Wallace Stevens: Fictional angels

Wallace Stevens seems to need to be introduced, he is a famous American poet, far-reaching, and vice president of insurance companies, living a good life. It seems that he has cleverly defused the "ancient hostility" between life and poetry. He has many fans in China, and many famous works have become must-read articles for poetry introductions, and have become cultural symbols for some fashionable literary and artistic youth to show off their identity and self-intoxicated. His poetic keywords such as "fiction" and "meditation" have also evolved into the basic discourse methods of speech and poetry. But at the same time, like other poets whose style is obscure and linguistically incomprehensible, although Stevens' name is familiar in the Chinese world, the interpretation of his poetry is ambiguous.

Wallace Stevens

Born October 2, 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania, he died August 2, 1955 in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Poetry Prize of the National Book Award in 1951 for The Aurora of Autumn, and the second prize for poetry in 1955 for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

This is certainly due to Stevens's emphasis on the irrationality of the poetic imagination and his "opposition to interpretation", but perhaps even more so because his poetry and poetics have deeply constructed a new order for poets and the world, creating and preserving the secrets of poetry in the modern world. To some extent, by sorting out Stevens's relevant rationale, we may be able to receive the secret joint codes of the poets, and we can also reimagine poetry.

Written by lou Yanjing |

The supreme affirmation of "imagination/poetry"

According to stevens translator and poet Zhang Zao's simple combing, in Stevens's "earlier poems" there are two voices, one is "irony", the other is "lyrical and sublime", and the latter kind of poetry is "more widely circulated", including "The Snowman", "Anecdotes of the Jar", "Sunday Morning" and other famous passages, together with Stevens's late creation, together constitute "typical Stevens". The core idea of this Stevens is the supreme affirmation of "imagination/poetry" in a modern world of "gods hiding" and after God's death—"when man abandons faith in God, poetry fills the void as compensation for life", thus:

It is the void of imagination

Desperately need to be imagined. Huge pond, much needed

The experience of understanding, without reflections, leaves, mud,

The water was also not like dirty glass, full of silence, only

Express the silence of the mouse when it comes to peeping.

The wreckage of the large pond and its lilies, both

Must be imagined as an inevitable cognition,

An urgent need, an indispensable urgent need

- "At a Glance"

After God's death, the world seems to be "clear at a glance", but it is in a state of extreme disorder, and it is in urgent need of imagination to fill in and reconstruct the order of the world so that "things are as they are". To do this,

You have to be an ignorant person again

See the sun again with an ignorant eye

See it clearly in its philosophy.

Under this premise, the role of the poet is also in urgent need of transformation, to become,

...... That one

The man in that old coat, that sagging breeches,

It is to use him, the youth, to create, to modulate

The last grace, not to go to comfort

Nor is it reverence, but an open presentation.

- "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction"

In the modern world, to create the "last grace", the poet/subject must be "ignorant" and "frank", allowing things to appear in the idea of things themselves. At the same time, poetry, as a form of imagination, as an intermediary for things to return to their own ideas, how to present this process, how to move towards "supreme fiction", requires a change in style, and "the change of style is the change of theme" (Xu Huan).

"Things are the way they are"

Under the new theme of "things as they are", a new style of poetry was formed, it was

...... That blue guitar

Be where things are,

The composition of a guitar sensation.

- "The Man Who Plays the Blue Guitar"

It is "syllable",

We don't talk about ourselves as we do in poetry.

We speak of ourselves in syllables, they come from

The floor rises, rises in what we don't say.

- "The Creation of Sound"

It is also a "bird song",

That thin chirp, that is

The lead choir's lead singer was

A large and insane part of the sun,

Surrounded by a circle of choirs,

Although it is still very far away. It's like

A new inquiry into reality.

- "Not the Object But the Thing Itself"

In short, poetry is pure sound, because even "that blue guitar" is made up of "the feeling of the guitar", so that words are equated with things, poetry is not even a form of symbolism, poetry "is not an object but a thing itself", it is "a speech that does not speak". In the ultimate sense, poetry becomes a "point" of "nothingness", which the poet must choose:

Nothingness is a kind of nakedness, a point

Beyond it thought cannot move forward as a thought.

He has to choose. But it is not one

Mutually exclusive choices between things. It's not one

between, but the choice that belongs. He chose to include

The things that include each other, the whole,

That complexity, that convergence of harmony.

