8

Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut

I wrote a little book on Stevens in 1960 (a new edition appeared in 1989) and was co-editor with Joan Richardson of the Library of America edition (1997). I also prepared an edition of Harmonium but it was lost to the world when the United States changed its copyright rules; consequently copyright, thought to have expired, would not do so till 2018 or thereabouts, and the publisher withdrew the book. I think of this essay as my best tribute to the poet.

 

The last poetry of Wallace Stevens, which may be his greatest, seems not to have found the critic who can speak for it. The present essay will not do so, for my purpose is the marginal one of reflecting on various interests that we know Stevens to have had in his last years, in the hope that they may have some relevance to those venerable poems. They are mostly poems of death, or of the achievement of a posture in which to meet it correctly. Stevens was a correct man. There was also a proper mise en scène for poetry; he cared for the physical presentation of his and other people’s poems, as if their disclosures, even the most exalted, the closest to a final truth, required the art of the typographer and the gold, leather, and linen of the binder as accompaniments to revelation. Propriety is not always satisfied by greys and blacks; ideas, poems, and persons may need or deserve some decorous slash of vivid colour from the remoter parts of the lexicon, some gaiety. Or, if they do not deserve it, they should get it: ‘Merit in poets is as boring as merit in people’ (Adagia, Opus Posthumous, p. 157).¹

In these years Stevens was also interested in Friedrich Hölderlin, who also knew that merit was not enough: ‘Full of merit, yet poetically / Man dwells on the earth’. And because of Hölderlin he looked toward the poet’s great explainer, the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Whether he ever found Heidegger is an interesting question. Between them, Hölderlin and Heidegger form a kind of model of that composite poet, virile youth and old tramp, who seized on Stevens’ imagination. But Stevens himself was not very like them. For him the poetical, the supererogatory grace might be a gaiety, ‘light or color, images’, or a gilt-top edge. Like Hölderlin, he thought of the poet as ‘the priest of the invisible’; but unlike him, he would choose a wild word with sane care and give his poems wry titles to make them self-ironical. Like Heidegger, he thought of poetry as a renovation of experience; unlike him, he thought that the truth in the end did not matter. And even as he grew old, Stevens was never the tramp, as he had never been the virile youth. The encounter of being with death was not far off, but there was time for these interests, the well-made typeface or rich binding, the Germans, mad and obscure.

 

As for the fine bindings and limited editions, Stevens came to like them more and more, and not only for his own poems. He wrote letters to printers and binders about the way books should be produced. He told his editor, Katharine Frazier, that he would rather rewrite lines in Notes toward a Supreme Fiction than have ugly turnovers in the printed copy (Letters, p. 407).² Later he had a bibliopegic correspondence with Victor Hammer a Viennese who operated first the Anvil Press in Lexington, Kentucky, and then the Aurora Press at Wells College. In 1946 he bought Janet Lewis’ The Earth-Bound, beautifully published by Mr Hammer, and negotiated for a bookplate. On 22 January 1948, he wrote to Hammer ordering a copy of his limited edition (fifty-one copies only) of Hölderlin’s Poems 1796-1804 – ‘I read German well enough,’ he remarked – and he later thanked Hammer for the book in terms that bore entirely upon the beauty of the printing (L, pp. 576, 681). He spoke not of Hölderlin’s art but of Mr Hammer’s.

It was not unimportant to Stevens that Hammer was living in Kentucky. Reality changes, he observed, and ‘in every place and at every time the imagination makes its way by reason of it’. He thought of this Viennese printer in Kentucky and reflected that ‘a man is not bothered by the reality to which he is accustomed, that is to say, in the midst of which he has been born. He may be very much disturbed by reality elsewhere, but even as to that it would be only a question of time’ (L, p. 577). He wondered whether Hammer could procure him a drawing of a necessary angel by Fritz Kredel. Mr Kredel was ‘to state in the form of a drawing his idea of the surroundings in which poor people would be at rest and happy’. A few weeks later he explained why this was desirable, referring to his ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’: ‘There must be in the world about us things that solace us quite as fully as any heavenly visitation could.’ The plan was given up; perhaps Kredel could not see that particular angel (L, pp. 656, 661, 662 – 3).

