The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Wallace Stevens · a book of poems · Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1923 · scored as one body, the first edition as it is read, on Stevens’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Lyric book: the meditative ode in blank verse, the short lyric of perception, emblem and wit, comic and exotic verse, and a long comic voyage in blank verse, under one argument of imagination and reality
Mythos
A religion of the earth made inside a poem, a ring of men chanting to the sun “as a god might be”; Susanna and the Elders reworked as a myth of desire and of the body’s immortality; the American poet as Crispin on his voyage; and the emblems of the jar, the snow man, Hoon and the emperor
Phase
A Sunday from late breakfast to the evening flight of pigeons, a winter day, a night at ten o’clock, and a voyage out of France into a new country
Presentation
Poems; the first edition of 1923, written and mostly first printed in magazines between about 1914 and 1922; among them one of eight stanzas of fifteen lines, one of thirteen numbered sections, one of twelve stanzas of eleven lines, one in four parts, and a long poem in six parts
Register
From the grave blank verse of the meditative ode to the bare lyric of one sentence, the gaudy and foreign-flavoured comic diction, the nonsense that is not nonsense, and the ornamental verse paragraph of the voyage
Scale
One mind before the world it perceives; a room, a hill, a landscape and a coast; eros in youth and in middle age; the earth without a god
Governing Proposition
A woman at her late breakfast on a Sunday morning faces the end of belief, and is answered that the earth must be enough and that death is the mother of beauty; around her meditation stand a listener in a winter landscape who becomes nothing himself, a jar placed on a hill in Tennessee that takes dominion over the wilderness, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, a lady told that poetry is the supreme fiction, a poem whose only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream, and the comic voyage of Crispin from Bordeaux to the Carolinas. The wager of the book is that the imagination, acting on a reality it cannot master, can make a world sufficient without a god, and that one law speaks in grave blank verse and in gaudy play.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Harmonium was published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1923. It was Wallace Stevens’s first book of poems, and he was forty-four, a lawyer at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. The poems had been written, and most of them first printed, over some eight years, from about 1914 to 1922, in Poetry, Others, The Dial and other magazines. The book scored here is the first edition of 1923. A second edition followed in 1931, and Stevens authorised both; the second is part of the book’s history, and it is not the text weighed here.
The book’s central poem opens at a late breakfast: “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair”. A woman sits in the morning among things that please her, and the poem follows her mind as it turns from them to the question that the morning has raised: belief has gone, and what is left when it has. “Sunday Morning” is the book’s meditative ode, eight stanzas of fifteen lines of blank verse, 120 lines in all, its verse paragraphs long enough for a mind to turn away from its question and come back to it.
Harriet Monroe printed five of its stanzas in Poetry in 1915, in a different order. The book restores all eight. Around the poem it gathers pieces of every size, from a single sentence in fifteen lines to a voyage in six parts, the grave beside the gaudy, the meditation beside the joke. The title names both the instrument and the principle: a harmonium is a small reed organ, and a harmony is a sounding of many voices together.
Movement II
The poem answers the woman’s question without returning her to the faith she has lost. The earth must be enough. What was divine is not abolished but moved, from a heaven to the woman and to the world she lives in: “Divinity must live within herself”. The argument is made slowly, a stanza at a time, each paragraph of blank verse turning on what the last has said.
At its centre stands the sentence on which the book turns: “Death is the mother of beauty”. Mortality is not the price of beauty but its source. In the seventh stanza the poem builds what it has argued for. It imagines a ring of men chanting “their boisterous devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be”, a religion of the earth made inside the poem and offered to the century that had lost the other.
“Peter Quince at the Clavier”, in four parts, comes to the same argument through the body. It reworks the story of Susanna and the Elders, and rises from Susanna’s bath to its conclusion: “Beauty is momentary in the mind”, but “in the flesh it is immortal”. The close of “Sunday Morning” gives the argument its last image. At evening, in the isolation of the sky, flocks of pigeons sink in ambiguous undulations, “Downward to darkness, on extended wings”: a descent that is also a flight, and the end of the ode.
Movement III
“The Snow Man” begins with a requirement: “One must have a mind of winter”. Its fifteen lines, in five tercets, make one sentence, and the sentence empties the mind as it goes, until the listener in the snow, nothing himself, beholds “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”. It is the reverse of “Sunday Morning”: a perception from which the self’s projection has been taken away. It has been read as Buddhist, as Humean, as phenomenological, and as a poem against all three, and its last line still divides its readers.
