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Bart Eeckhout
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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
MUSIC AND LITERATURE
The Poetic Music of

Wallace Stevens
Bart Eeckhout · Lisa Goldfarb
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature
Series Editors
Paul Lumsden
City Centre Campus
MacEwan University
Edmonton, AB, Canada
Marco Katz Montiel

Facultad de Letras
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Santiago, RM - Santiago, Chile
This leading-edge series joins two disciplines in an exploration of how
music and literature confront each other as dissonant antagonists while
also functioning as consonant companions. By establishing a critical con-
nection between literature and music, this series highlights the interaction
between what we read and hear. Investigating the influence music has on
narrative through history, theory, culture, or global perspectives provides
a concrete framework for a seemingly abstract arena. Titles in the series,
both monographs and edited volumes, explore musical encounters in nov-
els and poetry, considerations of the ways in which narratives appropriate
musical structures, examinations of musical form and function, and studies
of interactions with sound.
Editorial Advisory Board

Frances R. Aparicio, Northwestern University, US
Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, US
Barbara Brinson Curiel, Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies,
Humboldt State University, US
Gary Burns, Northern Illinois University, US
Peter Dayan, Word and Music Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Shuhei Hosokawa, International Research Center for Japanese
Studies, Japan
Javier F. León, Latin American Music Center of the Jacobs School of
Music, Indiana University, US
Marilyn G. Miller, Tulane University, US
Robin Moore, University of Texas at Austin, US
Nduka Otiono, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada
Gerry Smyth, Liverpool John Moores University, England
Jesús Tejada, Universitat de València, Spain
Alejandro Ulloa Sanmiguel, Universidad del Valle, Colombia
Bart Eeckhout • Lisa Goldfarb
The Poetic Music of

Wallace Stevens
Bart Eeckhout Lisa Goldfarb
Department of Literature Gallatin School
University of Antwerp New York University
Antwerp, Belgium New York, NY, USA
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature

ISBN 978-3-031-07031-0 ISBN 978-3-031-07032-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07032-7
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Acknowledgments
So many years of collaborative work and intellectual exchange come

together in this book that we hesitate to draw up a list of institutional and
individual names to express our gratitude, as the list is bound to be
incomplete.
Over the years in which we prepared different components of our book,
we enjoyed the institutional support of our respective employers, the
Gallatin School of New York University (Lisa) and the University of
Antwerp (Bart). During the academic year 2016–2017, Bart was able to
plot and draft some of his contributions through a Residential Fellowship
of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and
Social Sciences, combined with a sabbatical fellowship of the Flemish
Research Council (FWO). Lisa received a Gallatin Faculty Research
Fellowship 2017–2019, which enabled her to work on the book proposal
and begin the research for some of her contributions, and a fellowship
from the NYU Center for the Humanities during the academic year
2020–2021 to work on her own chapters. We were also given the oppor-
tunity to try out early versions of our chapters at conferences and other
academic gatherings: a conference entitled “Melodies and Modernisms”
at Ghent University in 2007 (Bart); an annual symposium of the Flemish
Association for Literary Theory (VAL), entitled “Music in Literature—
Literature in Music,” at the Free University of Brussels in 2016 (Bart); a
panel on Stevens and music at the Modern Language Association’s annual
convention in New York in 2018 (Lisa and Bart); and two meetings of the
NYU Center for the Humanities, which hosted workshops first on the
birdsong chapter and then our introduction (Lisa).
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our deepest thanks always go to our families and friends for the pride
they have in our work, and the good cheer that they always provide. A
special thanks from both of us to George Burns, who read every chapter
in advance of the final preparation of the manuscript.
For more than a decade now, we have both been active as officers of
The Wallace Stevens Society and editors of both The Wallace Stevens
Journal and various volumes on the poet edited either for the Journal or
for separate publishers. These activities have allowed us to benefit con-
stantly from the inspiration and companionship offered by many col-
leagues who make the academic study of Stevens such a sophisticated,
witty, generous, and warm environment. We can do no more than honor
our longtime partners here through an alphabetical list of names: Charles
Altieri, Massimo Bacigalupo, Dennis Barone, Milton J. Bates, Jacqueline
Vaught Brogan, Stephanie Burt, Robert Buttel, Angus Cleghorn, Bonnie
Costello, Alan Filreis, Zachary Finch, James Finnegan, Florian Gargaillo,
Natalie Gerber, Thomas Gould, Gül Bilge Han, Anna Jamieson, Daniel
Jean, Lee M. Jenkins, George S. Lensing, James Longenbach, Glen
MacLeod, Rachel Malkin, Maureen N. McLane, the late J. Hillis Miller,
Axel Nesme, Marjorie Perloff, Justin Quinn, Edward Ragg, Irene Ramalho
Santos, Jahan Ramazani, Patrick Redding, Joan Richardson, Alexis Serio,
John N. Serio, Tony Sharpe, Laura Slatkin, Lisa M. Steinman, Juliette
Utard, Helen Vendler, and Krzysztof Ziarek.
At Palgrave Macmillan, we would like to thank Allie Troyanos (Senior
Editor), with whom we first discussed our project, and Vinoth Kuppan
(Project Coordinator), who has helped move the book to completion.
Additional thanks go to Heather Dubnick (independent editorial ser-
vices), who prepared our index.
We would like to thank all editors and publishers who provided invalu-
able input on and gave permission to reprint components of this book in
earlier stages of its development. A much briefer, preliminary version of
Chap. 3 appeared as “Wallace Stevens’s Modernist Melodies” in Texas
Studies in Literature and Language (vol. 55, no. 1, Spring 2013,
pp. 53–71). Portions of our introduction and of Chaps. 5 and 6 appeared
as “‘In, on, or about the Words’: The Latent Music of Stevens’s Poetry”
and “Stevens and Stravinsky: Shared Aspects of a Musical Poetics” in a
special issue, “Stevens into Music,” that we guest-edited for The Wallace
Stevens Journal (vol. 43, no. 2, Fall 2019, pp. 191–213 and 214–33). A
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
succinct version of Chap. 7 was first published as “‘Things as they are /

Are changed upon the blue guitar’: Learning from Ned Rorem’s Last
Poems of Wallace Stevens” in a thematic issue, “Literature and Music,”
guest-edited by Inge Arteel and Bruno Forment for Cahier voor
Literatuurwetenschap (vol. 10, 2018, pp. 65–76).
Finally, the authors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following
for permission to reproduce copyright material.
Stevens, Wallace. “Of Modern Poetry,” copyright © 1923, 1951, 1954
by Wallace Stevens; “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” copyright © 1937
by Wallace Stevens; “The Plain Sense of Things,” copyright © 1952 by
Wallace Stevens; “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” copyright © 1942
by Wallace Stevens; “Credences of Summer,” copyright © 1954 by Wallace
Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens; “Poetry Is a
Destructive Force,” copyright © 1942 by Wallace Stevens, copyright
renewed 1970 by Holly Stevens; “The Creations of Sound,” copyright ©
1947 by Wallace Stevens; “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing
Itself,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “Esthétique du Mal,”
“Autumn Refrain,” “Vacancy in the Park,” “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,”
“Long and Sluggish Lines,” “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of
Fine Ideas,” “A Primitive Like an Orb,” “Anglais Mort à Florence,”
“Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial,” and “Two Tales of Liadoff” from
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace
Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed
1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint
of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC, and by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.
Stevens, Wallace. “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” and
“Effects of Analogy” from THE NECESSARY ANGEL: ESSAYS ON
REALITY AND THE IMAGINATION by Wallace Stevens, copyright ©
1942, 1944, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Used by per-
mission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing
Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Stevens, Wallace. Excerpt(s) from THE LETTERS OF WALLACE
STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens, copyright © 1966
by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of
the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC. All rights reserved.
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Stevens, Wallace. “Of Mere Being,” copyright © 1967, 1969, 1971 by

Holly Stevens; “The Dove in Spring,” “The Irrational Element in Poetry,”
“Poetry and Meaning,” and “Adagia” from OPUS POSTHUMOUS by
Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1957 by Elsie Stevens and Holly Stevens.
Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights
reserved.
Praise for The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens
“Almost all talk about musicality in poetry concentrates on specific aural effects.
But surely there are possible questions about ways that melody, tone, pacing, and
harmonic structure can illuminate the relationship between the two arts. Then
there are questions about how a poet engages the ideas of musicians, especially a
poet like Wallace Stevens intensely concerned to escape Romantic emotion for
Modernism’s hard-edged constructions. This book heroically both engages these
questions and shapes possible ways of answering them. I think Bart Eeckhout and
Lisa Goldfarb’s The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens is an instant critical classic
because of the depth of its exposition, its loving and often stunning attention to
particular Stevens poems, and its combination of careful pedagogical presentation
with totally engaging flights of critical imagination liberated by the sharpness of its
framing questions.”
—Charles Altieri, Stageberg Professor of English,
University of California, Berkeley, USA
“There have been numbers of case studies and theoretical frameworks offered by
literary critics and art historians that have enriched the way exchanges between the
visual and literary arts are now treated, but until recently there has been far less
work done on the relationship between music and poetry. The Poetic Music of
Wallace Stevens admirably fills this gap. Erudite, lucid, and nuanced, this volume is
not simply six case studies in alternating voices, but a polyphonic rethinking of an
undertheorized area of study that offers multiple ways of approaching poetic musi-
cality and of considering exchanges between poetic and musical practices. Although
more than one hand was involved in writing The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens, it
seems apt to quote the following lines from Marianne Moore: “To explain grace
requires / a curious hand.” Eeckhout’s and Goldfarb’s curiosity is everywhere on
display in this book. Their rigorous but open-minded study is a treasure.”
—Lisa M. Steinman, Kenan Professor of English
and Humanities, Reed College, USA
Contents
1 Introduction: Musicking Stevens 1
2 The Enigmatic Relation Between Music and Memory 21
3 The Challenge of Inventing Modern Melodies 51
4 The Lifelong Lure of Birds and Their Song 85
5 The
Vibrations of Latent Music: Juxtaposing Stevens with
Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Paul Hindemith, and
Claude Debussy113
6 Shared
Aspects of a Musical Poetics: Juxtaposing Stevens
with Igor Stravinsky149
7 Learning
from Composers: Ned Rorem’s Last Poems of
Wallace Stevens173
Index203
xi
Abbreviations1
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and
CPP
Joan Richardson, Library of America, 1997.
L Letters of Wallace Stevens. Edited by Holly Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf,
1966; reprint, U of California P, 1996.
Note
1. The above mentioned standard abbreviations for the works of Wallace

Stevens are used throughout. As a rule, references to poems and prose are
to the Library of America volume edited by Frank Kermode and Joan
Richardson (abbreviated as CPP). In those rare instances where a small error
in CPP occurs, we follow the editorial practice of The Wallace Stevens Journal
and make silent corrections on the basis of the Corrected Edition of The
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, edited by John N. Serio and Chris Beyers
(Vintage Books, 2015). Page references are provided for poems only when
quotations from those poems are included in the discussion.
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Musicking Stevens
1 Aims and Theoretical Inspiration

Wallace Stevens’s musicality has long been identified as one of the most
consistent and rich aspects of his verse. Scholars and critics have explored
the musical features that mark his poems—from the names of composers
and instrumental images that punctuate his work to his distinctive poetic
forms that often resemble musical structures. Stevens, as scholars have
noted, took inspiration from composers and music he appreciated, and
composers have, from Stevens’s day to ours, drawn inspiration from his
poems. As John Hollander wrote already more than forty years ago, music,
for Stevens, is a “master trope of such complexity that merely to catalogue
its elements can be bewildering” (“Sound” 235). While scholars and crit-
ics (including ourselves) have done a great deal of that cataloguing,
Stevens’s relationship to music is so profound, and at times elusive, that
there is still a great deal of work that remains to be done to deepen our
understanding of both the music of his own poetry and his ties to the art
of music. It is to some of this deeper work that we intend to devote The
Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens.
Rather than retread and synthesize work that has been done in earlier
volumes and essays, we intend to study Stevens’s music here in six elabo-
rate case studies that present different angles on the poet’s connection to
music. To describe our overall aim in this book, we have borrowed the
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
B. Eeckhout, L. Goldfarb, The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens,
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07032-7_1
2 B. EECKHOUT AND L. GOLDFARB
term “musicking” from the musicologist Christopher Small, who coined

