Wallace Stevens: Imagination and Faith
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Wallace Stevens: Imagination and Faith
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Overview
At the center of this mystical theology, the author finds, is the conviction that God and the imagination arc one. The study concludes that poetry provides for Stevens a sanction, a solace, a form of order, a source of delight, and a means of redemption through which men arc saved, and natural fact is transformed into divine force.
Originally published in 1974.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691618661 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Essays in Literature , #1373 |
| Pages: | 220 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Wallace Stevens
Imagination and Faith
By Adalaide Kirby Morris
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1974 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06265-5
CHAPTER 1
LINEAGE AND LANGUAGE:
Stevens' Religious Heritage
It is a habit of mind with me to be thinking of some substitute for religion. I don't necessarily mean some substitute for the church, because no one believes in the church as an institution more than I do. My trouble, and the trouble of a great many people, is the loss of belief in the sort of God in Whom we were all brought up to believe. (LWS 348)
What Stevens confesses as a habit of mind, his poetry and prose reveal to be a near obsession. His search for a substitute for religion occupied his poetic energy from the early poetry to the late. This energy vacillated between negative and positive poles, between condemnation of the "deaf-mute churches" (CP 357) and affirmation of personal, vital faith in "a chapel of breath" (CP 529). These poles competed like powerful magnets so that his contempt, though often jaunty, was rarely pure, because he respected the church as a once omnipotent supreme fiction, and his affirmations, though often rhapsodic, were rarely total, because he feared the presumption of any fiction which might call itself supreme. Stevens' heritage, the piety of his ancestors the Zellers and of his own youth, was belief in the sort of God Who joined the visible and the invisible in symbol, rite, and creed. His critique of religion in its twentieth-century dilapidation rested on the assumption that new integrations, not wholly unlike the old, were possible. Stevens' momentary affirmations of such possible substitutes as the palace of art, romanticism, skepticism, naturalism, and humanism, however, were frail and tentative. His substitute is finally the search itself: poetry and the theory of poetry. The sort of God in Whom we can believe is imagination. His church is not the massively rigid cathedral but the chapel of breath: the personal, ephemeral, radiant, life-giving, and mutable merging of self and environment, visible and invisible.
"Winter Bells," the poem Stevens was explicating when he noted his habit of mind, is a listless poem arguing that "the strength of the church grows less and less until the church stands for little more than propriety" (LWS 348). It is a facile criticism, one Stevens had made many times before and would make again. The poem, included in Ideas of Order (1926), is striking, however, for its bleakness. Its negations lack the joviality of "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," the savagery of "The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws," or the passion of "Sunday Morning." It has, unlike "Sunday Morning" or the later "Esthétique du Mai," no affirmations. It is a poem of exile. The Jew, who neither lives in his land nor speaks his language, does not go to the synagogue to be flogged but to the Catholic church to be exotically distracted:
He preferred the brightness of bells,
The mille fiori of vestments,
The voice of centuries
On the priestly gramophones.
(CP 141)
His "rage against chaos" is soothed by custom and stifled by tidy, irrelevant "regulations of his spirit." If puzzled, he promises himself to combat exile with exile, "to go to Florida one of these days" and "to give this further thought."
A true faith for Stevens is one vitally connected to our time, our land, and our language. In it we are at home in a place we know and a time we understand. There we live, Stevens explains in a pattern of speech that seems to comfort him, "as Danes in Denmark all day long" (CP 419); we absorb life "as the Angevine / Absorbs Anjou" (CP 224); our speech is "as the cackle of toucans / In the place of toucans" (CP 52); and our rituals, like those of Crispin's colonists, incorporate the peach and its incantations, the visible and the invisible. It is a blessing as well as a fatality that "all gods are created in the images of their creators" (OP 211), for if "God is a postulate of the ego" (OP 171), He is by that directly related to us, our land and our time. For the Irish, and not for the Jew, Catholicism is a true faith. "The identity of the Irish with their religion," Stevens remarked with some nostalgia, "is the same thing as the identity of the Irish with their lonely, misty, distant land, a Catholic country, breeding and fostering Catholic natures" (LWS 877). This is especially attractive to men living, like the Jew,
in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
(CP 383)
We live without direct relation to either the visible, our land, or the invisible, our faith. For us, God is an abstraction; for the Irish, "in Ireland, God is a member of the family" (LWS 448).
