An Optimistic Approach in the Select Poems of Wallace Stevens

Abstract

Several of Stevens's key poetic passages are on a deeper level, they shared an intense interest in the poetic process examined against a metaphysical background. But the similarities between them were entirely a matter of coincidence rather than influence, and the differences were far more profound than the similarities. Like all the 'influences' on Stevens except that of Santayana this one is overrated almost as soon as it is mentioned, as is Stevens's debt to French literature in general. He was throughout his life devoted to the French language and to the idea of France 'the centre of the world' as he says with rather absurd self-deprecation in the letter quoted above but neither the theory nor the practice of French poetry left any considerable mark on his work. As he once wrote, “denying the influence of Mallarme and Verlaine meant a good deal more to me... But I was never a student of any of these poets; they were simply poets and I was the youthful poet and to the general readers” (45). The great difference between his own poetry and that of the best French poets with whom he has been associated, Mallarm and Valley, is the firm hold on ordinary ways of thought, on what one might call common sense, that Stevens never abandoned and that Mallarme and Valery each in his way thought quite irrelevant to the concerns of poetry.