New Wallace Stevens Recordings Reveal a Daring but Human Poet

Wallace Stevens holds a celebrated place in the English poetry canon. Inventive, witty, philosophical, and abstract, his poems successfully experiment with language and redefine the boundaries of the genre. As Helen Vendler, Harvard professor and renowned poetry critic, puts it, “[He] is as good with language as Rembrandt was with paint, or as Balanchine was with dance…the medium is used much more imaginatively.”

The general public got to experience Stevens’s genius in a new light on Tuesday, Oct. 21, when the Barker Center played a series of recordings of Stevens reading his own work. The recordings had been made in 1954 at Harvard, Stevens’s alma mater, and then subsequently forgotten; set on gramophone records and stored in the Woodberry Poetry Room, they remained inaccessible for 60 years. The recent digitization of the collection, though, allowed for the rediscovery of the discs. A new technology, called IRENE, de-laminated the records and converted them to a more contemporary format. The Barker Center reception was the first time that they had been played for the public.

The tapes consist of Stevens reading “It Must Change” and “The Auroras of Autumn.” The first poem is part of the “Notes on a Supreme Fiction” sequence, a highly philosophical work that examines the capabilities of art in the context of human life. According to Stevens, art culminates in “supreme fiction,” or a fictive substitute for a formally religious god. The title of “It Must Change” refers to one of Stevens’s criteria for such successful fiction; the other titles in the sequence are “It Must be Abstract” and “It Must Give Pleasure.”

According to Vendler, who offered commentary on the poems prior to their being played, “It Must Change” specifically comments on the relationship between European and American art. By her interpretation, Stevens argues throughout the poem that American art must reject the tropes and traditions of Europe: it must change and thereby assume its own identity. Characteristically of Stevens, this thesis is very far from explicit. Still, parts of the poem support Vendler’s theory. For example, one section of the multi-section poem inspects and ultimately rejects the classically European symbol of the military equestrian statue. “the General, / the very Place Du Puy, in fact, belonged / Among our more vestigial states of mind. / Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. / Yet the General was rubbish in the end,” writes Stevens.

By contrast, other sections involve distinctly New World language, featuring a planter working in a world of unforeseen, exotic lushness and a captain and his men who are named as one. It is also possible to identify statements that could very well be sweeping assertions of belief, such as the statement, “It is a sound like any other. It will end,” which might refer to the transience of ideology and culture.

The second poem, “The Auroras of Autumn,” is far more accessible. Though largely opaque in its language, it handles more common, emotional subjects, such as family and the relative powers of time, humans, and art. In the first section, Stevens sets a benevolent mother against a brutally coarse, strong father, probably speaking from personal experience: Stevens endured a lifelong estrangement from his troubled family’s patriarch, and none of his family members showed up to his wedding. After this move into the autobiographical, the poem shifts into the apocalyptic and visually spectacular. The speaker steps outside his house to witness the aurora borealis, a natural phenomenon in which colored lights appear in the sky, and contemplates the fragility of life and art in the face of time. The poem closes as Stevens explores the idea of innocence relative to the earth. He concludes that we are “an unhappy people in a happy world,” but art provides “a blaze of summer straw in winter’s nick.”

The “blaze of summer straw” line exemplifies the process of reading Stevens for the first time. The purpose of the image is not immediately apparent, but the image itself is strong and beautiful: even without full comprehension, the lyricism of the poems make them gorgeous experiences. Hearing Stevens read the poems on tape adds another dimension of accessible pleasure. As Vendler pointed out, the author lingers on some words and slides over others in a slow, caressing voice. This deliberate and individual reading reveals the poem’s intended rhythm and shape.

And the recordings offer something even to non-connoisseurs. The tapes, originally considered outtakes, feature Stevens occasionally coughing or accidentally replacing one word with another. These little mistakes provide humanity and even humor, making a giant of a poet seem like a familiar presence.

Ultimately, the tapes are part of an ongoing journey towards understanding Stevens; nearly half a century after his death, the poetry community is still in the process of unearthing new truths about his life and work. According to Vendler, Stevens’s poems never fail in their offerings.“I’ve been reading him now for 50 years,” she says. “He’s a good one to read when you’re young, because he’ll last you all your life.”