Nearer, clearer, and more compelling than the winter bells for Stevens were "the old Lutheran bells at home" (CP 461),the bells that brought the intangible into the very tangible world of John Zeller, Stevens' maternal great-grandfather, a religious refugee who came to America in 1709 and settled in the Susquehanna Valley. In exile, he found a place his own and, much more, himself. The family house was, almost literally, a house of worship:
Over the door there is an architectural cartouche of the cross with palm-branches below, placed there, no doubt, to indicate that the house and those that lived in it were consecrated to the glory of God. From this doorway they faced the hills that were part of the frame of their valley, the familiar shelter in which they spent their laborious lives, happy in the faith and worship in which they rejoiced. Their reality consisted of both the visible and the invisible. (NA 100)
Stevens' lingering description perhaps glances at Psalm 121: from the firm framework of their door, the Zellers would have contemplated the hills from whence came their help and the Lord who preserved their going out and coming in. Their life incorporated religious symbol, ritual, and faith as simply as it did the plough and hay-rake. Significantly, the Zellers remind Stevens of a "stout old Lutheran [who] felt about his church very much as the Irish are said to feel about God" (NA 100). More significantly, the Zellers are Stevens' blood, neither an abstraction nor an example but a living presence.
Stevens' poems about John Zeller stem from the quarrel between the great-grandfather and the skeptical realist in him: the one who "would sacrifice a great deal to be a Saint Augustine" and the other who replies, "but modernity is so Chicagoan, so plain, so unmeditative" (LWS 32). "The Bed of Old John Zeller" affirms the first of these competitors, "Two Versions of the Same Poem" the second. "The Bed of Old John Zeller" finds the poet, like the ephebe of "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," tossing in bed. His is "voluble dumb violence" (CP 384): he cannot bellow like the lion, since he is alienated from his instinct, nor can he sing like the angel, since he is alienated from his spirit. He is not, however, alienated from old John Zeller, who lies within him as he lies within old John's bed. It is
as if one's grandfather lay
In one's heart and wished as he had always wished,
unable
To sleep in that bed for its disorder.
(CP 327)
The poet is searching for an invisible structure of ideas which will fit and explain the visible, chaotic structure of things. Counting possible structures, "these ghostly sequences / Of the mind" (CP 326), as he might count sheep, the poet merely adds his "own disorder to disaster" and "makes more of it" (CP 326). This is, Stevens seems to feel, a fatal process. The structure of things without an explicating structure of ideas is chaos. Chaos produces despair, which in turn produces "the habit of wishing": nostalgia and self-delusion. In this process, the thinker inevitably loses touch with reality, falsifying the things of the earth as he progressively refines himself out of existence. At least, Stevens concludes, for old John Zeller, alienated from neither instinct nor spirit, "it was the structure / Of things ... that was thought of in the old peak of night" (CP 327). Old John was at home in a religion which fused things and ideas, the visible and the invisible. Ideas had a tangible reality, so that the hills outside his door seemed to be the Lord who made and kept him.
In "Two Versions of the Same Poem," old John Zeller "stands / On his hill, watching the rising and falling" of the "human ocean" (CP 354). The sea is Stevens' customary image for chaos, the structure of things which defies any fixed structure of ideas. Like Crispin and the Doctor of Geneva, John Zeller confronts the sea and is at a loss. His structure of ideas, like Crispin's burgherhood and the Doctor of Geneva's Calvinism, is irrelevant. As if to emphasize old John's quaintness, Stevens makes him the exponent of a medieval theory. Zeller divides the mass into its elements — "sea, earth, sky — water // And fire and air" — and then, ineffectually, recognizes that "there is no golden solvent here" (CP 355). There is nothing quintessential, nothing that would be to the masses what John Zeller's faith was to him: an essence that permeated all nature and composed the heavens. Old John is as irrelevant to the world of Owl's Clover as the orderly old Pennsylvania Lutherans in "Dutch Graves in Bucks County" are to the turmoil of World War II. When Stevens addresses the Lutherans as "you, my semblables, whose ecstasy / Was the glory of heaven in the wilderness" (CP 292), the title is, as Joseph N. Riddel notes, "honorific yet ironic": they are to be admired, perhaps even envied, but they will not be resurrected to deliver us from evil.
