Meghan O’Neal
Wallace
Stevens as an Anti-Romantic
Stevens,
in Imagination as Value, states, "Then,
too, before going on, we must somehow cleanse the imagination of the
romantic... The imagination is the liberty of the mind. The romantic is a
failure to make use of that liberty. It is to the imagination what
sentimentality is to feeling." Stevens uses the imagination not to lie,
but to reveal the truth. The romantic is a lie. The romantic allows us to lie
to ourselves and live in a world that is not real. Imagination is not a lie,
but a way to demonstrate the truth. However, if we allow the romantic into the
imagination, if we allow ourselves to see the world through a romantic lens, we
are not seeing the true world. Then, we are trying to live in a world that does
not exist while the real world passes us by. How can we possibly truly live if
life is a lie? In order to truly live and truly be happy, we cannot live a lie.
Even if the truth is terrifying, and even if the truth is something that we do
not want to hear, at least it is the truth, and at least we know what that
truth is. Once we know that truth, we are able to move on and live in the real
world, which is a beautiful world. But we cannot see this beautiful world if we
are blinded by lies.
Sentimentality mars feeling. Sentimentality creates
something that is not real. Looking back, sentimentality can change feelings.
Sentimentality breeds emotions that did not exist. It seems very real. It is
easy to look back on a memory and create feelings that did not exist. I
experience this feeling all the time. Take, for example, high school. Many
times I look back and miss the simpler days when my mom cooked my food,
homework was easy, and I didn’t have a care in the world. However, the reality
of it is that high school was not that great. I was a sad, lonely teenager who
just wanted to leave home and couldn’t wait to grow up. The reality is much
different than the memory, but it is the sentimental memory that sometimes
keeps me rooted in the past and keeps me longing for something that never
existed instead of staying in the present and looking forward.
It
is the same with the romantic and the imagination. The imagination can serve to
illustrate reality, make reality beautiful. However, imagination with the romantic
blinds reality. The romantic is not real. The romantic is what we want life to
be, much like sentimentality is what we want feelings to be. The romantic does
nothing to serve reality, and only serves as a crutch to those who cannot
handle reality. The world of the romantic is a world of lies.
Therefore,
we must always be aware of reality when we use the imagination. In Anecdote of the Jar, it says:
“I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennesse.
Here,
reality and imagination work together. The jar (reality) makes “the slovenly
wilderness surround that hill” (imagination). The jar tames the wilderness as
it grows around the jar because it is the presence of the jar that reminds us that
the world is no longer wild and free, but tamed because of humanity. The jar
serves as a reminder that , although the world is beautiful, there is still
ugly, manmade things which, no matter how small, serve only to dominate nature
instead of work alongside it: “It took dominion everywhere, the jar was grey
and bare.” Although the imagination of the wilderness came all up and around
it, and it itself was beautiful, the jar was still there and could not be
ignored. So it is with the imagination and reality. Imagination can come up and
around reality, it can work with reality, but it cannot be used to hide
reality. It is when the jar is not covered, and when nature cannot overtake it
that it becomes “like nothing else in Tennesse.” It may be ugly, and it might
have been happier or more beautiful if the jar could just have been covered,
but that is not reality, and reality has its own sort of unique beauty.
Imagination becomes
dangerous when it is used to hide reality. Stevens, in Imagination as Value,
states, "We live in the mind. One way of demonstrating what it means to
live in the mind is to imagine a discussion of the world between two people
born blind, able to describe their images, so far as they have images, without
the use of images derived from other people." Later, he also says,
"If we live in the mind, we live with the imagination." Imagination
is something that we all have and we all have to live with. Imagination is all
around us. Imagination is a part of us. We must be aware of this imagination
and how to correctly use it.
He
also says, "What, then, is it to live in the mind with the imagination,
yet not too near to the fountains of its rhetoric, so that one does not have a
consciousness only of grandeurs, of incessant departures from the idiom, and
of inherent altitudes? Only the reason stands between it and the reality for
which the two are engaged in a struggle." Reason is the way we keep
reality in the imagination. Reason is the way to stay away from the romantic
and free the imagination.
