It was autumn, it was “that time of year”—the lowered sun makes things golden early—a season of reflection, even in the frantic pre-election days, when the weather wants to remind us what a year is, what it was. For me, autumn is often a season for poetry—the dimmer lights prep the stage set for the soul to be plumbed. Isn’t the experience of poetry one of the most deeply personal ones? No one hears carefully chosen words inside our heads like we do. People see the same film, hear the same song (and exceptions can be made in what they experience), but words filled with images and metaphors get lapped up off the page and into perception by some fine-grain cognizance, as delicate and nimble as the flowers poets love to trope.

It had been a while since I’d returned to Wallace Stevens. After years devoted to Pound and Eliot, I thought I would find him impoverished, or worse, just not as consistently gleaming as, particularly, Eliot. I’d been gifted a first edition of The Auroras of Autumn, so I read a physical copy closer to the source, a book alive in that emanation’s time and possibly espied by him. The poems were written between 1947 and 1949 with some previously published in the leading journals of the day, like The Kenyon Review, or pressed into chapbooks. Two long poems, “The Auroras of Autumn” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” basically bookend the collection, but inside are a number of haunting, thematically linked short poems. The whole of the experience akin to being in a large exhibition holding only Cezanne or only Matisse. My mind soon pulsed like the stars in “glittering belts” in the title poem: “They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash/Like a great shadow’s last embellishment.”

I come back to these poems because they are inexhaustible. They all have roughly the same theme: how does the imagination survive in a world as beautiful and as terrible as ours?—a query even more amplified in his second-longest poem, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” But where did the shift from those absurd, light-hearted divertissements of Harmonium to these darklings occur? Stevens dated it to writing “Credences of Summer,” the last poem to fill the book Transport to Summer (1947): “At the time when that poem was written my feeling for the necessity of a final accord with reality was at its strongest.” What else happened in these years? The relationship with his only child, Holly, grew, as she gave birth to his only grandchild and soon left her husband—a repairman Stevens apparently would not let in his house. Stevens turned seventy while writing the book; the autumn of his life was upon him. “What I want more than anything else in music, painting and poetry, in life and in belief,” he wrote to a friend, “is the thrill that I experienced once in all the things that no longer thrill me at all.” And so, the poems deepen in their Byzantine formation on the page as the speakers make their “final accords with reality.” Projecting themselves into an astral bas-relief, they war with the invisible about the nature of the aesthetic far up above our heads.

It is possible to fully appreciate a difficult poem understanding only a few of its crepuscular lines. Years ago, an important person explained to me that all those Annunciations, Madonna and Childs, Crucifixions, and the like, painted by the old masters, were less about the artist’s own faith or great religious events than about the artist himself, about his relationship to line and paint, as he saw himself (his artistic enterprise) in the blue folds of Mary’s gown or the pulverized body of Christ on the cross. In Stevens’s poetic, something of the qualities of paint has been consecrated into words. Stevens, who wrote a long essay called “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting,” made poems the way a painter fleshes out a picture. Words are colors, phrases lines—we see how they are connected and what they may resemble but sometimes will hardly know what they mean. “Do not be descriptive,” Ezra Pound advised poets, for “the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can.” Alighting on the verb describe in that formula ,James Longenbach observed a two-way traffic of longing, how “a desire for the scribal, the written, may sneak into our sense of the visual, just as a desire for the visual may infect our sense of the written.” And in the second of five cantos in Stevens’ “The Bouquet,” one can almost smell the paint Picasso quickly lacquered:

Through the door one sees on the lake that the white duck swim

Away—and tells and tells the water tells

Of the image spreading behind it in idea.

Here is a solid cinematic image, imbuing a picture most everyone has seen dozens of times in their lives, but this gives those smallish eddies a holy quality, a graceful flow.

