It is frustrating that Eliot nowhere gave any indication of why he had no interest in Stevens’ poetry. Since we have seen him admitting to taking pleasure in Valéry’s poetry despite disapproving its lack of content, and since he confessed in his contribution to the Trinity Review that he liked Stevens’ poetry “so much,” we can surmise that it was not Stevens’ manner or style that occasioned his lack of interest, but rather the substance or themes of his poetry. That circumstance did not prevent Eliot from commenting at considerable length on Valéry’s poetry, carefully articulating the ground for his disapproval. Perhaps the difference is that, unlike Valéry’s poetry, the bulk of Stevens’ would seem to endorse Russell’s Humanist injunction that mankind should “worship at the shrine that his own hands have built.” Or perhaps it was the vitalist component in Stevens’ philosophy – the almost immanentist belief that we participate in a cosmos that we “understand” even though we can only infer its nature from the world we observe – that caused Eliot to shy away from any commentary.
Perhaps he was frightened by what he would surely have regarded as pantheistic tendencies in Stevens, as exemplified by the following familiar passage from “Blue Guitar” XXVIII:
I am a native in this world
And think in it as a native thinks,
Gesu, not native of a mind
Thinking the thoughts I call my own,
Native, a native in the world
And like a native think in it.
It could not be a mind, the wave
In which the watery grasses flow
And yet are fixed as a photograph,
The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.
But Stevens is careful to keep just this side of an immanentist pantheism. Although the speaker thinks in the world “as a native thinks,” he is careful to add that he is “not native of a mind / Thinking the thoughts I call my own,” that is to say, he is not merely a mouthpiece for an Anima Mundi or Heideggerean Being; as with the singer in “Key West,” the poet’s thoughts are his own because the world in which he is a native “could not be a mind.”
But it is probably not so much a difference in philosophy that separates the two poets as a difference in temperament. Eliot is irremediably serious, even gloomy. In the ironically titled “Religion without Humanism” (1930), he complains that he “found no discipline in humanism,” none of the discipline of which he thought “the modern world has great need.” However, discipline is something that the irremediably cheery doctrine of Humanism could scarcely supply, since only “those have the right to talk of discipline who have looked into the Abyss.” The clear implication is that there is no – in Stevens’ words – “dumbfoundering abyss” for the Humanist (Humanism and America 110). A few years later, in the “Matthew Arnold” lecture from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism Eliot mocks Arnold’s view that poetry is “at bottom a criticism of life” as being insufficiently cognizant of the horrors mankind must face: “At bottom: that is a great way down; the bottom is the bottom. At the bottom of the abyss is what few ever see, and what those cannot bear to look at for long; and it is not a “criticism of life” ... We bring back very little from our rare descents, and that is not criticism” (Lecture of 3 March 1933 111). He does not say what it is that we bring back, but the epigraph he had planned to use for The Waste Land from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness suggests that it would not be pleasant or reassuring:
Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of compete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath – “The horror! The horror!” (The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript 3).
Stevens has a much lighter take on the abyss. For example, in poem VIII of “It Must Give Pleasure”:
What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,
Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,
Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied? (“Blue Guitar”)
Stevens’ poet masters the abyss as an angel or eagle does, soaring on the wings of his imagination. In “Saint John and the Back-Ache,” he seems to take it a little more seriously, and jettisons the angel. After listing the various pleasures of eye and ear St John continues:
My point is that
These illustrations are neither angels, no,
Nor brilliant blows thereof, ti-rill-a-roo,
Nor all one’s luck at once in a play of strings.
They help us face the dumbfoundering abyss
Between us and the object, external cause,
The little ignorance that is everything, (Auroras of Autumn)
Stevens’ concession that the abyss is “dumbfoundering” gives it more gravity than he granted it in “Blue Guitar,” but still nothing like the horror that Conrad’s Kurtz glimpsed.
While Stevens’ more sanguine take on the issue of belief or its absence no doubt derives from a difference in temperament, he contrives to justify it with “philosophical” argument. He ends up philosophically in a place that is compatible with Alfred North Whitehead’s “process philosophy,” though not at all indebted to it. Whitehead explains his view with an analogy: “The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.”1 Of course, the poet is not required ever to “land.” Put most generally, Stevens’ point is the Bergsonian one that humans are a product of evolution, and therefore “native” in the world – an entirely materialist position. He rejects the immanentist postulate that there is some sort of mental affinity between humans and an enfolding spiritual or mental realm. The poet or the singer is thinking his or her own thoughts in the face of “reality,” the perceived natural world; neither resonates to some cosmic vibration. There is nothing “New Age” about Stevens’ philosophy. What he does constantly assert is that his thoughts – anyone’s thoughts – are guaranteed some degree of validity since they are the thoughts of an organism that has evolved in accordance with the same cosmic forces – whatever they might be – that have constituted the circumambient world..
