An American poet? No, something more: the American poet. Not in an ethnic, national, racial sense. Let us be more sensible, more modest. American literature – the literature of the United States – has a group of poets who have entered the awareness of our countrymen late, in fragments, and haphazardly. To attempt to define the American poet is not a trivial game, at least, not only and not completely. Let us revise a bit the question at hand: the American poet – or any country’s poet – is not an absolute, but rather a preference of each one of us. The history of taste is the history of preferences. To say our American poet – to say my American poet – is to proffer a signal, a symptom.
Some will think of remoter poets, those from the nineteenth century: delicate and tender Longfellow, or sonorous and glacial Poe, who has the curious virtue of appealing almost exclusively to foreigners. Others, more exalted, will think of Walt Whitman: reckless, vast, encyclopedic, at the same time deeply gentle beneath his severity, like an old tree under rough bark, or the echo of a chorus of waves overheard in a dark, barren cave. Some will look to Emily Dickinson, who lived as if drenched in water and exposed to the icy air of death or the expansive fire of infinitude – in the bliss of verdant grass and petals weighed down with dew. Old images, as if engraved on boxwood.
Our century has other poets. Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro, disordered genius, coarse like a badly polished gem, a prodigy of gesticulation and disarray, rough draft of a prospective Homer gone too early to seed, a puzzle of ill-fitting pieces; perhaps this is why he fascinates us, because he allows to imagine the possible poems sketched out in his magnetic flow of words. There are the patrician Americans, as Gabriel Ferrater used to call them: wise, agrarian Robert Frost, strict and noble Robert Lowell. And William Carlos Williams, playful and precise. Then there is the banker, eternally endued with a certain workaday air, a functionary of poetry, Anglicising and Anglicised – we imagine him in a bowler, holding a black leather briefcase – and yet, when he wants, he is deliriously dramatic, intimate with the atavism of fear immemorial, of dusty, dreadful myth: T.S. Eliot.
American poets, certainly. But the most guarded among them – and, why not say it, my American poet – is not quite so well known as they. He was a shadowy, discreet man, an assiduous subscriber to French magazines who never traveled to Europe and barely budged from the town where he lived. He was vice president of an insurance company and his name was Wallace Stevens. This fall will be the centenary of his birth; next summer, it will be twenty-five years since his death. He did not care for much to be known of his life; in his words, he had done nothing but study law and live in Hartford, and these facts struck him as neither compelling nor relevant.
The Catalan world lacks, to my knowledge, even a minimally satisfactory edition of Wallace Stevens in translation. A dozen or more years back, a brief bilingual anthology was published in Spanish in Argentina. Now, in Barcelona, Plaza & Janés has published another one, likewise bilingual, and far more extensive, selected by a poet from the Canary Islands, Andrés Sánchez Robayna – whose ties to Catalonia, incidentally, are very deep. The excerpts are representative of Stevens, who is an absolutely exquisite poet, elliptical, characterised by outlines subtly arranged against a completely stark background. There is nothing of sinuosity: the poet’s words aim straight for the essential, the nucleus, so vivid and variable that often, like an optical illusion, we do not see it at first glance. This nucleus is – as with the greatest poets – a purely mental and strictly sensuous time: luminous visions, exotic, shadowed, abstract, unbound from everything that is not pure existence as image and the hint of sound, or else a flickering swordplay of ideas and concepts growing clearer in the camera obscura of the mind as it invents the poem. Inevitably, it all flows together: the poem is the spectacle – mental and sensuous – of the process of poetry’s creation, analogous to the development of a photographic negative, in which the contrast, vaguely silver, wavers between black and white, mutating progressively into the splendor of clearly defined colours, concise and tender or powerful and imposing, as the case may be. The brilliance of this consummate intelligence, of this incomparably refined sensibility, is a tension in the pure and dazzling air.
12 February 1980