it in the 1990s. Although Small wanted to use it for very different pur-
poses than our own (mostly to broaden the understanding of how music
is produced and staged from a sociological point of view), we appreciate
the term for how it is also able to evoke the kind of studies we practice in
each of our chapters. Small introduced the intransitive participle form
“musicking” to insist that music should not be studied as an object but as
a process. All the case studies we develop in The Poetic Music of Wallace
Stevens have in common that they are primarily interested in music as a
temporal art form—one that exists only in time. They investigate the role
of a musical aesthetic of transience, ephemerality, and affective intensifica-
tion that appealed so strongly to Stevens, whose poems we do not approach
as fixed textual products but (in the tradition of American pragmatism that
also shaped his thinking) as an art of textual performance that invites
open-ended interpretive processes and embodied experiences. We high-
light this performative, open-ended, interpretive, and experiential quality
by shifting (or modulating) Small’s concept to a transitive use of the verb:
because Stevens is a verbal artist and not a musician in the strict sense,
approaching his work from the perspective of music requires a conscious
act of “musicking” his poetry that simultaneously invites reflections on its
own undertaking.
Thus, in the pages that follow, we will be doing more than just offering
the standard academic juxtaposition of Writer and Concept (in this case,
“Stevens and Music”). We will be exploring a range of heterogeneous yet
complementary case studies that seek to go beyond registering how
Stevens took an interest in music and demonstrated this interest in his
poetry and prose: we will be showing also that as critics who want to study
this poet in relation to music, we have to engage in various strategies for
translating his poetry into musical concepts and terms, allowing its music
to be heard; for grasping what its musicality might involve in relation to
time, memory, melody, and the sounds of nature; and, importantly as well,
for understanding how his poetry might be configured with the works and
theories of musical composers.
Before we turn to a few particular sources of inspiration that undergird
our work on Stevens and music, we want to acknowledge the larger field
of Word and Music Studies within which our explorations may be situated.
Since 1997, the year in which it was founded, the International Association
for Word and Music Studies has fostered interdisciplinary work that
encompasses scholarship across musical and literary genres (orchestral and
1 INTRODUCTION: MUSICKING STEVENS 3
instrumental music; opera and music composed for the theater; poetry,
fiction, drama, and film). Their ongoing book series (drawn from annual
conferences) is testament to the broad range of contributions to the field:
Essays on Performativity (Bernhart and Halliwell), Arts of Incompletion:
Fragments in Words and Music (Bernhart and Englund), and Silence and
Absence in Literature and Music (Wolf and Bernhart) are just a few titles
that are relevant to our research. These books include various essays that
either explore related theoretical aspects or parallel our aim to musicalize
Stevens’s work—from Adrian Paterson’s examination of the radio perfor-
mances of W. B. Yeats to Margaret Miner’s discussion of Charles
Baudelaire’s writings on music and Mary Breatnach’s study of the relation
between silence and music in Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés.
There are, of course, several specific historical and theoretical studies
about the relationship between poetry and music that serve as a founda-
tion for the task we set for ourselves in this book. Among them is
Hollander’s masterful study of the history of the relations between these
arts in English poetry, The Untuning of the Sky, which focuses on early
modern poetry (1500–1700), and his Vision and Resonance, which con-
siders both visual and musical dimensions of poetry. James Anderson
Winn’s Unsuspected Eloquence is another comprehensive examination of
the history of music and poetry that, like Hollander’s, concentrates on
earlier periods (up through Shakespeare), but also includes chapters on
Romantic and Symbolist poetry, the latter of which famously aimed to
achieve “the condition of music” (in Walter Pater’s phrase). Among the
many notable theoretical forays into the topic, we must number Theodor
Adorno, particularly his essay “Music, Language, and Composition”;
Lawrence Kramer’s Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After;
and Marshall Brown’s The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul. What likens
music and language (not specifically poetic language) is that both are com-
prised, to borrow Adorno’s words, of “a temporal succession of articu-
lated sounds that are more than just sound” (113). Most striking to the
scholar of poetry are Adorno’s descriptions of music that one might apply
to lyric poetry, and it is these comments that might serve as a guide when
one studies poetic language (and Stevens’s, in particular) in relation
to music.
A few such statements must suffice for our introductory, stage-setting
purposes here. “What music says is a proposition at once distinct and con-
cealed,” Adorno writes (114), and how we interpret music relies on the
“act of execution” (115). Certainly, we can substitute “poetry” in place of
music in the first statement, and conclude that our understanding of a

poem—a Stevens poem, in particular—likewise relies on the critical “act of
execution”; that is, on how we read and, indeed, perform it. Adorno fur-
ther describes music as an art of “remembrance and expectation” (116), a
comment that powerfully echoes Paul Valéry’s description of music as the
art of “l’attente et de l’attention” (expectation and attention) (Oeuvres I
136), the principle of which the French poet goes on to extend to lyric
poetry. Applying such principles to our readings of Stevens’s poems helps
to accentuate the musicality intrinsic to them. Similarly, Adorno’s more
poetic descriptions of music seem to gesture toward, even to crave, the
poetic: “Music refracts its scattered intentions away from their own power
and brings them together into the configuration of the name.” Both his
notion of music’s “scattered intentions” (as compared with the relative
linearity of discursive prose) and his emphasis on mobility—what he calls
music as a “wandering journey”—underpin our analyses of Stevens’s
poems and the relationship of his work to that of composers (116).
Drawing on the common origins of music and poetry as art forms,
Lawrence Kramer, too, probes their relation in modernity: “In the begin-
ning was the song. Is it fair to add that, once separated, music and poetry
tend to become nostalgic for each other?” To begin an answer to this ques-
tion, citing the language of a Ludwig van Beethoven letter of 1817 and a
stanza from Stevens’s “Variations on a Summer Day,” he writes, “Both
Beethoven and Wallace Stevens seem to have thought so” (Music 3). Both
arts, Kramer insists, demand to be studied in relation to one another, for in
both “the alliance of connotative and combinatory features becomes sig-
nificant in two ways: intertextually, through allusion, generic affiliation,
and the play of stylistic codes; and intratextually, through rhythmic design
and the play of likeness and difference among particulars” (5). Kramer sees
a “complementarity in the roles that the two arts assign to their connota-
tive and combinatory aspects: each art makes explicit the dimension that
the other leaves tacit” (6). Marshall Brown, as well, especially in his chapter
entitled “Negative Poetics: On Skepticism and the Lyric Voice,” offers a
thought-provoking musical understanding of lyric. The music of lyric
poetry, Brown maintains, occurs in the tension between its two voices—
that of the poet and the speaker of the poem (Brown calls it a kind of musi-
cal “doubling”). “Whether called music, aura, or haunting, the interior
distance achieved by lyric is an opening onto a dynamic mental space whose
power has often been felt” (97). To study the voicing of a given lyric—the
poem as “act,” as Stevens might say (CPP 218–19)—is to understand its
innate musicality, Brown insists. Thus, Adorno, Kramer, and Brown all
carve out a critical vocabulary that opens the interdisciplinary conversation
and invites further critical study.
In her introduction to The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, a vol-
ume of essays coedited with Craig Dworkin, Marjorie Perloff argues that
sound and music have long been understudied in poetry criticism.
“[H]owever central the sound dimension is to any and all poetry,” she
asserts, “no other poetic feature is currently as neglected” (1). Critical
discourse, she maintains, still prioritizes meaning, and “regards the sound
structure in question … as little more than a peripheral issue, a kind of
sideline” (2). Seeking to redress the neglect of sound and music in mod-
ern and contemporary poetry studies, Perloff and Dworkin devote their
collection to various methodologies and case studies that put sound at the
center of analysis. The volume includes fascinating studies that range from
Susan Stewart’s discussion of the endurance and central significance of
rhyme, and essays on translating sound in poetry by Leevi Lehto, Yunte
Huang, and Rosmarie Waldrop, to those that address the relation between
contemporary sound poetry from a musicological perspective (e.g., Nancy
Perloff). Given our focus here, it is nevertheless noteworthy, considering
how central music is in his writings, that Stevens is not mentioned any-
where in the collection. We see the absence as an open invitation to expand
upon the poet’s relevance and aesthetic rewards in the present volume.
While Hollander may have been among the first to note, in 1980, the
“bewildering” complexity of the musical trope in Stevens, he has been far
from alone in identifying the pervasive presence of music and stylized
sound in his poems. There is scarcely a critic who has not taken notice of
these features, and, indeed, many have devoted books and essays to the
topic. Stevens’s sonic experts include some familiar names to readers of
this poet: Marie Borroff, Eleanor Cook, Bart Eeckhout, Natalie Gerber,
Lisa Goldfarb, Barbara Holmes, George Lensing, Beverly Maeder, Alison
Rieke, Anca Rosu, and Helen Vendler (see, for all, our list of Works Cited).
So far three special issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal have also been
devoted to the poet in relation to sound and/or music: “Stevens and
Structures of Sound” (edited by Jaqueline Vaught Brogan in 1991);
“Wallace Stevens and ‘The Less Legible Meanings of Sounds’” (edited by
Natalie Gerber in 2009); and, most recently, our own “Stevens into
Music” (2019), a project that inspired us to undertake the present vol-
ume. For as much as previous work has covered—from the wordplay in
Cook’s early work and the metaphysics of sound in Rosu’s book to the
fine-grained discussions of the musicality in particular poems in Vendler’s

criticism—a great deal is still to be done. Crucially, while some critics have
studied affinities that Stevens shares with particular composers (notably,
Kramer’s early study on Stevens and that other idiosyncratic New
Englander in the insurance business, Charles Ives), in the arena of the rela-
tion between particular composers and this poet the field remains
wide open.
2 Stevens as Listener
Before we turn to the rationale and summary of our case studies, let us
take the time to characterize some of Stevens’s own relationship to music
more concretely by considering him as an avid listener of music. Several
patterns that may be discerned in the poet’s record collection were already
identified by Michael Stegman when he drew up his list—with the help of
the poet’s daughter, Holly—more than forty years ago: a large number of
Stevens’s records were ordered from abroad; most of the repertoire was
canonical with respect to Western art music; more than a quarter consisted
of piano solo works (Stevens’s wife, Elsie, played the piano well); late
Romantic music constituted the bulk of the recordings, though he col-
lected a more diverse range of twentieth-century composers; within the
twentieth century, he shunned the avant-garde, such as the Second
Viennese School; and, as with things literary and pictorial, he had a weak
spot for anything coming out of France (80).1 To these observations, let
us add a few more.
Stevens’s collection, which some visitors remember him being “very
proud of,” partly because he said “it thoroughly relaxed him” (Brazeau
276), was resolutely Eurocentric. In this sense, the case studies in our
book, which establish connections with such figures as Richard Strauss,
Gustav Mahler, Paul Hindemith, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and the
Franco-American Ned Rorem are entirely representative. Stevens seems to
have bought almost no records of American composers or music: no jazz,
no blues, no spirituals, no Ives, George Gershwin, Samuel Barber, Aaron
Copland, or Amy Beach. The French and German repertoire were the two
obvious pillars of his collection, with a secondary interest displayed in
Russian, English, and Italian music. Little of this was opera, though that
decision may have been due in some measure to the difficulty of chopping
up operas into 78 rpm or early LP records; we do know for a fact that
Stevens listened systematically to opera on the radio and occasionally
attended performances in New York (Stegman 79; Brazeau 137, 281).

More surprisingly, perhaps, he seems to have collected none of the great
German Lied cycles, despite their ideal combination of poetry and music
and his own knowledge of the language (he was partly of German descent):
he apparently did not own Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, had none of
the great cycles and collections by Franz Schubert (Die schöne Müllerin,
Winterreise, Schwanengesang), possessed neither Robert Schumann’s
Dichterliebe nor his Liederkreis, nor any cycles or collections by Johannes
Brahms (such as Die schöne Magelone) or Hugo Wolf (neither the
Italienisches nor the Spanisches Liederbuch). He seems to have gravitated
almost entirely to French poetry again and was clearly very fond of the
soprano Maggie Teyte in this repertoire. When it came to performers, he
tended to prefer local specialists playing music from their own national or
ethnic backgrounds, though less so in the case of Russian music.
How a lifetime of playing music as an amateur (piano and guitar),
attending concerts in New York and Hartford, listening to records and the
radio turned Stevens into a choosy connoisseur may be gauged from his
description of two famous European orchestras in letters from the final
year of his life, both addressed to his friend Barbara Church. On December
2, 1954, he reports taking Holly to “a concert of the Concertgebouw
orchestra” a few days earlier. The Amsterdam orchestra, he notes, “played
a Haydn symphony without any of [the] metronomic stiffiness [sic] which
makes Haydn a bit of an affliction. Such a sympathetic, tender and limpid
performance made us both happy” (L 854).2 Three months later, on
March 21, 1955, he appears to be anticipating another visit, this time by
the Berlin Philharmonic. “It will be our last concert, here in Hartford, for
the season,” he explains, “and I look forward to it, not merely out of curi-
osity, but because in a world so largely undisciplined the music of this
orchestra will be music from the very center of discipline” (L 877).3
It would take us too far to run down all of Stevens’s epistolary com-
ments on composers and their music; many of these are also rather per-
functory. To gesture to the potential of the topic, let us just select a handful
of composers whose names have not been mentioned yet. Stevens’s fanci-
ful attempt to define the “Teutonic,” in a 1935 letter to Ronald Lane
Latimer, is especially interesting for the opposition it sets up with the cat-
egory of the poetic. Perhaps due to his love of French lyricism, Stevens
decides to associate the Teutonic with the antipoetic, so that “It may even
be said that the sound of German poetry is not Teutonic.” Further detach-
ing the notion from a particular people or nation-state, he goes to Finland
for a musical example: “The Teutonic makes a very good foil in the music
of Sibelius; the heavy Teutonic characteristics are not what constitute its
poetry: the poetry arises as the strings rise from that volume of sound” (L
302). The character of Jean Sibelius’s music continued to puzzle him, for
ten years later, in a letter to José Rodríguez Feo, Stevens makes a distinc-
tion that seems to verge on the confessional: “in the case of the music of
Sibelius,” he proposes, “one cannot help feeling that his identity is really
to be found in melancholy melody. Sibelius, himself, recognizing this,
forces himself, with the concealment typical of so many of us, to the oppo-
site extreme and writes score after score of the harshest, most discordant,
most vigorous music. But the source of all this is the melancholy melody”
(L 519).
In such comments, we notice a recurrent impulse toward skeptical,
resistant listening, as if Stevens had also written the aphorism “Music must
resist definition almost successfully.” Thus, in 1948, he writes, “It is curi-
ous that I have never been able to go for Mozart. He makes me as nervous
as a French poodle” (L 604). As the image of the French poodle suggests,
such waving off could equally apply to Gallic composers. “Poulenc is a
beautiful instance of mignardise in music,” he notes in another 1935 letter
to Latimer. “He will take a perfectly good thing and conclude it with a
phrase that is meant to be the last word in a job of seduction. After you
have heard the thing several times, it becomes intolerable. This leads to an
antithetical commonplace; the unpalatable will often become what is most
enduringly palatable” (L 303). Yet embracing the unpalatable did not
therefore translate into an admiration for a composer such as Arnold
Schoenberg, as we learn from a third letter to Latimer. There Stevens
starts by taking his distance from the art for art’s sake he had himself prac-
ticed in his Harmonium years. “I am very much afraid,” he writes, “that
what you like in my poetry is just the sort of thing that you ought not to
like: say, its music or color. If that is true, then an appropriate experiment
would be to write poetry without music and without color” (L 297).
Thinking of how to illustrate this, Stevens then adds a footnote: “In music,
this would give you Schönberg” (L 298)—thereby bluntly suggesting that
dodecaphonic music stripped itself not only of color but even of music. If
Stevens’s formulation might seem to leave the door open, nevertheless,
for an analogous poetic pursuit, that door is quickly closed again: “But so
many of these experiments come to nothing. If they were highly success-
ful, well and good, but they so rarely are” (L 297).
That Stevens would in general insist on being the critical outsider mak-
ing up his own mind about experiments in modern art is further illus-
trated, finally, by a letter of 1934 to Harriet Monroe in which he reports
on the world premiere of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts. This
time it was the music by Virgil Thomson that won him over. “I reached
Hartford in time for the opening performance of Gertrude Stein’s opera,”
he recounts. “While this is an elaborate bit of perversity in every respect:
text, settings, choreography, it is most agreeable musically, so that, if one
excludes aesthetic self-consciousness from one’s attitude, the opera imme-
diately becomes a delicate and joyous work all round” (L 267).
3 Compositional Principles and Overview

