Introduction
A Discovery
This is not just another book on the poetry of Wallace Stevens. More than a thesis, it presents a remarkable discovery that opens up Stevens’ poems to an entirely new ways of understanding them and to fresh appreciation, even after decades of reading and discussions.
Several years ago, I began a study of Wallace Stevens’ The Rock, his last “book” of poems and the last section of his Collected Poems. Like others, I believed those poems were among the best works of this distinguished American poet.
My intention was to place The Rock in the context of philosophical movements associated with Harvard around the turn of the century when Stevens had been an undergraduate at the university (1897–1900). So, I was reading the so-called “Harvard Philosophers”: William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana. In this way, I happened upon something unexpected.
As I was reading Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), I began to notice curious resemblances between it and the poems of The Rock (1954). For example, the first chapter of Santayana’s book discusses the fruitless attempt to discover the origin of things. One of the early poems of The Rock, “The Irish Cliffs of Moher,” takes up the same topic.
That resemblance was interesting but hardly remarkable until I read Santayana’s next chapter where he wonders how far scepticism can go in reducing extraneous ideas. The very next poem in The Rock is titled “The Plain Sense of Things” and takes up the same idea. In addition, there also seemed to be an echo of phrases: Santayana concluding that “even if each of its efforts fails,” the mind is driven to search for the truth by “brute necessity” (SAF 9); and Stevens acknowledging that while “a fantastic effort has failed,” it was “required, as a necessity requires” (CP 502–03).¹
Stevens’ next poem in his book, “One of the Inhabitants of the West,” had always puzzled me; but by consulting Santayana’s third chapter (“Wayward Scepticism”), it suddenly became comprehensible. Santayana’s fourth chapter (“Doubts About Self-Consciousness”) then unlocked the otherwise mysterious “Lebensweisheitspielerei,” the next poem that follows in Stevens’ sequence.
Having now noticed four coincidences, I was particularly eager to see if Santayana’s next chapter would make sense of Stevens’ next poem, “The Hermitage at the Center,” which I had always found confusing. Turning to what literary critics had to say about the poem had not been helpful. Their interpretations seemed all over the place. By consulting Santayana, however, I found I could set aside these exercises in scholarly opining. The meaning of the poem was not elusive. The poet was taking up ideas about change that the philosopher had put forward in fifth chapter of Scepticism and Animal Faith.
I was holding my breath, consequently, when I began to compare Santayana’ sixth chapter (“Ultimate Scepticism”) with Stevens’ next poem (“The Green Plant”). I noted they shared the same topic. But there was something more. Stevens apparently borrowed an unusual image from the philosopher. In his chapter, Santayana wants readers to understand that our ideas about reality do not reliably correspond with reality itself. As an example, he points to preconceptions and asks us to consider the scenario where we were expecting a certain event to happen but it did not occur . . . and here Santayana continues this example via metaphor: “[the event] failed at the very roots, so to speak, of the tree of intuition, and left nothing but its branches flowering in vacuo” (SAF 36). Stevens seemed to employ this unusual image in his poem when he contrasts the world of ideas with reality itself. In Stevens’ poem, the world of ideas is a secondary realm, a life appearing in a mirror, and there we encounter not a vivid blooming thing but an eviscerated Platonic realm where “the shadows of the trees” are “like wrecked umbrellas” (CP 506).
As I explored more of Stevens’ poems and studied their connections to Santayana’s work in greater detail, I started finding numerous examples of Stevens apparently using Scepticism and Animal Faith to compose the poems of The Rock. The evidence seemed clear, specific, and abundant. Topics were shared. There were unmistakable echoes of Santayana’s words, images, and entire phrases in Stevens’ poems. On top of that, there was a more or less chapter-for-poem correspondence between the two books. Finally, and perhaps most important to Stevens’ readers, the poems were no longer difficult and obscure: With reference to Santayana’s book, their intentions became clear.
Take the next poem in Steven’s sequence (“Madame La Fleurie”) as an example and consider it in light of the next chapter in Santayana’s book.
In the seventh chapter of Scepticism and Animal Faith, Santayana says that the great mistake of idealists is to believe that their ideas take precedence over reality. Death is the great argument against that because death carries down all our ideas about life and restores the natural supremacy of the world over our notions about it. Indeed, for the idealist, Nature seems a fickle lover who first evokes ideas, then finally crushes them; or as Santayana says, Nature seems a “monstrous excrescence” who “ravishes [men] first and betrays them afterwards” (48).
