References to Santayana in Wallace Stevens:

An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Sources (as of 1990) by John Serio

References to Santayana taken from Wallace Stevens: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography, ed. John N. Serio (U of Pittsburgh P, 1994).

131. Tejera, V. “Wallace Stevens’ ‘Transport to Summer.’” Journal of Philosophy 45 (February 1948): 137–39.

Detecting a philosophical attitude in Stevens, calls his novel way of handling metaphor and analogy a complement of metaphysics, especially similar to that found in the work of Santayana.

206. Davenport, Guy. “Spinoza’s Tulips, A Commentary on ‘The Comedian as the Letter C.’” Perspective 7 (Autumn 1954): 147–54.

Uses Santayana’s Realm of Matter to bridge the philosophic inquiries of Spinoza and Stevens by emphasizing Stevens’s use of landscape in “The Comedian as the Letter C” to interconnect reality and the imagination through which he seeks knowledge of the world without illusions.

231. Pearson, Norman Holmes. “Wallace Stevens and ‘Old Higgs.’” Trinity Review 8.3 (May 1954): 35–36.

Calls Santayana Stevens’s mentor, his “Old Higgs.”

353. Kermode, Frank. Wallace Stevens. Writers and Critics series. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1960; rpt. new preface and bibliography. London: Faber and Faber, 1989.

Provides an appreciative introduction to the life, prose, and poetry. Characterizes Stevens as wholly American, despite a French influence, and downplays the reputed divorce between the lawyer and poet. Dismisses Winters’s charge of hedonism and Jarrell’s of philosophicalism by sanctioning the poetry as a sophisticated way of knowing reality. Devotes a chapter to the prose essays as illuminating the poetry, and links him with philosophers such as Santayana and Bergson in the romantic/symbolist tradition. Except for “Owl’s Clover,” terms the long poems “the major poems of the twentieth century.” Stresses the positive aspects of Stevens’s accomplishment — gaiety, freshness, integrations between reality and imagination — and views all of Stevens as a unity, in which “one poem proves another and the whole.” Selections reprinted in Ehrenpreis 1972, see entry 781.

371. Kermode, Frank. “The Words of the World: On Wallace Stevens.” Encounter 14 (April 1960): 45–50.

Introduces Stevens as a writer of redemptive poetry that “is the most important fact of our lives,” and points out Stevens’s debt to Bergson and Santayana. Reviews the three sections of “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” stating that Stevens contributes to reality by viewing it through the imagination.

400. Kermode, Frank. “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction: A Commentary.” Annali dell’Instituto Universitario Orientale: Sezione Germanica (Naples) 4 (1961): 173–201.

Annotates the title poem by providing several relevant quotes by Stevens, Valéry, and Santayana for each of its thirty cantos.

442. Burney, William A. “Wallace Stevens and George Santayana.” Ph.D. diss., State University of Iowa, 1962.

See Dissertation Abstracts 23.8 (February 1963): 2912.

514. Wilbur, Robert H. “George Santayana and Three Modern Philosophical Poets: T. S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, and Wallace Stevens.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1964.

See Dissertation Abstracts 26.4 (October 1965): 2228.

522. Buhr, Marjorie. “The Impossible Possible Philosopher’s Man: Wallace Stevens.” Carrell: Journal of the Friends of the University of Miami Library 6 (June 1965): 7–13.

Shows how Stevens reflects the ideas of many philosophers: Nietzsche (death of god), Santayana (art as redemption), Bergson (the world as flux), Heidegger and Husserl (phenomenology, the difficulty of being), and Whitehead (tension between particular and universal).