Readers who are familiar with our scholarly work will guess that the pres-
ent collection has an extensive pedigree. What we have chosen to develop
on this occasion is rooted in many years—indeed, a few decades—of prior
attempts at writing about music, particularly in relation to Stevens. We
have been building actively on this previous work, extending and enrich-
ing it, reviewing and revising it, modulating it wherever we felt we should
rethink what we had written, and challenging ourselves to pursue new,
additional perspectives. This is why we have been so bold as to describe
this project in terms of a deepening of our understanding on a topic that
we never tire of exploring.
Since this book is not meant to present a single argument worked out
by two authors in supposed unison, we wondered for a while how to stage
the results of our collaborative efforts. Eventually, we opted to include the
chapters’ respective authors in the summaries below but not in our table
of contents, where we want to insist on the collective conception and
coherence of the book. Because of the extent to which we engaged in
active discussion about each other’s chapters, and felt free to propose tex-
tual changes to them, we also decided to use the first person plural
throughout, where in individually authored essays we would normally
resort to the singular pronoun. To add to the unifying effect or appear-
ance of the book, finally, we came up with a few formal structuring ele-
ments that are tailored to our subject as well. Thus, each chapter is
preceded by one or more epigraphs, along the lines of a musical motif, and
each is divided into a handful of sections with numerals and subheadings,
somewhat on the analogy of the movements of compositions in the tradi-
tion of art music. If such formal features help to pull the chapters together
into a single composition, as befits a coauthored rather than a coedited

book, we should nevertheless clarify that we have looked on our composi-
tion from the start as a musical duet for two distinct voices involving two
singers with their own personalities. While we have sought to avoid pitting
too many discordant melodies against each other (the book is not polemi-
cal but aesthetically curious), we have given each other the room to play
into our respective strengths and complement each other’s work. The
result is more polyphonic and methodologically diverse, we believe, than
if either of us had attempted to author a single book on the topic.
We begin Chap. 2 (Goldfarb) with an exploration of Stevens’s writings
on music and memory from his youthful journals and early letters, for
these often presage what will become a core feature of how music works
in his later verse. In his journal entries and letters, the young Stevens offers
extended reflections and meditations on music that foreshadow his later
poetic music and suggest that he reflected on music and memory long
before he composed poems that set forth their relation. In one crucial let-
ter to Elsie, Stevens reflects on a performance of Schubert’s Unfinished
Symphony that he had attended, and he offers a nearly Proustian medita-
tion on music’s transformative power of sparking memory. The musical
scale, he writes, transports us from one time and place to another—into
the domain of the imagination or into the very substance of memory:
“that ten-year-old do-re-mi-fa reanimates—and by closing the eyes—it is
ten years ago” (L 117). In another such letter, he ruminates on the power
of music to awaken memory. Stevens’s meditations in these early prose
writings look ahead to his own more abstract figurations of music in the
Collected Poems. His language in early letters anticipates the enigmatic role
that music and the musical-poetic analogy play in his work—the way that
music, as he writes in a 1909 letter to his wife, “vibrate[s] on the unknown”
(L 151). This initial chapter comprises three main parts: the first examines
Stevens’s reflections on music and memory in journals and letters; the
second provides some critical background on the topic of memory; and
the third and most extensive part explores the resonance of these medita-
tions in later poems, where we have selected poems across his oeuvre, early
to late, from “Domination of Black” to “Anglais Mort à Florence,” the
understudied “Two Tales of Liadoff,” and “Long and Sluggish Lines.”
Our third chapter (Eeckhout) addresses a second fundamental feature
of music that has rarely been explored in relation to Stevens’s (or, for that
matter, any poet’s) writings: melody. In poetry criticism, the notion of
melody is not part of the traditional arsenal of concepts and analogies,
although the analysis of sound has long been a staple of critical practice.
Similarly, critical attention to the place of melody in Stevens’s work has

been either implicit—as in Beverly Maeder’s claim that the poet “success-
fully integrated limited moments of suggestive consonant and vowel
effects into an auditory experience of momentous developments”
(“Sound” 40)—or else thematic, as when Alison Rieke interprets the
poet’s swan figures as encrypted comments on melody (53–54). There are
some very good reasons why melody has received short shrift in poetry
criticism, and these are acknowledged at the outset. Yet we will argue that
the potential of the concept as an analytical tool that can enrich the experi-
ence of poetic texts has not been fully explored. In this more experimental
chapter, we attempt to undertake a minute and methodical dissection of
the notion of melody so as to understand its relevance to the act of reading
poetry in general, and Stevens’s work in particular. We focus predomi-
nantly on three material elements and investigate how they might inform
a musical reading of Stevens’s verse. This involves, first, the vertical axis of
the units out of which verse melodies may be composed. Such a study may
in turn be split into a consideration of three features: (1) the character and
variety of the stylistic register Stevens employs; (2) the extent to which he
values the production of phonemes as an autotelic aesthetic sensation; and
(3) the relative autonomy of the sonic material in his poetry. Second, the
notion of melody presupposes the combination of such units along a hori-
zontal axis. An analysis of this feature likewise requires attention to three
aspects: (1) how Stevens uses recurring sonic units (analogous to pitches
in musical composition); (2) how he develops sonic patterns that change
and interact; and (3) how he builds connections between sonic units in
relatively short sequence. Here, it helps to fall back on the discussion of
melodies, tunes, themes, motives, and phrases offered by Leonard
Bernstein in one of his popularizing works, and how these elements play
out in the history of Western art music. Such framing, combined with vari-
ous examples from Stevens’s work, allows us to situate the poet’s style in
the musical traditions of late Romanticism and early, non-avant-garde
Modernism. Finally, when we seek to identify the rhythmical organization
and pacing of Stevens’s characteristic melodies, we find that in this respect,
too, his work may be inserted in those same musical traditions. By provid-
ing a wide range of concrete material drawn not only from Stevens’s
poetry but also from his reflections on its musical elements in letters and
essays, we become better attuned to how he attempted to meet the
demands of modern melody making with a high degree of self-
consciousness and startlingly original, idiomatic results.
Stevens’s recurrent staging of birdsong, discussed in Chap. 4 (Goldfarb),

continues the topic of melodies from the previous chapter, but from a dif-
ferent perspective, with the poet responding to so-called melodies coming
from nature. One of the most consistent features of Stevens’s verse is the
abundance of raw natural sounds that enter—sometimes softly and sweetly,
sometimes boldly—in poem after poem. In sharp contrast to the bird-
songs of British and American Romantic poetry (John Keats’s nightingale,
Percy Shelley’s skylark, Walt Whitman’s thrush, W. B. Yeats’s swans and
golden bird), typically measured in relation to the poet’s own sound,
Stevens’s birdsong contributes to a “mountainous music” (according to
“The Man with the Blue Guitar”) that “always seemed / To be falling and
to be passing away” (CPP 147). We look at birdsong in Stevens to under-
stand the ways it demonstrates musical temporality, its motion, and ever-
changing qualities captured in the moment of its sounding. This chapter
investigates the myriad kinds of birdsong in the Collected Poems, from the
quails that “Whistle about us their spontaneous cries” in “Sunday
Morning” (CPP 56) to the sparrows, wrens, and robins in “Notes Toward
a Supreme Fiction,” which seem to engage in a musical dialogue all their
own, to the “scrawny cry” of the bird “In the early March wind” in “Not
Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself” that augurs the music of
spring (CPP 451). Some of the questions that guide this chapter include:
How do Stevens’s bird sounds and songs compare with those of his Anglo-
American Romantic forebears and, more importantly, how might we dif-
ferentiate Stevens’s practice ? Is there a relationship between birdsong and
the poet’s song, and, if so, how might we describe its contours? Do the
accumulated birdsongs of the poems constitute what we might call a har-
mony? How do birds move and sing in particular poems and across poems
and volumes of Stevens’s verse? We pursue these questions as they arise
throughout Stevens’s poetry, with a concluding section of the chapter
devoted to more detailed analysis of a number of poems that demonstrate
recurring musical principles, such as the way Stevens transposes musical
counterpointing and creates a call-and-response effect between bird and
poet, between birdsong and his own evolving poetics. Close readings of
poems here include “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,”
“Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial,” “The Dove in Spring” (the last of
many dove poems), as well as two other late poems, among the most
musical in his oeuvre, “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”
and “Of Mere Being.”
Chapter 5 (Eeckhout) continues at first with the inspiration of birdsong

in “Of Mere Being,” but this time not as Stevens heard and enjoyed it on
so many of his walks. In this concrete instance, the sound of birds has first
been translated into orchestral music by Richard Strauss in the final of his
Four Last Songs. Taking our cue from Stevens’s observation that he some-
times actively sought to translate Strauss’s music into poetry, we juxtapose
the German composer’s farewell composition with what is generally taken
to be the poet’s own farewell composition. The kind of analogical reading
we propose here between a canonical musical work and a poem by Stevens
is remarkably rare in criticism on the poet, although there are many oppor-
tunities for pursuing it. In some cases, as with these two farewell works, it
is possible even to speculate on actual influence, even if in Stevens’s trans-
formative poetics the inspiration provided by a musical work should always
be regarded only as the creative starting point for an autonomous verbal
artifact that is never derivative or naively imitative.
To demonstrate the potential for establishing significant connections
between extant musical works and Stevens’s poetry, the chapter then pur-
sues a second, more elaborate case—that of the grotesque funeral march
in Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony and Stevens’s equally grotesque
funeral march in his poem “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate.” We argue,
with respect for all the historical evidence that is available, that Stevens
may have been present at the New York premiere of this symphony con-
ducted by Mahler himself in 1909. Although the question whether he did
so must ultimately be left open, a juxtaposition of symphonic movement
and poem is revelatory in that it allows us to understand both composi-
tions within a larger cultural framework of modern art making and the
new modes that innovative artists sought to explore. Case studies such as
these invite theoretical reflections as well on the presence of latent (as
opposed to patent or implicit) music in Stevens’s poetry. Even though the
identification of latent music in Stevens’s case is almost always a matter of
speculation, this does not diminish its validity as a critical practice. After
all, speculating about latent musical inspirations is standard fare for musi-
cians who study scores with an eye to performing them. To keep our
thinking about such issues sufficiently open, the rest of the chapter pur-
sues two similar but slightly modified types of connection with extant
music by composers that Stevens knew. One is with Paul Hindemith,
whose Concerto for Trumpet, Bassoon, and Strings was commissioned for
the same celebration of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences for
which Stevens’s long poem “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” was
commissioned. Here again, a juxtaposition between composer and poet,