That “monstrous excrescence” appears in Stevens’ corresponding poem. At first Nature seems the lovely “Madame La Fleurie” of the title, but by the end of the poem she is “a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light.” Stevens’ unnamed persona, an idealist, has presented his ideas about Nature to Nature, and in the end she devours him.
Now, remember: This was the seventh chapter-poem correspondence I had discovered. The next poem, consequently, took on an even greater significance since it a contained a mailing address in its title. “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” is directly addressed to Santayana.
At this point, I began to feel I was in a detective story. I had stumbled upon remarkable connections between an important work by a major American poet and a classic book by a famous philosopher. Here was something extraordinary. I wondered what to make of it.
Pushback
This groundbreaking discovery, I thought, was likely to turn Stevens criticism on its head. For one thing, readers of his poems no longer needed to wrestle with Stevens’ ambiguity: We needn’t wonder what a poem was “about” since we could consult Santayana’s book to identify the subject that was being addressed, and then attention could shift to the ways Stevens played his own variation upon that topic in his poem. This discovery was likely to change basic understandings of some of Stevens’ most famous poems. So it seemed to me.
As I narrate in the Acknowledgements at the end of this volume, some scholars who examined my early explorations of the connection between Stevens’ and Santayana’s books came away amazed and enthusiastic; in that regard, I remember particularly Samuel French Morse (Stevens’ literary executor and a Stevens critic) who was especially excited and encouraging. On the other hand, I soon learned that enthusiasm was not universal.
When I sketched my discovery to a handful of other scholars, their reactions, I now see, amounted to predictable “pushback.” To be sure, those Stevens scholars willing to wade into the depths of philosophy are rare birds; so some, the unphilosophical, simply dismissed my discoveries out of hand. Others already had their own ideas and found mine farfetched; as one wag said, “Sure, and Francis Bacon wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays.” While initially discouraged, I eventually came to welcome this scepticism as a goad to making my arguments stronger.
As I went further, it became evident that I first needed to reckon with those doubts and doubters before the implications of my discovery could be enjoyed. While some of my interlocutor’s objections were quite sophisticated and specific, others fell into two general categories.
The first might be described as “whataboutism.” Generally speaking, Stevens’ criticism divides into four kinds:
- examinations of the poem alone (the legacy of New Criticism)
- biographical understandings (so, for example, the late poetry of The Rock is said to reflect the “mature” poet)
- contextual explications (here a poem is seen within the wide body of Stevens’ work and a concordance comes in handy)
- and comparative discussions (linking Stevens’ work with that of other poets or thinkers, like Yeats and Emerson)
In that world, my own approach (identifying source material and tracing its implications) seemed to some the work of a “fifth column,” shortchanging those other approaches. On those occasions, seizing on some point yielded by one of these other approaches, my critics would sputter: “Yes, but what about . . . ?” and “What about . . .?”
I need to be clear. The intent of this study is not to criticize or supplant those other approaches and what they yield, though occasionally my discoveries will inevitably do that. To my way of thinking, the real genius of Stevens is his ability to say many things simultaneously; and the great accomplishment of Stevens’ poems is that they are prism-like diamonds reflecting many meanings. If in my presentation of new ways of thinking about Stevens’ poems I have sometimes neglected to mention other facets of the poem yielded by these more conventional approaches or failed to acknowledge what others have found, it is only because I can’t say everything at once. In any event, when it comes to the relationship between my own and these other approaches, to quote Stevens, it’s often “not a choice between but of.” Indeed, I employ those other techniques throughout this study to bolster my views.
The other categorical criticism of my thesis arises from a high estimation of Stevens’ genius, an estimation I share. Some worry that by tracing Stevens’ ideas and inspirations back to Santayana’s text I am suggesting that Stevens is, in some way, playing second fiddle to Santayana, as if the poet was only secondary and paraphrasing the philosopher’s ideas. That, most emphatically, is not the case. When they first met at Harvard, Stevens was a nineteen-year-old student and the popular professor in his thirties; but in the decades that followed, and in many ways, the student surpassed the master. As we will see, Stevens was not only able to comprehend Santayana’s most subtle arguments but recast them in a new medium and in brilliant ways by bringing his considerable gifts as a poet. Then, too, Stevens sometimes distances himself from Santayana, objects to the philosopher’s ideas and heads off in his own direction.
As I later suggest, Stevens seems to see his poetic responses to Santayana’s book in terms of a certain paradigm: Many Western painters, he notes, have played variations upon the theme of The Virgin Surrounded by Angels (NA 73). By implication, Santayana and Stevens are playing their own variations upon shared ideas, one in philosophical prose and the other in poetry. That seems to be Stevens’ outlook.