544. Young, David P. “A Skeptical Music: Stevens and Santayana.” Criticism 7 (Summer 1965): 263–83.

Explores Stevens’s debt to Santayana, beginning with their shared belief in the contingency of fact and the irrational essence of existence. Calling both men “connoisseurs of chaos,” points out how their skeptical view of reality constantly renewed their knowledge as they ceaselessly cast off old forms of belief. Sees Stevens sharing a “radical skepticism” with Santayana, in which “Our only ‘immediate’ or direct knowledge is of mental states or ideas.” Emphasizes the aesthetic character of all knowledge and its dependence on the imagination, that all we can ever know are fictions: “This view of the primacy of the human imagination becomes the central concept of Stevens’s thought.” Concludes by referring to Santayana’s analysis of four aspects of poetry, and links Stevens with the highest, in which the poet reconstructs reality. Reprinted in Ehrenpreis 1972, see entry 781.

551. Doggett, Frank. Stevens’ Poetry of Thought. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966.

Explores Stevens’s use of philosophic ideas to form naturalistic poetry that depends less on a consistent logical basis than on the aesthetic values of the ideas. Shows these ideas to consider usually some aspect of the subject/object relationship, based on a human, intuitive experience of reality. Notes affinities with numerous philosophers, including Schopenhauer, James, Santayana, Bergson, Jung, Cassirer, Whitehead, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Croce, and Bradley. Reprints Doggett “This Invented World” (1961), see entry 387; selections reprinted in Ehrenpreis 1972, see entry 781.

601. Fuchs, Daniel. “Wallace Stevens and Santayana.” In Patterns of Commitment in American Literature, ed. Marston LaFrance, 135–64. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967.

Studying the influence of Santayana on Stevens, finds that Santayana served as a source for Stevens, but that Stevens ultimately departed from and transcended Santayana. Parallels Santayana’s shift of interest from the philosophy of history to ontology with Stevens’s shift from a hedonist concern with the outside world to a concern with a mentally conceived world. Finds that Santayana’s aesthetic of beauty informs much of Stevens’s earlier poetry, but that it bears no resemblance to Stevens’s later aesthetic of evil.

616. Riddel, Joseph N. “Blue Voyager.” Salmagundi 2 (1967–1968): 61–74.

Reviewing the Letters of this most perambulatory of poets, finds the same struggle between imagination and reality, subject and object as that manifested in the poetry, even though the journals and letters may appear engaged more with facticity than the discovery of reality. Observes Stevens’s self-criticism saves him from solipsism and reinforces his belief in the interdependence of all vital things, including mind and world, and thus, provides insight into his poetry. Cites the influence of Emerson, Whitman, and Santayana, and describes Stevens as culturally and politically conservative, yet of enduring humanity.

636. Alexander, Charles. “The Idea of Evil in Wallace Stevens’ Poetry.” Massachusetts Studies in English 1 (Fall 1968): 100–05.

Notes Stevens follows Nietzsche in his stoical acceptance of evil as part of life and Santayana in his aesthetic absorption of it, and finds this distasteful.

652. Nilsen, Helge Normann. “The Quest for Reality: A Study in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens.” In Americana-Norvegica. Norwegian Contributions to American Studies. Vol. II, ed. Sigmund Skard, 219–98. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968.

Revealing the affinity with Santayana’s philosophy, organizes a lengthy but clear discussion around central themes, such as the struggle of the individual to exist in an inhuman world after the collapse of traditional belief systems; the poverty of rational explanations of the world in contrast to the rich life of the imagination; the importance of the imagination to lend order to experience; the quest for pure fact, the urge to perceive the world without a fictive covering, yet the inescapable necessity of metaphor as an element in experience. Argues that Stevens’s rejection of metaphysics makes him a materialist, but one counteracted by personal idealism, and concludes that Stevens’s aestheticism lies at the root of his shortcomings as a poet: “It has limited his subject-matter too severely, excluded the personal, dramatic element and led the poet to act as a refined poetic connoisseur who wrote lengthy poems about the process of creating an image, examining it, questioning it and then letting it go, as it were, only to start the whole process all over again.”

