Title: Stevens' Mixed-Breed Versifying and His Adaptations of Blank-Verse Practice
Abstract: Stevens' Mixed-Breed Versifying and His Adaptations of Blank-Verse Practice Natalie Gerber The prosody of Wallace Stevens has long intrigued scholars. Unlike many of his contemporaries who famously composed their poetry entirely in meter (Robert Frost and E. A. Robinson), or vehemently eschewed rhyme and meter in favor of free verse (William Carlos Williams), or elected some alternate form of measure (Marianne Moore), or alternated periods of both practices (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound), Stevens conveys his receptivity to what he terms both measure and free verse, provided each has any "aesthetic impulse back of it" (Letter to Ferdinand Reyher, 13 May 1921). He also frequently wrote both metrical and free-verse poems throughout his career. At times, the form of the one comments upon the other. Yet, as frequently, the two forms function more simply as different modes suited to different purposes. In his late verse, whose metricality has been questioned, we see a quasi-blank verse that is described as a nearly "free-verse line" and one that has elicited interest but not, to my knowledge, a theoretical description. In this article, I will propose one way in which Stevens' experiments with the two verse practices merge together and one way in which his late blank-verse line might serve as an unlikely bridge to what we think of as conventional free-verse lines. Before coming to the late blank verse, though, I want to look back to Stevens' earliest expressive positioning of iambic pentameter verse as a vehicle for poetry. I. Stevens' Early Verse: A Complicated "Plot" Staking New Territory for American Verse The oddly paired poems "Earthy Anecdote" and "Invective Against Swans" with which Harmonium opens provide a fascinating instance of Stevens' self-conscious use of poetic form. The first poem in particular has elicited a range of readings. Why Stevens, who as we know was particular about the order of poems in a volume, might choose such intransigent texts to begin his first book is a question well worth contemplating. In his article "Intentionality as Sensuality in Harmonium," Charles Altieri has [End Page 188] offered remarkable possibilities, clarifying Stevens' resistance in these poems to presenting an "organizing narrative or the corollary figure of an expressive agent exploring how its psyche adapts to a range of dramatic situations" (166) as part of a "challenge in American poetry to conventional ways of thinking about lyric speech" (172). Here I would like to highlight how Stevens' conscious counterpoint of prosodic methods might also contribute to conversations about the structure of the opening sequence. As Stevens sets himself two tasks—to write the great poem of the earth and to carve out a space for American poetry—positioning these two poems to open Harmonium seems a determined gesture to fashion a new American poetry distinct from its European heritage, but at arm's length and mindful of it. The two texts, as Eleanor Cook astutely points out in her Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens, have distinctive meters and more: "In contrast to 'Earthy Anecdote,' ['Invective Against Swans'] uses couplets in regular iambic pentameter, some rhyme, imitative older syntax . . . , i.e., it is an old-style poem" (31). Indeed, the former poem's use of an energetic short free-verse line that is shaped syntactically counterpoints the latter poem's use of iambic pentameter and occasional rhyme to forge couplets from longer lines and syntactic units that draw out and perhaps sedate the sense. I want to suggest that the distinctions go even further. As I have profitably taught undergraduates, the two poems can be counterpointed on nearly every point, whether or not Stevens intended such a careful counterpoint at the time of composing the respective poems (a question I will return to later): against the silent swans, emblems of an outmoded poeticism associated with European poets from Orlando Gibbons to W. B. Yeats, Stevens counterpoints the firecat, the mysterious animal whose energetic bristling and leaping answer the imagined "bland motions" of the birds (CPP 4). Where the latter poem's lines are imagined as vertical descents—motions that decayed from Zeus's "impregnating shower of gold" (Cook 31) into the crows' parodic anointing of statues with...
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 7
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