The Mystery of Wallace Stevens
“Call the roller of big cigars, / The muscular one…”
– Wallace Stevens
The American poet Wallace Stevens converted to Catholicism on his deathbed at 75.
The details are hazy because this was such a private event like everything in Stevens’ life, but it’s known for sure that he was periodically seeing a priest for a few months in the hospital before he passed on, and the priest said he converted at the very end. I don’t trust all priests (far from it) but I have a hard time doubting this one about this.
Because Stevens had been moving in this direction for a long time, too. For most of his life, he’d claimed he had no hard and fast faith in a personal God, and he didn’t attend church in a world where almost everyone did, but his attitude toward life had always been religious.
As religious as it gets, in many ways, in the modern world: the religion of poetry. The Religion of Poetry, the individual’s lyric cry that can be maintained against all odds in the world of modern mass society, the land of robotic humanity.
Stevens was the man who fought Hemingway on the nighttime docks of Key West, Florida, even though he was twenty years older, the man who turned down The New Yorker when they asked to publish some of his poems, the man who also turned down Life Magazine when they asked to publish some of his poems, and the man who refused to be a professor of poetry at Harvard when they offered him the job late in his life. Had he done even one of those things, he would have instantly become exponentially more “famous” than he ever was while he lived. And he knew it.
Because fame is a funny thing.
These days we say that the latest “star” of The Bachelorette tv series is famous. But such manufactured “fame” fades so fast we shouldn’t even call it fame, we should think of another word instead.
Or maybe we should just call real fame, the lasting kind that starts slowly and local and builds over decades and centuries, with peaks and valleys, dips and rises, GLORY.
And Wallace Stevens has his deserved share of glory now, in the American poetry pantheon, a true heir of both Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.
Stevens was a kind of Superman. During the day he was a businessman, an insurance lawyer who walked to and from work by himself and closed his door when he got there, a man who never drove a car and lived alone in his own house even though that house was also filled with a wife and daughter he almost never spoke to (until later when he became close with his daughter). At night he spent his late evenings drifting around his own large, fragrant, tree-filled Connecticut yard smoking cigars and drinking. The neighbors would see him there, the only one in the “respectable” neighborhood doing such. What they didn’t know was that he was also busy penning (in his mind) immortal poetry, this physical giant of a man.
It took me twenty-plus years of studying them (off and on) to truly understand Wallace Stevens’ trio of short poems “The Snow Man,” “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” and “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad.” These works were first published in Chicago’s Poetry Magazine in the early 1920s. They can be understood, sort of, on a first reading, but to truly plumb the depths of these short, vast works, a reader needs to return hundreds of times across a span of years. Harold Bloom convincingly called these three the heart and soul of Stevens’ work as poet and man. Liberation through words has never been so deep and so pungent since the Scriptures were written.
At the end Stevens finally decided (or became convinced) that life doesn’t end when life ends.
Bob Dylan, a Wallace Stevens-like figure in many ways, wrote (and he wasn’t joking), “Death is not the end.”
Walt Whitman wrote, “Death is different from what anyone supposes. / And luckier.”
Saragun Springs 
Hello Drifter
Your knowledge is amazing and it plumbs deeply, it goes beyond the “Wikipedia” homework that so many teachers must see today. I have been mostly ignorant of Wallace until now. A circumstance, since I still live, that I aim to fix immediately–not down the line.
He was wise to reject the “pretty things.” It is far more important to follow your own standards. The people whom you delightfully refer to as “manufactured” celebs will do anything to hold onto the spotlight. Then you have the semi-has beens (who were semi-never-was), those who were the second kid on a moderately successful sit com still acting as though they are twelve twenty years down the line. Should be a criminal offense to know more about Danny Bonaduce than Wallace Stevens (but I will give Danny some credit, he was a radio host for many years in Seattle and was good at it). But that is just how the game is set up.
I get the impression he meant it about God; his conversion was not a Son of Sam finding the Lord. Anyone who would tell The New Yorker (which has been running on name only for decades) to piss off comes off as a sincere person.