702. Morse, Samuel F. Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life. New York: Pegasus, 1970.

Stylistically compressed, reveals Stevens’s life as it manifests itself in the poetry: “He would have liked the poems to stand as his true biography.” Contains pithy material on early years from Harvard juvenilia to experimental plays to first publication of poems in small journals. Discusses in detail Harmonium, noting influences from Donald Evans, William James, Bergson, and Santayana, and middle period, with Stevens’s response to Marxist criticism, but never escapes these early works. Confesses: “More than half of the letters in the volume edited by his daughter Holly belong to the last fourteen years of Stevens’s life . . . Together with the poems and essays that span the same period — nearly half of all he published — they comprise a full record of the life of his mind. They make any biography, in one sense, superfluous . . .”

711. Eder, Doris L. “Wallace Stevens: Heritage and Influences.” Mosaic 4 (Fall 1970): 49–61.

Superficially discusses possible influences on Stevens, concentrating the most attention on the French symbolists. Mentions Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Keats, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Laforgue, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Samain, Valéry, Whitman, Emerson, and Santayana. Believes Mallarmé to have the greatest affinity with Stevens, yet concludes that Stevens should be understood as an American rather than a European poet.

723. Mulqueen, James E. “Wallace Stevens: Radical Transcendentalist.” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 11 (1970): 329–40.

Suggests that Stevens can be read as influenced by the radical transcendentalism of Santayana. Describes Stevens’s notions of this theory as an understanding of the subjectivity of experience and of the need to keep the imagination grounded in the real.

781. Ehrenpreis, Irvin, ed. Wallace Stevens: A Critical Anthology. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1972.

Contains: see entry 488; Young’s “A Skeptical Music: Stevens and Santayana” (1965), see entry 544

834. Sastri, P. S. “Stevens, the Romantics, and Santayana.” Indian Journal of American Studies (Hyderabad, India) 3 (1973): 39–46.

Discontinuously interweaves numerous statements from Stevens to show his romantic kinship. Uses terms from “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” to link Stevens to his romantic forebears: thus, “it must be abstract” echoes Wordsworth’s emphasis on the transformative power of the imagination; “it must change” relates to Keats and Shelley’s emphasis on mutability; “it must give pleasure” corresponds to Keats and Coleridge’s emphasis on the joy of creation. Finally, associates Stevens’s emphasis on perceiving essence with Santayana’s philosophy.

853. Beckett, Lucy. Wallace Stevens. Chatham: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

Argues that Stevens belongs to the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Santayana in their search for morals and values in human life through literature and poetry. Reads Stevens’s poetry affirmatively, arguing that he sought to construct “reconciling structures of belief” in defiance of the “desolation of existence” typified by Eliot’s The Waste Land. Compares Stevens’s oeuvre with Christianity to show the similarity of their purposes — the “ennoblement of humans,” and to affirm “the value of the individual soul and . . . the meaning of its relation to the absolute.” Claims that Stevens shares I. A. Richards’s view that the imagination is not make-believe but that “mythologies . . . are the utterance of the whole soul of man.” States that Stevens’s work “is the record of his progress in a faith whose existence and whose object could be defined, the old defining words being dead, only in the new words of his poetry.” Unfortunately, rather than supporting references to the soul and God with close readings, claims that “as usual, it would be rash to identify with any firmness the subject of [a] poem.” Anticipates Stevens’s alleged conversion to Catholicism with such observations as, “Stevens is here very near a spiritual centre . . . that could as well be described in the traditional terms of christian theology.”

1012. Hughson, Lois. “Stevens and the Sufficiency of Reality.” In Thresholds of Reality: George Santayana and Modernist Poetics, 158–75. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977.

In a book examining Santayana’s philosophy, shows how his aesthetic and critical theories find a parallel in Yeats and a fulfillment in Eliot and Stevens. Details Santayana’s influence on Stevens in terms of Stevens’s emphasis on the constructive aspect of the imagination to create the necessary fictions to help humans endure reality.