Stevens illustrates this
point in section II of The Rock, The Poem
as Icon:
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,
And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.
The fiction of the leaves is the icon
Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness,
And the icon is the man. The pearled chaplet of spring,
The magnum wreath of summer, time's autumn snood,
Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock.
These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.
These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves.
In the predicate that there is nothing else.
They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without change.
They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock.
They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,
New senses in the engenderings of sense,
The desire to be at the end of distances,
The body quickened and the mind in root.
They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.
They bear their fruit so that the year is known,
As if its understanding was brown skin,
The honey in its pulp, the final found,
The plenty of the year and of the world.
In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,
Of such mixed motion and such imagery
That its barrenness becomes a thousand things
And so exists no more. This is the cure
Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves.
His words are both the icon
and the man.
The
cure of the ground is the imagination. Imagination is the moss that grows over
top of the rock. The flowers that cover it and make it beautiful. The rock is
still there. The rock will always be there, and we will always be aware of it.
We must be aware of it. The rock is things the way they are. The rock is
reality. The moss does not cover the rock in order to hide it, but it covers it
in order to make it more beautiful. It enhances the rock, much like imagination
enhances reality.
Poetry
is the imagination. Poetry is the leaves and the flowers that covers the rock.
“In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,/Of such mixed motion and
such imagery/That its barrenness becomes a thousand things/And so exists no
more. This is the cure/Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves./His words
are both the icon and the man.” The imagination of poetry does not cover or
hide the rock, but makes meaning of it. It uses the imagination of imagery and
creates scenes and metaphors in order to illustrate reality, not cover it. Once
the reality is shown using the imagination, the rock is not so cold and barren,
but it becomes beautiful. Reality does not need to be hidden. Reality should
not be hidden. Reality is not a cold, barren thing if looked at correctly. Once
the imagination is used in this way, to beautify reality rather than hide it,
once we see things the way they are rather than shying away from them, then we
can truly live and be happy. It is then that we can move forward. It is then
that we are free from the romanticization of the world. We can stop wishing for
things that do not exist. Poetry, the imagination, is the cure. Poetry and the
imagination free us from the confines of the romantic.
Stevens serves as a
destructive character. He removes the romantic in order to reveal the truth
beneath. Andrew Lakritz, in Modernism and
the Other in Stevens, Frost, and Moore says, "The destructive
character is just that: a storyteller who passes on situations." Stevens
illustrates things the way they are. He does not lie in order to make things
look nice. He writes reality. He is merely passing on situations to the reader.
As a destructive character,
Stevens strives to separate the romantic from the imagination, as well as
stripping the imagination of outside influences. Lakritz states (about The Snow Man), “It is… about finding
ways to think and feel about one’s own experience in the world, ways that have
diminished in the modern period precisely because one can regard and behold
“nothing that is not there” – not adding gratuitously to the scene – and the
“nothing that is, the emptiness of the land itself.” Being human, there are
certain assumptions made, certain precedents set. It is difficult to see things
the way they are when so many things are shown to be different. Stevens strives
to remove these precedents and assumptions. He strips away common concepts that
are said to be reality in order to reveal the truth.
And so, what is the truth?
Returning to The Rock, Stevens writes
in section I:
“It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves
By our own motions in a freedom of air.
Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.
It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.”
We are nothing more than
dust, small particles passing through this earth. Soon, we will be nothing, not
even a memory. We can never make an impact on this earth that is big enough to
be remembered forever. It is an
illusion that we were ever alive. We are such small blips on the radar that it
is as if we never existed. The world moves on so quickly, 70 years flies by and
yet that may be a lifetime. “The houses still stand, though they are rigid in
rigid emptiness.” The houses of 70 years ago are still around, yet they are not
what they used to be and never will be. Time moves on, leaving us behind. We
are nothing. Our lives are nothing. No matter what we do, all things will
eventually fade. As if we never existed.
So how is the truth
beautiful? How can removing the romantic from this truth make things better? If
we can be happy lying to ourselves in our romantic world where we do have
meaning and death is not the end, isn’t that better than facing this dark reality?