never before undertaken, proves to be enlightening, as it is also in our
final, elaborately pursued case, where we identify a rich range of affinities
between Claude Debussy’s piano piece “Des pas sur la neige” (from Book
1 of his Préludes) and Stevens’s late poem “Vacancy in the Park.”
In the next chapter (Goldfarb), we stay with composers but turn our
attention to Stevens’s prose and a more theoretical consideration of musi-
cal poetics. Over a few years in the early 1940s, Stevens was preoccupied
with establishing a Chair of Poetry, and in a number of letters to his friend
Henry Church, he laid out the parameters for such a position: “The Henry
Church Chair of Poetry at Harvard” would be “a chair for the study of the
history of poetic thought and of the theory of poetry” (L 358). Letters
indicate that Stevens wrestled with what would be extraneous to such a
chair and what it would comprise. “The intention,” he writes, “is not to
read poetry from archaic to contemporary; nor is the intention to teach
the writing of poetry.” He makes it clear that the subject of what consti-
tutes the poetic is not easily defined, and it is this hard-to-define dimen-
sion of poetry that he seeks to explore: “It is the aspects of the world and
of men and women that have been added to them by poetry. These aspects
are difficult to recognize and to measure” (L 377). At the same time that
Stevens ruminated about a Chair of Poetry, Igor Stravinsky delivered (in
1942) a series of lectures at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer.
Drawing on Aristotle’s definition of “poetics,” Stravinsky declares his aim
“to talk about making in the field of music”—the principles, form, and
physical phenomenon of music itself as well as his own personal reflections
on his experiences as an “inventor of music” (4, 53). It is the shared
aspects of Stravinsky’s and Stevens’s musical poetics that we will take up in
Chap. 6, whose first section comprises a brief historical and contextual
introduction, which is followed by a close consideration of the parallels in
their respective poetics. In the third and last section, we demonstrate how
an understanding of Stravinsky’s poetics, and of the ideas Stevens and
Stravinsky seem to have held in common, might yield a deeper grasp of the
musicality that characterizes Stevens’s verse. We will look at a range of
poems that exhibit the two artists’ shared ideas about birdsong (expand-
ing upon work in Chap. 4), about variety and unity (variations on a theme
and the relation between the one and the many), and about what both
Stravinsky and Stevens have to say on musical and poetic ways of finding a
“center” at the heart of their respective poetics.
For our final chapter (Eeckhout), the focus moves beyond Stevens’s
own writings to study how one major American composer from the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century who is well known for his literary sensi-
bilities and temperament, Ned Rorem, has responded to the poet’s work.
Here we return to the claim, made by Stevens and many others, that the
foundational principle of all poetry is transformational, and we ask whether
the main value of intermedial transpositions might lie precisely in the way
they manage to refresh and, at best, intensify such intrinsic transformative
processes. These questions will be grounded in a detailed empirical inves-
tigation of Rorem’s twenty-five-minute song cycle for voice, cello, and
piano entitled Last Poems of Wallace Stevens. Composed between December
1971 and February 1972, Rorem’s cycle sets seven of Stevens’s lyrics from
the period 1953–1955 to music. Our main interest here is to find what we
might learn from analyzing such a musical setting, not just about various
qualities of the original poetry as well as the subsequent music, but also
about the relationship between these two arts and the critical interest in
returning to their confluence today. Once again it is striking that, despite
the hundreds of musical settings of Stevens’s poetry that have been com-
posed over the decades, such an extended analysis, which avails itself not
only of the published score but also of an audio recording and a range of
contextual material, has never been undertaken. After an introduction in
which we bring in two further composers who have set the poet to music
(Elliott Carter and Matthew Barber), this case study starts with a substan-
tial portrait of Rorem as a composer, in particular his love of the art song
as a genre and the Francophilia of his style (conspicuously shared by
Stevens), and proceeds to build on the work of musicologists as well as on
Rorem’s own writings. We then analyze such issues as Rorem’s selection
of poems and their idiosyncratic sequencing; his choice of genre and
instrumentation; the question of a late style; the musical enhancing of
particular images, sounds, and ideas from the selected texts; and, at last,
the question of how Rorem’s music allows us to hear, experience, and
understand Stevens’s poetry in new ways.
4 Final Notes

Despite Stevens’s countless visits to museums and galleries, the many cata-
logues he collected, or the money he spent on occasional paintings shipped
from Paris, he could never really enjoy the same active connection with
painting as he did with music, which he was able to play, sing, hum, and
whistle to himself. And he could never import his favorite painters’ works
into the meditative space of his home in quite the same manner as he was
able to do with the musical canon, which he turned into his regular eve-
ning companion. Yet the connections with specific composers and their
music have never received as much attention in Stevens criticism as those
with painters and their works. Certainly, it is more convenient for literary
scholars to illustrate arguments that involve the visual arts than those
involving music. The former can be instantly effective by including literal
illustrations, whereas music cannot be scanned quickly or viewed as a sin-
gle gestalt; musical compositions require time and patience, as well as
active effort and re-listening, before one is able to develop a mental image
of them that one can then also remember. And there is always the chal-
lenge posed by the difficulty of writing about music. As the musicologist
Nicholas Cook notes, quoting either Thelonious Monk or Elvis Costello
(he is not sure which), “writing about music is like dancing about archi-
tecture” ([ix]; see also 131). Cook points out that music, as an experience
occurring over time in body and mind, is a fundamentally imaginary object
that is only problematically represented by musical notation. In postwar
academia, moreover, previously marginal disciplines such as music theory
“tried to make themselves look as ‘hard’ as possible by adopting scientific
language and symbol systems,” the result being that “theory and analysis
became increasingly technical, increasingly incomprehensible to anyone
except specialists” (93). Poetry critics wishing to trace musical links, affini-
ties, or allusions are thus likely to feel incompetent trespassers on the ter-
rain of musicologists more easily than those who stray onto the terrain of
visual art historians. We are very much aware of the strain that such chal-
lenges place upon us, yet we still hope that our chapters, in all their careful
and slow attention to sonic detail, will manage to remind readers of the
basic fact that even the most sensitive analysis of a Stevens poem remains
fundamentally impoverished if it does not also take the risk of sounding
out the music enacted by, or circling behind or around, the words.
Our final hope is that this book’s duet-like form, with its six exploratory
case studies in alternating voices, will appeal not only to Stevens experts,
students of Modernism in the arts, and a wider audience interested in the
relationship between music and poetry, but also to readers and practitio-
ners with a specific interest in the dynamic interchange between these two
arts. What should differentiate our treatment of Stevens in relation to
music is that we are not only deepening what has already been written on
the topic over several decades, but also revitalizing some of the ways in
which to think and write about the two arts in conjunction.
Notes
1. For further discussion of the most important facts and figures about
Stevens’s relation to music, see especially Stegman; Goldfarb, “Music”;
and Holmes.
2. A quick search through the online archives of the Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra tells us that this must have been the concert in Hartford on
November 26, 1954, conducted by the orchestra’s chief conductor at the
time, Eduard van Beinum. The entire program must have been to Stevens’s
liking, with Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Rudolf Escher’s
Musique pour l’esprit en deuil, Haydn’s Symphony No. 103, and Stravinsky’s
1909 suite compiled from his ballet The Firebird. Stevens was an admirer of
van Beinum; when the dissertation-writing Bernard Heringman made notes
of a conversation he had with the poet, they included the following: “He
was quite enthusiastic about Bruckner. He raved about the van Beinum
recording of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. He was emphatic enough that
I made a note about the specific recording. He told me to be sure and listen
to it” (Brazeau 200).
3. According to the Berlin Philharmonic’s website, this was the orchestra’s first
tour in the United States under the young Herbert von Karajan, who had
been elected its new conductor a few months earlier.
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———. “The Sound of the Queen’s Seemings in ‘Description Without Place.’”
The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, Spring 2009, pp. 44–60.
Rosu, Anca. The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens. U of Alabama P, 1995.
Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening.
Wesleyan UP, 1998.
Stegman, Michael O. “Wallace Stevens and Music: A Discography of Stevens’
Phonograph Record Collection.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 3, nos. 3–4,
Fall 1979, pp. 79–97.
Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Edited by Holly Stevens, U of
California P, 1996.
———. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and
Joan Richardson, Library of America, 1997.
Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. Translated by Arthur
Knodel and Ingolf Dahl, Harvard UP, 1970.
Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems.
Harvard UP, 1969.
———. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire. U of Tennessee P, 1984.
Winn, James Anderson. Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between
Poetry and Music. Yale UP, 1981.
Wolf, Werner, and Walter Bernhart, editors. Silence and Absence in Literature and
Music. Brill, 2016.
CHAPTER 2
The Enigmatic Relation Between Music

and Memory
To-day I did not write a single line. But I planned much, read much,
and thought much. A city is a splendid place for thinking. I have a
sonnet in my head the last line of which is—
And hear the bells of Trinity at night—
bells which start ringing in my remotest fancies.
—Wallace Stevens, journal entry, July 4, 1900
To-night, after dinner, … I thought I should like to play my guitar, so I

dug it up from the bottom of my wardrobe, dusted it, strummed a
half-dozen chords, and then felt bored by it. I have played those
half-dozen chords so often. I wish I were gifted enough to learn a new
half-dozen.—Some day I may be like one of the old ladies with whom I
lived in Cambridge, who played a hymn on her guitar. The hymn had
thousands of verses, all alike. She played about two hundred every
night—until the house-dog whined for mercy and liberty.—Alas! It is a
sign of old age to be so full of reminiscences.
—Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie, December 7, 1908
There is a church in the neighborhood that has the grace to ring its bell
on Sundays. It has just stopped. It is so pleasant to hear bells on Sunday
morning. By long usage, we have become accustomed to bells turning
this ordinary day into a holy one.
—Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie, January 10, 1909
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2022
B. Eeckhout, L. Goldfarb, The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens,
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07032-7_2
1 Musings on Memory and Music

Journal entries shortly after the young Wallace Stevens’s arrival in
New York City and letters during the first decade of his time in the city
provide glimpses of how he would later come to see the relation between
music and remembrance. On July 4, 1900, the year he arrived in New York,
Stevens hails the city as “a splendid place” for the kind of “thinking” that
bestows him with the last lines of a sonnet. In the church bells that sound
in these fragmentary lines, Stevens registers the power of music: the
“bells … start ringing in my remotest fancies”; the sonorous chimes have
the power to draw what is “remotest” in his mind nearer (L 42). In a letter
to his fiancée, Elsie, in December of 1908, he recounts, in a more jocular
tone, his experience of taking out his guitar, and his wish to know more
than the “half-dozen chords” that he often plays (L 110). His effort to
strum the strings occasions a memory of “one of the old ladies with whom
I lived in Cambridge,” who, in contrast to himself, “played about two
hundred” hymnal verses every night. Even before he began to pen the
poems from New York for which he is still best known—“Sunday Morning”
and “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” both of which tie music to memory—
he gestures to their relation and enviously exclaims, “Alas! It is a sign of
old age to be so full of reminiscences” (L 111). A month later, on January
10, 1909, in another letter to Elsie, Stevens records the impact of bells
“on Sunday morning,” which, he writes, we have long understood, turn
“this ordinary day into a holy one” (L 117). Whether it is the guitar,
hymns, or bells, Stevens, in these very early writings, hints at music’s
expression and evocation of memory that will resound in his poems: music
draws the remote close; its chords express “reminiscences”; and instru-
mental sounds transform our perception of one day into another.
We propose to begin this first case study with an exploration of Stevens’s
early prose writings on music and memory from his journals and early let-
ters, for these often presage what will become a core feature of how music
is both represented and enacted in his poems. In these writings, the young
Stevens offers extended meditations on music that foreshadow his more
abstract poetic music, and suggest that he reflected on music and memory
long before he composed poems that explore how they intertwine.
Stevens’s meditations, especially in a few letters of the first decade of the
twentieth century, look ahead to his figurations of music in the Collected
Poems. His language in these letters anticipates the enigmatic role of music
in his poems—the way that “the long chords of the harp,” as he writes in
2 THE ENIGMATIC RELATION BETWEEN MUSIC AND MEMORY 23
a 1909 letter to Elsie, “vibrate on more than the ‘sensual ear’—vibrate on

the unknown” (L 136). This chapter will unfold in three parts: the first
examines Stevens’s reflections on music and memory in key journal entries
and letters; the second briefly considers a few critical studies that approach
the subject of memory in Stevens; and then in the third part, we explore
the resonance of Stevens’s prose meditations on music and memory in a
range of poems across different volumes. By including examples from each
of the main decades in which Stevens was most active as a writer (the
decade leading up to Harmonium and then the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s),
we should be able to demonstrate some of the shifting and varying ways in
which the relation between music and memory is enacted in Stevens’s poetry.
Stevens is keen to note the sounds that abound in his environment—
urban and bucolic—and their musical promise even in his earliest writings.
In a letter to his mother from Ivyland, Pennsylvania, dispatched on July
31, 1896, the sixteen-year-old boy not only details the instruments of
“Innes band” but also characterizes their sounds: “The piping of flamboy-
ant flutes, the wriggling of shrieking fifes with rasping dagger-voices, the
sighing of bass-viols, drums that beat and rattle, the crescendo of cracked
trombones” (L 8). Later in the same letter, he remarks on the sounds of a
clock, “a vigilant sentinal [sic] of the hours,” almost as though he were
looking ahead to later reflections and poems in which he connects sound,
music, and memory, describing the clock as if it were a living creature: “oh
that clock,” he writes, “every quarter hour or so the trembling creature
springs with a whirr into its covert among the depths of the springs” (L 9).
A few years later, after he has moved to New York, he records the sounds
he heard while wandering on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, and
indicates their “spiritual” significance: “An old argument with me is that
the true religious force in the world is not the church but the world itself:
the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses. What incessant mur-
murs fill that ever-laboring, tireless church!” (L 58–59). At the same time,
several journal entries show him ruminating about memory, if not the
explicit relation between music and memory. Walking on West Street in
the city, Stevens details its colorful inhabitants and merchants, writing of
the street that it is “as cosmopolitan and republican as any in the world. It
is the only one that leaves the memory full of pictures, of color and move-
ment” (L 47). Stevens also frequently remarks on what he reads, noting in
another passage, “Homer’s only a little story—and so are all the others;
and yet men have not memory enough even to remember a little story” (L
87). And in a letter to Elsie on December 7, 1908, he writes of his journals
as a record of his own memories: “It is the most amusing thing in the
world—that long record of states of mind—and of historic events, like the
famous night when I read ‘To Have and To Hold’ until half-past three in
the morning. I had completely forgotten it. Is it worth remembering?”
(L 111).
That Stevens begins to think more about what is “worth remember-
ing,” and of the relationship between music and memory, is clear from a
series of letters he writes over the course of a year, from 1909 to 1910, and
it is in these writings that we see the seeds of his musical poetic. In the
first, dated January 10, 1909, he reflects on a performance of Franz
Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony that he had attended the evening before;
in the second, a couple of months later, on March 3, he expands on those
reflections to offer a more abstract theory of the relation between music
and memory. Given the importance of these letters, we should include a
lengthy passage from each. Of his response to Schubert, he writes as
follows:
It is ten years since I heard [Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony]. An echo ten

years old—surely the world is a magical place. But think of music a hundred
years old.—There is a difference between the thought of motions long ago
and the thought of sound long ago. I think of the siege of Rome, say, simply
as motion, without sound—take an ancient siege. The trenches are dug, the
guns are brought up, the regiments manouevre [sic], the walls tumble. It is
all visionary. The firing of the guns is merely a flash of color—a flick in the
mind. The regiments are as quiet as leaves in the wind. The wall falls down
mutely as all things happen in times far off.—But let sound enter—the hum
of the men, the roar of the guns, the thunder of collapsing walls. The scene
has its shock.—So that ten-year-old do-re-mi-fa reanimates—and by closing
the eyes—it is ten years ago. (L 117)
As if in anticipation of the opening stanza of “Sunday Morning,” when

the unnamed dreaming woman who is being conjured up imagines “silent
Palestine” (“Winding across wide water, without sound. / The day is like
wide water, without sound” [CPP 53]), Stevens’s experience of the sym-
phony prompts him to meditate on the difference between our thinking of
past time with and without sound. Relying solely on visual images, Stevens
asserts that all that transpires is “a flash of color—a flick in the mind.”
Sound, however, has the unique property of transporting us from the
immediate present to an altogether distinct moment in time. “The scene
has its shock,” Stevens writes, and he maintains that the musical scale
makes the crucial difference and brings back his decade-old experience of
listening to the symphony: “that ten-year-old do-re-mi-fa reanimates—
and by closing the eyes—it is ten years ago.”
Less than three months later, Stevens again contemplates the relation
between music and memory, this time more abstractly, as he posits music’s
effects. If in the January letter he considers music’s power to reanimate a
personal memory and to revive a ten-year-old experience, in the following,
he imagines music’s far more extensive reach into a deeper collective past:
A little phantasy to beguile you—a bit of patch-work—and about music …

