Poems Misbegotten and Misplaced:

“Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” & “The Course of a Particular”

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Early in 1950 Wallace Stevens promised to send some new poems to the Hudson Review but near the end of that year, on December 5, he was apologizing to Joseph Bennett that he had been “overwhelmingly busy at the office–and in consequence too tired to do anything” (L. 701). Three days later, however, he apparently had found something in his files and sent along “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” (L. 701). This was followed by another, “The Course of a Particular,” sent on January 29 (L. 701, n. 3). Both poems would be published in the same issue of Hudson Review, IV (Spring 1951). This particular group created two anomalies in the more or less straightforward correspondences between chapter (in Scepticism and Animal Faith) and poem (in The Rock).

“Final Soliloquy” seems to be the earliest composition of the poems that appear in The Rock. In his letter to Bennett, Stevens describes it as a failed attempt at a long poem but, upon reviewing it, a not-so-bad effort that might satisfy his promise to send something for Hudson Review. In my discussion of the poem, I make the point that “Final Soliloquy” was an early attempt to respond to Santayana’s “Chapter XV. Belief in Substance” that went astray, but that Stevens did a better job in the poem he apparently composed right after, viz. “The Rock.” Moreover, “The Rock” seems to be the long poem that Stevens hoped “Final Soliloquy” would become.

The other poem that appeared in this same issue of Hudson Review, “The Course of a Particular,” likewise seems a “misfire” that Stevens found in his files but sent along to Bennett as a belated way of honoring his promise to send something. As I indicate elsewhere, “The Course of a Particular” responds to Santayana’s Chapter XV but in a less satisfactory way than “Long and Sluggish Lines.” (more)

Robert Pack, letter, included in “Corrected Edition”

Final Soliloquy (Gaod and the imagination are one) a favorite of critics and Marianne Moore, ends Faber & Faber’s Selected edition