My own paradigm for their relationship is different but likewise implies equality and does not see “derivative” as a dirty word. My own suggestion is that the conversation between Scepticism and Animal Faith and The Rock is more playful and can best be described in terms of the musical tradition of call-and-response.
A Working Hypothesis
The “discovery” that this book offers — that there are strong and comprehensive links between Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith and Stevens’ The Rock — is something I am convinced of. At the same time, I realize that it might require more evidence than what has been assembled here to convince others. For that reason, I offer my assertion as a “working hypothesis” that, if not convincing, is still useful in the ways it illuminates both books. In the scientific realm, this might be called a “pilot project” or a “feasibility study.” And for that reason, in the pages that follow, the reader may wish to insert before more than one sentence the phrase “For the time being, let us assume that . . . .”²
At the outset, I offer my thesis — again, that there are strong and comprehensive links between Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith and Stevens’ The Rock — only as a possibility because it takes time to establish that connection. For example, I can point to Santayana’s highly unusual image of ghostly trees blooming “in vacuo” and Stevens’ creation of an image of shadowy, transcendental trees looking like “wrecked umbrellas” — but that might be written off as a single, curious coincidence. But if I can, over the course of a number of pages, point to twelve other highly unusual images employed by Santayana and echoed by Stevens in the twenty-five poems of The Rock — well, then, patience might transform what is a possibility into a conviction. To say this differently, I caution against impatience and rash judgements since, undoubtedly, strong arguments for and against my thesis can be raised before the conclusion is reached. Even so, at that end, if the evidence gathered is judged incomplete, it must still be acknowledged that it is remarkably abundant.
Of course, a major change of thinking about such a significant poet as Wallace Stevens does not occur overnight. What is needed at the outset, then, is a suspension of disbelief. It may be that by gathering of a plethora of “coincidences” I will move some readers to eventually exchange their hypothesis for certainty. Still others, I realize, may remain unconvinced but still open to the possibility of connection between Santayana’s and Stevens’ books; and to them I extend an invitation to join this project and see better what I have only glimpsed; indeed, down the road, I expect more expert critics will flesh out what I have sketched here. Finally, I am aware that this endeavor is not for everyone and that some, lacking certainty, will never join in; this is as might be expected.
I should add, however, that there is one obstacle to testing this hypothesis and that is that it requires someone familiar with Santayana’s ideas or, at least, a reader willing to wade into philosophical thought. In that regard, I was lucky in the later stages of this project to encounter members of the Santayana Society who, along with some literature specialists and lay enthusiasts, formed a cadre of volunteers who were willing to meet and debate my ideas in regular online discussions during the Covid-19 quarantine.
This was a new kind of scholarship for an author like myself, someone accustomed to solitary writing pursuits. Here was a gregarious group of smart and opinionated people (many from different parts of the United States but others from abroad) who were willing to set aside weekends once a month to engage in Zoom discussions where they challenged my assertions, offered their own ideas, and made suggestions that eventually shaped my work. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that this is a “crowd-sourced” book.
As I indicate in the Acknowledgments, I am deeply grateful to those who offered help and advice during the year-and-a-half of our symposium and who did so without any inducement or reward other than the enterprise itself. Familiar with the shortcomings of an autodidact, I found it a great benefit to try out my ideas in a shared way and in social circumstances; and it may be that that as a result of our joint endeavor, my compatriots may yet generate studies of their own. In any event, my peers often reminded me not to let my opinions get ahead of my evidence.
As I shared my ideas in online discussions, I began to notice two kinds of responses. Some would have preferred me to be a kind of property-rights lawyer; my job, according to them, was to assemble every possible proof that one author borrowed from the other and literary understandings were, for the most part, beside the point. At the other extreme were indulgent auditors who — when it came to questions about any connection between Stevens and Santayana — were willing to entertain such a link on the chance it might yield new understandings of the poems; of course, such open-mindedness suggested that this pairing was not special and that other pairings (not just Stevens and Santayana) might be equally productive.
That has been the horns of my dilemma: Whether to devote myself to proving Stevens was responding to Santayana or whether to identify the riches that follow once that relationship is assumed. I have chosen to do both.
The following pages are, consequently, a hybrid endeavor. The first section lays out the case for “Plausibility” by discussing such topics as Stevens’ familiarity with Santayana, describing Stevens’ methods of composition, and examining three strong examples of Stevens reworking Santayana’s ideas into poems. The second and longer section presents “Implications” that follow from a linking of Scepticism and Animal Faith with The Rock: offering detailed discussions of connections between each of Stevens’ poems and their corresponding chapters in Santayana’s book, and showing how (by mirroring the structure of Santayana’s work) Stevens’ made The Rock into that coherent thing he called a “book” of poems.