Although he said nothing about the contents of Hammer’s Hölderlin, Stevens was presumably interested in them. He had recently acquired a German edition of the Gedichte, published in 1949. This book is described in the catalogue of the Parke-Bernet sale of Stevens’ books (March 1959) as a small folio, full niger morocco, gilt fillets on sides, gilt edges. ‘In a morocco-edged linen slipcase … A SUMPTUOUS BOOK PRINTED WITH A SPECIALLY CUT TYPE-FACE AND PRINTED ON HAND-MADE PAPER.’ Angels visiting the poor were, for Stevens, none the worse for top-edge gilt, even though they might themselves claim to have no ‘wear of ore’ and to ‘live without a tepid aureole’. Still, he must have looked inside this splendid package. He was certainly reading about Hölderlin, for example, an essay by Bernard Groethuysen, which he read in May 1948. Four years later he discovered that ‘Heidegger, the Swiss philosopher’, had written a little work on Hölderlin, and he asked his Paris bookseller, Paule Vidal, to find him a copy. He would prefer, he said, a French translation, ‘But I should rather have it even in German than not have it at all’ (L, p. 758).

As it happens, his local bookseller could have provided him with the essay in English, for a translation of the Erläuterung zu Hölderlins Dichtung was included in a collection of essays by Heidegger, Existence and Being, in 1949. Perhaps its workaday appearance would not have suited Stevens in any case. He asked Mme Vidal for a copy from ‘some bookseller at Fribourg’. Probably she did not find one, for when Stevens’ Korean friend Peter H. Lee was in Freiburg in June 1954, Stevens wrote asking him about Heidegger in terms that do not suggest close acquaintance with his work: ‘If you attend any of his lectures, or even see him, tell me about him because it will help to make him real. At the moment he is a myth, like so many things in philosophy.’ At the end of September, still unsatisfied and still apparently under the impression that Heidegger was Swiss, he asked Lee whether the philosopher lectured in French or German (L, pp. 839, 846). That letter was written two days before the publication of Collected Poems, three before Stevens’ seventy-fifth birthday, and less than a year before his death. At that late date his knowledge of Heidegger seems scanty enough, more myth than reality. The only certain fact is that Stevens was mixing up the Swiss and German Freiburgs, which is why he used the French form of the name of the city and referred to Heidegger as Swiss. He can therefore have known nothing of the philosopher’s brief tenure as the Nazi-appointed rector of Freiburg University. It is an odd mistake, if one reflects that Heidegger spent about as much time outside of Germany as Stevens did out of the United States.

Still, he must have heard talk of Heidegger and the Hölderlin essays (though he mentions only one). His belated career as a lecturer and reader at colleges and universities had made him acquainted with philosophers – people who did their probing deliberately, he said, and not fortuitously, like poets. But we can be sure that he did not know Heidegger, even in French, as he knew, for example, Emerson, Santayana, and William James. Heidegger’s was a book he did not, as a reader, ‘become’. Years before, a philosophy professor had asked him why he did not take on a ‘full-sized’ philosopher, and, when asked by Stevens to name some, included C. S. Peirce on the list. In his relation of this episode to Theodore Weiss, Stevens added, ‘I have always been curious about Pierce [sic], but have been obliged to save my eyesight for THE QUARTERLY REVIEW, etc’ (L, p. 476). Since his correspondent was the editor of The Quarterly Review, we must take this as banter, but all the same, he probably meant that he preferred being curious about Peirce to reading him.

Perhaps for his purposes a smattering of knowledge was more useful than an understanding. Some image of Heidegger in his peasant clothes, darkly speculating upon his hero and supreme poet, precursor of the angel most necessary when, after the failure of the gods, our poverty is most complete, suited Stevens better than a whole philosophy, however vatic in expression. Perhaps the notion of this venerable man as having thought exhaustively about death and poetry and about the moment of their final encounter was enough. Stevens would try by his accustomed channels to acquire the sage’s book, but if it did not come, it would still be interesting to know how he looked and what language he spoke in his Freiburg lecture room, in the midst of his accustomed reality.