A Stevens poem is no more about the things in it than a painting is; and like a painting, it is completed by forces that defy easy anecdotal recounting. Nor do the speakers of these poems stand in for Stevens, though the privations overheard through them are his. It is this all-terrain private world of the Pennsylvania-born lawyer who roosted in Hartford—his form fronting for feeling—that keeps me coming back to the work. “The poem is the cry of its occasion,/Part of the res itself and not about it,” as the twelfth canto of  “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” has it. The cry of its occasion: not a cry for succor, not an enactment of self-help; not enough to say I’m depressed, or I’m sad, or My wife drives me crazy. Stevens’ task was rather to put together images and sounds (metaphors of life) that will subordinate the poet’s feelings, bronze them and make them palpable, if not always palliative, to an audience that still read verse by the light of an ingrained historicism, the inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Wordsworth to the poets born in the 1870’s and 1880’s. Much of the direct narcissism of our current moment by contrast discolors the object, whose mystery is lessened, its power curtailed by unartful transmission.

The shorter poems in the collection are easier to scale than “Auroras” and “Ordinary Evening,” though—like the fractal form of foothills and outcroppings against a backdrop of peaks—they repeat and resemble them in their thematic geometry. Of these I seized on “Puella Parvula” with particular interest, all the more so given the resounding reading Stevens gave it in 1952 at Harvard (available on PennSound). Eighteen lines in this man's mouth takes a little less than two minutes and, incredibly, at fifty-eight seconds in one hears the clock tower outside toll the hour, just as he turns to “this season of memory, / When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past.” It is as portentous a moment as one could imagine, just before the unexpected profanity of “O wild bitch”:

Every thread of summer is at last unwoven.

By one caterpillar is great Africa devoured,

And Gibraltar is dissolved like spit in the wind.

But over the wind, over the legends of its roaring,

The elephant on the roof and its elephantine blaring,

The bloody lion in the yard at night or ready to spring

From the clouds in the midst of trembling trees

Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows

Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat,

Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs

Like a trumpet, and says in this season of memory,

When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past,

Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch. O mind

Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella.

Write pax across the window pane. And then

Be still. The summarium in excelsis begins . . .

Flame, sound, fury composed . . . Hear what he says,

The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.

The season of memory is probably October, as in the “Auroras.” The poem details the triumph of imagination over the wind—and that is all, in terms of narrative. The words are charged, they grow out of each other, intensifying on reverberation, like worse weather from bad. The third sentence of the poem spans four three-line stanzas; these lines form the poem’s narrative and its clearest part. But too much exegesis risks ruining them; forms born of the deeps may not hold at the surface. I kept going over “Puella Parvula,” looking at what Harold Bloom wrote (Helen Vendler commented only passing) and reintegrating what I learned into my reading of the poem, knowing how words for words is the most applicable criticism in all art criticism. But the final six lines presented conundrums, which might be the brain layers of the poet, as Bloom writes “Memory is a kind of thinking” and that Stevens “show[s] us the dissolving of memory as the falling, apart and away, of poetic thinking.” Stevens is discreetly talking of the muse. Puella—Latin for “little girl.” Parvula—Latin for “slight, unimportant.” Is he saying his muse is reborn as a little girl?—but is that even interesting to a more than casual reader of poetry? B.J. Legget gives it a most grounded parsing, saying it tries to both “accept autumn’s destruction as a part of the innocence of the earth, to change the ‘wild bitch’ of the heart to the innocent young girl of the poem’s title…and…when the speaker accepts the change of seasons as the act of a godlike imagination…his fear subsides.” This sounds good—it sounds correct, but knowing this, I feel I see (and hear) less. A different common-sensical register has been keyed into and in exchange for meaning I have lost the form—the sounds and syllables, the meter, the ordering of verse, which may or may not take on meaning as summer or winter sun to our skin. A recently unearthed phone call with Stanley Kubrick “explaining” the endings of 2001 and The Shining took the energy out of his images and sounds which artistically created what he described but did so unconsciously and so not tendentiously—a viewer finds (even creates) their own meaning. To call on T.S. Eliot, Stevens’s nemesis in some ways: “poetry communicates before it is understood,” just as jazz or classical music can cause some inner electricity without voice.