Stevens says no.
“Imagination, as metaphysics, leads us in one direction and, as art, in
another. When we consider the imagination as metaphysics, we realize that it is
in the nature of the imagination itself that we should be quick to accept it as
the only clue to reality” (“Imagination as Value” 727). He uses an example of
the dangers of the imagination as metaphysics from Professor Joad: “If . . .
God is a metaphysical term, if, that is to say, He belongs to a reality which
transcends the world of sense-experience . . . to say that He exists is neither
true nor false. This position . . . is neither atheist nor agnostic; it cuts
deeper than either, by asserting that all talk about God, whether pro or anti,
is twaddle.” Imagination as metaphysics, imagination alongside the romantic is
nothing more than supposings and musings. With no reality to base it on, it
becomes null and void. How can one have a good, concrete thought when it is all
based on the abstract? It is worthless. Twaddle.
Reality is not as grim as
it may seem. In fact, once you recognize reality as it is and remove the
romantic, it becomes downright sublime. You find the truth and you find
meaning. In Stevens’ poem How To Live.
What To Do. it says,
“Last evening the moon rose above this rock
Impure upon a world unpurged.
The man and his companion stopped
To rest before the heroic height.
Coldly the wind fell upon them
In many majesties of sound:
They that had left the flame-freaked sun
To seek a sun of fuller fire.
Instead there was this tufted rock
Massively rising high and bare
Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown
Like giant arms among the clouds.
There was neither voice nor crested image,
No chorister, nor priest. There was
Only the great height of the rock
And the two of them standing still to rest.
There was the cold wind and the sound
It made, away from the muck of the land
That they had left, heroic sound
Joyous and jubilant and sure.”
The man and his companion
in this poem “left the flame-freaked sun to seek a sun of fuller fire.” They
were searching for the romantic. They wanted a better, brighter sun, a sun
which does not exist. It was a futile quest. However, they come upon this rock
(reality), rising above the wilderness (imagination) and this catches their
eye. This rock they find instead of
the romantic sun they are looking for. And this rock, reaching up to touch the
clouds, is far more beautiful than the false sun they sought. They had no
pivotal moment with choruses, they had no religious understanding, no priest
had to tell them what this was. They just saw reality as it was, and they knew
what it was and how life was and it was beautiful. Then, they hear only the
wind, but the sound of the wind, so simple and small, was “joyous and jubilant
and sure.” They had gone out in search of the romantic, in search of something
they knew that they wanted, but that was false. What they found instead was
nothing more than the grey rock of reality, a simple thing, and yet this was
more beautiful than anything they could have dreamed of. And in it, they not
only find joy, but they are now sure.
This poem illustrates that
this is the greatest thing reality can give: assuredness. Even if reality is
not exactly what is expected or wanted, it is sure. Reality will always be
reality. It is a rock; firm, steady, unfaltering. This is sublime. Knowing is
sublime. Reality will never falter, and as long as you see reality as it is,
without romanticizing it, you will experience the sublime existence.
Once the veil of
romanticism is lifted, you can see the world the way it is. Romanticism hides
the truth. Romanticism causes you to search for things that do not exist.
Reality frees you from this. Reality allows you to understand things the way
they are and only then can you move forward. Romanticism is nothing but chains,
holding you to a false reality. Imagination without romance sets you free.
Stevens uses imagination to
illustrate reality. The imagination of his poetry does not flourish or
embellish reality, but shows reality as it really is. He strove only to show
that reality, although harsh and ugly, is beautiful once it is understood. He
lived the sublime, free from falsities and promises of things that would never
be. Because he saw things the way they are instead of fighting it with the
false possibility of things that could be, he remains grounded in reality and
is therefore able to move forward and do the things that he needs to do in
order to live this life. He is able to find true happiness in this world
because he is not searching for things that don’t exist. He finds peace in
this, even if reality is not all butterflies and hopscotch.
The true sublime is seeing
things the way they are. The romantic only serves to blind.
Not Ideas About the Thing, But the Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow…
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…
The sun was coming from outside
That scrawny cry – it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