It is sometimes argued that Stevens’ poems are suffused with the philosophy of others, indeed, that they are sometimes virtually paraphrases of such philosophies, so that the sense of, say, ‘The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws’ must be sought in William James’s The Pluralistic Universe.³ However that may be, the focus here is on something else. Heidegger thinking about Hölderlin – his great poet of the Time Between the failure of God and the birth of a new age, and of the sense in which man dwells poetically on earth – was meditating on the essence of poetry, its disclosures of being and its relation with death, which completes and annihilates being. He was probing these matters as deliberately as his extraordinary pre-Socratic manner allowed, and the text he meditated was the text of a schizophrenic seer who also loved those philosophic origins and sought to subvert the civil languages that had supervened upon them. Perhaps, borrowing Housman’s joke, one could say that Stevens was a better poet than Heidegger and a better philosopher than Hölderlin, and so found himself, in a manner, betwixt and between. But there he was in the accustomed reality of Connecticut, meditating these very problems, probing fortuitously, and commenting on his own text. The projects were related. It was a leaden time; when reality is death, the imagination can no longer press back against it. When you live in ‘a world that does not move for the weight of its own heaviness’ (The Necessary Angel, p. 63),⁴ you may imagine how differently it might appear to a young virile poet, but in the end you must find out for your ageing self how that weight is to be lifted, what fiction will transform death.

 

In ‘The Poet’s Vocation’, Hölderlin calls upon the angel of the day (des Tages Engel) to awaken the people, stupefied by their world, and enable them to help the poet by interpreting him. But even if he is denied that help, he goes on all the same

And needs no weapon and no wile till
God’s being missed in the end will help him.⁵

Stevens was capable of a fair degree of rapture at the poetic possibilities opened up by the death of God; indeed, on this point he is less gnomic than his precursor. But like Hölderlin, he also felt the cold: ‘wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?’⁶ ‘What are poets for in the time of poverty?’ is a question he often asked in his own way. In his own way he also maintained, though his obscurities are not Hölderlin’s, that ‘Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde’ [full of merit (what would be a better translation?), yet poetically, man dwells on this earth].⁷ Does the approach of death make this a little difficult to see?

In his essay ‘Effects of Analogy’ (1948), Stevens proposes: ‘Take the case of a man for whom reality is enough, as, at the end of his life, he returns to it like a man returning from Nowhere to his village and to everything there that is tangible and visible, which he has come to cherish and wants to be near. He sees without images. But is he not seeing a clarified reality of his own? Does he not dwell in an analogy?’ (NA, p. 129). He thinks that the being-toward-death, as Heidegger would call it, finds its form in the roofs, woods, and fields of a particular accustomed reality. It is a theme not altogether remote from that of Hölderlin’s ‘Homecoming’ (‘Heimkunft’). And it is central to Stevens. The place where the poet dwells, especially if it is his place of origin, will be his mundo, a clarified analogy of the earth he has lived in, the more so as death approaches. In the same essay he explains that a poet’s sense of the world, his sense of place, will colour his dealings with death. James Thomson has a melancholy sense of the world; his place was a city of dreadful night, and he writes ‘We yearn for speedy death in full fruition, / Dateless oblivion and divine repose’. Whitman, on the other hand, speaks of a ‘free flight into the worldless, / Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done …’⁸ Stevens does not enlarge upon these disclosures. They are effects of analogy; death is understood analogously, the last reality has the colour and the shapes of a clarified reality of one’s own. In ‘Imagination as Value’, delivered as he approached his seventieth birthday, Stevens spoke of Pascal as one who, for all his hatred of the imagination (‘this superb power, the enemy of reason’), clung ‘in the very act of dying’ to the faculty that, however ‘delusive’, might still create ‘beauty, justice and happiness’ (NA, pp. 135 – 6). As Pascal needed it to comprehend his death, so the poet needs it, especially in a time when ‘the great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to be written’ (NA, p. 142).