Having bent over this poem daily for a week, for many minutes and stretching to an hour some days, I eventually concluded that pax is the key word and is written on the window pane because this is the poet’s prime portal of vision. We saw it in canto eighteen of “Ordinary Evening”:

It is the window that makes it difficult

To say good-by to the past and live and to be

In the present state of things as, say, to paint

In the present state of painting and not the state

Of thirty years ago…

Henry James’s famous metaphor of the million windows in the house of fiction has incredible carryover here. I was forked back some years to my father-in-law’s funeral, at a church where the traditional Latin mass was used—the wording of those verses, with some of these same sounds, delved into my core, just as Stevens, full of Latin in those five closing lines of “Puella,” turns what is an almost indescribable moment into the poetry of words.

In “World Without Peculiarity”, Stevens returns to the image haunting this book, that of the bereft mother, who is in “The Auroras” (“She makes that gentler that can gentle be”):

The day is great and strong—
But his father was strong, that lies now
In the poverty of dirt.

Nothing could be more hushed than the way
The moon moves toward the night.
But what his mother was returns and cries on his breast.

The red ripeness of round leaves is thick
With the spices of red summer.
But she that he loved turns cold at his light touch.

What good is it that the earth is justified,
That it is complete, that it is an end,
That in itself it is enough?

It is the earth itself that is humanity . . .
He is the inhuman son and she,
She is the fateful mother, whom he does not know.

She is the day, the walk of the moon
Among the breathless spices and, sometimes,
He, too, is human and difference disappears

And the poverty of dirt, the thing upon his breast,
The hating woman, the meaningless place,
Become a single being, sure and true.

Bloom writes about the Whitman and Keats submerged in these lines, but I decided that criticism would be no good here: I wanted Stevens as he is or not at all. Stevens is as direct as he gets in these lines and still it is incomparable, building syllogistically until a different understanding is forged. It is not the speaker’s mother who returns and cries but “what his mother was,” a very different thing: this is memory, seance, and a piquant conjuring. But that memory of the mother will tussle with nature—that is, the thing the speaker still has. The father is also dead, though the speaker resists this with the defiant question in stanza four:

What good is it that the earth is justified,
That it is complete, that it is an end,
That in itself it is enough?

Only to say in the next line that “It is the earth itself that is humanity…” How can he merge with nature? He can as the “difference disappears” and the list of four things (“And the poverty of dirt, the thing upon his breast,/The hating woman, the meaningless place,/ Become a single being”) standing for death, heartache, and bad and good memories is fused into a Paterian state—that hard, gemlike flame, “sure and true.” A world without peculiarity is as brief and bracing as the moon’s transit; “we have an interval,” Pater wrote, “and then our place knows us no more.”But the hard, gemlike flame is one bracing in its coldness, and the hating woman and the meaningless place are two faces or phases of it, along with sexual estrangement, and then the letting go of other attachments, other enmeshments, that is, of desire and meaning and claims to particularity. Far from pleasure in the usual sense this too is a kind of ecstasy, one Stevens branded in these late poems: like the mystics, it was a state of rapture that keeps the body sullen while the soul contemplates higher things, like the creation of the “single being, sure and true.”


I had been rereading Stevens when Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize in fall of 2020. Much as I admire some of her best poems, I find her essays in Proofs and Theories to be her greatest contribution to literature. And Stevens has a small but memorable role in that book. “It never occurred to me that I wasn’t going to write poetry until I read Wallace Stevens,” begins one essay. She goes on to write that his poems “are allowed to be overheard” and “the difficulty to the reader is a function of the poem’s mode, its privacy: to be allowed to follow is not to be asked along.” This goes toward demarcating Glück’s constitutive difference from Stevens: her poems are indeed “addressed outward,” they do ask readers along, so many of whom—across lines of gender, generation and sensibility—have heard their own pain, loneliness, and sadness in the stark language of her speakers; it is this that underwrites her tenure. That said, the two poets have deeper affinities. Others say Rilke has the greatest presence in her work. (You can say that about nearly every lyric poet who came after him.) But critic Stephen Yenser has suggested, and I will say plainly, No, it was Stevens all along. If only because he writes in her language and not one translated.

