Wallace Stevens and the Whiteness That Is There
The poet’s new American imagination looks uncomfortably like the old.
Stevens was one of my favorite poets way back when I was reading poetry obsessively some thirty years ago. His first book, Harmonium, is out of copyright now, and I finally was able to read it all the way through. As I remembered, his writing is marvelous in its verve and vocabulary and imaginative bombast. But I was also more aware this time of the downsides of some of his expansive Americanness, which is specifically an expansive white Americanness.
The long poem “The Comedian as the Letter C” for example is classically interpreted as a fanciful narrative about Stevens’ own aesthetic or philosophical journey to a new American poetry that is more real and powerful precisely because it’s more conscious of its own transience and fictiveness. But the narrative is on the literal level about a man, Crispin, who journeys from Europe to the Americas in search of “some starker, barer self/In a starker, barer world.”
The Americas serve as a vision of authenticity stripped of humanity. That’s a metaphor made possible by treating the “gross Indian” as a trope rather than a person. The heroic-minded artist pushes aside indigenous people, “Abhorring Turk as Esquimau.” When Cripin does settle down on colonized land and raises a family, it’s presented as a kind of inevitable compromise. Crispin wanted to escape the old self, but finds it still with him, almost as if, instead of opening his consciousness to meet new people and new ideas, he just stole somebody’s stuff and added it to his pile.
One critic argues (https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2021/12/06/book-review-the-new-wallace-stevens-studies/ ) that the conglomerate of Brazilian, Mexican, Carribean, and Anglo words in the poem is anticolonial in its polyglot sensibility. I’m not sure I buy it though. Colonizers have always been willing/eager to pick up things, including words, from the colonized. You didn’t have to be anticolonialist to eat potatoes or smoke tobacco.
As another example, here are the first stanzas of “Earthy Anecdotes,” the wonderful poem that opens Harmonium.
Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved,
In a swift, circular line,
To the right,
Because of the firecat.
Americana and/or regional poetry traditions (“the bucks went clattering/Over Oklahoma”) are chased about the landscape by Steven’s explosive, supple imagination (“The firecat went leaping.”) But you could also read the verse as a metaphor for a colonial dream which harries those on the land to exhaustion, reveling in their distress. (“Later the firecat closed his bright eyes/And slept.”)
And here in full is one of the most straightforward, and entertaining, pieces in the volume.
THE WORMS AT HEAVEN’S GATE
Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,
Within our bellies, we her chariot.
Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,
The lashes of that eye and its white lid.
Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,
And, finger after finger, here, the hand,
The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,
The bundle of the body and the feet
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.
This is a playful grotesque; Stevens is having fun with religious ideas of resurrection by turning some ancient quasi-religious figure into wormfood and poem-food. Stevens is the worm here, cataloguing all the bits and pieces, “The lashes of that eye and its white lid,” “finger after finger,” dissecting and regurgitating them in his own “genius.” God can’t bring Badroulbadour back, but earthworm Stevens slides her from the earth onto the page.
So where’s the colonialism? Well, the Seussian name “Badroulbadour” is clearly a kind of Orientalist goof—a Western exoticist mock of Islamic/Arabic and/or ancient Egyptian nomenclature. Stevens—like some New Atheists—leverages the stigma against Eastern cultures and practices as a way to mock religion more broadly. More, he chews up and digests some ill-defined, dissected non-Western someone to make his own memoriam. Badroulbadour’s death, “The bundle of the body and the feet” are crafted on Stevens’ “lips” into a monument to Stephens himself, the bombastic, squiggly American poet who knows that their eternity is nonsense fodder for his.
Does that mean Stevens is a bad poet? Not to me! He remains one of my all time favorite writers, and probably the one I most shamelessly steal from when I dabble in poetry myself. “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate” is odd and funny and makes you want to slither about with those solemn chanting worms, creating new forms, new landscapes, and new dreams from the most disparate corners of your own mind.
Stevens is forging a new specifically American imagination, filled with worms and fire-fangled feathers and concupiscent curds. But it’s also a little sad to realize how often that new imagination, for all its verve and firecats and wild ducks, mirrors the old. Stevens’ poetry is exhilarating because it feels like it has no fetters. And then you realize that these particular fetters, at least, are still there, squirming in the brain matter, bounding across Oklahoma, sailing to a supposed New World. Stevens boasted in “The Snowman” of seeing “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” But one meaning of that wintry vision is that he imagines the real world as white.
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This appeared some time back on Splice Today; I’ve been thinking about it and Stevens, so figured I’d reprint it.
I’m a big fan of Wallace Stevens as well and am keenly aware of his whiteness and his class biases. Nonetheless, I’m not entirely following your take on “Worms.” Badroulbadour is a character in the Aladdin tale from 1001 Arabian Nights. The name is not some amalgam drawn from Stevens’ or the “West’s” Orientalist imagination so far as I am aware. I’m not denying the Orientalist implications of the name, but it’s hard to put aside Stevens’ love of wordplay. Badroulbadour is a type: the beautiful and seemingly unattainable woman who inspires ambition. More importantly, “ Badroulbadour” is a hell of a lot more fun to read aloud than, say, “Helen of Troy.” The poem is a contemplation of the fragility of beauty as much as anything else and therefore makes a nice companion to “Sunday Morning.”
As for your implied interpretation of “The Snow Man,” as I’m sure you’re aware, there are two diametrically opposed ways of reading the poem, depending on the meaning of “must” in the first line. Does the word “must” form an imperative (“You really should have a mind of winter”) as you suggest or is it more an expression of exasperation (“You have got to be out of your wintery mind to think such things”)? The former makes the poem out to be Stevens’ rejection of the pathetic fallacy. The latter makes the poem out to be a rejection of hyper-literalism. The evidence in the poem itself, I think, is too limited to decide between the two, but if the poem means the latter, that puts a whole other cast on the whiteness—that one can and perhaps should imagine other pigment possibilities. Then again, it is all still so damn white!
Anyway, another great piece by you. I really enjoy your writing and had fun with this one.
I love Stevens, not least because his day job was as surety lawyer, as was mine. He was a VP, however, and got to order his clerks to go round searching for the perfect word. I was a mere "senior" and have to scrounge up my own.
I am startled by the idea that The Snow Man has anything much to say about "Whiteness." It has much more to do with freezing, with cold, does it not? And snow, outside the stuff piled up by the plows on the side of the road, is well, white.
I read it in relation to the other poems I love of his that consider the question of "making the world"--how our consciousness has much more to do with our perceptions and how they shape what we see. As I read more and more on the actual neuroscience of perception, I get more entranced with this function of the mind: to turn all those electrical impulses that are all our brain can actually "see" (or hear, etc) into a coherent world with some predictability but some quirks (consider the young woman/crone optical illusion).
The poem that comes first to mind, of course, is The Idea of Order at Key West, though it is also in many other poems. And if our consciousness fastens on winter, what do we see? The nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.