Books like Harmonium

Wallace Stevens’s verse—as exhibited in his first major work Harmonium (1923), published when he was forty-four—either jumps from one concrete sense impression to another, or else leaps beyond them all toward some particularized meditation filled with vivid imagery, lush sonority, and dry wit. One thing Stevens avoids, however, is “the malady of the quotidian”—what we would call “everyday life”—and thus he deprives his readers of anything approaching an autobiography.Still, the life of Wallace Stevens shows through his verse. And as usual the life—like most other peoples’—is about love and money.Stevens loved writing poetry, loved reading Whitman and Baudelaire; he loved Harvard’s literary atmosphere too, but had to quit school when Father told him there was no more money. Father said Wallace could find a lot of money in law, but instead he found a little money in writing: writing for the newspapers of the city of New York. He never loved the newspapers, but he loved the museums, loved looking at the Renoirs and Monets, the Picassos and the Duchamps. And he loved bohemian Greenwich Village, with its contempt for money, and loved hanging out with its poets: Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings. He also loved the French Symbolists, Mallarme and Apollonaire, and so he decided to quit newspapers and write his poetry in the original artist's bohemia of Paris. But Father said there was no money for him to go to Paris, so Wallace gave up his bohemian dream and began to study the law.Stevens became a New York lawyer, good at making money, when, traveling on a train, he met Elsie Kachel, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He fell in love, but knew Father would not approve (Elsie was what father called “common,” for her people had never had money), but he loved her, and knew he must have her, and worked hard to the make money to make her his wife. (When they married, Father stopped speaking to Wallace. Father died two years later. He never spoke to Wallace again.)Wallace and Elsie got an apartment in New York where Wallace worked for the Fidelity and Deposit Company (keeping that insurance money right where it belonged), and Elsie sometimes worked as a model. She was so beautiful she was chosen—so the story goes—by the sculptor Adolph Weinman to be the face of America’s money: not only the Mercury Dime, but the Walking Liberty Half Dollar too. Wallace still loved New York, but Elsie hated it with a passion, so Wallace got a job in Connecticut that paid even more money (Hartford Accident and Indemnity, keeping the insurance money right where it belonged) and now Elsie had the life she always thought that she wanted. Then came baby Holly, and Wallace and Elsie drew apart. Forever after, they slept in separate rooms.Wallace kept the day job keeping the money where it belonged. But his lady, the one on the money, grew melancholy, grew away from Wallace, grew away from his love. So Wallace spent some of his money on vacations, stealing what beauty his imagination could find from winter sunsets off the coast of Key West.Is my story a little too simple? Sure it is. There are other things one needs to know to understand Steven’s poetry—his lack of faith, his passion for order, and his attempt to reconcile the two—but, at least for my purposes, this story of love and money tells me much of what I want to know.Harmonium (1923) doesn’t contain all of Steven’s best work (he wrote even better as he got older), but it contains most of the famous pieces we think of when we think of Stevens: the lyrics “Domination of Black,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Disillusionment at 10 O’clock,” “Bantam in the Pine Woods,” and “Anecdote of the Jar,” plus the exquisite meditation “Sunday Morning” (my favorite Stevens’ poem), and the sustained longer poems “Le Monocle du Mon Oncle” (an amused reminiscence of vanished love) and the “The Comedian as the Letter ‘C’,” a playful poem of poetic theory, in six parts.I refuse to reprint these justly famous poems once again, but instead offer four lesser known but memorable examples of how Stevens—piecemeal, in fragments—fashioned a self through loneliness, through the power of the imagination, in spite of a surfeit of money, in spite of a lack of love:\ TEA AT THE PALAZ AT HOONNot less because in purple I descendedThe western day through what you calledThe loneliest air, not less was I myself.What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?Out of my mind mind the golden ointment rained,And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.I was myself the compass of that sea;I was the world in which I walked, and what I sawOr heard or felt came not but from myself;And there I found myself more truly and more strange. THEORYI am what is around me.Women understand this.One is not duchessA hundred yards from a carriage.These, then are portraits:A black vestibule;A high bed sheltered by curtains.These are merely instances.NOMAD EXQUISITEAs the immense dew of FloridaBrings forthThe big-finned palmAnd green vines angering for life,As the immense dew of FloridaBrings forth hymn and hymnFrom the beholder,Beholding all those green sidesand gold sides of green sides,And blessed mornings,Meet for the eye of the young alligator,And lightning colorsSo, in me, come flingingForms, flams, and flakes of flames.TEAWhen the elephant’s-ear in the parkShrivelled in frost,And the leaves on the paths Ran like rats,Your lamp-light fellOn shining pillows,Of sea-shades and sky-shades,Like umbrellas in Java.\