by M. L. Harvey

Wallace Stevens was an intelligent, portly president of an insurance company. He lived too quiet a life with a pretty, quiet wife who was never happy. His life divided neatly between business and poetry and all this somehow translated into an elegant, strange poetry that invites comparison with Eliot and Thomas. Critics might call it painterly--Cubist or Fauvre--but they do not know what to call it. There are so few poets who closely ally themselves with painting that scholars are slow to make the bold connection.

poet may say flippantly (we have heard this person many times) that confusion is the whole point. Abstract art avoids imitating or extending objective reality in favor of exploring the potentials of a medium and creating subjective reality. In traditional, representational art, the subject matter, be it the Virgin, Sister Carrie, or Hamlet, exerts an influence upon the selection of lines, colors, and shapes in painting or words, images, and metaphors in poetry. In abstract art, however, subject matter exerts little or no influence upon the artist. The artist constructs parts of a painting or poem based on how they work together or based on how they work with the idea they themselves suggest. The result is sometimes incomprehensible, but after all, the abstract poet says flippantly, that's the point. The artist's comment inevitably draws us in.

Again and again in Stevens similar questions arise--what is the purpose of the following associations:

Abstract painting inevitably invites comparison with the poetry of Stevens because abstract painting has won the use of the word "abstract" to everyone's satisfaction and Stevens called his poetry "abstract." Thus, if we examine Miro and Stevens, we may locate similar motives. In the paintings of Joan Miro, the purpose of linking globular shapes with a thin line or star is to enjoy the juxtaposition of quite different, apparently random elements and the fruit they bear. So it is with the poetry of Stevens. Underneath the surface of his random words, the juxtaposition-by-sparks produces an idea such as "Abstract art [verb]s" or "[adjective] abstract art." Fill in the verb or adjective yourself. Pick any one at all, because that is the whole point--any verb or adjective will do, because abstract art can do anything, be anything. For example:

"Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way . . ."
("Earthy Anecdote")

Why do the bucks clatter? Viewed as a metaphor for abstract art, the bucks can do anything. What is the "firecat?" Try abstract art. Or perhaps the "firecat" is an aspect of abstract art--its firecat aspect--as the clattering bucks are its clattering buck aspect. "Firecat" surely conjures up Matisse and Picasso. "Clattering bucks" conjure up a variety of early twentieth-century paintings--not of bucks but of the colors or energy of "clattering bucks"--hot colors like orange, pink, and yellow, in vibrant collision. In other words, "clattering bucks" is an aspect of abstract art found in the psyche of Wallace Stevens--and it has cousins throughout early twentieth-century abstract painting as well.

This is only to say that Wallace Stevens selects images that on one level make sense as a part of the poem containing them and on another level refer us to certain areas of abstract art. While T.S. Eliot's Waste Land referred us to Dante and to Jacobean playwrights and to ancient sacred literature, Wallace Stevens directs us to great contemporary painters. Like no one before him, the twentieth-century was his domain.

What of his message--that abstract art can be anything, do anything? It can, can't it. It can make a buck clatter. It can place a firecat in the path of the buck:

In the poem, the purpose of the bucks and the firecat is to create an abstract action poem--a poem in which the juxtaposition of "clattering bucks" and "firecat" creates the action we view--an intellectual, sensory action. In the poem "Prejudice Against the Past," the juxtaposition of "Swedish cart" (heart) and "philosopher's hat" (mind) creates an intellectual, emotional contrast. In "Danse of the Macabre Mice," "turkeys," "horses," and "mice" create an animalistic chaos that leaves us with an image of the State under the constant burden of mice. In each poem, a small number of apparently random images take on the purpose granted by the poem. Their "randomness" reminds us that they speak in favor of the limitless nature and breadth of purpose of contemporary abstract art. One gets the feeling that any image at all could have appeared in a poem and succeeded in shaping the poem. The purpose of the seemingly random images in each poem evidences the continual success of a contemporary artist in creating purposeful works of art guided by the free, powerful, spirit of abstract art.