The point is Heideggerian; Stevens does not quote Heidegger here, one feels, only because he had not read him. Instead, he thinks of Santayana, whom he had known well at Harvard fifty years before. He thinks of him as one who gave the imagination a part in life similar to that which it plays in art. For the art of dying depends on our having dwelt poetically on earth. And so Santayana in old age ‘dwells in the head of the world, in the company of devoted women, in their convent, and in the company of familiar saints, whose presence does so much to make any convent an appropriate refuge for a generous and human philosopher … there can be lives in which the value of the imagination is the same as its value in arts and letters and I exclude from consideration as part of that statement any thought of poverty or wealth, being a bauer or being a king, and so on, as irrelevant’ (NA, p. 148). Reflecting on Santayana’s death in a letter to Barbara Church (29 September 1952), he thinks again of one who abandoned poetry for thought but made this imaginative gesture, the choice, for a long old age, of a Roman convent, of a kind of poverty (he ‘probably gave them all he had and asked them to keep him, body and soul’ [L, p. 762]), of an image of oncoming death founded in the accustomed reality of prayer, liturgy, and the earthly city, which, being the heart of one world, may be the figure of another, the more so if, in dwelling poetically, we dwell in analogy. So the poem he might have written for Heidegger became a poem for Santayana.

‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’ is about such dwelling, and about the moment when accustomed reality provides a language for death, invents it, as it invents its own angels, by analogy. The poem straddles the threshold, ‘the figures in the street / Become the figures of heaven … . The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome / Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind’ (Collected Poems, p. 508).⁹ It is, one may say, a great poem, though perhaps not wholly characteristic of Stevens in the persistence with which it fills out its scenario of antitheses: ‘The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme / Of the unknown’; the candle and the celestial possible of which it is the symbol, life as a flame tearing at a wick; grandeur found in ‘the afflatus of ruin’, in the ‘Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead’; splendour in poverty, death in life. It is language accommodating itself to that which ends and fulfils being, an image of that ‘total grandeur’. This is a grandeur made of nothing but the bed, the chair, the moving nuns, the bells, and newsboys of the civitas terrena; but it is total, and the only image of a grandeur still unknown.

Note also that it is easy: ‘How easily the blown banners change to wings’. Somehow it has become easy to find heaven in poverty’s speech. The ease is the ‘ease of mind’ mentioned at the beginning of ‘Prologues to What is Possible’, where the rowers are sure of their way, and ‘The boat was built of stones that had lost their weight and being no longer heavy / Had left in them only a brilliance, of unaccustomed origin’ (CP, p. 515). The voyager easily passes into the unfamiliar – into death – as if it were the known. I do not mean that for Stevens this step is always easy, only that there is a kind of comfortable grace in some of his accounts of the threshold, an absence of what might be called, after Heidegger, care (to say nothing of dread), a grace that arises from acquiescence in the casual boons of the world of poverty, even at the moment when suffering caused by the absence of the gods might be most acute.

Heidegger called Hölderlin the poet of the Time Between – between the departure and the return of the gods – the midnight of the world’s night. Stevens is consciously a poet of the same time. His answer to Hölderlin’s question, ‘wozu Dichter?’ (which Heidegger took as the title of his astonishing lecture on the twentieth anniversary of the death of Rainer Maria Rilke), would not be, in essence, different from either the poet’s or the philosopher’s. He had long been trying to make poetry out of commonplaces, for instance, in Owl’s Clover in the Thirties, and in 1949 he said that in ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ his interest was ‘to try to get as close to the ordinary, the commonplace and the ugly as it is possible for a poet to get. It is not a question of grim reality but of plain reality. The object is of course to purge oneself of anything false’ (L, p. 636). At the end of that poem reality, plain reality, is given some of the imagery of death: ‘It may be a shade that traverses / A dust, a force that traverses a shade’ (CP, p. 489). Those ‘edgings and inchings of final form’, those statements tentatively closing in on the real, are in their way a figure for the imagination’s edging and inching toward the comprehension of death. Hence, too, the idea of self-purgation; the moral and the poetic functions of imagination grow toward identity and in virtually the same way labour to include death in being. Death is a threshold, the commonplace on one side of it, its transcendent analogue on the other, as the Santayana poem at once asserts. And that notion is much prefigured, for Stevens is a poet of thresholds: even summer is a threshold and, in ‘Credences of Summer’, an image of death. At the end of ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ the ‘scholar of one candle’ opens his door and sees across the threshold ‘An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame / Of everything he is. And he feels afraid’ (CP, p. 417). Finally, the supreme poet understands, out of the partial fact that we are ‘An unhappy people in a happy world’:

In these unhappy he meditates a whole,
The full of fortune and the full of fate,
As if he lived all lives, that he might know,

 

In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,
To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights
Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick. (CP, pp. 420 – 21)

Here all the accustomed realities are known and accommodated to a summerlike brilliance in an icy world. Hölderlin would have called this poet a servant of the wine god, bearing all such care, seeing that blaze on behalf of all, imagining everything for them, including death. Knowing poverty (‘His poverty becomes his heart’s strong core‘[CP, p. 427]) is the means to find a way through the world, which ‘Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it‘(CP, p. 446). This is what Stevens calls the will to holiness. It is a favorite word of Hölderlin’s. Wozu Dichter? They must dwell in their huts, their accustomed reality, framed by their commonplace thresholds, and do all that angels can – intimate, by use of a perhaps delusive faculty, what lies beyond, the fullness of the encounter when Being has inched and edged its way to death. Santayana’s choice of Rome as a place to die is a poet’s choice; he seeks out this central city as affording the structures, the rituals, even the ritual compassions, that, out of accustomedness, the imagination confers on death. ‘These are poems’, wrote Randall Jarrell of The Rock, ‘from the other side of existence, the poems of someone who sees things in steady accustomedness, as we do not, and who sees their accustomedness, and them, as about to perish.’¹⁰ Or, as Stevens himself puts it, ‘The thing seen becomes the thing unseen’ (Adagia, OP, p. 167). Nevertheless, as he states elsewhere in the Adagia, ‘The poet is the intermediary between people and the world in which they live … but not between people and some other world’ (OP, p. 162). Thus, in concerning himself with death, the poet must concern himself with the poverty of the accustomed, with the mystery of dwelling poetically in its midst. And perhaps, as Hölderlin remarked, ‘God’s being missed in the end will help him’. Perhaps it will also help him to see the poet’s words comfortingly coated in the adventitious splendours of decorative bindings, rendered easy by sharp, clear type, the blessings of richness in poverty, of ease in the world of care.

 

Stevens was quite right to be curious about Heidegger and to want to know what the philosopher said about Holderlin. The intense meditation on poetry that Heidegger produced in the series of works inaugurated by the 1936 essay on Hölderlin represents, in a way, the fulfilment of an ambition evident in Stevens’ prose. Stevens could not achieve it fully for various reasons. The desire for ease could have been one. Then again, his philosophy, as he himself admitted, was a philosophy of collects, an amateur’s philosophy. Heidegger was professional as well as incantatory; he thought as the pre-Socratics (or some of them) thought, poetically. But he thought accurately. Albert Hofstadter says that as a thinker Heidegger did what a poet does: dichtet.¹¹ Like the poet, he was concerned with ‘the saying of world and earth’, with their conflict – not unlike the conflict of world and mundo in Stevens – and so with the place of all nearness and remoteness of the gods. ‘Poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of what is. Actual language at any given moment is the happening of this saying.’ This is the truth, for Heidegger looked to the etymological meaning of altheia, which is ‘unconcealedness’. Thus, although it sets up a world, the work of art also lets the earth be an earth. ‘As a world opens itself the earth comes to rise up.’ And so it happens that ‘art is the becoming and happening of truth’. All art is in essence poetry, a disclosure of the earth, a ‘setting-into-work of truth’. The appearance of this truth is beauty.¹²

There are times when Stevens would have recognized this voice as that of a remote kinsman in poetry, for example, in the ‘thinking poem’, ‘Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens’ (‘The Thinker as Poet’):

When the early morning light quietly
grows above the mountains … .