What is the mysterious effect of music, the vague effect we feel when we
hear music, without ever defining it? … It is considered that music, stirring
something within us, stirs the Memory. I do not mean our personal
Memory—the memory of our twenty years and more—but our inherited
Memory, the Memory we have derived from those who lived before us in
our own race, and in other races, illimitable, in which we resume the whole
past life of the world, all the emotions, passions, experiences of the millions
and millions of men and women now dead, whose lives have insensibly
passed into our own, and compose them. (L 136)
Stevens muses on memory in this passage and, importantly, distinguishes

between the personal memory (as, say, his experience listening to the
Schubert symphony) and a notion of a longer and deeper cultural memory
that connects us to times past in a less direct but nonetheless profound
manner. To make that distinction, he uses the upper-case “M” to under-
line that he wishes to describe a conception of “Memory” different from
personal recollection. Music, he suggests, “stirs the Memory” in such a
way that we sense, rather than rationally grasp, our connection to all those
who have come before; such deep Memory is “illimitable,” he insists, and
music enlivens it “insensibly,” almost without our conscious participation
in eliciting it. As if he were returning to his own memory of listening to
Schubert’s symphony, and other such concert experiences, Stevens con-
nects his own listening to his more expansive “phantasy” of deep memory.
He extends his thought when he imagines that “what one listens to at a
concert” is not simply the “harmony of sounds” but rather “the whisper-
ing of innumerable responsive spirits within one, momentarily revived,
that stir like the invisible motions of the mind wavering between dreams
and sleep” (L 136).
Stevens’s reflections on music in these early letters seem to look ahead

to poems in which the poet imagines a kind of music that is beyond sound
(“listening to what we have never heard” [L 149]): “A sunken voice, both
of remembering / And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain,” in “The
Comedian as the Letter C”; or “A music more than a breath, but less /
Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech,” in “Variations on a Summer
Day” (CPP 23, 212). His rendering of the effect of sounds inducing a
dream-like state also sharply anticipates Marcel Proust’s meditations on
the power of music in Remembrance of Things Past, particularly in Swann
in Love, when the “little phrase” of Vinteuil’s sonata throws the protago-
nist into an emotional turmoil that temporally and spatially displaces him
from his surroundings.1 So in Stevens’s letter, the “whispering of innu-
merable responsive spirits” similarly displaces or reorients the listener in
time and space. “‘[G]reat music’ agitates,” he writes in the same letter,
quoting an unacknowledged passage from Paul Elmer More’s Shelburne
Essays, “‘to fathomless depths, the mystery of the past within us’” (L 136).
We cannot resist citing one more letter, for it is important to note that
for Stevens—in letters and poems alike—music may issue from natural
sounds as much as from instruments, and in a beautiful letter to Elsie just
before the arrival of summer, on June 17, 1909, he ponders the effect of
the persistent sound of rain:
The sweet sound of the down-right rain changes the city into something
very much like the country—for rain falls on roofs, pavements etc. with
pretty much the same sound with which it falls on trees or fields: no, trees;
for surely it falls on fields (and the grass of them) with a softer sound than
this.—So much for the sweet sound of the down-right rain!—The whistles
on the river are drowned in it, the noise of the Elevated is swallowed up, a
neighborly mandoline [sic] is quite lost (except in snatches.)—One long,
unbroken, constant sound—the sound of the falling of water.—A sound not
dependent on breath. One sound made up of a multitude. A dark chorus
blending in wide tone. A numerous sound, to speak so (and it wouldn’t be
shocking at all.)—A sound native to the mind, remembered by the mind.—
Therefore, the ancient and immemorial sweet sound of the down-right
rain. (L 145)
Stevens’s rhythmic prose here reads as a kind of prose poem in which he

charts the transformative nature of sound—it “changes the city into some-
thing very much like the country”—and then its evolution into music, as
he measures its tone in relation to others—the “whistles on the river,” the
“noise” of the elevated urban trains, and the instrumental sounds of a

nearby “mandoline.”2 Anchoring his more abstract meditation on music
and Memory from several months earlier in the physical sound of the rain,
Stevens then considers the sounds converging, as a gathering of many
sounds together (as “of a multitude”) into a “chorus blending in wide
tone.” Such music, Stevens suggests, is “native” to humans, and, crucially
for our subject of music and memory, it is “remembered by the mind.”
The “down-right” rain is not merely a physical or natural shower falling
on pavement or on leaves; it is an “ancient and immemorial sweet sound”
that bespeaks a deep, ancestral memory.
2 Critical Considerations
“It would be worth while, given the prevalence of the theme of memory
in Stevens,” Helen Vendler writes, “to track his many descriptions and
enactings of memory” (259). To trace the “enactings” of memory in
Stevens’s poetry is to connect the theme of memory to his musical poetic.
Considering how ubiquitous the theme and how musical a poet he is, it is
surprising how few critics have devoted attention to it. Vendler takes on
the theme of memory in Stevens most directly in her 2004 article “Wallace
Stevens: Memory, Dead and Alive,” in which she offers brilliant close
readings of two important memory poems, “A Dish of Peaches in Russia”
and “Arcades of Philadelphia the Past,” yet she does not connect the
poet’s treatment of memory to his musicality; rather, she seeks to differen-
tiate Stevens from William Wordsworth and other Romantic predecessors
in his treatment of the theme. In contrast to Wordsworth, who finds in
memory “a rich and renovating source,” Stevens, she writes, “is taken
aback by the poverty of memory. When we summon up the past,” she
contends, “it is usually … in the form of a set of visual images” (249).
Vendler then focuses her readings specifically on the visual aspects of
memory (lilacs and so forth) and does not pursue the acoustic or musical
dimension except to show its diminishment in these particular poems.
While several Stevens scholars hint at the relation between music and
memory, none seems to take on the subject directly. Simon Critchley notes
the poet’s philosophical aspects and, alluding to “Of Modern Poetry,”
maintains that the poet’s “dark metaphysical talk is only successful insofar
as the sounds passing achieve sudden rightnesses”; Critchley contends that
“such rightness possesses the transience of music” (39). One might sur-
mise that memory has a part in that “dark metaphysical talk,” yet Critchley
does not include memory in the discussion. Juliette Utard focuses intently
on Stevens’s late work, and notes the presence of personal memory in
many poems. She finds in the poems of The Rock a “highly self-referential”
verse that includes “specific references to his age” (especially in the title
poem, “The Rock”), though it is not her aim to connect these retrospec-
tive poems specifically to Stevens’s musicality (194).
In an early Wallace Stevens Journal article, “Santayana on Memory and
‘The World as Meditation,’” Jerome Griswold explores the latter poem
through the lens of George Santayana’s chapter on memory in Scepticism
and Animal Faith (1923). He demonstrates how in “The World as
Meditation” “Stevens particularizes the philosopher’s discussion by pro-
viding an example of memory at work—Penelope remembering the absent
Ulysses.” Santayana (and, by extension, Stevens in his poem) “means to
correct the mistaken notion that in remembrance we drift back to the past;
instead, the memory is lifted out of the past, comes forward, invades the
present, and creates ‘a waking dream’” (113). Griswold edges toward the
music that Stevens composes as he traces “the memory [that] is lifted out
of the past,” yet does not follow a musical stream of thought. In another
Wallace Stevens Journal essay, “The Poetry of Matter: Stevens and
Bergson,” Temenuga Trifonova relates Henri Bergson’s understanding of
memory, perception, and matter to Stevens’s understanding of imagina-
tion and metaphor. When she compares the two figures, she touches on
aspects of Stevens’s musical aesthetic that enable him to express our ever-
moving and temporal experience. “Stevens’ poetry and Bergson’s philoso-
phy of becoming,” she writes, “bear witness to the evanescence, the
ephemerality of life” (43). For Bergson, the memory is “always a part of
perception” and therefore “dematerializes or subtilizes the world” (61),
while for Stevens, Trifonova maintains, “the very structure of poetry—
metaphor being the form of poetry as metamorphosis—is that of mem-
ory” (62). Trifonova comes close to linking music and memory in her
study of “Domination of Black,” when she refers to the “continuity of a
melody” (65; the phrase is Bergson’s), but does not develop her analysis
along explicitly musical lines. In the readings that follow, we will address
Stevens’s treatment of music and memory more extensively with a focus
on how he performs their relation—how the poems themselves evoke
memory often through flexible, interpretive, and open-ended musical
processes.
3 Poems of Music and Memory

Music and memory go hand-in-hand in Stevens’s poetry in myriad ways.
He often calls forth the association between the two in particular stanzas
of poems and, at times, in entire poems. Starting with “Domination of
Black,” a poem that will make its way into Harmonium, we will proceed
to study one poem from each of the following decades: “Anglais Mort à
Florence” (1930s); “Two Tales of Liadoff” (1940s); and “Long and
Sluggish Lines” (1950s). In close readings of entire poems from each dis-
tinct period of his writing life, we can see how Stevens enacts the relation
between music and memory both thematically and structurally.
“Words are the only melodeon,” Stevens proclaims in his “Adagia”
(CPP 909), and we might start by applying the proclamation to his 1916
poem “Domination of Black.” In the course of the four stanzas that com-
prise the poem, the poet unfurls a memory. Stevens may not take on the
subject of music proper and memory thematically in this early poem from
Harmonium; however, the text is worth revisiting for how it demonstrates
memory’s musical unfolding in the poem’s very structure and restricted
vocabulary. In the first stanza, Stevens situates his speaker by the night-
time fire:
At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding—
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. (CPP 7)
Stevens begins the poem with a spare vocabulary that refrains from
even describing the speaker’s posture: we do not learn that he “sits” by the
fire, or that he gazes at the flames. Rather, it is the fire itself that blurs the
distinction between inside—“the fire”—and outside—“The colors of the
bushes / And of the fallen leaves”—and sparks the colors “Repeating
themselves, / … / Like the leaves themselves.” Stevens creates a sense of
temporal collapse in the first stanza: the fire spurs confusion in time and
space. He alternates verb forms, present progressive and past tense, the
leaves “Repeating themselves” as they “Turned in the room, / Like the

leaves themselves / Turning in the wind,” so as to lift the past into the
present moment. Stevens composes his lines in staccato fashion—the
opening sentence unfurls in strong, irregularly placed two-beat lines as if
he were approximating in the sounds of the language the insistent whirl-
ing movement of the leaves and their colors. Stevens marks the second
sentence with “Yes:” and, with the colon’s pause, he then draws us into
the substance of the speaker’s daytime memory. “[S]triding” echoes the
“turning” and he speaks as if from the past, for then the “heavy hemlocks
/ Came striding.” It is the last line that sounds most powerfully, for all the
activity—both real and imagined, all “Repeating,” “Turning,” and “strid-
ing”—culminates in an auditory memory, as the speaker recounts in a
declarative sentence, “And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.”
While it is, as Vendler contends is often the case in Stevens’s poems, a
visual image—the fire—that ignites the speaker’s memory, the poetic rep-
resentation of that process is decidedly musical. One might even say that
Stevens practices in “Domination of Black” what Igor Stravinsky writes of
melody. “Mélôdia,” he explains in his Poetics of Music, “in Greek, is the
intonation of the melos, which signifies a fragment, a part of a phrase. It is
these parts that strike the ear in such a way as to mark certain accentua-
tions. Melody is the musical singing of a cadenced phrase” (39). Stevens
sets forth a “melody” in the opening stanza of “Domination of Black”
(and we will have much more to say on the construction of melodies in the
following chapter) that he develops in the second and third stanzas of the
poem. He forms the next two stanzas out of each of the key words of the
first—“colors,” “leaves,” “Turned” / “Turning,” “hemlocks,” and “pea-
cocks”—thus modulating and inflecting the speaker’s voice (“the musical
singing of a cadenced phrase”).
The second stanza, which consists of three sentences, reads as follows:
The colors of their tails

Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry—the peacocks. (CPP 7)
Stevens recounts the speaker’s memory of the hours before nighttime in

the above lines. With the word “twilight,” he signals the intrusion of the
speaker’s earlier experience into the present nighttime moment, yet the
repetition of familiar words—“colors,” “leaves,” “room,” “wind,” “hem-
locks”—and of entire phrases—“the leaves themselves / Turning in the
wind” (with identical enjambment)—“strike the ear,” to borrow
Stravinsky’s definition of melody, recalling and extending the mood of the
first stanza. Adding to the repetition of whole words and the rhythm of
the lines are tonal repetitions that contribute to a chanting effect and
growing momentum. Short and long vowel sounds alternate in quick suc-
cession—repeated short “i” sounds throughout as in the twice repeated
“in the … wind”—and converge in the internal rhymes that follow the
peacock’s descent: they “flew from the boughs of the hemlocks / Down to
the ground” (emphases added). Once the speaker has relived (or re-
envisioned) the twilight scene, it is crucial to note that the visual memory
culminates once more in sound: “I heard them cry—the peacocks.”
Stevens heightens the speaker’s voice in the syntax and punctuation of the
final line: in contrast to the declarative sentence that closes the first stanza
(“And I remembered the cry of the peacocks”), the speaker’s voice is halt-
ing as he hears once more (and we hear with him) the peacock’s shrill cry.
With the pause of the em-dash now in the middle of the line, Stevens
marks the cry with what Stravinsky might call a sharp “accentuation.”
Stevens brings the emotional pitch of the poem to a peak in a series of
questions that constitutes the third stanza:
Was it a cry against the twilight

Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks? (CPP 7)
The speaker, struck by his memory of the peacock’s cry, confusedly won-
ders at the sound and its object: “Was it a cry against the twilight,” he asks,
“Or against the leaves themselves,” and in a winding question that persists
through nine of the ten lines, he heightens his voice by means of repeti-
tion. We hear of the “twilight” again, and of “the leaves themselves /
Turning in the wind” (again with the same enjambment). Such repetitions
linguistically mimic the swirling motion of the “flames,” “fire,” and “tails
of the peacocks” (these words, too, echo previous soundings), as sound
and vision coincide until whatever boundary between inside and outside,
daylight and night there is dissolves in the successive anaphoric repetitions
of the resonant verb “to turn” alternately in present progressive and past
tense: “Turning,” “Turning,” “Turned,” “Turning,” Turned.” Paul
Valéry, the French post-Symbolist poet, whom Stevens much admired,
called such key words as “turning” in “Domination of Black” “resonant”
words, for with each successive sounding they become distanced from
their referential content and operate like musical notes.3 Stevens then
emphasizes the speaker’s total displacement in time and space, and in syn-
esthetic confusion, he attributes the peacock’s shriek to the sound of the
fire and hemlocks: the bird’s tails “Turned in the loud fire,” and they are
“Loud as the hemlocks.” Finally, the exhausted speaker doubts himself
and poses, in one more breath, a final question, just one line long: “Or was
it a cry against the hemlocks?”
Stevens draws the poem to a close as the speaker looks outside:
Out of the window,

I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid—
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. (CPP 7)
As if to underscore the speaker’s intense perception of the movement of

the fire, leaves, and the piercing sound of the peacock’s cry, Stevens
endows him with the power to perceive the very motion of the heavens: “I
saw how the planets gathered.” He voices the last stanza, however, in
contrast to the one preceding, in quieter tones, with a succession of
declarative statements: “I saw how the planets gathered,” “I saw how the
night came,” “I felt afraid,” “And I remembered,” repeating the personal
pronoun “I” four times in eight lines. But, most importantly for the sub-
ject of music and memory, Stevens closes the poem with repetitions of its
intertwining phrases or melodies. The first, “Like the leaves themselves /

Turning in the wind,” is sounded in each of the previous stanzas. The
second, which repeats the last line of the first, “And I remembered the cry
of the peacocks,” prompts us, as a composer of music might, to hear its
lines once again. “I am sorry,” Stevens writes in a 1928 letter of
“Domination of Black,” “that a poem of this sort has to contain any ideas
at all, because its sole purpose is to fill the mind with the images & sounds
that it contains,” so that we feel, as he hopes, as we would actually feel if
we saw and heard all these images and sounds in reality (L 251).
“Domination of Black” offers us one early example of the way Stevens
enacts music in Harmonium, an otherwise very heterogeneous volume in
which music assumes many different guises. In his first volume of the
1930s, Ideas of Order, music becomes more consistently an organizing
artistic analogy. In “Anglais Mort à Florence” (1936), Stevens powerfully
interweaves memory and music both thematically and structurally, as the
poet looks achingly back on his former self, and rues what he has lost. He
subtly traces a shift in the way he sees and feels, and expresses that lessen-
ing of feeling in musical terms, especially in the way he hears the nineteenth-
century composer Johannes Brahms. In the opening stanza, he considers
Brahms as a second self, “His dark familiar,” to whom he turns later in the
poem (in the movement from stanza five to six) “as alternate // In
speech” (CPP 119–20). This elegiac poem is musical not only in theme:
the speaker’s sorrowful tone is reminiscent of Brahms’s intensity of feel-
ing, and its eight stanzas, of three lines each, advance with a classical sym-
metry that echoes the composer’s stately forms. Of “Anglais Mort à
Florence,” Harold Bloom writes, “The little elegy for an imaginary English
High Romantic dead at Florence is Stevens’ saddest and most elegant ver-
sion of Wordsworth’s Immortality ode and is another anticipation of The
Auroras of Autumn, particularly in its lament for a time of lost glory,
‘before the colors deepened and grew small’” (113). Almost as if he were
reflecting back on his earlier letters, Stevens seems to ponder memory here
in musical fashion to ask himself, What can draw the distant near? What
force can draw the past closer to the present?
To say that “Anglais Mort à Florence” resembles Brahms in tone or
structure, however, is not to tie Stevens and Brahms too tightly together,
or to assert that Stevens self-consciously tries to turn poetry into music
proper. Yet, Stevens’s choice of Brahms in this tender and self-searching
poem at such a transition in the poet’s own life is not an arbitrary one. In
a letter of 1940 to Hi Simons, in which he discusses the poem, Stevens
writes that even “a strong spirit … is subject to degeneration,” and in

“states of helplessness” such a spirit may “turn to the spirit of others” (L
348). And it is to Brahms’s “spirit” that he turns in “Anglais Mort à
Florence.” It is well known that Brahms’s music is firmly Classical in form,
and, at the same time, celebrated for its evocation of deep Romantic feel-
ing. Stevens, then, takes a backward glance at his earlier self in Harmonium
much as he might have imagined that the Romantic Brahms regarded his
Classical forebears and his own self. (Like Stevens in relation to avant-
garde Modernists, Brahms was often subjected to criticism that he was
conservative.) As Michael Stegman notes, Stevens’s extensive record col-
lection reveals his strong interest in late Romantic music (the music that
was roughly contemporaneous with his own youth), and included a broad
range of Brahms in multiple genres: orchestral music (all four sympho-
nies); concertos (both piano concertos and the violin concerto); a wide
range of piano repertoire (ballades, Hungarian dances, intermezzi, rhap-
sodies, capriccios); and various items of chamber music (from piano quar-
tets to string quartets) (Stegman 84–85). Stevens’s consistent structure in
this poem and the way he voices the poem as a kind of inner dialogue
unwinding in a measured pace may be felt to parallel Brahms’s structures
in some of his intermezzi. The composer’s clarity of themes and, in par-
ticular, his stylistic use of polyrhythms have a lingering effect as if he were
aiming to recollect or preserve the past in the present moment. So it is in
“Anglais Mort à Florence,” in which Stevens’s use of voice, repetition, and
refrains similarly produces a compelling, lingering effect as the speaker
remembers his former self.
Stevens unwinds the eight stanzas of “Anglais Mort à Florence” the-
matically in two groupings of roughly four stanzas. In the first four, the
speaker, in mournful tones, expresses a sense of loss:
A little less returned for him each spring.

Music began to fail him. Brahms, although
His dark familiar, often walked apart.
His spirit grew uncertain of delight,
Certain of its uncertainty, in which
That dark companion left him unconsoled
For a self returning mostly memory.
Only last year he said that the naked moon
Was not the moon he used to see, to feel
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century ago and exercise at least a limited discretion in casting their
votes. In a State like Nebraska, for instance, it looks as though it
would be possible that the electoral ticket on the anti-Republican
side would be composed of four Bryan and Watson men and four
Bryan and Sewall men. Now in the event of Bryan having more votes
than McKinley—that is, in the event of the country showing strong
Bedlamite tendencies next November—it might be that a split
between Sewall and Watson would give a plurality to Hobart, and in
such event it is hardly conceivable that some of the electors would
not exercise their discretion by changing their votes. If they did not,
we might then again see a return to the early and profoundly
interesting practice of our fathers and witness a President chosen by
one party and a Vice-President by the other.
I wish it to be distinctly understood, however, that these are merely
interesting speculations as to what might occur in a hopelessly
improbable contingency. I am a good American, with a profound
belief in my countrymen, and I have no idea that they will deliberately
lower themselves to a level beneath that of a South American
Republic, by voting for the farrago of sinister nonsense which the
Populistic-Democratic politicians at Chicago chose to set up as
embodying the principles of their party, and for the amiable and
windy demagogue who stands upon that platform. Many entirely
honest and intelligent men have been misled by the silver talk, and
have for the moment joined the ranks of the ignorant, the vicious and
the wrong-headed. These men of character and capacity are blinded
by their own misfortunes, or their own needs, or else they have
never fairly looked into the matter for themselves, being, like most
men, whether in “gold” or “silver” communities, content to follow the
opinion of those they are accustomed to trust. After full and fair
inquiry these men, I am sure, whether they live in Maine, in
Tennessee, or in Oregon, will come out on the side of honest money.
The shiftless and vicious and the honest but hopelessly ignorant and
puzzle-headed voters cannot be reached; but the average farmer,
the average business man, the average workman—in short, the
average American—will always stand up for honesty and decency
when he can once satisfy himself as to the side on which they are to
be found.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Review of Reviews, September, 1896.
X
HOW NOT TO HELP OUR POORER BROTHER[18]
After the publication of my article in the September Review of

