I am a graduate of Brooklyn Law School, and proud of it. That means that, fairly or unfairly, I believe it is the best “local” law school. That also means, I think it is better than New York Law School. However, if both schools last through the next millennium, I doubt that Brooklyn Law School will equal one achievement of New York Law School. Admittedly, I say that this achievement of New York Law School is a mere accident of time and place. That accident is that the man rated America’s third greatest poet was graduated from New York Law School. Now, I have it on nameless, but reliable, authority that New York Law School does not particularly celebrate this illustrious graduate. That’s understandable, law schools are in the business of training lawyers and not poets. Furthermore, this poet was a successful though not distinguished lawyer.
Who was this lawyer, and who says he was our third best poet? The title obviously tells you it was Wallace Stevens. Harold Bloom, in the Western Cannon; only puts Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson before him. As for “The Eye of the Blackbird,” one of his most famous poems is: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. The slight change is to pose the question, does the poet have a special vision? More particularly, does this poet have a special vision? Now there are so many books about Wallace Stevens that it is impossible to say anything original about him. That is not my object in this article. As a matter of fact, I don’t know if I really know what my purpose here is, other than to apprise you of materials to study the work of Wallace Stevens, and just to discuss, some aspects of his life and work. I myself like poetry, but I do not have true affection for poetry, especially modern poetry as exemplified by Wallace Stevens. The problem is that if you read a long poem of his it will trip euphoniously off the tongue and then, all of a sudden, you’ll realize eight pages have gone by and you’re not sure what you’ve just read. You might say the same for T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, but you’d never say that of his other contemporaries, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams. Does Stevens purposely obfuscate? Is that a fair question? Does Eliot? Does Pound?
I can’t answer the question, but answers, are provided by Joan Richardson in her massive, two volume biography, the first volume, which Grand Army Plaza has, is the early years, 1879 to 1923. Unfortunately, all of Brooklyn does not have volume two: Wallace Stevens, The Later Years, 1923-1955. I could catalog all of the books about Wallace Stevens and fill up this article, but this critical biography illuminates the poetry by explaining the life. Some of the early years depict events that occurred in the later years. So, half a loaf is better than none. For me, Harold Bloom’s Wallace Stevens, The Poems of Our Climate, was less helpful. Surprisingly, Wallace Stevens by William Burney in the Twaynes series has almost no biographical details, although it has a chronology. For me, a work that was very helpful is Daniel Fuchs’s The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens. Joan Richardson says that much violence was locked in this man, and he found it best to channel it to comedy. Still, a famous anecdote about Wallace Stevens, who was over six feet tall and over 250 pounds, was that he broke his hand in a fist fight with Papa Hemingway.
In Six American Poets, Joel Connaroe, the editor, says that there was nothing remarkable about Wallace Stevens. In 1916, he accepted a position with The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he remained in the surety bonds department till he died. Colleagues when questioned perhaps disingenuously replied: Wally poetry?- You have to be kidding. They had to have known because he began receiving awards and honorary degrees with sustained regularity.
Reading the Joan Richardson biography reminds me of Kennedy’s quote (I believe it was Kennedy): “Most people live lives of quiet desperation. The violence in Stevens was caused by his conflicting desires to be a poet and his desire to be like his father, “a real man.” His father Garrett wrote poetry, but made his living as a lawyer and business man. Poetry in this Pennsylvania Dutch value system could only be an avocation. Above all, “real men” make a living. Poets do not make a living. Wallace Stevens once received $6.70 royalties for a book of poetry. Even back then, it did not go far. Yet the quiet desperation was because Stevens never wanted to be a lawyer. He always wanted to be a poet. He’d have gotten more pleasure out of life if he realized that though he practiced law he was a poet. Stevens first came to my attention through the Western Cannon. However, that was not enough to make me go out and read him. In researching my Meredith article, I came across Joseph Moses’s book, Meredith as Comic Novelist. Moses covered Meredith’s essay on comedy. He used quotations taken from Stevens’s “The Comedian as the Letter C.” Oddly, out of context, the quotations were truly comic. I really had to scramble to find The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which has the six poems that make up “The Comedian as the Letter C.” In context, the poems were less comic, harder to connect, but possibly more beautiful. I recommend that if you want to try Stevens, try the comedian or the blackbird. They are difficult, but less so than other famous poems such as “The Emperor of Ice Cream ” which isn’t about an emperor or ice cream, but about death or “Peter Quince at the Clavier.”
Now, like T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens wrote plays. Unlike T.S. Eliot, he never had a success, or even a run. William Burney, in the Twaynes, says that you wilL find the plays perhaps most accessible. No way! I didn’t have a clue. The most famous Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise, published in 1916, is covered also by Joan Richardson. Let us say, try it. You’ll find it in Opus Post humous. Read Burney, Richardson, and Harriet Monroe. You’ll buy what they’re selling as to this play, but you won’t really be sure. By the way, Harriet Monroe was one of Stevenf s first backers. She published him in her magazine Poetry. You can find her essay, “From Mr. Yeats and the Poetic Drama,” in an anthology of Stevens’s criticism: The Achievement of Wallace Stevens. The essay deals with both W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens.
Eventually, Stevens’s father lost his money and had a nervous breakdown. There is a price to be a “real man,” but before he did, he was able to send Wallace to a fine prep school in Williamsburgh. Not Virginia, but Brooklyn. From there he went to Harvard, where he wrote poetry for The Advocate.
After graduation, Stevens came to New York, where he worked at the New York Tribune. Suddenly, when he was actually doing very well and making $25 weekly, he decided he couldn’t make it as a reporter. That’s when he went to New York Law School. That’s also why I say it was a coincidence. He was here, and so wa the law school. Joan Richardson brings out the agony. “Real men” might write poetry on the side, but they were not poets.
Joan Richardson calls him a puritan and indicates his upbringing was puritanical. As he succeeded with Hartford, he developed a taste for fine wines and fine music. In one of her footnotes she indicates that someone catalogued his record collection for a Wallace Stevens journal. Alas! No results are given. There was a price for all this. She talks about the waitresses in the restaurants in Hartford who knew to bring Mr Stevens his Martini. Ms. Richardson makes it clear this meant pitchers, not glasses. Nor did he really get any pleasure out of his success. After receiving an academic honor, he told his wife that his academic hood was a new scalp. For that matter, the marriage appears from his poetry to have been less than successful. After a long courtship, apparently marked by stage fright, he married a girl with little education and from the wrong side of the tracks. lie tried and failed to mold her as his Pygmalion. It would appear that in her youth she was strikingly beautiful because she was the model for the Liberty head dime. I only have Roosevelt dimes. From her picture, I don’t think she’s so beautiful, but we have different standards today.
Now, what may be original is that I think Stevens is so hard to decipher because he didn’t have to make a living at poetry, and he had much he wanted to disguise. Julian Symons, one of my favorite mystery writers, in 1940, wrote A Short View of Wallace Stevens. He said many things in eight and one-half pages as he tried to introduce Stevens to England. He said in America Mr. Stevens was second only to Eliot. He said Mr. Stevens was an imagist poet without being imagist serious. There’s always a titter. As to Blackbird: “This is nearly very gentle, very observant, very charming, but it’s not serious, it is in a manly way a little absurd.” Is he right? Who knows. Stevens’s era went from the horse and buggy country town to the auto, the airplane, and the A-bomb. Certainly, it also encompassed two world wars and the theater of the absurd. Other critics take Stevens as totally serious.
In an eerie coincidence Allen Ginsberg died the day I wrote this article.