1048. Bates, Milton J. “Stevens’ Books at the Huntington: An Annotated Checklist.” Parts I, II, Errata. Wallace Stevens Journal 2 and 3 (1978, 1979): 45–61, 15–33, 70.

Lists Stevens’s library holdings through four periods (The Reading Years, The Cambridge Years, The New York Years, and The Hartford Years, the latter of which includes art books, portfolios, periodicals, catalogues, genealogical books) as well as works containing his own writing, as a way of reconstructing possible influences (Arnold, Keats, Santayana, Klee): “To reconstruct Stevens’ reading, then, is partially to map the topography of his imagination.” Along with useful annotations (“His file of magazines containing his own work amounts to a short survey of the aesthetic revolution we call modern poetry”), details whether works contain inscriptions, notations, marginalia, or laid in materials.

1114. Buchsbaum, Betty. “Wallace Stevens: The Wisdom of the Body in Old Age.” Southern Review 15 (1979): 953–67.

Reads Stevens’s late poems as resulting from wisdom acquired from the process of aging. Selects several aspects of aging conducive to great poetry: desire, awakened by the body’s decrepitude and by nostalgia; an unconscious or sleeping state affected by old age where one forgets the boundary between self and other so that the consciousness becomes “rooted” in the body; a closely related transcendence of the self where self and other become being; and a unity of desire and strength which centers the consciousness, typified by Penelope and Santayana.

1128. Griswold, Jerome. “Santayana on Memory and ‘The World as Meditation.’” Wallace Stevens Journal 3 (1979): 113–16.

Suggests the title poem particularizes Santayana’s ideas on memory (emphasis on the present, invention, control, and repetition) found in Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923).

1295. Ruddick, Lisa. “Fluid Symbols in American Modernism: William James, Gertrude Stein, George Santayana, and Wallace Stevens.” In Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield, 335–53. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Traces the influence of James’s Principles of Psychology, which uses water imagery to represent the external world of sensation and differentiates between personalities that assimilate new experience and those that resist it, in the symbolism of Stein, Santayana, and Stevens. Documents Stein’s acceptance of the value of a “resisting” personality transforming into an “attacking” personality, Santayana’s modification whereby he insists that the transformation must be matched by creativity and the building of a fiction to have value, and Stevens’s further modification of realizing that a created fiction has only momentary value.

1309. Bates, Milton J. “Selecting One’s Parents: Wallace Stevens and Some Early Influences.” Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1982): 183–208.

Discusses the influence of Stevens’s father on his early life, prompting his choice of law and instilling a belief in hard work and practicality. Notes Santayana’s encouragement and support of Stevens’s literary endeavors. See also Bates’s Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (1985), entry 1476.

1324. Griswold, Jerome. “The Calculated Failures of ‘Prologues to What Is Possible.’” Wallace Stevens Journal 6 (1982): 74–78.

Attempts to relate Stevens’s “mental bumblings” in “Prologues to What Is Possible” to Santayana’s argument in Scepticism and Animal Faith that non-sequiturs, contradictions, and errors certify the existence of mental life.

1342. Strom, Martha. “Wallace Stevens’ Revisions of Crispin’s Journal: A Reaction Against the ‘Local.’” American Literature 54 (1982): 258–76.

Unlike Martz (see entry 1218), argues that the parts excised from “The Comedian as the Letter C” show Stevens reacting against the dominant local color movement, rather than being in alliance with it. Notes Santayana’s influence on his comic mode, and sees Stevens stressing the primary role of imagination over setting. Reprinted in Axelrod and Deese 1988, see entry 1677.

1352. Peterson, Margaret. Wallace Stevens and the Idealist Tradition. Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1983.

Anchors Stevens in the romanticism of Coleridge and traces his affiliation with modern directions of idealism in Richards, Croce, Bergson, James, and Santayana. Contains Peterson’s “Harmonium and William James” (1971), see entry 765.