Stevens' pilgrimage to the Zeller home in September 1948 was part of his persistent and intense investigation of family origins. Genealogical research consumed much of Stevens' time, patience, and passion between the years 1942 and 1952, and it involved not only over four hundred dry and detailed letters remaining from this period but also the more lyric, if uncompleted, project for a Hymn to J. Zeller (LWS 792). Yet this pilgrimage to the Susquehanna Valley occurred as well in homage to Stevens' own youth. He was once, as the Zellers once were, "completely satisfied that behind every physical fact there is a divine force" (LWS 32). In Stevens' early letters and journals, it is difficult to sort the postured from the heartfelt, but two things are clear. He longed for the full, familial relationship with God and the land which the Zellers' faith had provided them, and he tended, at least during his New York years, to come alive only on Sundays. On Sundays, Stevens exercised his two principal forms of piety: homage to God in nature and homage to God in church. One Sunday in August 1902, after an hour in Saint Patrick's Cathedral and a seven-teen-and-a-half mile walk — "a good day's jaunt" — Stevens contrasted his two deities: the presence in the cathedral and the presence on the highway. "The priest in me," he wrote, "worshipped one God at one shrine; the poet another God at another shrine. The priest worshipped Mercy and Love; the Poet, Beauty and Might" (LWS 59).
Mercy and Love appealed, Stevens confessed, in his "more lonely moods" (LWS 58). In church he preferred "dark corners ... a great nave, quiet lights, a remote voice, a soft choir and solitude" (LWS 86): a sensuous, stimulating, yet isolating solace. He enjoyed hearing the prayers of men and women and "dreaming with the Congregation" (LWS 59), but his love and mercy were vulnerable to fits of snobbish misanthropy. "Impossible to be religious in a pew," he shuddered after one Sunday in 1906. "Near me was a doddering girl of, say, twenty — idiot eyes, spongy nose, shining cheeks." In her homemade bonnet, she made him feel that "human qualities, on an average, are fearful subjects for contemplation" (LWS 86). Churches are "beautiful and full of comfort and moral help," Stevens wrote his wife-to-be in 1907, yet, he rather jauntily asserted, "they do not 'influence' any but the 'stupid'" (LWS 96).
If Stevens the skeptic is something of a dandy, Stevens the jaunty woodland tramper sounds much like Emerson and Whitman. A journal entry from 1899 is revealing. First, Stevens, like Emerson finding particular natural facts symbols of particular spiritual facts, affirms a divine force behind every physical fact. Then, like Emerson, he cautions himself not to "look at facts, but through them." With a flourish reminiscent of Whitman, he signs off "in this phrase alone: Salut au Monde!" (LWS 32-33). Echoes of Emerson and Whitman, however, can be misleading. Unlike the Transcendentalist, Stevens finds physical fact more enticing than divine force. His precise, loving descriptions of nature usually stop with sunset colors, the sounds of rain, "the wet sides of leaves glitter[ing] like plates of steel" (LWS 62). His intuitions of God seem more often a distraction than a passion. Sometimes they seem mere self-conscious conceit, as when, for instance, he noted that "stalks of golden rod burned in the shadows like flambeaux in my temple" (LWS 60-61).Stevens may have felt like Whitman when he "went tramping through the fields and woods [and] beheld every leaf and blade of grass revealing or rather betokening the Invisible" (LWS 59),but his Salut au Monde was not nearly as generous and expansive. He was, for example, revolted to find eggshells in the woods; they were, like the dingy girl in church, sure signs of humanity "loafing in my temple" (LWS 62).
