Randall Jarrell
REFLECTIONS ON WALLACE STEVENS
Let me begin with a quotation from Stendhal: "'What I
find completely lacking in all these people,' thought Lucien, 'is the
unexpected... .' He was reduced to philosophizing." In my quotation
Lucien stands for Stevens, "these people" for America and Business,
"the unexpected" for Culture, the exotic, the past, the Earth-minus–
America; "philosophizing" stands for, alas! philosophizing.... But
before Stevens was reduced to it, he drew the unexpected from a hun–
dred springs. There has never been a travel poster like
Harmonium:
how many of its readers must have sold what they had, given the money
to steamship agents, and gone to spend the rest of their lives in Lhasa.
Yet there was nothing really unusual in what Stevens felt. To have
reached, in 1900, in the United States, the age of twenty-one, or fifteen,
or twelve-as Stevens and Pound and Eliot did-this was so hard a
thing for poets, went so thoroughly against the grain, that they emi–
grated as soon as they could, or stayed home and wrote poems in which
foreignness, pastness, is itself a final good. "But how absurd!" a part
of anyone protests. "Didn't they realize that, to a poet, New York City
means just as much as Troy and Jerusalem and all the rest of those
immensely overpaid accounts
that Whitman begged the Muse,
install'd
amid the kitchenware,
to cross out?" They didn't realize it; if one
realizes it, one is not a poet. The accounts have been overpaid too
many years for people ever to stop paying; to keep on paying them is to
be human. To be willing to give up Life for the last local slice of it, for
all those Sears Roebuck catalogues which, as businessmen and generals
say, would be the most effective propaganda we could possibly drop
on the Russians-this is a blinded chauvinism, a provincialism in space
and time, which
is
even worse than that vulgar exoticism which dis–
regards both what we have kept and what we are unique in possessing,
which gives up
Moby Dick
for the Journals of Andre Gide. Our most
disastrous lacks--delicacy, awe, order, natural magnificence and piety,
