Though I'm trying to read the authors on my CAE in chronological order, Wallace Stevens, whom I studied in class this week, jumps forward from William Bradford by about 300 years, and from Walt Whitman by about 80 years. However, since I was studying him for my class on sound, noise and silence in American literature, I tried to form some impressions of Stevens' poetry that would assist me in fitting him into American literature as a whole.
Wallace Stevens was a Modernist poetry who wrote in the first half of the twentieth century. The Modernist tendencies of his work--it avoids, or even rejects, realism, and experiments with form, rhythm, and metre to break away from traditional poetic conventions--help, I think, when we formulate our expectations of his work. I think we all, whether consciously or not, approach our reading with certain expectations of what the reading experience will be like, and if we approach the poetry of Stevens with the expectation that, with a little close reading, we'll be able to form a fairly coherent interpretation of his poems, we are (or at least I am) bound to be thwarted. Instead, I find it helpful, when reading Modernist poetry, to think about how the work is self-consciously being not traditional.
Part of my favourite poem that we studied, "The Idea of Order at Key West," is below (visit the link for the full poem. Tip for reading poetry - read it out loud. You'll get much more out of reading it out loud once than you will reading it silently):
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
What I love about this poem, particularly this first half of it, which I've reproduced here, is its rejection of the romantic poetic trope of rhapsodizing over the lovely woman who "belongs" in nature. A common trope in English literature involves characterizing female characters or figures as somehow more "in touch" with, or connected to, nature than men are. To be naturally at home in a picturesque, natural environment is to be feminine; to have an antagonistic relationship with "land" that must be conquered is to be masculine. The woman who lovingly seems to "understand" the plants and flowers surrounding her, the woman who seems as if she can somehow communicate with nature. This link between women and nature, so common in traditional English poetry and prose, occurs, ultimately, to establish the woman's maternality (whether already realized, or merely potential). Why is the woman so "in touch" with nature in ways that the masculine cannot be? Because nature is fertile, and so is the woman, ideally. The growth and new life associated with nature serves to accentuate the ways in which woman, through her own ability to produce life, is different from man.
Clearly, characterizing women through their fictive connection to nature (we'll call it the Earth Mother trope) is problematic for a few reasons:
- It's a way of representing a woman as, ultimately, an archetype and not as a character with any kind of complex subjectivity.
- . It's a way of reducing women to her most "essential" female characteristics -- i.e. the maternal. I think it's easy to see how making this the ultimate measure of femininity and personhood perpetuates rigid gender roles that confine women to the domestic space.
- . The "charming" connection of the feminine to nature can be a means of infantalizing the woman -- she has more in common with animals and flowers than with "real" humans (men).
So, I just love how Stevens thwarts this trope in "The Idea of Order"; while the woman in this poem remains a figure about whom we know very little, she can't simply be reduced to the natural landscape surrounding her: "For she was the maker of the song she sang. / The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea/ Was merely a place by which she walked to sing." In other words, she is more than the sea. Rather than anthropomorphizing the sea to forge a connection between the woman and the sea, Stevens subjugates the sea to the woman, as merely a setting for her to produce her song ("the song and water were not medleyed sound"). No goofy, romanticized "she sings the song of the ocean, and look how lovely it is to say that the woman is the sea" for Stevens.
While I'm not at all convinced that Stevens is deliberately making a proto-feminist argument here, I do think he's rejecting poetic conventions here to highlight, potentially, the absurdity of equating and reducing a person to her surroundings: "When she sang, the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song, for she was the maker." All this poetic language that turns object of nature into people, he says, that's not real. The ocean doesn't have a self, but if you insist, it's subjugated to her. She's the one with the personhood here.
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15749#sthash.AlshoDdu.dpuf
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15749#sthash.AlshoDdu.dpuf
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15749#sthash.AlshoDdu.dpuf
