Depiction of Modern Materialist American Society in the Select Poems of Wallace Stevens

Abstract

Any absolute work of art which serves no further purpose than to stimulate an emotion has about it a certain luxurious and visionary taint. We leave it with a blank mind, and a pang bubbles up from the very foundation of pleasures. Art, so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease to prove a disappointment. Its ladle cruelty, its narcotic abstraction, can never sweeten the evils we return to at home; it can liberate half the mind only by leaving the other half in abeyance. These ideas are central in more than Stevens's sense. They reflect the consensus of English critical thought since it began. Neither Dryden nor Johnson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats in his brief maturity, or Arnold would have disagreed with them. And perhaps the obloquy heaped on Leavis for repeating them only shows how slow we have been to recover from the aestheticism in which sonic writers of the later nineteenth century took refuge from responsibility. The young Stevens's sense of responsibility significantly manifests itself more in general reflection and resolution about his own mind and character than in theories about poetry itself. It is as if he were already subconsciously aware that 'the first phase of the poet's problem is himself. In his Journal after he left Harvard and, in the letters, replacing it, to Elsie Moll, the girl from his home town' whom he eventually married in 1909, his poet's sensibility is continuously evident. But, unlike most young poets, he is in no hurry. He is content to get on with earning his living and at the same time simply to absorb the particulars of reality that please and move him and to think, in fits and starts, about the enormous issues that underneath it all concern him most. Something of his particular kind of determination can be gathered from these remarks in his Journal a few weeks after he arrived in New York from Harvard.