Nature makes "a god of man," Stevens summarized, "but a chapel makes a man of him" (LWS 96). Neither was entirely satisfactory, and his attitude toward both lapsed easily into pose. But, he continually reaffirmed, "the feeling of piety is very dear to me" (LWS 32). "Piety" is a word Stevens never used in his poetry. When he uses it again in prose, it excludes the superfluous and defines his lasting concern. "I write poetry," he confessed in 1944, "because it is part of my piety" (LWS 473). His reverence was no longer for the action of God in nature. It involved instead the action of imagination in reality. It was not flippantly that in 1953, reprimanding an insistent scholar, he remarked, "I believe in pure explication de texte. This may in fact be my principal form of piety" (LWS 793). Poetry, or the imagination's explication of reality, became Stevens' piety.
The piety Stevens admitted in 1944 carries the emotional commitment of the piety he experienced in 1899, and, perhaps partly for that reason, when it emerges in his poetry it often assumes shapes traditionally given to the expression of religious piety. Stevens' use of biblical forms, symbols, and echoes is, like his search for a substitute for religion, a habit of mind. It evinces his desire, often difficult to tell from despair, to establish a poetic religion, one in which imagination replaces God as the prime mover. Stevens respected the church, and he wanted what it had provided the Zellers: a direct, encompassing relation with the visible and the invisible. The skeptic in him, however, knew reality had changed so thoroughly and violently that the old structure of ideas no longer fitted the new structure of things. His transmutation of the church's forms and symbols reveals his reverence for the accuracy that must admit a new structure of things. It also reveals his need for the old structure of ideas which the church had once embodied.
The major biblical forms that Stevens uses in his poetry are the parable, the proverb, the prayer, the hymn, and the psalm. The parable is usually defined as a brief narrative from which a moral can be drawn, but it differs from the short story or illustrative joke, also brief and pointed narratives, in several ways. First, and importantly, it is for us a specifically biblical form with a religious or ethical rather than a social or psychological aim. Although there are some Old Testament parables, the form is principally identified with Christ. The New Testament records forty-seven parables. They range from simple figurative statements, such as the comparison of the kingdom of God with a mustard seed (Mark 4.31), to more lengthy, involved, and developed narratives, such as the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10.25-37), but each embodies a lesson to be learned by the faithful. Secondly, therefore, the intent is not primarily to amuse but to instruct. This has implications for the tone, since it distances the speaker from his audience. He is not a raconteur currying favor or an ancient mariner craving attention but a calm, detached teacher. This may involve some condescension, for the speaker's effort is to lead the unenlightened to an understanding of a difficult ethical situation through a comparison with a more simple, earthy, familiar situation. It may also involve some elitism, since inevitably the audience divides into the sheep who comprehend and the goats who do not, and perhaps cannot. Christ, explaining his method to the disciples, distinguishes between their knowledge and that of the masses: "It is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. ... Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing, see not; and hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand" (Matthew 13.11,13). The burden of penetrating the mystery is on the audience rather than on the narrator: in the Old Testament, God commands and men obey; in the New Testament, Christ hints and men ponder. Finally, as a result of its structure, the parable is what Stevens terms one of the "effects of analogy" (NA 105). It demands the pondering of parallels. For this reason, it may, but need not, be an allegory in which each character or object stands for an abstraction otherwise hard to grasp. The danger here is that, as Stevens points out with reference to Bunyan, "the other meaning divides our attention and this diminishes our enjoyment of the story." The ideal which he sought in his parables was the conjunction of concrete and abstract: "the story and the other meaning should come together like two aspects that combine to produce a third or, if they do not combine, inter-act, so that one influences the other and produces an effect similar in kind to the prismatic formations that occur about us in nature" (NA 109). Stevens' parables are always doctrinal, sometimes condescending and elitist, and usually intricate in their analogy, but they are always a fusion of the concrete and the abstract, the visible and the invisible.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wallace Stevens by Adalaide Kirby Morris. Copyright © 1974 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Acknowledgments, pg. ix
- Abbreviations, pg. xi
- Introduction, pg. 1
- 1. Lineage and Language: Stevens' Religious Heritage, pg. 9
- 2. The Deaf-Mute Church and the Chapel of Breath, pg. 45
- 3. A Mystical Theology: Stevens' Poetic Trinity, pg. 82
- 4. How to Live, What to Do, pg. 136
- Selected Bibliography, pg. 189
- Index, pg. 197
- Princeton Essays in Literature, pg. 205