Reviews on the vice-presidential candidates, I received the following
very manly, and very courteous, letter from the Honorable Thomas
Watson, then the candidate with Mr. Bryan on the Populist ticket for
Vice-President. I publish it with his permission:
Hon. Theodore Roosevelt:
It pains me to be misunderstood by those whose good
opinion I respect, and upon reading your trenchant article in
the September number of the Review of Reviews the impulse
was strong to write to you.
When you take your stand for honester government and for
juster laws in New York, as you have so courageously done,
your motives must be the same as mine—for you do not need
the money your office gives you. I can understand,
instinctively, what you feel—what your motives are. You
merely obey a law of your nature which puts you into mortal
combat with what you think is wrong. You fight because your
own sense of self-respect and self-loyalty compels you to
fight. Is not this so?
If in Georgia and throughout the South we have conditions
as intolerable as those that surround you in New York, can
you not realize why I make war upon them?
Tammany itself has grown great because mistaken leaders
of the southern Democracy catered to its Kellys and Crokers
and feared to defy them.
The first “roast” I ever got from the Democratic press of this
State followed a speech I had made denouncing Tammany,
and denouncing the craven leaders who obeyed Tammany.
It is astonishing how one honest man may honestly
misjudge another.
My creed does not lead me to dislike the men who run a
bank, a factory, a railroad or a foundry. I do not hate a man for
owning a bond, and having a bank account, or having cash
loaned at interest.
Upon the other hand, I think each should make all the profit
in business he fairly can; but I do believe that the banks
should not exercise the sovereign power of issuing money,
and I do believe that all special privileges granted, and all
exemption from taxation, work infinite harm. I do believe that
the wealth of the Republic is practically free from federal
taxation, and that the burdens of government fall upon the
shoulders of those least able to bear them.
If you could spend an evening with me among my books
and amid my family, I feel quite sure you would not again
class me with those who make war upon the “decencies and
elegancies of civilized life.” And if you could attend one of my
great political meetings in Georgia, and see the good men
and good women who believe in Populism, you would not
continue to class them with those who vote for candidates
upon the “no undershirt” platform.
In other words, if you understood me and mine your
judgment of us would be different.
The “cracker” of the South is simply the man who did not
buy slaves to do his work. He did it all himself—like a man.
Some of our best generals in war, and magistrates in peace,
have come from the “cracker” class. As a matter of fact,
however, my own people, from my father back to
Revolutionary times, were slave owners and land owners. In
the first meeting held in Georgia to express sympathy with the
Boston patriots my great-great-grandfather bore a prominent
part, and in the first State legislature ever convened in
Georgia one of my ancestors was the representative of his
county.
My grandfather was wealthy, and so was my father. My
boyhood was spent in the idleness of a rich man’s son. It was
not till I was in my teens that misfortune overtook us, sent us
homeless into the world, and deprived me of the thorough
collegiate training my father intended for me.
At sixteen years of age I thus had to commence life
moneyless, and the weary years I spent among the poor, the
kindness I received in their homes, and the acquaintance I
made with the hardship of their lives, gave me that profound
sympathy for them which I yet retain—though I am no longer
poor myself.
Pardon the liberty I take in intruding this letter upon you. I
have followed your work in New York with admiring sympathy,
and have frequently written of it in my paper. While hundreds
of miles separate us, and our tasks and methods have been
widely different, I must still believe that we have much in
common, and that the ruling force which actuates us both is to
challenge wrong and to fight the battles of good government.
Very respectfully yours,
(Signed) Thos. E. Watson.
Thompson, Ga., August, 30, 1896.
I intended to draw a very sharp line between Mr. Watson and
many of those associated with him in the same movement; and
certain of the sentences which he quotes as if they were meant to
apply to him were, on the contrary, meant to apply generally to the
agitators who proclaimed both him and Mr. Bryan as their
champions, and especially to many of the men who were running on
the Populist tickets in different States. To Mr. Watson’s own sincerity
and courage I thought I had paid full tribute, and if I failed in any way
I wish to make good that failure. I was in Washington when Mr.
Watson was in Congress, and I know how highly he was esteemed
personally by his colleagues, even by those differing very widely
from him in matters of principle. The staunchest friends of order and
decent government fully and cordially recognized Mr. Watson’s
honesty and good faith—men, for instance, like Senator Lodge of
Massachusetts, and Representative Bellamy Storer of Ohio.
Moreover, I sympathize as little as Mr. Watson with denunciation of
the “cracker,” and I may mention that one of my forefathers was the
first Revolutionary Governor of Georgia at the time that Mr. Watson’s
ancestor sat in the first Revolutionary legislature of the State. Mr.
Watson himself embodies not a few of the very attributes the lack of
which we feel so keenly in many of our public men. He is brave, he is
earnest, he is honest, he is disinterested. For many of the wrongs
which he wishes to remedy, I, too, believe that a remedy can be
found, and for this purpose I would gladly strike hands with him. All
this makes it a matter of the keenest regret that he should advocate
certain remedies that we deem even worse than the wrongs
complained of, and should strive in darkling ways to correct other
wrongs, or rather inequalities and sufferings, which exist, not
because of the shortcomings of society, but because of the existence
of human nature itself.
There are plenty of ugly things about wealth and its possessors in
the present age, and I suppose there have been in all ages. There
are many rich people who so utterly lack patriotism, or show such
sordid and selfish traits of character, or lead such mean and vacuous
lives, that all right-minded men must look upon them with angry
contempt; but, on the whole, the thrifty are apt to be better citizens
than the thriftless; and the worst capitalist cannot harm laboring men
as they are harmed by demagogues. As the people of a State grow
more and more intelligent the State itself may be able to play a larger
and larger part in the life of the community, while at the same time
individual effort may be given freer and less restricted movement
along certain lines; but it is utterly unsafe to give the State more than
the minimum of power just so long as it contains masses of men who
can be moved by the pleas and denunciations of the average
Socialist leader of to-day. There may be better schemes of taxation
than those at present employed; it may be wise to devise inheritance
taxes, and to impose regulations on the kinds of business which can
be carried on only under the especial protection of the State; and
where there is a real abuse by wealth it needs to be, and in this
country generally has been, promptly done away with; but the first
lesson to teach the poor man is that, as a whole, the wealth in the
community is distinctly beneficial to him; that he is better off in the
long run because other men are well off; and that the surest way to
destroy what measure of prosperity he may have is to paralyze
industry and the well-being of those men who have achieved
success.
I am not an empiricist; I would no more deny that sometimes
human affairs can be much bettered by legislation than I would affirm
that they can always be so bettered. I would no more make a fetish
of unrestricted individualism than I would admit the power of the
State offhand and radically to reconstruct society. It may become
necessary to interfere even more than we have done with the right of
private contract, and to shackle cunning as we have shackled force.
All I insist upon is that we must be sure of our ground before trying to
get any legislation at all, and that we must not expect too much from
this legislation, nor refuse to better ourselves a little because we
cannot accomplish everything at a jump. Above all, it is criminal to
excite anger and discontent without proposing a remedy, or only
proposing a false remedy. The worst foe of the poor man is the labor
leader, whether philanthropist or politician, who tries to teach him
that he is a victim of conspiracy and injustice, when in reality he is
merely working out his fate with blood and sweat as the immense
majority of men who are worthy of the name always have done and
always will have to do.
The difference between what can and what cannot be done by law
is well exemplified by our experience with the negro problem, an
experience of which Mr. Watson must have ample practical
knowledge. The negroes were formerly held in slavery. This was a
wrong which legislation could remedy, and which could not be
remedied except by legislation. Accordingly they were set free by
law. This having been done, many of their friends believed that in
some way, by additional legislation, we could at once put them on an
intellectual, social, and business equality with the whites. The effort
has failed completely. In large sections of the country the negroes
are not treated as they should be treated, and politically in particular
the frauds upon them have been so gross and shameful as to
awaken not merely indignation but bitter wrath; yet the best friends of
the negro admit that his hope lies, not in legislation, but in the
constant working of those often unseen forces of the national life
which are greater than all legislation.
It is but rarely that great advances in general social well-being can
be made by the adoption of some far-reaching scheme, legislative or
otherwise; normally they come only by gradual growth, and by
incessant effort to do first one thing, then another, and then another.
Quack remedies of the universal cure-all type are generally as
noxious to the body politic as to the body corporal.
Often the head-in-the-air social reformers, because people of sane
and wholesome minds will not favor their wild schemes, themselves
decline to favor schemes for practical reform. For the last two years
there has been an honest effort in New York to give the city good
government, and to work intelligently for better social conditions,
especially in the poorest quarters. We have cleaned the streets; we
have broken the power of the ward boss and the saloon-keeper to
work injustice; we have destroyed the most hideous of the tenement
houses in which poor people are huddled like swine in a sty; we
have made parks and play-grounds for the children in the crowded
quarters; in every possible way we have striven to make life easier
and healthier, and to give man and woman a chance to do their best
work; while at the same time we have warred steadily against the
pauper-producing, maudlin philanthropy of the free soup-kitchen and
tramp lodging-house kind. In all this we have had practically no help
from either the parlor socialists or the scarcely more noxious beer-
room socialists who are always howling about the selfishness of the
rich and their unwillingness to do anything for those who are less
well off.
There are certain labor unions, certain bodies of organized labor—
notably those admirable organizations which include the railway
conductors, the locomotive engineers and the firemen—which to my
mind embody almost the best hope that there is for healthy national
growth in the future; but bitter experience has taught men who work
for reform in New York that the average labor leader, the average
demagogue who shouts for a depreciated currency, or for the
overthrow of the rich, will not do anything to help those who honestly
strive to make better our civic conditions. There are immense
numbers of workingmen to whom we can appeal with perfect
confidence; but too often we find that a large proportion of the men
who style themselves leaders of organized labor are influenced only
by sullen short-sighted hatred of what they do not understand, and
are deaf to all appeals, whether to their national or to their civic
patriotism.
What I most grudge in all this is the fact that sincere and zealous
men of high character and honest purpose, men like Mr. Watson,
men and women such as those he describes as attending his
Populist meetings, or such as are to be found in all strata of our
society, from the employer to the hardest-worked day laborer, go
astray in their methods, and are thereby prevented from doing the
full work for good they ought to. When a man goes on the wrong
road himself he can do very little to guide others aright, even though
these others are also on the wrong road. There are many wrongs to
be righted; there are many measures of relief to be pushed; and it is
a pity that when we are fighting what is bad and championing what is
good, the men who ought to be our most effective allies should
deprive themselves of usefulness by the wrong-headedness of their
position. Rich men and poor men both do wrong on occasions, and
whenever a specific instance of this can be pointed out all citizens
alike should join in punishing the wrong-doer. Honesty and right-
mindedness should be the tests; not wealth or poverty.
In our municipal administration here in New York we have acted
with an equal hand toward wrong-doers of high and low degree. The
Board of Health condemns the tenement-house property of the rich
landowner, whether this landowner be priest or layman, banker or
railroad president, lawyer or manager of a real estate business; and
it pays no heed to the intercession of any politician, whether this
politician be Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile. At the same time
the Police Department promptly suppresses, not only the criminal,
but the rioter. In other words, we do strict justice. We feel we are
defrauded of help to which we are entitled when men who ought to
assist in any work to better the condition of the people decline to aid
us because their brains are turned by dreams only worthy of a
European revolutionist.
Many workingmen look with distrust upon laws which really would
help them; laws for the intelligent restriction of immigration, for
instance. I have no sympathy with mere dislike of immigrants; there
are classes and even nationalities of them which stand at least on an
equality with the citizens of native birth, as the last election showed.
But in the interest of our workingmen we must in the end keep out
laborers who are ignorant, vicious, and with low standards of life and
comfort, just as we have shut out the Chinese.
Often labor leaders and the like denounce the present conditions
of society, and especially of our political life, for shortcomings which
they themselves have been instrumental in causing. In our cities the
misgovernment is due, not to the misdeeds of the rich, but to the low
standard of honesty and morality among citizens generally; and
nothing helps the corrupt politician more than substituting either
wealth or poverty for honesty as the standard by which to try a
candidate. A few months ago a socialistic reformer in New York was
denouncing the corruption caused by rich men because a certain
judge was suspected of giving information in advance as to a
decision in a case involving the interests of a great corporation. Now
this judge had been elected some years previously, mainly because
he was supposed to be a representative of the “poor man”; and the
socialistic reformer himself, a year ago, was opposing the election of
Mr. Beaman as judge because he was one of the firm of Evarts &
Choate, who were friends of various millionaires and were counsel
for various corporations. But if Mr. Beaman had been elected judge
no human being, rich or poor, would have dared so much as hint at
his doing anything improper.
Something can be done by good laws; more can be done by
honest administration of the laws; but most of all can be done by
frowning resolutely upon the preachers of vague discontent; and by
upholding the true doctrine of self-reliance, self-help, and self-
mastery. This doctrine sets forth many things. Among them is the
fact that though a man can occasionally be helped when he
stumbles, yet that it is useless to try to carry him when he will not or
cannot walk; and worse than useless to try to bring down the work
and reward of the thrifty and intelligent to the level of the capacity of
the weak, the shiftless, and the idle. It further shows that the maudlin
philanthropist and the maudlin sentimentalist are almost as noxious
as the demagogue, and that it is even more necessary to temper
mercy with justice than justice with mercy.
The worst lesson that can be taught a man is to rely upon others
and to whine over his sufferings. If an American is to amount to
anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must
take pride in his own work, instead of sitting idle to envy the luck of
others; he must face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can,
and accept defeat if he must, without seeking to place on his fellow-
men a responsibility which is not theirs.
Let me say in conclusion, that I do not write in the least from the
standpoint of those whose association is purely with what are called
the wealthy classes. The men with whom I have worked and
associated most closely during the last couple of years here in New
York, with whom I have shared what is at least an earnest desire to
better social and civic conditions (neither blinking what is evil nor
being misled by the apostles of a false remedy), and with whose
opinions as to what is right and practical my own in the main agree,
are not capitalists, save as all men who by toil earn, and with
prudence save, money are capitalists. They include reporters on the
daily papers, editors of magazines, as well as of newspapers,
principals in the public schools, young lawyers, young architects,
young doctors, young men of business, who are struggling to rise in
their profession by dint of faithful work, but who give some of their
time to doing what they can for the city, and a number of priests and
clergymen; but as it happens the list does not include any man of
great wealth, or any of those men whose names are in the public
mind identified with great business corporations. Most of them have
at one time or another in their lives faced poverty and know what it
is; none of them are more than well-to-do. They include Catholics
and Protestants, Jews, and men who would be regarded as
heterodox by professors of most recognized creeds; some of them
were born on this side, others are of foreign birth; but they are all
Americans, heart and soul, who fight out for themselves the battles
of their own lives, meeting sometimes defeat and sometimes victory.
They neither forget that man does owe a duty to his fellows, and
should strive to do what he can to increase the well-being of the
community; nor yet do they forget that in the long run the only way to
help people is to make them help themselves. They are prepared to
try any properly guarded legislative remedy for ills which they believe
can be remedied; but they perceive clearly that it is both foolish and
wicked to teach the average man who is not well off that some wrong
or injustice has been done him, and that he should hope for redress
elsewhere than in his own industry, honesty, and intelligence.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Review of Reviews, January, 1897.
XI
THE MONROE DOCTRINE[19]
The Monroe Doctrine should not be considered from any purely