The world’s darkening never reaches
to the light of Being.

 

We are too late for the gods and too
early for Being. Being’s poem,
just begun, is man …¹³

Or, one can just imagine these aphorisms occurring in the Adagia:

Poetry looks like a game and yet it is not.

 

Poetry rouses the appearance of the unreal and of dream in the face of the palpable and clamorous reality, in which we believe ourselves at home. And yet … what the poet says and undertakes to be, is the real.¹⁴

Yet the affinity, I think, goes beyond these resemblances. It is of course mitigated by differences of a kind at which I have already hinted; Stevens was less bold, less willing to be oracular than Heidegger. And then there is the matter of those new typefaces and fine bindings: wear of ore for the angel of accustomedness, precursors of a transfigured commonplace, patches of Florida in the world of books. Likewise, there are the trouvailles and the collects and the fortuities of dizzledazzle that interrupt disclosures of pure poverty. But for all that, there is an affinity.¹⁵

If we think of the idea of dwelling and death we may come to understand this affinity. ‘Poetically man dwells on this earth’, said Hölderlin. In the poverty of the Time Between, one establishes this dwelling by finding the poetry of the commonplace, in the joy of Danes in Denmark, in the cackle of toucans in the place of toucans, in Elizabeth Park and Ryan’s Lunch. Stevens did it over and over again, observing the greater brilliancies of earth from his own doorstep. He dwelt in Connecticut as Santayana dwelt in the head of the world, as if it were origin as well as threshold. He wanted to establish Hölderlin’s proposition, and every reader of Stevens will think of many more instances of his desire to do so. Freiburg, Fribourg, were elsewhere. The foyer, the dwelling place, might be Hartford or New Haven, Farmington or Haddam. The Captain and Bawda ‘married well because the marriage-place / Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell’ (CP, p. 401). It was earth, and the poetry of the earth was what Hölderlin sought and Heidegger demanded. Stevens was always writing it and naming the spot to which it adhered. This is what poets are for in a time of need. They provide a cure of that ground; they give it health by disclosing it, in its true poverty, in the nothing that is. The hero of this world, redeemer of being, namer of the holy, is the poet. Stevens has many modest images of him, yet he is the centre. In that same central place Heidegger sets Hölderlin and adorns him with words that have special senses: truth, angel, care, dwell.

Heidegger gave the word dwell a special charge of meaning. Drawing on an old sense of the German word, he can say that ‘Mortals dwell in that they can save the earth’, that is, ‘set it free in its own presencing’, free, as Stevens would say, of its man-locked set. There is much more to dwelling,¹⁶ but I will mention only that to dwell is to initiate one’s own nature, one’s being capable of death as death, ‘into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death’. Furthermore, ‘as soon as man gives thought to his dwelling it is a misery no longer’; so out of its insecurity and poverty (‘man dwells in huts and wraps himself in the bashful garment,’ says Hölderlin;¹⁷ ‘a single shawl / Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor …’, says Stevens [CP, p. 524]) he can build, can make poetry.¹⁸ For Heidegger is here meditating on Hölderlin’s enigma, that we dwell poetically on this earth, even in a time of destitution, and that our doing so is somehow gratuitous, independent of our merits, a kind of grace.

Where one dwells is one’s homeland, and to return to it is to see it in its candid kind. Heidegger’s first essay on Hölderlin is about the elegy ‘Homecoming’, a poem of serenity and angels but also of the poet who names the town and makes it ‘shine forth’. The angels are best summoned in one’s homeland because the ‘original essence of joy is the process of becoming at home in proximity to the source’.¹⁹ The gods have failed; the poet ‘without fear of the appearance of godlessness … must remain near the failure of the god until out of that proximity the word is granted which names the High One’. For he is the giant of the time that follows the default of the god. He is the first among men; others must help him by interpreting his word (which is the life of the world) so that each man may have his own homecoming.

