Stevens’s Late Lyrics: ‘His Actual Candle Blazed with Artifice’

Abstract

May I begin my final chapter schematically, if not reductively? In the early poems of Harmonium Stevens is fascinated with surfaces – with sounds, smells, and oddities of linguistic combination for their own sake. In the middle poems he is preoccupied with using experience in the service of creating abstract truths about the nature of poetry and fiction and the imagination. Finally, in the late poems he creates a dialogue within the speaker’s consciousness between sensations and abstractions. In The Rock (1950), as we shall see, Stevens rejects self-immersion in the life of the poem as an end in itself, and in ‘Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself’ (1954) he insists that the abstractions must respond to – and be in epistemological service to – ideas. To dwell among surfaces is a kind of solipsism, if not cynicism. For the late Stevens, cynicism is the mortality of attitude and sarcasm the mortality of speech. Playfulness is at the service of a deep need for definition.