Poetry, "one point", nihilistic, naked, extremely stylized, formalized, yet all-encompassing, forms a whole, "the harmony that converges.". It is like Borges's Aleph, "thing itself", omnipresent, and thus makes "things as they are". Only in this way can the modern world return to the state it once was "silent" and "peaceful":

...... The truth of a peaceful world,

There is no other meaning in it, it itself

Tranquility, itself is summer and night, it is itself

It is the reader who leans over to the evening and reads there.

- "The House Was Once Silent and the World Was Once Peaceful"

With the authorization of the "Supreme Fiction", the "word" and the "thing" are no longer divided, and they are re-isomorphic, each being what they are and what they are, and the whole world becomes a book that reads by itself and reads to each other, silent and peaceful. The world returns to its "once" appearance, as complete as ever, as the years are quiet and the present world is stable. It is a world of a new order, a fictional, utopian world, and if the Christian world is lost, then a pagan world is taking shape, coming from an old and new "poetic religion."

In Stevens's rhapsody, this new world, is recoded into a book, or a tablet, a virtuous system of self-circulation that forms the perfect closure. Stevens categorically argues that "the word must be what it reproduces, otherwise it is a symbol." It's a question of identity. Since words are things, with this as the center, on one hand, "things are as they are", and on the other hand, the poet is "the man who makes words", becoming a kind of "pure existence":

A golden feathered bird

Sing a strange song in a tree,

It is neither unintended nor humane.

- "Pure Existence"

"Absolute Fiction"

However, the more perfect this system is, the more the world is not false, the more it will show its own loopholes. A simple question is, where did the first driving force in this world come from? If a bird song is "a new inquiry into reality," who hears it, if things are made up of "guitar sensations," who is the "man who plays the blue guitar," who puts a jar in Tennessee to integrate the "messy wilderness," who places the altar, if God is dead? As a last resort, or as it should have been, Stevens must also set up an "absolute fiction" in front of the "supreme fiction":

...... To discover the true one,

To strip away every kind of fiction except one,

An absolute fiction, the angel,

Be quiet in your glowing clouds and listen

The right sound that glowing melody.

This "absolute fiction," the angel, is undoubtedly the embodiment of the poet, the one who has oriented or invented the "supreme fiction," which is the great premise of "things as they are," of the formation of a new order, and which, as Stevens called, the "necessary angel," in its own affairs.

Stevens also defended the necessity of angels in a slightly generous manner, saying in The Noble Rider and the Voice of Words:

In fact, there is a world of poetry sufficient to distinguish us from the world in which we live, or, I must say, no doubt, the world in which we will live, for what makes the poet the effective image of who he is, or has been, or should be, is that he has created the world to which we turn uninterruptedly and know nothing, and the supreme fictions which he has endowed to life, without which we cannot imagine it.

This is Stevens's hole card, a romantic hole card, but also a void hole card, and the angel is "necessary", perhaps just to characterize its "unnecessary". And the angels are necessary precisely because of the ideological illusion, and in "Slow Down", Stevens has to admit, "The ultimate faith is a fiction of faith." You know there is nothing but fiction. What a subtle truth it is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe it willingly. And the subtlety of this truth is also that Stevens reserved a rare sobriety, "This day will come: poetry, like heaven, looks like a sad device." When poetry tries to fill the void in heaven, it must also replicate the loss of heaven, and the problem is simply that "this day" has come when it does or thinks so.

Stevens' poetics once again confirmed Hugo Friedrich's view that modernist poetry is a kind of "de-romanticization of romanticism." Stevens's fiction of the "necessary angel" naturally lies within this Western tradition, but also from what he calls "the pressure of reality", and the chaos of the modern world makes Stevens choose the poetics of "escapism". Of course, in stevens' "toward the supreme fiction," he was in his private garden in Hartford, drinking wine, sipping tea, and enjoying a life of elegance. In any case, the "supreme fiction" is at the same time a "supreme reality," and the more the "necessary angel" says that he has nothing to do with reality, the more he relates to reality.

In China, the international tradition represented by Stevens has long been exchanged for the local style of either mainstream or copycat, and in the scramble to transplant and imitate, "poetry" is not only "the theme of this poem", but also the theme of life, and "fiction toward the supreme" has become a way of life. However, while reveling in the superiority of Stevens' poets "addressing an elite," savor another of Stevens' proverbs in The Slow Passage: "To have an original spirit, you must have the courage of a layman." The so-called "layman" is probably to jump out of the "fictional" illusion and return to the lively reality, the angel can be imaginary, but don't let the angel fictionalize the self and life.

Editor| Shang Zhongming

Proofreading | Xue Jingning