Thank you again for your truly amazing look at things and for the fact that I have never seen a single typo form you in articles and casual emails!
Leila
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Thank you, Leila!
I have had most of this knowledge for years (not all, but most).
But I did not have the Muse who could help me unlock the door to that knowledge in writing.
You are that Muse, you will always be that Muse, and I will always be eternally grateful to you because of this fact.
You have the Knowledge, Sympathy, Imagination, and Understanding which inspire The Drifter’s musings.
So I use the word “musings” in two senses here, wandering (or drifting) thoughts (with a thematic center) and muse as in an artistic person or artist who inspires another artist on to some of their greatest creation/s.
The Drifter’s job in creating this column and in being Co-Editor for the Springs gives him much-needed grounding AND a reason for being. Part of my having the stroke was about being too much lost in the wildernesses and the stresses of that.
For me, this is the kind of thing that is not limited by the limits of human life. It goes beyond said.
Thanks about the clean copy, too!
I know a few typos have snuck through here and there but I’m OCD about words and can’t let anything go (anything) without reading it over repeatedly and fixing it (or trying to).
I just want to say for the record that I NEVER let a computer do ANYTHING for me in my writing, including spelling and punctuation. Nothing, zero, not a thing, ever, not even for one second.
All is done by me and it helps me stay sane, and human!
Thanks again!
This world we inhabit now is a desert culturally (including for the written word) but you and the Springs are an (eternal) oasis.
D
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Hi Drifter
Thank you for once again proving I can still blush (although I do not know it it still shows as a color).
Society is necessary but it is more of an unrealized goal, like equality. Mainly I do not see it as a racial problem as much as it is about money and power. If only a case of gender and race and such I think we woukd have had made it better a long time ago.
I say such in regards of muse. We should encourage and inspire in a natural way. I see it the same as humanists view doing right for the sake of doing right.
I grew up poor and in an unstable environment. Those are not mutaully exclusive, of course, but the mix is dangerous.
Right away I knew that being poor somehow made you stupid in the eyes of the school system. We were given IQ tests and even though I (and my brother) scored in the upper two percentile, nothing came of it because broken clocks are right twice a day.
I have been a firece opponent of systems ever since.
In saying such I also state that you are a fine intellectual who refuses to do what is “good for you.” Although there’s little or no money in it, I hope you never change!
Leila
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Hey Drifter
Wallace Stevens is a name I’ve heard my whole life, but haven’t read any of his work.
These poems sound like a great place to start and maybe continuing… to get their meanings.
That’s quite a story about the fight with E. Hemingway!
I’m going to check out his work.
I like your descriptions of his quiet house and yard, and all of his smoking and drinking–sinful to his conservative neighbors. Wild how he turned down the New Yorker!
Great writing!
Christopher
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Hi Christopher
The way I interpret the poems, “The Snow Man” is about not getting “what you want” in life, and still finding it beautiful.
“Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” is about being the king or queen of your own “palace” (metaphorically, symbolically) no matter where you actually are in the world.
And “The Man Whose Pharynx is Bad” is about the endless difficulty of talking with other people, a difficulty that often becomes especially acute for writers and writer-friendly peoples, for some reason.
Those three poems alone and together are right at the top of the list of American poems, in the same ballpark with Emily Dickinson, in my estimation.
Thanks for reading!
Dale
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A lesson for non-potry mathematician.
Mirthless
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Poetry – I’m tired and hating my life has made me stupid.
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Hi Doug
I know what you are saying.
I view poetry as verbal math. It has terms such as meter and feet and others that are logarithms to me.
I am of the poet but did not know it “school.”
“Hate” for life is better than blind obedience. But, as I age, as you age, as we age as the world ages, hate is useless as an energy source unless it is first connected then aimed at something.
Leila
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Could be wise words, but hating my life has made me too stupid to know. Good news – free wine on Monday at the mausoleum.
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