They are both poets of weather, of seasons. Both had troubled relationships with their spouses and a more gracious muse came late to both, their outputs flourishing between the ages of fifty and seventy. They are both poets of New England—having lived there most of their lives, with intervals in New York City—and wrote both of its terrain and its firmament. They wrote of flowers, of stars and planets: some critics call their work “hieratic,” but I see them as solitary wayfarers using their Rilkean perceiving eyes. Their speakers search for beauty on behalf of a fomenting imaginations, with past pain as runway lights in the fog of a hard landing. Glück’s admit to yearning for a listener, for witness; Stevens’s instead disguise their pain as they work something out, often syllogistically. “Stevens looks to the world for those arresting configurations which stimulate the creative process,” Glück writes. If “objects are occasions,” then “all weight, all import, is conferred by the perceiving eye.”

And this is where they diverge—in their relationship to reality, to that essence dictated by time. In Stevens’ 1942 lecture “The Nobel Rider and the Sounds of Words,” he spoke of reality’s pressure, its power to shape and delineate eras of the imagination, to create “variation between the sound of words in one age and the sound of words in another”:

Rightly or wrongly, we feel that the fate of a society is involved in the orderly disorders of the present time. We are confronting, therefore, a set of events, not only beyond our power to tranquillize them in the mind, beyond our power to reduce them and metamorphose them, but events that stir the emotions to violence, that engage us in what is direct and immediate and real, and events that involve the concepts and sanctions that are the order of our lives and may involve our very lives, and these events are occurring persistently with increasing omen, in what may be called our presence. These are the things that I had in mind when I spoke of the pressure of reality, a pressure great enough and prolonged enough to bring about the end of one era in the history of the imagination and, if so, then great enough to bring about the beginning of another. It is one of the peculiarities of the imagination that it is always at the end of an era. What happens is that it is always attaching itself to a new reality, and adhering to it. It is not that there is a new imagination but that there is a new reality.

A poet writes in the speech of their time, and the poetic speech in 1942 was wider-ranging, weighed and weighted more for ideas and meter than for who the words might hurt. Glück has keyed into a later age’s truncated and debased talk, its campaigns of the self (projecting gaiety, for example, on the public screens of social media to shroud the privacy of a darker truth). Glück’s poems have long dwelt in chilly, cloistered settings, under conditions of social distancing with spiritual implications that came to seem prescient after March 2020. The language differs from that of her contemporaries in its adjudicating severity. Certain sharp words recur in her essays (“reprimand,” “annexed,” “annealed”) and in her poems (“divide” “despair,” and “mark”). Her sketch of Rilke in American Originality has the intimate contours of self-portrait:

His subject was longing, his natural tone lament: he required those separations that precede or guarantee longing. And part of his genius was his perception of the way we transform what is at hand into something sufficiently remote, immaterial, to be re-created as the focus of longing. 

The degree of lament and acuteness of longing in Glück have changed, but not the process. They are cross-stitched through her lines from her first porous words to the last.

I feel closer to “October” than almost any of Glück’s other poems. Getting The New Yorker second hand from a friend at the time, I cut it out and kept the pages it was printed on. The language is deceptively simple—what other kind of simple is there in great literature? Reading it now, twenty years later, I’m struck by the degree of Stevens—not Eliot—inside. “October” seems an elegy to Glück’s biography—both a long look back and a paean to her principles. “When poems are difficult, it is often because their silences are complicated, hard to follow,” she writes in Proofs and Theories. “For me, the answer to such moments is not more language.” And:

Those poets who claustrophobically oversee or bully or dictate response prematurely advertise the deficiencies of the chosen particulars, as though without strenuous guidance the reader might not reach an intended conclusion.

The poet in Glück is enjoined to keep it spare, keep it mysterious.

            In this poem of six parts, a speaker who has been “silenced” tries to make sense of it being winter again. The first part stresses the ordinariness of life: “I remember how the earth felt/red and dense…”—this is Stevensian ulterior language, though her narrator is nestled closer to the source and somewhat ambiguously—how can she “remember” how the earth felt? (Speak for yourself is the greatest riposte there is to a Glück poem.) The beginning of Part II gets more mercurial:

Summer after summer has ended,

balm after violence:

it does me no good

to be good to me now;

violence has changed me.