1428. Ferguson, Margaret W. “‘The afflatus of ruin’: Meditations on Rome by Du Bellay, Spenser, and Stevens.” In Roman Images, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982, n.s. no. 8, ed. Annabel Patterson, 23–50. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.

Examines the treatment of Rome, especially its ruins, as source of inspiration in the title authors. Uses “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” to discuss the relation between Rome and the theme of Freud’s “family romance,” in which Santayana functions as a heroic father-figure and Rome as a mythical homeland translating death into rebirth. Argues all three poets share the myth of “finding reassurance about the continued existence of one’s own poetic powers through a re-creative vision of another’s ruin — a ruin that is made an occasion for the exercise of one’s own eloquence.”

1429. Filreis, Alan. “Wallace Stevens and the Crisis of Authority.” American Literature 56 (December 1984): 560–78.

Characterizing turn-of-the-century Harvard as liberal in embracing the demands of a changing technological society, argues Stevens was influenced far more significantly by the antiliberal reaction among such teachers as Santayana who held antimodern attitudes about the function of art in society. Republished as “Wallace Stevens and the Strength of the Harvard Reaction” (1985), see entry 1499.

1484. Armstrong, Tim. “An Old Philosopher in Rome: George Santayana and His Visitors.” Journal of American Studies 19 (1985): 349–68.

Draws from letters, essays, poems, and other documentation the impression Santayana made on writers, including Pound, Edmund Wilson, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Robert Lowell, and Stevens, and other notable people during his stay in Rome. Indicates the idealistic apotheosis accorded by Stevens to Santayana, who upheld Santayana as an example of someone who lived purely for his art.

1618. Sawaya, Richard N. The Scepticism and Animal Faith of Wallace Stevens. New York: Garland Publishers, Inc., 1987.

A photographic reproduction of a 1976 dissertation (unindexed and replete with handwritten corrections), details the influence of Santayana on Stevens, including the relationship between religion and poetry and such central Santayanian concepts as “essence,” “intuition,” “spirit,” and “truth.”

1684. Wallace Stevens: Man Made Out of Words. In Voices & Visions. A Thirteen-Part Videotape Series on Modern American Poetry. The Annenberg-CPB Project. New York: New York Center for Visual History, 1988.

Features business associates, neighbors, poets James Merrill and Mark Strand, and critics Helen Vendler, A. Walton Litz, Harold Bloom, and Joan Richardson, discussing Stevens’s life and poetry. Provides biographical background, including many family photographs and original footage of life at the turn of the century, to depict the surroundings out of which Stevens emerged. Discusses many of the prominent themes in Stevens, including the role of the poet as maker, the interdependencies of opposites, the death of God, as well as the various influences of Santayana, romanticism, French symbolism, and artists Paul Klee and Cézanne. Supplies elucidating observations on numerous poems, including “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Planet on the Table,” and “The Auroras of Autumn.”

1816. Baechler, Lea. “Pre-Elegiac Affirmation in ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome.’” Wallace Stevens Journal 14 (Fall 1990): 141–52.

Sees the poem as a pre-elegy in which the poet approaches a state of mere being, an affirmation of this life as opposed to an afterlife, a creation of life as art through the endless interdependencies of reality and imagination. Finds the source for the 1952 poem in a memoir by Edmund Wilson about meeting Santayana in the convent of the Blue Nuns in Rome published in New Yorker in April 1946.

1863. Trzyna, Thomas. “‘Esthétique du Mal’ as Parody of Burke’s Sublime.” Wallace Stevens Journal 14 (Fall 1990): 167–73.

Maintains Stevens relies on Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty for his aesthetic theory and for his criticism of Burke’s outmoded theory of the sublime. Therefore, sees certain sentimental passages that others find flawed as being satiric, parodies of bad art.

Return to Table of Contents