Abstract
If a single poetic line encapsulates the mythopoeic motive in Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium (1923) it is: ‘Death is the mother of beauty’.1 It is evidence that Stevens had adopted Nietzsche’s tragic view of nature — ‘death’ signals the dissolution of the gods and beauty is a form of aesthetic salvation. In other words, death consciousness is the primary breeder of a secular, redemptive aesthetic. The title to Stevens’ first poetry collection, Harmonium, is a significant clue to the intermediate perspective that Stevens upholds as a necessary substitute for the loss of belief in God. In referring to a musical instrument (a type of reed organ), Stevens invokes the theme of Dionysian folk wisdom, so underscoring the spiritual quest for harmony, the balanced interplay, between human artifice and an anarchic impulse that concords with a godless natural order. For various critics, ‘perspectivism’ is seen to be key to the collection, implying there is no fixed point of view regarding a suitable art form for imagining a chaotic, godless, natural world.2 For example, William W. Bevis argues that the arrangement of Harmonium consists of antitheses, contradictions and subtle deflections of points of view, implying the dominant idiom is premised on perspectivism.3 However, I argue that Stevens moves through various ‘demonstrations’ of aesthetic conceptions, in order to arrive at a suitable post-religious metaphysic.4
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Notes
Various critics have attempted to define Stevens’ perspectivism, which appears to be an extension of the initial negative response to Harmonium that characterized Stevens as a ‘fanciful’ aesthete. See Steven Gould Axelrod & Helen Deese (eds.), Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988), p. 4. (I am grateful for Professor Steven Gould Axelrod for supplying me with a copy of the collection.) For Donald Sheehan, it means reality is not known by a fixed view: ‘Metaphor is both the prelude to knowledge and the evasion of reality’. ‘Stevens’ Theory of Metaphor’, from Critics on Wallace Stevens, ed. Peter L. McNamara (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1972), p. 39. B. J. Leggett argues that Stevens’ ‘perspectivist texts’ test naïve realism and other order-creating effects of artifice. Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1992). David R. Jarraway argues that: ‘Harmonium tends to foreground the elimination of God for the purposes of originating metaphorical play’ ‘Stevens and Belief, from The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens, ed. John N. Serio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 194–5.
J. Hillis Miller, ‘Wallace Stevens’ Poetry of Being’, The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, eds. Roy Harvey Pearce & J. Hillis Miller (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), p. 143. In Greek mythology, Harmonía is the goddess of concord.
Edward Ragg, Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 3.
Frank Kermode, ‘Harmonium and Ideas of Order’, Wallace Stevens (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1960), p. 25.
James Longebach, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 305.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Fish’, Birds, Beasts and Flowers! (New Hampshire: Black Sparrow Book, 2008), p. 81.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Body of God’, Last Poems, ed. Richard Aldington (London: Martin Secker, 1933), p. 30.
Letters to Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens & Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 204.
Milton J. Bates, A Mythology of Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 132.
Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 198.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (The University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 26.
See K. K. Ruthven, Myth (London: Methuen & Co Ltd., 1976), p. 74.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophical of Symbolic Forms (Volume 2: Mythical Thought), trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 38.
Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1953), p. 99.
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 79.
Michael Bell, ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’, from The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 9.
Phil Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 2–7.
See Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, ‘Metamorphosis in Wallace Stevens’, from Wallace Stevens: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Marie Borroff, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 54–70. Metamorphosis links the subjective and the physical world. Stevens also uses the term ‘metamorphosis’ when discussing the creation of resemblance between something real and something imagined. ‘Three Academic Pieces’, The Necessary Angel, quoted from Collected Poetry and Prose, pp. 686–7.
Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy From Hardy to Heaney, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 102–3.
See Frederic Jameson, ‘Wallace Stevens’, from Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens, pp. 176–90. See also Justin Quinn, Gathered Beneath the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community (Dublin: University Dublin Press, 2002), pp. 37–9.
Bernard G. Beatty, Byron’s Don Juan (London: Croom Helm, 1985), p. 25. Canto XV, 88, p. 423.
See Glen MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism, & Michael Benamou, in Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972). Benamou explores Stevens’ indebtedness to the aesthetics of modern painting, and argues that Stevens was conscious of the surrealist movement and the implications of Freud’s exploration of the unconscious (p. 57).
Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 31.
Michael Saler, ‘Profane Illuminations, Delicate and Mysterious Flames: Mass Culture and Uncanny Gnosis’, from Jo Collins & John Jervis (eds.), Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 184.
André Breton, ‘Surrealist Situation of the Object’ (1935), from Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver & Helen R. Lane (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 273.
René Magritte & Harry Torczyner, Letters between Friends. trans. Richard Miller (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p. 27.
From a radio interview with Jean Neyens (1965), cited in Harry Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. Richard Milien (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), p. 172.
Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: Quantum Books, 1983), p. 49.
For a fuller discussion of Magritte’s ‘uncanny sublime’ as a modernist aesthetic, see Scott Freer ‘Magritte: The Uncanny Sublime’, Literature and Theology 27:3 (September 2013), pp. 330–44.
David Punter, Metaphor (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 87.
John Henry Newman, The Grammar of Assent (New York: Image Books, 1955), pp. 95–6.
T. S. Eliot, The Rock (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), pp. 83–6.
Charles Berger, Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin, 1985), pp. 152–3.
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Freer, S. (2015). ‘Death is the mother of beauty’: Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium. In: Modernist Mythopoeia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035516_6
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