Daybreak. The low hills shine

ochre and fire, even the fields shine.

I know what I see; sun that could be

the August sun, returning

everything that was taken away—

You hear this voice? This is my mind’s voice;

you can’t touch my body now.

It has changed once, it has hardened,

don’t ask it to respond again.

Public terror versus private pain. Everyone suffers some violence, whether physical or emotional, and this speaker can’t accept the “balm.” She has to cope with the years gone by, stating how the retained August sun can call up pain via memory. Voice has taken over for the body, which won’t return any more advances or respond to stimuli.

Part three continues the dialogue with the plainsong of “What others found in art,/I found in nature,” echoing Stevens’s late letter quoted above. In the next part, music is introduced, where the changed light of autumn says “you will not be spared”:

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.

They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.

They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly

in anticipation of silence.

The ear gets used to them.

The eye gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

I hear Stevens again here, these “disappearances” met with dread expectancy reprising the awaited molt of the “Auroras”’ first canto:

This is form gulping after formlessness,

Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances

And the serpent body flashing without the skin.

What are these mysterious “songs” Glück describes? The songs of ourselves, more and more cloistered? Beauty recurs but sparer, starker, its radius ever narrower after seasonal shed, as eye and ear adjust to what will be acutest at its vanishing—death, or, the more melancholy: getting “used to disappearances.”

It provokes me, Glück’s recourse to language so simple, even if deceptively so. It is the language of the quiescent diarist who frequents their book but once a year, lighted by a forsaken tone. “His genius was tone,” she says of Rilke, which in his epigones can “degenerate rapidly into mannerism” or solipsism. There is, or should be, a trace of self-admonition in that. As there should be when she deplores the contemporary over-reliance on epiphany, which her own poetry so often dances close or succumbs to about half the time. But William Logan’s damning judgment of Glück, however apt—her “stark lines have the frigid emptiness of a Pinter play, everything a destructive shimmer of pronouns”—is not quite the whole story. For if they can be as empty as stardust, something you might see on Twitter, they are part of her peculiar familiar argot, and just as one tires of the confessions—“It is true there is not enough beauty in the world”—a startling image torques the straightaway into a serpentine, as here in part five of “October”:

The bland

misery of the world

bounds us on either side, an alley

lined with trees; we are

companions here, not speaking,

each with his own thoughts;

behind the trees, iron

gates of the private houses,

the shuttered rooms

somehow deserted, abandoned,

as though it were the artist’s

duty to create

hope, but out of what? what?

There are actually two exquisite images here, the first paving the way, as it literally bonds people in “an alley lined with trees” before the second details the cruel wasteland of “behind the trees, iron/gates of the private houses,/the shuttered rooms/somehow deserted, abandoned.” The rich have their third or fourth houses, empty bunkers, where nothing is ventured but capital, shuttered all but one week a year, if that, and gated against the mess of intimate, connected lives—what can the artist create (or “restore,” as the section’s opening lines would have it) in such ordered disorder? We’ve lived in an oligarchy now for more years than I can remember, and these images, the first oblique and the second bitterrooted, encompass the feeling of the many who have to worry the sun down at end of day for fear of getting through tomorrow.

The poem’s final lines ascend to an astral plane:

Above the fields,

above the roofs of the village houses,

the brilliance that made all life possible

becomes the cold stars.

Lie still and watch:

they give nothing but ask nothing.

From within the earth’s

bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness

my friend the moon rises:

she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?

