson, Griffin Shoglow-Rubenstein","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910920","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910920","url":null,"abstract":"The Place of the Neighbor in Harmonium Julia Houser, Nora Pehrson, and Griffin Shoglow-Rubenstein IN A 1906 JOURNAL entry, the twenty-six-year-old Wallace Stevens expressed a sentiment that would go on to become something of a commonplace in his reception both as a poet and as a literary personality: “I detest ‘company’” (L 89). But if the young Stevens’s asociality here sounds absolute, the scare quotes also indicate a possible interest in alternative notions of what company could be. Must it be human? Some fifty years later, Stevens would attest to his enduring ambivalence about his fellow humans in a letter to Robert Pack in which he reported having long considered making humanness the fourth essential feature of modern poetry: “For a long time, I have thought of adding other sections to the NOTES [i.e., ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’] and one in particular: It Must Be Human. But I think that it would be wrong not to leave well enough alone” (L 863–64). The attraction of the human was almost enough to make it as important as the other three criteria he had already elaborated: abstraction, change, and giving pleasure. But Stevens ultimately chose to leave it out. We would be mistaken, however, to view this demotion or diminution of the human as tantamount to a total rejection of sociality. Although Stevens’s poetry has often been read as a “Place of the Solitaires”—to borrow the title of a poem from Harmonium—his first volume in fact displays a multifaceted attitude toward the possibilities and prospects of intersubjective connection. From images and sounds to objects and creatures, allegories and ideas to environments and worlds, Stevens produces a vibrant ecology in which entities human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, real and fictive commune. That communion isn’t always harmonious. “Earthy Anecdote,” the collection’s opening poem, stages a confrontation between the “bristl[ing]” antagonism of the firecat and the avoidant “swerv[ing]” of the bucks (CPP 3). The bucks continually turn this way and that, attempting to shake the firecat off, but it anticipates their reactions, coercing them into an exhausting game of evasions. A mood of hostility dominates the episode; but at the same time, a sense of cohesion and regularity emerges from the predictability of the interaction between these apparent opponents. What appears to be a confrontation turns out to be cooperative as well, taking on the aspect of a hypnotic choreography. The consistency and interdependence [End Page 230] of the animals’ movements is reflected in the poem’s neatness and organization at the level of the line. “Every time” the bucks go clattering across Oklahoma, they get diverted by the sight of the firecat bristling in their path, and the lines themselves repeatedly stop short and change course in anticipation of prepositions and conjunctions: Wherever they went,They went clattering,Until they swervedIn a swift, circular lineTo the right,Because of the firecat. (CPP 3","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"181 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135504689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}