academic standpoint, but as a broad, general principle of living
policy. It is to be justified not by precedent merely, but by the needs
of the nation and the true interests of Western civilization. It, of
course, adds strength to our position at this moment to show that the
action of the national authorities is warranted by the actions of their
predecessors on like occasions in time past, and that the line of
policy we are now pursuing is that which has been pursued by all our
statesmen of note since the republic grew sufficiently powerful to
make what it said of weight in foreign affairs. But even if in time past
we had been as blind to the national honor and welfare as are the
men who at the present day champion the anti-American side of the
Venezuelan question, it would now be necessary for statesmen who
were both far-sighted and patriotic to enunciate the principles for
which the Monroe Doctrine stands. In other words, if the Monroe
Doctrine did not already exist it would be necessary forthwith to
create it.
Let us first of all clear the question at issue by brushing away one
or two false objections. Lord Salisbury at first put in emphatic words
his refusal in any way to recognize the Monroe Doctrine as part of
the law of nations or as binding upon Great Britain. Most British
statesmen and publicists followed his lead; but recently a goodly
number have shown an inclination to acquiesce in the views of Lord
Salisbury’s colleague, Mr. Chamberlain, who announces, with bland
indifference to the expressed opinion of his nominal chief, that
England does recognize the existence of the Monroe Doctrine and
never thought of ignoring it. Lord Salisbury himself has recently
shown symptoms of changing ground and taking this position; while
Mr. Balfour has gone still farther in the right direction, and the Liberal
leaders farther yet. It is not very important to us how far Lord
Salisbury and Mr. Chamberlain may diverge in their views, although,
of course, in the interests of the English-speaking peoples and of
peace between England and the United States, we trust that Mr.
Chamberlain’s position will be sustained by Great Britain. But the
attitude of our own people is important, and it would be amusing,
were it not unpleasant, to see that many Americans, whose
Americanism is of the timid and flabby type, have been inclined
eagerly to agree with Lord Salisbury. A very able member of the New
York bar remarked the other day that he had not yet met the lawyer
who agreed with Secretary Olney as to the legal interpretation of the
Monroe Doctrine. This remark was chiefly interesting as showing the
lawyer’s own limitations. It would not have been made if he had met
the Justices of the Supreme Court, for instance; but even on the
unfounded supposition that his remark was well grounded, it would
have had little more significance than if he had said that he had not
yet met a dentist who agreed with Mr. Olney. The Monroe Doctrine is
not a question of law at all. It is a question of policy. It is a question
to be considered not only by statesmen, but by all good citizens.
Lawyers, as lawyers, have absolutely nothing whatever to say about
it. To argue that it cannot be recognized as a principle of international
law, is a mere waste of breath. Nobody cares whether it is or is not
so recognized, any more than any one cares whether the
Declaration of Independence and Washington’s farewell address are
so recognized.
The Monroe Doctrine may be briefly defined as forbidding
European encroachment on American soil. It is not desirable to
define it so rigidly as to prevent our taking into account the varying
degrees of national interest in varying cases. The United States has
not the slightest wish to establish a universal protectorate over other
American States, or to become responsible for their misdeeds. If one
of them becomes involved in an ordinary quarrel with a European
power, such quarrel must be settled between them by any one of the
usual methods. But no European State is to be allowed to
aggrandize itself on American soil at the expense of any American
State. Furthermore, no transfer of an American colony from one
European State to another is to be permitted, if, in the judgment of
the United States, such transfer would be hostile to its own interests.
John Quincy Adams, who, during the presidency of Monroe, first
clearly enunciated the doctrine which bears his chief’s name,
asserted it as against both Spain and Russia. In the clearest and
most emphatic terms he stated that the United States could not
acquiesce in the acquisition of new territory within the limits of any
independent American State, whether in the Northern or Southern
Hemisphere, by any European power. He took this position against
Russia when Russia threatened to take possession of what is now
Oregon. He took this position as against Spain when, backed by
other powers of Continental Europe, she threatened to reconquer
certain of the Spanish-American States.
This is precisely and exactly the position the United States has
now taken in reference to England and Venezuela. It is idle to
contend that there is any serious difference in the application of the
doctrine to the two sets of questions. An American may, of course,
announce his opposition to the Monroe Doctrine, although by so
doing he forfeits all title to far-seeing and patriotic devotion to the
interests of his country. But he cannot argue that the Monroe
Doctrine does not apply to the present case, unless he argues that
the Monroe Doctrine has no existence whatsoever. In fact, such
arguments are, on their face, so absurd that they need no refutation,
and can be relegated where they belong—to the realm of the hair-
splitting schoolmen. They have no concern either for practical
politicians or for historians with true historic insight.
We have asserted the principles which underlie the Monroe
Doctrine, not only against Russia and Spain, but also against
France, on at least two different occasions. The last and most
important was when the French conquered Mexico and made it into
an Empire. It is not necessary to recall to any one the action of our
Government in the matter as soon as the Civil War came to an end.
Suffice it to say that, under threat of our interposition, the French
promptly abandoned Maximilian, and the latter’s Empire fell. Long
before this, however, and a score of years before the Doctrine was
christened by the name Monroe even the timid statesmen of the
Jeffersonian era embodied its principle in their protest against the
acquisition of Louisiana, by France, from Spain. Spain at that time
held all of what is now the Great West. France wished to acquire it.
Our statesmen at once announced that they would regard as hostile
to America the transfer of the territory in question from a weak to a
strong European power. Under the American pressure the matter
was finally settled by the sale of the territory in question to the United
States. The principle which our statesmen then announced was in
kind precisely the same as that upon which we should now act if
Germany sought to acquire Cuba from Spain, or St. Thomas from
the Danes. In either of these events it is hardly conceivable that the
United States would hesitate to interfere, if necessary, by force of
arms; and in so doing the national authorities would undoubtedly be
supported by the immense majority of the American people, and,
indeed, by all save the men of abnormal timidity or abnormal political
short-sightedness.
Historically, therefore, the position of our representatives in the
Venezuelan question is completely justified. It cannot be attacked on
academic grounds. The propriety of their position is even more easily
defensible.
Primarily, our action is based on national self-interest. In other
words, it is patriotic. A certain limited number of persons are fond of
decrying patriotism as a selfish virtue, and strive with all their feeble
might to inculcate in its place a kind of milk-and-water
cosmopolitanism. These good people are never men of robust
character or of imposing personality, and the plea itself is not worth
considering. Some reformers may urge that in the ages’ distant
future patriotism, like the habit of monogamous marriage, will
become a needless and obsolete virtue; but just at present the man
who loves other countries as much as he does his own is quite as
noxious a member of society as the man who loves other women as
much as he loves his wife. Love of country is an elemental virtue,
like love of home, or like honesty or courage. No country will
accomplish very much for the world at large unless it elevates itself.
The useful member of a community is the man who first and
foremost attends to his own rights and his own duties, and who
therefore becomes better fitted to do his share in the common duties
of all. The useful member of the brotherhood of nations is that nation
which is most thoroughly saturated with the national idea, and which
realizes most fully its rights as a nation and its duties to its own
citizens. This is in no way incompatible with a scrupulous regard for
the rights of other nations, or a desire to remedy the wrongs of
suffering peoples.
The United States ought not to permit any great military powers,
which have no foothold on this continent, to establish such foothold;
nor should they permit any aggrandizement of those who already
have possessions on the continent. We do not wish to bring
ourselves to a position where we shall have to emulate the European
system of enormous armies. Every true patriot, every man of
statesman-like habit, should look forward to the day when not a
single European power will hold a foot of American soil. At present it
is not necessary to take the position that no European power shall
hold American territory; but it certainly will become necessary, if the
timid and selfish “peace at any price” men have their way, and if the
United States fails to check at the outset European aggrandizement
on this continent.
Primarily, therefore, it is to the interest of the citizens of the United
States to prevent the further colonial growth of European powers in
the Western Hemisphere. But this is also to the interest of all the
people of the Western Hemisphere. At best, the inhabitants of a
colony are in a cramped and unnatural state. At the worst, the
establishment of a colony prevents any healthy popular growth.
Some time in the dim future it may be that all the English-speaking
peoples will be able to unite in some kind of confederacy. However
desirable this would be, it is, under existing conditions, only a dream.
At present the only hope for a colony that wishes to attain full moral
and mental growth, is to become an independent State, or part of an
independent State. No English colony now stands on a footing of
genuine equality with the parent State. As long as the Canadian
remains a colonist, he remains in a position which is distinctly inferior
to that of his cousins, both in England and in the United States. The
Englishman at bottom looks down on the Canadian, as he does on
any one who admits his inferiority, and quite properly, too. The
American, on the other hand, with equal propriety, regards the
Canadian with the good-natured condescension always felt by the
freeman for the man who is not free. A funny instance of the English
attitude toward Canada was shown after Lord Dunraven’s inglorious
fiasco last September, when the Canadian yachtsman, Rose,
challenged for the America cup. The English journals repudiated him
on the express ground that a Canadian was not an Englishman and
not entitled to the privileges of an Englishman. In their comments,
many of them showed a dislike for Americans which almost rose to
hatred. The feeling they displayed for the Canadians was not one of
dislike. It was one of contempt.
Under the best of circumstances, therefore, a colony is in a false
position. But if the colony is in a region where the colonizing race
has to do its work by means of other inferior races the condition is
much worse. From the standpoint of the race little or nothing has
been gained by the English conquest and colonization of Jamaica.
Jamaica has merely been turned into a negro island, with a future,
seemingly, much like that of San Domingo. British Guiana, however
well administered, is nothing but a colony where a few hundred or
few thousand white men hold the superior positions, while the bulk of
the population is composed of Indians, Negroes, and Asiatics.
Looked at through the vista of the centuries, such a colony contains
less promise of true growth than does a State like Venezuela or
Ecuador. The history of most of the South American republics has
been both mean and bloody; but there is at least a chance that they
may develop, after infinite tribulations and suffering, into a civilization
quite as high and stable as that of such a European power as
Portugal. But there is no such chance for any tropical American
colony owned by a Northern European race. It is distinctly in the
interest of civilization that the present States in the two Americas
should develop along their own lines, and however desirable it is that
many of them should receive European immigration, it is highly
undesirable that any of them should be under European control.
So much for the general principles, and the justification, historically
and morally, of the Monroe Doctrine. Now take the specific case at
issue. Great Britain has a boundary dispute with Venezuela. She
claims as her own a territory which Venezuela asserts to be hers, a
territory which in point of size very nearly equals the Kingdom of
Italy. Our government, of course, cannot, if it wishes to remain true to
the traditions of the Monroe Doctrine submit to the acquisition by
England of such an enormous tract of territory, and it must therefore
find out whether the English claims are or are not well founded. It
would, of course, be preposterous to lay down the rule that no
European power should seize American territory which was not its
own, and yet to permit the power itself to decide the question of the
ownership of such territory. Great Britain refused to settle the
question either by amicable agreement with Venezuela or by
arbitration. All that remained for the United States, was to do what it
actually did; that is, to try to find out the facts for itself, by its own
commission. If the facts show England to be in the right, well and
good. If they show England to be in the wrong, we most certainly
ought not to permit her to profit, at Venezuela’s expense, by her own
wrong-doing.
We are doing exactly what England would very properly do in a
like case. Recently, when the German Emperor started to interfere in
the Transvaal, England promptly declared her own “Monroe
Doctrine” for South Africa. We do not propose to see English
filibusters try at the expense of Venezuela the same policy which
recently came to such an ignominious end in the Transvaal, in a
piece of weak, would-be buccaneering, which, it is perhaps not unfair
to say was fittingly commemorated in the verse of the new poet-
laureate.
It would be difficult to overestimate the good done in this country
by the vigorous course already taken by the national executive and
legislature in this matter. The lesson taught Lord Salisbury is one
which will not soon be forgotten by English statesmen. His position is
false, and is recognized as false by the best English statesmen and
publicists. If he does not consent to arrange the matter with
Venezuela, it will have to be arranged in some way by arbitration. In
either case, the United States gains its point. The only possible
danger of war comes from the action of the selfish and timid men on
this side of the water, who clamorously strive to misrepresent
American, and to mislead English, public opinion. If they succeed in
persuading Lord Salisbury that the American people will back down if
he presses them, they will do the greatest damage possible to both
countries, for they will render war, at some time in the future, almost
inevitable.
Such a war we would deplore; but it must be distinctly understood
that we would deplore it very much more for England’s sake than for
our own; for whatever might be the initial fortunes of the struggle, or
the temporary damage and loss to the United States, the mere fact
that Canada would inevitably be rent from England in the end would
make the outcome an English disaster.
We do not in any way seek to become the sponsor of the South
American States. England has the same right to protect her own
subjects, or even in exceptional cases to interfere to stop outrages in
South America, that we have to interfere in Armenia—and it is to be
regretted that our representatives do not see their way clear to
interfere for Armenia. But England should not acquire territory at the
expense of Venezuela any more than we should acquire it at the
expense of Turkey.
The mention of Armenia brings up a peculiarly hypocritical plea
which has been advanced against us in this controversy. It has been
solemnly alleged that our action in Venezuela has hampered
England in the East and has prevented her interfering on behalf of
Armenia. We do not wish to indulge in recriminations, but when such
a plea is advanced, the truth, however unpleasant, must be told. The
great crime of this century against civilization has been the upholding
of the Turk by certain Christian powers. To England’s attitude in the
Crimean War, and after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, the present
Armenian horror is primarily due. Moreover, for six months before the
Venezuelan question arose England had looked on motionless while

The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens Bart Eeckhout Full Chapter

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The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens

The Poetic Music of

Marco Katz Montiel

Editorial Advisory Board

The Poetic Music of

Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature

So many years of collaborative work and intellectual exchange come

succinct version of Chap. 7 was first published as “‘Things as they are /

Stevens, Wallace. “Of Mere Being,” copyright © 1967, 1969, 1971 by

1 Introduction: Musicking Stevens 1

2 The Enigmatic Relation Between Music and Memory 21

3 The Challenge of Inventing Modern Melodies 51

4 The Lifelong Lure of Birds and Their Song 85

1. The above mentioned standard abbreviations for the works of Wallace

Introduction: Musicking Stevens

1 Aims and Theoretical Inspiration

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

term “musicking” from the musicologist Christopher Small, who coined

music in the first statement, and conclude that our understanding of a

fine-grained discussions of the musicality in particular poems in Vendler’s

attended performances in New York (Stegman 79; Brazeau 137, 281).

3 Compositional Principles and Overview

into a single composition, as befits a coauthored rather than a coedited

Similarly, critical attention to the place of melody in Stevens’s work has

Stevens’s recurrent staging of birdsong, discussed in Chap. 4 (Goldfarb),

Chapter 5 (Eeckhout) continues at first with the inspiration of birdsong

commissioned. Here again, a juxtaposition between composer and poet,

4 Final Notes

Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught, editor. “Stevens and Structures of Sound.” Special

The Enigmatic Relation Between Music

To-night, after dinner, … I thought I should like to play my guitar, so I

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

1 Musings on Memory and Music

a 1909 letter to Elsie, “vibrate on more than the ‘sensual ear’—vibrate on

It is ten years since I heard [Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony]. An echo ten

As if in anticipation of the opening stanza of “Sunday Morning,” when

A little phantasy to beguile you—a bit of patch-work—and about music …

Stevens muses on memory in this passage and, importantly, distinguishes

Stevens’s reflections on music in these early letters seem to look ahead

Stevens’s rhythmic prose here reads as a kind of prose poem in which he

“noise” of the elevated urban trains, and the instrumental sounds of a

3 Poems of Music and Memory

At night, by the fire,

leaves “Repeating themselves” as they “Turned in the room, / Like the

The colors of their tails

Stevens recounts the speaker’s memory of the hours before nighttime in

Was it a cry against the twilight

Out of the window,

As if to underscore the speaker’s intense perception of the movement of

intertwining phrases or melodies. The first, “Like the leaves themselves /

writes that even “a strong spirit … is subject to degeneration,” and in

A little less returned for him each spring.

After the publication of my article in the September Review of

The Monroe Doctrine should not be considered from any purely

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1 Introduction: Musicking Stevens 1

2 The Enigmatic Relation Between Music and Memory 21

3 The Challenge of Inventing Modern Melodies 51

4 The Lifelong Lure of Birds and Their Song 85