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 