Other short poems reach heights of their own by other means. “Domination of Black” builds dread from leaves, fire and “the cry of the peacocks”, in repetitions so timed that the dread gathers as they return. “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” gives the imagination’s claim its grandest form in a few lines: “I was the world in which I walked”.
“Anecdote of the Jar”, twelve lines long, sets the argument as an event: “I placed a jar in Tennessee”. One made thing, set on a hill, orders the wilderness around it and takes dominion over it. The poem rhymes and half rhymes around “round” and “ground” as the jar orders the hill. Its close keeps the made thing apart from what it rules: “It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee.”
Movement IV
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” sets out its knowledge in thirteen numbered sections, and none of them is privileged. One section finds a single moving point in a still world: “Among twenty snowy mountains, / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird.” What follows looks again, and again, from thirteen places, so that the bird is the sum of the ways of seeing it, and the beauty lies equally in “The blackbird whistling / Or just after”.
The book’s other mode is comic, and the comedy is exact. “Bantams in Pine-Woods” opens on a fanfare of internal rhyme and assonance: “Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt!” “The Plot Against the Giant” and “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” play with colour and with mood. “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” turns the comedy on its argument and names the book’s programme in one line addressed to the lady: “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame”.
“Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”, twelve stanzas of eleven lines, carries the dandy tradition of Laforgue into a meditation on eros in middle age. The inheritance is open throughout the book: the Romantic meditative lyric of Keats and Wordsworth, the French Symbolists, the Imagism of the 1910s. The turn is Stevens’s. It is a modernism unlike Eliot’s and Pound’s, hedonist rather than penitential, and of the American South and Florida rather than of London.
Movement V
“The Comedian as the Letter C” is the book’s longest poem, in six parts of blank verse. It follows Crispin on a voyage from Bordeaux to the Carolinas, and attempts in it a myth of the American poet, in which the proposition “man is the intelligence of his soil” turns over into “his soil is man’s intelligence”. Crispin remains a figure of comedy, and the poem’s diction, ornamental and self-delighting, spins the voyage out at length. Beside it stand the slighter pieces, “Floral Decorations for Bananas”, “Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges” and “Exposition of the Contents of a Cab”, which the body carries with the rest.
“The Emperor of Ice-Cream” is two stanzas of eight lines, and it ends on a couplet that is taught every year and has not been settled: “Let be be finale of seem. / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” It has been read as a wake, as a hedonist creed and as a joke about death, or as all three at once. Its nonsense is not nonsense; the play of a single word, “seem”, carries as much of the argument as any image in the book.
Harmonium appeared a year after The Waste Land and in the year of Spring and All, and for a decade it was eclipsed by both. Its reach came later, chiefly after the Collected Poems of 1954, which open with it, and through Stevens’s whole work into Ashbery, Merrill and Jorie Graham. Its central poems now stand in every anthology of American poetry. What they keep is the law the book holds from its ode to its jokes: the imagination acting on a reality it cannot master, grave in one key and comic in another.