Importance
While not quite a Copernican Revolution, this book is likely to cause a big splash in the small pond of Stevens readers and critics because it does something new and important. As the history of other literary revelations of its kind suggests, this work is sure to be controversial and upset the status quo. This study’s thesis, after all, has wide implications. Consider, for example, what follows once it is possible to identify (with reference to Santayana) the subject of a particular poem and what Stevens is trying to describe: some of Stevens’ most difficult poems suddenly become understandable, and some of his simplest become more profound. Once we have a good sense of what Stevens is trying to say in particular poem, we can also more confidently judge his work and sort the successful from the unsuccessful. And after decades of critical discussions and reams of analytical studies, attention can now be redirected: The question is no longer what is the poet saying but how.
But the value of this study does not end with just the pleasures of finally understanding some of Stevens’ most important poems. Other pleasures can be found as well. I know, for example, of no other occasion in the world of letters where there is such a high degree of interdisciplinary interaction between philosophy and poetry. This goes far beyond the work for which Lucretius is famous. This is something more exciting and wonderful: where two books from different genres are set up opposite each other and then reflect and elucidate each other, creating a conversation in the reader’s mind, engaging in playful cross-talk, brilliant call-and-response.
But there is one more reward also to be found in these pages. This work considers two top minds at their very best. Scepticism and Animal Faith is generally considered, by experts familiar with Santayana’s long career, the best summary of his philosophy; it is the summum bonum of a philosophical genius. And The Rock, in many ways, is an important poet’s “last word” on many issues and concerns that preoccupied him over a lifetime; bringing his Collected Poems to a close, looking back over his career, Stevens offers conclusions and the final residuum of his beliefs.
But the identification on this book’s values needn’t stop there. On a larger scale, we can now step back and recognize that both works offer important responses to modernity. A shorthand description of the Modern Age is this: “If God is dead, then what?” And in that regard, an indulgent Santayana is reported to have said, “There is no God and Mary is His mother”;³ and Stevens, in his famous poem “Sunday Morning,” observed how the “ancient sacrifice” in Palestine no longer has dominion over us.
In place of old beliefs, both thinkers offer secular alternatives, building up their systems from nature and from scratch. For Santayana, in the absence of God and in the manner of Descartes, he creates from scepticism’s ground zero an alternative (in terms of epistemology and ontology) which he styles “animal faith.” In The Rock, Stevens founds his faith upon a different rock. In his own secular vocabulary, Stevens replaces God-and-the-World with Imagination-and-Reality; and as he says in one poem, “We say God and the imagination are one.” Understood in this way, both Scepticism and Animal Faith and The Rock are keen responses to our Modern Era and manuals of existentialism.
But there is one final thing to add to the counting of values to this study.
The so-called “lay” members of our Zoom discussion group earned that sobriquet because they were not academics but smart folks with a keen interest in Stevens and Santayana, and they came from careers in business, science, the performing arts, and law. These frequently reminded me that the value they found in the subjects we took up here were quite apart from any academic debates or their import to intellectual history. Occasionally, links were made to Buddhism — not in any serious way but only to suggest that the subjects we were pursuing were important, personal, timeless, and existential: how we live, how we think, and how we find the world.⁴ As one person said, “These two books and these two thinkers take up things that really matter.”
These, then, are some of the many gifts to find in the pages that follows. Join me, if you like, in this adventure of discovery.
San Diego, California
June, 2022
Notes.
- Following convention and where not otherwise clear, references to Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy appear as “SAF” followed by the page number(s) and refer to the edition first published in 1923 and, in my case, to the unaltered republication of that work by Dover Publications (New York, 1955). In the case of Stevens: “CP” refers to The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954); “OP” to Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Knopf, 1957); “L.” to Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966); and “NA” to The Necessary Angel (New York: Knopf, 1951).
- For these methodological notes, I am indebted to my friend Elaine Scarry and her book Naming the Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 2016).
- After the war, Robert Lowell visited the aging philosopher in his residence in Rome. He (ostensibly) quotes the old philosopher in his poem “For George Santayana” in Life Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1959).
- For those who might want to explore a comparison of Stevens and Buddhism, I direct your attention to my essay “Zen Poetry, American Criticism, American Poetry Zen Criticism: Robert Aitken, Basho, and Wallace Stevens” which can be found in the Appendix or by clicking here.
