A perceptive, enlightening biography of one the most important American poets of the twentieth century--Wallace Stevens--as seen through his lifelong quest to find and describe the sublime in the human experience. Wallace Stevens lived a richly imaginative life that found expression in his poetry. His philosophical questioning, spiritual depth, and brilliantly inventive use of language would be profound influences on poets as diverse as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. The Whole ...
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A perceptive, enlightening biography of one the most important American poets of the twentieth century--Wallace Stevens--as seen through his lifelong quest to find and describe the sublime in the human experience. Wallace Stevens lived a richly imaginative life that found expression in his poetry. His philosophical questioning, spiritual depth, and brilliantly inventive use of language would be profound influences on poets as diverse as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times, as well as the creator of a poetry which has had a profound and lasting impact on the modern imagination itself. Stevens established his career as an executive even as he wrote his poetry, becoming a vice president with an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. His first and most influential book, Harmonium, was not published until he was forty-four years old. In these poems, Stevens drew on his interest in and understanding of modernism. Over time he became acquainted with the most accomplished of his contemporaries, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams among them, but his personal style remained unique. He endured an increasingly unhappy marriage, losing himself by writing poetry in his study. Yet he had a witty, comic, and Dionysian side to his personality, including long fishing (and drinking) trips to Florida with his pals and a fascination with the sun-drenched tropics. People generally know two things about Wallace Stevens: that he is a "difficult" poet and that he was an insurance executive for most of his life. Stevens may be challenging to understand, but he is also greatly rewarding to read. Now, sixty years after Stevens's death, biographer and poet Paul Mariani shows how over the course of his life, Stevens sought out the ineffable and spiritual in human existence in his search for the sublime.
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I have returned to the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879 -- 1955) many times in my adult life and was glad to find this new biography, "The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens" (2016) by Paul Mariani. The University Professor of English at Boston University, Mariani has published several volumes of poetry together with biographies of the American poets Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Hart Crane, and now Stevens. I read and learned from Mariani's biography of Crane, "The Broken Tower" which I reviewed in 2002 on Amazon.
I have loved Stevens' difficult poetry for its own sake. He has inspired me over the years in his ability to combine artistic achievement with career success as a lawyer and executive for an insurance company. Other 20th century Americans who combined career with art include W.C. Williams and the composer Charles Ives. Williams and Stevens knew each other well, and their friendship is discussed in this biography. Ives and Stevens apparently did not know one another, and the parallels and differences in their lives may be a subject for exploration.
I also have loved Stevens for the strongly philosophical cast of his poetry. He is one of the rare poets who work in the realm of thought as well as in the concreteness of experience. The philosophical tenor of Stevens' poetry owes something to his student years at Harvard where he got to know George Santayana and, to a lesser extent, Josiah Royce. I have been studying the American idealist philosopher Josiah Royce in recent years. In reading Mariani's biography, I saw parallels between his absolute idealism and Stevens' absolute fiction that I hadn't thought about before.
In reading a biography of a person one admires, the reader sometimes learns about the person for what he is, separately from the person's accomplishments or from the reader's picture of him. There is a tendency to over-intellectualize or to idealize. I found this the case in learning about Stevens through Mariani's biography. Stevens was frequently petty, cold, wedded to business, and uninspiring. There is always something inexplicable about how a very human, fallible person could rise to great accomplishment. With Stevens, this is sometimes jarring.
Mariani's biography, for me, tended to separate rather than integrate Stevens the man from Stevens the poet. Part of the separation is a result of Steven's publication of his first book of poems, "Harmonium" in his early 40s. Thus the early parts of Mariani's biography concentrate on Stevens' life, including his childhood in Reading, Pennsylvania, his studies at Harvard, his years as a young struggling journalist in New York City, and his courtship and marriage. Mariani describes Stevens' efforts in poetry and his formation of ties in modernist literary circles during this years but the focus is on the person. When the book reaches the publication of "Harmonium" and the second half of Stevens' long life, the focus changes. To a degree, the reader loses site of Stevens the person. Instead, the biography becomes more a work of literary criticism as Mariani studies many of Stevens' poems while offering interpretation of them based on Stevens' life. The book comes into its own with the literary interpretations more than with the straightforward biography, granting that the two would be intertwined in the biography of a poet. In addition to the poetry, Mariani also discusses and analyzes the many lectures and essays on the nature of poetry that Stevens gave in his latter years.
Throughout his book, Mariani discusses the imagination and its relationship to reality in Stevens' poetry. Early in the study, he offers the following interesting observation.
"After all, the imagination had to be served, because most people -- himself included -- lived far too ordered lives and moved in the same monotonous groove day after day. Life was what humans cried out for, and that was not to be found in going to and from work on the subway. What mattered most was breathing in the pure oxygen of the imagination. Wasn't Poe's short, tragic life far more exciting than the life people like himself led, surrounded as they were by walls: office walls, apartment walls, yes, and the walls of the subway stations they found themselves imprisoned in each day?"
I learned a great deal about Steven's poetry, his response to the World Wars and to politics. As mentioned above, I also saw a great deal more into Stevens' philosophy than I had known before. The study enhanced my appreciation of Stevens. But with the exception of the ten years between the publication of "Harmonium" and his next book, and the account of Stevens' death bed conversion to Catholicism, his life largely drops out in the latter sections of the book. In fact, many scholars have questioned the claim that Stevens converted at the end of his life or at any time. Helen Vendler makes this point, and many others, in her critical review of Mariani's biography, "Wallace Stevens: The Real and the Made-Up" published in the July 14, 2016, New York Review of Books. With Vendler's criticisms in mind, I still find Mariani's book useful.
I found much to admire and to learn from in this curmudgeonly, private modernist poet. With his conservative politics, Stevens defies current stereotypes and to a degree stereotypes in his day as well. I still have my admiration for Stevens' combination of poetry with the business world but am less taken with the latter after reading this book. The biography could have used an introductory chapter or overview to tie the work together. As it stands, the book seems to me divided between a biography and a literary analysis. Still, I found this book provocative and thoughtful. It has encouraged me to reread Stevens again with older and perhaps more informed eyes. He is a uniquely philosophical poet whose works mean a great deal to me, as Mariani reminded me in this fine book.