Act III · The Twelve
At the level of the single poem the necessity is often absolute. “The Snow Man” is one sentence whose every clause is needed to arrive at its last line, “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”: take away a tercet and the listener never becomes nothing himself. “Anecdote of the Jar” and “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” could not lose a line. But the unit is the body, and at the level of the body the subtractive test bites. A first book gathered over eight years carries bagatelles that could go without loss, “Floral Decorations for Bananas” and “Exposition of the Contents of a Cab” among them, and its longest poem, “The Comedian as the Letter C”, is its least necessary: Crispin’s voyage is spun out in a diction so ornamental that whole verse paragraphs could be cut. The great poems would stand higher; the book stands here.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. In “Sunday Morning” a woman at her late breakfast faces the end of belief, and the poem answers that the earth must be enough, that “Divinity must live within herself”, and that “Death is the mother of beauty”: mortality is not the cost of beauty but its source. That is an articulated condition of the modern secular mind, and few poems state it more exactly. “The Snow Man” discloses the reverse, a perception emptied of the self’s projection, and “Anecdote of the Jar” shows how one made thing orders a wilderness and takes dominion over it. The book’s central argument, the imagination against reality, is real knowledge. Held below the top because a large share of the body discloses a mood, a colour or a wit, in the bantams, the peacocks and “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”, rather than a meaning.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The heights are among the highest of the century in the English lyric. The close of “Sunday Morning”, “Downward to darkness, on extended wings”, is a summit of American verse. “The Snow Man” reaches a cold elevation by subtraction. “Peter Quince at the Clavier” rises from Susanna’s bath to “Beauty is momentary in the mind” and to the body, where “in the flesh it is immortal”. “Domination of Black” builds dread from leaves, fire and “the cry of the peacocks”, and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” has grandeur in a few lines: “I was the world in which I walked”. Frequency is the charge. The book’s other mode is comic and exquisite, and the comic poems, “Bantams in Pine-Woods” and “The Plot Against the Giant”, delight without lifting. Elevation is frequent for a collection, but it is not continuous.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The book builds myth in a few places and evokes it in many. “Sunday Morning” builds: its seventh stanza imagines a ring of men chanting their devotion to the sun, “Not as a god, but as a god might be”, a religion of the earth made inside the poem. “Peter Quince at the Clavier” reworks Susanna and the Elders into a myth of desire and of the body’s immortality. “The Comedian as the Letter C” attempts a myth of the American poet, a voyage from Bordeaux to the Carolinas in which “man is the intelligence of his soil” turns to “his soil is man’s intelligence”; but Crispin stays a figure of comedy, and the myth does not bear the poem’s weight. The jar, the snow man, Hoon and the emperor are emblems more than archetypes: particular, memorable and load-bearing in their poems, but not myths a culture lives by. That holds the axis short of the bar.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is the Romantic meditative lyric, with Keats and Wordsworth behind “Sunday Morning”; the French Symbolists and the dandy tradition, with Laforgue behind “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”; and the Imagism of the 1910s. The turn is large and of a kind no contemporary made. A comic, gaudy, foreign-flavoured diction, “Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt!”, is put to the service of a philosophical poetry of mind and world, and a meditative blank verse keeps the grandeur of the Romantic ode while removing its God. It is a different modernism from Eliot’s and Pound’s: hedonist rather than penitential, and of the American South and Florida rather than of London. The stake was real: the first book of a forty-four-year-old lawyer, open to the charge of preciosity, which it largely drew.
Score: 8.8 / 10
In the best poems the form is the knowledge. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is an epistemology made into a structure: thirteen discontinuous views, none of them privileged, so that its argument, that reality is the sum of ways of seeing and that “The blackbird whistling / Or just after” are both its beauty, could not be made in a continuous poem. “The Snow Man”, fifteen lines in five tercets and one unbroken sentence, enacts the mind emptying as it reads. “Sunday Morning” needs the long blank verse paragraph for a meditation that turns and returns. “Anecdote of the Jar” rhymes and half rhymes around “round” and “ground” as the jar orders the hill. Held below the summit because the order of the book is not an argued form: Harmonium is a gathering, not a made sequence like Leaves of Grass, and “The Comedian as the Letter C” is a form that holds its content loosely.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The evidence is a century of re-examination without exhaustion. “The Snow Man” has been read as Buddhist, as Humean, as phenomenological, and as a poem against all three, and its last line still divides readers. “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, with its “Let be be finale of seem”, is taught every year and is not settled: a wake, a hedonist creed, a joke about death, or all three. “Sunday Morning” has carried arguments about secularism for a hundred years, and Stevens’s critics have returned to these poems across whole careers. The formal depth yields as much as the semantic: the sound, and the play of a single word such as “seem”, repay return as the meanings do. The charge is the slighter poems, which do not reward return, and which a body scored whole must carry.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is poetry in English of the twentieth century, American poetry first. The intrinsic force is high. The book made a new kind of poem, the comic and philosophical lyric of imagination and reality, and with “Sunday Morning” gave the secular century its great meditative ode; “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” names the programme: “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame”. What holds it below the top is that the reach was delayed and in part carried by later books. Harmonium appeared a year after The Waste Land (9.1 on this desk) and in the year of Spring and All, and for a decade it was eclipsed by both. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its influence came chiefly after the Collected Poems of 1954, through Stevens’s whole work, into Ashbery, Merrill and Jorie Graham and into the critical canon; and the poems of this book are those through which most readers and poets first meet Stevens.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and three years. Form: the text survives whole, in two editions both authorised by Stevens, with nothing lost, and nothing is charged to it. Presence has been continuous since the 1950s and wide in the English-speaking world: “Sunday Morning”, “The Snow Man”, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Anecdote of the Jar” stand in every anthology of American poetry and are taught every year, and Stevens is widely translated. The surface is not fixed to its moment. Two charges hold the axis where it stands. The book was little read in its first decade; and it is read now mostly as the first section of the Collected Poems and through its anthology pieces, chiefly in the academy and among poets rather than across the culture.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Stevens’s English, with no translation between. The ear is among the finest in the language. The blank verse of “Sunday Morning” stands at the level of Wordsworth’s and Keats’s, and its last stanza, where “casual flocks of pigeons make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink”, shows how a cadence can carry a meaning. The comic mode is mastered as fully: the internal rhyme and assonance of “Bantams in Pine-Woods”, the nonsense that is not nonsense of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, the timed repetitions of “Domination of Black”. In the best poems the exotic vocabulary is precise rather than decorative, and the making bears the weight. Held from the top by “The Comedian as the Letter C”, where the diction becomes self-delighting and clotted, and by a strain of preciosity in the minor poems.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the grave meditation of “Sunday Morning” and the gaudy play of “Bantams in Pine-Woods” or “The Plot Against the Giant”. They obey one law. Both are acts of the imagination upon a reality it cannot master, and the comedy is the gravity in another key. The title admits as much: a harmonium is a small reed organ, and a harmony of many voices. The range is wide, and the law holds across most of it. Narrowness is not the issue; looseness is. As a gathering of eight years’ magazine poems, the book admits pieces that sit outside its physics as occasional verse, and “The Comedian as the Letter C”, which argues for plainness, contradicts its own argument by its style.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what the body holds, as a book of lyrics, and not marked down for being short beyond what it holds. Consciousness, fully: perception, imagination, the self as “the world in which I walked”. The sacred and its ending, in “Sunday Morning” and “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”. The natural order, in Florida, Tennessee and the Carolinas, the seasons and the winter. Death, at the emperor’s wake and on the Sunday morning. Sexuality and the body, in “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and the middle-aged eros of “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”. Art itself. They are integrated by one argument, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the book leaves out: the family barely appears, labour and the state not at all, and history only as the voyage of Crispin.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.1, then The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.0. An ear among the finest in the language, in the blank verse of “Sunday Morning” and in the timed comedy of “Bantams in Pine-Woods” and “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” alike; a century of re-examination that has settled neither “The Snow Man” nor the emperor; and a text that survives whole, its central poems anthologised and taught every year.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: consciousness, the sacred and its ending, the natural order, death, the body and art itself, held by one argument; the family barely present, labour and the state absent, and history only as Crispin’s voyage. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.1: single poems that could not lose a line, in a body that carries removable bagatelles and a longest poem whose verse paragraphs could be cut. Then The Archetypal Deep at 8.2: one myth built, in “Sunday Morning”, and elsewhere emblems that do not become archetypes.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.1, The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.8, The Unconcealment at 8.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 falls short by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.1, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. The aggregate, 8.6, stands in Tier IV in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium, his first book of poems, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1923, and scored as one body: the first edition of 1923, as it is read. The second edition of 1931 is named as context only and is not weighed. The poems weighed most are “Sunday Morning”, “The Snow Man”, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”, “The Comedian as the Letter C”, “Anecdote of the Jar”, “Domination of Black”, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”, “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”, “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” and “Bantams in Pine-Woods”; the slighter pieces, “Floral Decorations for Bananas”, “The Plot Against the Giant”, “Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges” and “Exposition of the Contents of a Cab”, are weighed as part of the body and not set aside. Every axis is judged on Stevens’s English, with no translation between. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text beyond the stanza forms and line counts of the poems named, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where its words are certain, briefly, and cited by poem; other lines are paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of poems in each edition and the poems dropped and added in 1931, the order of the poems in 1923 and the poems that open and close the book, the length of “The Comedian as the Letter C” in lines, the size and sale of the first printing and its first notices, the date of Stevens’s next book, and the names of the critics who have written on it.