In a second essay on Hölderlin, Heidegger deepens these apprehensions and speaks of the godlike power of his poet. Man has been given arbitrariness, and he has been given language, with which he creates and destroys and affirms what he is. What he affirms is that he ‘belongs to the earth and gives it being: Only where there is language is there world’. (The ‘words of the world,’ says Stevens, ‘are the life of the world’ [CP, p. 474].) The naming of the gods (‘This happy creature – It is he that invented the Gods’ [OP, p. 167]) was only the first act by which language – poetry – established Being. To dwell poetically is to stand in the proximity of being; when the essence of things receives a name, as the gods once received a name in the first poetic act, things shine out.²⁰ These things are commonplace and accustomed till thus named: only then is it the case that ‘The steeple at Farmington / Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways’ (CP, p. 533).

The completion and delimitation of Being come with death, with my death, for we cannot think authentically about the deaths of others. Heidegger had written much about this in Being and Time, and he thought about it in relation to poetry in essays written between 1947 and 1952, when Stevens’ not dissimilar meditations were in progress and when he was saying he would like to read Heidegger. Only on the subject of care, on the necessity of speaking heavily and with radical plainness of being and ending, might he have found in the German a weight as of stones he chose not to lift.

But perhaps, after all, Stevens did know something about Being and Time. Perhaps it was knowing about it that sent him looking, in his seventies, for news of what that Swiss philosopher might have to say about his supreme poet. Heidegger wrestled with ideas we all wrestle with: the potentiality of no more being able to be there, he remarks, is the inmost, one might say the own-most, potentiality. We have many ways of estranging death; for example, we say, ‘Everybody dies’, or ‘one dies’. So we conceal our own ‘being-toward-death’; yet death is the ‘end’ of Being, of Dasein – and the means by which it becomes a whole. To estrange it, to make it a mere fact of experience, is to make it inauthentic. Being understands its own death authentically not by avoiding that dread out of which courage must come but by accepting it as essential to Being’s everydayness, which otherwise conceals the fact that the end is imminent at every moment. There must be a ‘running forward in thought’ to the potentiality of death.

Only where there is language is there world, says Heidegger; and only where there is language is there this running in thought, this authentication of death. It is the homecoming that calls for the great elegy; it is ‘learning at home to become at home’, as Heidegger says of the Hölderlin elegy.²¹ ‘All full poets are poets of homecoming,’ he says. And he insists that Hölderlin’s elegy is not about homecoming; it is homecoming. Stevens knew this, whether he learned it from Heidegger or not. He knew the truth of many of Heidegger’s assertions, for example, about the nature of change in art. ‘The works are no longer the same as they once were. It is they themselves, to be sure, that we encounter … but they themselves are gone by.’²² The work of art ‘opens up a world and at the same time sets his world back again on earth’.²³ The perpetuation of such truth is the task of an impossible philosopher’s man or hero. Stevens’ poet works in the fading light; the ‘he’ of the late poems has to make his homecoming, has to depend on his interpreters to make it for themselves and understand that it is impermanent. The advent of the Supreme Poet, who would stop all this, is like the return of the god. Heidegger’s most impressive meditation on this coming event is in the lecture on Rilke, ‘Wozu Dichter?’ (1946). The time is completely destitute; the gods will return only when the time is free. Poets in such a destitute time must ‘sense the trace of the fugitive gods’ and, in dark night, utter the holy. Of this night Hölderlin is the poet. Is Rilke such a poet? Certainly he came to understand the destitution of the time, a time when even the trace of the holy has become unrecognizable, and there is lacking ‘the unconcealedness of the nature of pain, death and love’.²⁴ Certainly he understood the need for ‘unshieldedness’ and the need to ‘read the word “death” without negation’. But it is not certain that he attained the full poetic vocation or spoke for the coming world era, as Hölderlin did.

