Connoisseur in Chaos:
.
Wallace Stevens
WYLIE SYPHER
A
T A TIME
of determined anti-romanticism Wallace Stevens has
never concealed his own romantic affiliations; the success of his verse
must be measured against the recent vogue of the metaphysical.
Allen Tate has formulated our distaste for poetry that does not integrate
the denotative with the connotative, that slackens tensions through
irresponsible denotations, that grasps the actual world feebly, and that
communicates an affective state-what Shelley called remote and
minute distinctions of feeling. A great deal of Stevens' verse, imper–
fectly articulating the denotative and connotative, conveys minute and
remote distinctions of feeling. The denotative level in Stevens is imag–
ist - an intensely visual statement with virtuoso sound, color,
rhythm. This visual statement, however, may have little to do with the
connotative, affective level of statement on which
his
fictions are
his feelings. The speculative passages in .Stevens belong in a category
of pseudo reference, to use Yvor Winters' term; behind the intellect–
ualized phrasing
is
an imprecision of thought almost unparalleled
in modern verse, which has depended, it is said, upon the counter–
point of the intellectual against the affective, the definite against
the indefinite.
In fact, Stevens has demonstrated the uses of imprecision. First,
the very fictions that compose the world for
him
are emphatic states
-fictions· that are feelings. They are not, for example, what they
are in Eliot, scriptural, ritualistic, doctrinal; the differences between
"Sunday Morning" and "The Waste Land"
in
this regard are
notable. Nor
is
Stevens' poetry, except
in
its imagist, denotative, ex–
tensional moments, directed toward objects, or to living amid objects.
The characteristic motion of Stevens is centrifugal, not centripetal:
the nuances of feeling and association, as in "The Idea of Order at
- Key West," extend indefinitely outward from the statement; whereas
in most modern verse the meanings tend to fall at once and heavily
inward upon texture, upon the logic and precision of statement, then
by repercussion to diffuse outward. The intimations of Eliot rise by
