Wally Steve - Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Always at the end of an era

Wallace Stevens: The Thing Itself

I’m a medium poetry guy.¹ One of the poets I really love is Wallace Stevens. I come back to him every so many years the way I do with favorite musicians or albums—to wit, my propensity for going through periodic, intense, and relatively brief Neil Young and Elvis Costello phases. I was talking with my friend Yael the other night. We covered a lot of ground, and it was one of those conversations where the question of what it was we were actually talking about was largely what we were talking about. (I have a lot of conversation like this, as most of the time I’m just trying to figures out what’s going on.) During our talk, a favorite line from Stevens came into my head—a line I have pulled onto my sampler (SP-404!) but haven’t yet done anything with: “Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself.” It’s not actually a line; It’s a title.

There’s a starkness in this line that I like, and that starkness is offset by the nonsensical assertion of “the thing itself” using language—a system that requires abstraction from signified to signifier, a system that by its nature traffics exclusively in ideas, not things—in, of all places, the title of a poem—the most idea and least thing place of all.

There are a few recordings of Stevens reading his poems. Here’s the one mentioned above:

Stevens’s delivery underscores the impression I’ve gotten of him, which is that he was not fucking around. But he was also consistently silly, to wit: “such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk” from the dramatic monologue “A High-toned Old Christian Woman” being an example of his brand of silliness, which largely consists of revelry on the beachhead where waves of sense beat endlessly against the shore of nonsense, and sometimes manifests as a bunch of sounds rather than some words purporting to contain meaning. The brief “Bantams in the Pine-Woods” included on the album linked above contains examples of this sound-over-sense move.

Stevens is one of those creative figures where I remember the very first time I encountered his work. I was driving my 1987 Buick Century to school my senior year of drudgery in high school in rural Georgia. The car had only a radio, no tape or CD player, and I was deeply invested in Georgia State’s now-defunct college radio station 88.5, or Album 88. A lot of my musical taste from the middle of high school until I got to Athens for college developed thanks to this station. This morning they were playing a rendition of someone reading “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” In my memory there was jazzy accompaniment. It wasn’t Wallace himself reading, but I don’t know who it was. I’ve never found a recording that I’m sure was the one I heard that morning. Maybe it was this one, but I really hate this recording of this really great poem:

Regardless, the words punched through that morning. I caught the phrase “finale of seem,” which I was familiar with from a They Might Be Giants song that cribs the line. I also grabbed onto the primary juxtaposition of imperiality and a melty dairy treat. I’ve been a fan ever since. I started reading Stevens soon thereafter, locating this poem and a precious few others in my English class lit. anthology.

Stevens is interesting too in that, like Kafka, he had a highly successful professional career outside his writing life. Wallace worked in insurance and was an executive for most of his active writing and publishing career. There’s something fascinating to me about these people, whose creative output seems so distant from the workaday world, also succeeding in the professional world where their ideas and dispositions are so out of place.

When I started my Stevens binge this time around I ventured outside his verse and read a small volume of essays, The Necessary Angel, which is a compilation of papers he was invited to write—in the way that celebrated poets are periodically called upon to explain what poetry is. I usually find essays like these silly-in-a-bad-way (not silly-in-a-good-way like Stevens’s poetry)—like pretentious without saying anything. I was really struck by these essays, however. For example, he describes poetry as “a search for some supremely acceptable fiction,” and elsewhere calls poetry (along with painting), “sources of our present conception of reality.”

I think there’s something here. Wallace point seems to be that poetry is an attempt to say how things are, to get at “the thing itself,” so to speak. The mediation of language simultaneously makes that attempt possible, but also limits its success. This makes the whole endeavor kind of pointless if you were to think of such a project as akin to a logical proof. The proof can’t work out “the thing itself” using words words words. I’m getting twisted up here. There’s some connection I can’t quite articulate with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and the unsuitability of language as a conveyance of experience, a la Wittgenstein. And all of that is maybe a way of saying Stevens seems to be circling around the same set of questions as many of my pet obsessions, and he isn’t afraid to get a little mystical.

Here are a few more quotations from Stevens’s essays that are worthy of appreciative write-ups unto themselves, and after those (beyond the paywall) I’ll share the results of some light and utterly pointless statistical analysis of an arbitrary selection of some of my favorite of his poems. The quotations:

“I suppose that the present always appears to be an illogical complication”

“A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words”

“what is central to philosophy is its least valuable part”

“I fear we have always substituted illusory problems for the real ones” quoting Henry Bradley, editor of the OED

“The accuracy of accurate letters is an accuracy with respect to the structure of reality”

Collage of the day: Venus in Furs

Subscriber collage: Crossroads

I’ve done a couple of art markets lately. It’s fun and it’s a chance to see how people react to what I’m doing. Anyway, someone bought this one!