The long, dark essay on Rilke is finally beyond the scope of Stevens. But Stevens knew that language makes a world of the earth and includes death in that world; he knew that it effects the unconcealment of the earth, that this is the poet’s task in a time of destitution and seclusion. He could imagine a vocation for a supreme poet. Sometimes he could speak or chant of these things majestically enough, but in the last poems he would not dress the poet in singing robes. The poet is, mostly, at home and old, shambling, shabby, and human. He does not say ‘“I am the greatness of the new-found night” ’ (OP, p. 93). But he accepts that what one knows ‘of a single spot / Is what one knows of the universe’ (OP, p. 99). His Ulysses strives to come home; he seeks a new youth ‘in the substance of his region’ (OP, p. 118), in its commonness, like that of the great river in Connecticut, which one comes to ‘before one comes to the first black cataracts’ (CP, p. 533) of the other, Stygian river.

It should be added that the ‘he’, the poet, of some of the last poems, can be a ‘spirit without a foyer’ and search among the fortuities he perceives for ‘that serene he had always been approaching / As toward an absolute foyer …’ (OP, p. 112). It is a different version of the running-toward-death, and Heidegger would have approved of that ‘serene’, for Hölderlin used the word and his glossator turned it over many times in his mind. Is this ordered serenity too easy? When we climb a mountain ‘Vermont throws itself together’ (OP, p. 115); Vermont does the work, provided, of course, that we climb the mountain. It is not quite easy, but it is of the essence that it is also not quite difficult. The greatest image of the being at the threshold of death is, I suppose, ‘Of Mere Being’, a poem that is also, one may be sure, very late. It contains a foreign song and a foreign bird. There is dread in it. Heidegger, I dare say, would have admired it, but there is no reason to suppose that he would have been less severe on Stevens than on Rilke.

 

So one forces them together, Hölderlin-Heidegger in Freiburg or Fribourg, and Stevens in Hartford. But Stevens always draws back, as if to examine a binding or to keep some distance between himself and a mad poet or a very difficult philosopher. ‘Philosophical validity’, he assured a correspondent in 1952, was no concern of his; ‘recently’, he added, ‘I have been fitted into too many philosophic frames’ (L, p. 753). Perhaps the Heidegger frame would have pleased him better than most; for one thing, Heidegger’s thought is very different from any that Stevens was accustomed to think of as philosophical. But Stevens would have drawn back. Not to find a copy of Existence and Being was, in a way, to draw back, to seek Heidegger instead in Paris, where his bookseller knew the kind of book he liked, and it would arrive like something exotic. Then again, there was a crucial difference of origin: Stevens was an American in America, Heidegger a German in Germany (not Switzerland), all life long. Part of this difference is reflected in varying styles of solemnity, in the fact that Heidegger is wholly without irony, while Stevens always has it within call.

There was an affinity between the ways in which they felt the world and understood poetry; between the truths they disclosed in the night of destitution by dwelling poetically in – that is, by saving – their worlds. Stevens had something of the quality that made Heidegger describe Hölderlin as himself having that third eye he attributed to Oedipus; he was virtually talking about it in the last lines of ‘The Auroras’:

he meditates a whole,

The full of fortune and the full of fate,
As if he lived all lives, that he might know … .

(CP. p. 420)

But few could have refused more obstinately the fate of Hölderlin. For Stevens the world was by no means always a haggling of wind and weather or even of an unheimlich ‘serene’. It was often, perhaps daily, a place of ease, of ‘Berlioz and roses’ if that happened to be ‘the current combination at home’ (L, p. 505), of postcards from Cuba, tea from Ceylon – fortuities of earth that solace us and make a world, or, like the Tal Coat painting that hung in his house in these years, an angel of reality. Such, too, though more elegant and more ornate, were the finely printed books of Mr Hammer, a Viennese ‘without a foyer’ but now growing accustomed to the reality of Kentucky, whence he might send surrogate angels to Connecticut. There dwelt the poet, watching the shining of the commonplace (occasionally, a distant palm, an unclassifiable, fire-fangled bird) and, for the most part, easy among his splendid books, though soon to die.