This sixth and last part reprises the “balm after violence,” this time with the earth as the changed, hardened lover: “Between herself and the sun/something has ended.” The closing lines cloyingly suggest that the speaker will have her beauty, one called Nature. So we will go back where we started after the apocalypse—“the earth’s/bitter disgrace” is its human population dying by its consumptive appetites. Many see the poem, written in 2002, as a response to 9/11, but it can’t be that simple—or can it? Yes, Stevens might stoically reply, that’s the pressure of reality. I would add that such pressure can, for a certain kind of artist, merge events large and small in a single symptom—the painful whiplash, say, reportedly suffered by Glück at the time, following an accident but in the wider wake of the planes, the towers and their subsequent collapse. Reverberations of the major event will pluck at such an artist, sending them to stupor and brood, creating something outside of it: “The poem is the cry of its occasion,/Part of the res itself and not about it.” The speaker of “October” sees the world as wasteland but tries to reconcile it with the sensorium of nature: “I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,” “the long shadows of the maples nearly mauve on the gravel paths,” and “Sunrise. A film of moisture/on each living thing. Pools of cold light/formed in the gutters.” Yet the speaker, who oscillates between woman and outer being, declares that she—the earth—wants to be left alone and that “we must give up/turning to her for affirmation.” So what does she have left? “October” is Glück’s portrait of the artist on a dying planet. The bourgeois delights of the world give so little now. There has to be something more, something spiritual. The force of the poem is in detailing how the time called “October” won’t be recognized and will be duly discarded, and how our diurnal travails might become less special to us in the face of multiple overwhelming disasters.    

Earthly splendor returns after long absence, “for the first time in many years,” in a later poem in Glück’s Averno, “Evening Star.” It comes as vision, by grace of a solar eclipse, in which as the earth is darkened, the evening star (usually lost in the sun’s glare) grows brighter until its light, which is “the light of death,/seemed to restore to earth/its power to console.” The poem concludes by apostrophizing:

 

…Venus,
star of the early evening,

to you I dedicate
my vision, since on this blank surface

you have cast enough light
to make my thought
visible again.

I saw Glück’s Venus, as it were, in celestial transit across the face of Stevens’s “Angel Surrounded by Paysans.” Here the angel speaks:

I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.

Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,

Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings
Like watery words awash; like meanings said

By repetitions of half meanings.

Both lead with vision, with Stevens as so often elsewhere giving way to the aural. He presses more colorations into his poem, his answer to poetic difficulty being just what Glück abjures—more language. (There can be no wetter metaphor than “watery words awash”). The starkest divide between Stevens’ era in the history of the imagination and Glück’s (which, for better or for worse, is ours) is the latter’s reliance on ellipsis and fragmentation, the ethos of less is more that grew out of writers as diverse as Roland Barthes and Raymond Carver (by way of Gordon Lish) in prose and William Carlos Williams and George Oppen in poetry. 

The Nobel Prize committee’s announcement has always been a kind of simpering gesture, attesting less to a writer’s distinctive achievement than to the judicious timeliness of their own good taste. Glück was thus praised “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Why does individual existence need to be universalized? Or better to ask, Hasn’t it always been so? “Austere beauty” is Swedish for elliptical and fragmentary writing, the sound of words in our age. The density of other literary eras remains in full retreat, with a few notable exceptions. (“I shall never experience the pleasure of juggling with metaphors or indulging in stylistic play,” wrote last year’s winner, Annie Ernaux, praised by the committee chair for her “strong prose, both uncompromising and brief.”) The symphony is out and the single indefatigable gesture that defines our world, the soul left quivering or quaking by such a forlorn lark, is in.

I read and reread “October” that fall, going through it until it became water through my fingers. It is not the sound of Glück, as it is in Stevens, that gives me the most pleasure (there is a fair bit of monochrome in that regard). It is rather the questions posed in and by the work. “Her poems simultaneously create the vivid illusion of voice and reveal its artifice,” writes the critic Reena Sastri. “They employ conversational tones and structures not as marks of authenticity but as aural patterns, as manifestations of language’s interlocutory dimensions.” These might be arguments people have with themselves in their heads, in other words, but where a question—e.g., should I do this?—is not voiced by the mind’s interlocutor so much as shorthanded by its court stenographer. We all know well that running murmur of inner dispute, as if overheard and only faintly. Our self-talk is often simple, and we mar our public voice’s sentences for fear of a thousand things, especially for how often it comes out wrong; but it is often right when unvoiced in the head. Glück is as wily and private as Stevens or Beckett, as in her head as they are; or more to the point, as we are. And in that she carries the correct transponder for our day, signaling high and wide.