That Eliot was entirely out of sympathy with any such materialist view is clear. He is never more pointed on this matter than in a letter to Bonamy Dobrée of 17 April 1936: “The doctrine that in order to arrive at the love of God one must divest oneself of the love of created beings was thus expressed by St. John of the Cross, you know ... But the doctrine is fundamentally true, I believe. Or to put your belief in your own way, that only through the love of created beings can we approach the love of God, that I believe to be UNTRUE ... I don’t think that ordinary human affections are capable of leading us to the love of God, but rather that the love of God is capable of informing, intensifying and elevating our human affections, which otherwise have little to distinguish them from the “natural” affections of animals” (Quoted in Tate, 81. Eliot’s emphasis). This fundamentally ascetic posture puts Eliot at loggerheads with Stevens – indeed, with the vast majority of his contemporaries – and accounts for his disapproval of the kind of poetry that Stevens wrote, despite his liking it “so much.”
Although he declined to say as much, Eliot almost certainly understood Stevens’ poetry as a poetic expression of either Bergsonian vitalism, or American pragmatism, philosophical postures he had rejected categorically in a graduate paper of 1914, as Donald Childs explains:
Eliot argued in 1914 that Bergsonians and pragmatists agree insofar as both regard history as a “process in which human purposes are illusory.” The problem with Bergson and James is “their confusion of human and cosmic activity.” Bergson makes everything cosmic, makes everything part of the Life Force. “Bergson denies human values,” Eliot complains; for him, “history is a vitalistic process in which human purposes do not exist.” (1914, 21, 20, 20–1)
“The error of pragmatism,” he [Eliot] writes, “is, I believe, exactly the reverse”: “for pragmatism, man is the measure of all things. [It] is a practical philosophy. You choose a point of view because you like it. You form certain plans because they express your character. Certain things are true because they are what you need; others, because they are what you want (1914 20–1). (Childs in Lobb 1993 120)
In the same paper, Eliot explicitly dismissed the central tenet of Stevens’ philosophical posture: “It may be true that man does not live by bread alone, but by making fictions and swallowing them alive & whole. This seems to reduce the high cost of living by eliminating living” (Lobb 121).
Eliot’s characterizations of Bergson and Pragmatism, as cited by Childs, are caricatures of those philosophical schools. Neither is as simplistic and human-centred as he makes out. For Bergson, human purposes are the finest expression of cosmic purposes; it is that feature that justifies them – much as doing God’s will justifies human behaviour for a Christian. Eliot’s characterization of pragmatism as merely wishful thinking is an even broader caricature. The fundamental principle of Pragmatism is that we cannot know the truth about the world incorrigibly, but must make do with contingent versions of the truth. The test of such contingent versions is that they meet the pragmatic test; that is, that they are not contradicted by experience. Eliot’s later comments on Bergson and pragmatism were less contentious, but – except for the years he came under the influence of Russell’s Humanism – his hostility was consistent.
In “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” Stevens acknowledged his affinity with both Bergson and Pragmatism, quoting Valéry’s praise of Bergson as “le dernier grand nom de l’histoire de l’intelligence européenne” [the last great name in the history of European intelligence]. And he cites William James’ praise of Bergson’s Creative Evolution to the effect that he felt the same “flavour of persistent euphony” that reading Madame Bovary had given him. Although the praise is ambivalent, Stevens does not seem to have taken it ironically (Kermode, ed. 666–7).
Another feature of Stevens’ poetry that Eliot would have disliked is its focus on the process of composition. That he would disapprove is clear from the strictures he applied to the poetry of Valéry – both in published remarks surveyed above, and even more bluntly in a late letter to Herbert Read (1 August 1963). He told Read that Valéry “seemed to write poetry only for the sake of analysing his own mind at work writing poetry,” and considered it to be a “poésie de luxe.” He thought such poetry too easy, contrasting it to his own poetry for which he had “paid through the nose in experience” (Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria. My emphasis). There is little personal pain and anxiety expressed in Stevens’ poetry, and it is undeniably a poésie de luxe in Eliot’s sense of a poetry that reflects on the mind of the poet writing poetry rather than on his life experiences.
Stevens does not have a lot to say about Valéry – even though we have just seen him quoting Valéry’s praise of Bergson. In “Effects of Analogy” (1948) he does invoke Valéry as exemplifying the first of two theories of poetry: “One relates to the imagination as a power within him not so much to destroy reality at will as to put it to his own uses. He [the poet] comes to feel that his imagination is not wholly his own but that it may be part of a much larger, much more potent imagination, which it is his affair to try to get at.” To achieve that, Stevens says, he must live “as Paul Valéry did, on the verge of consciousness.” However, such a practice “often results in poetry that is marginal, subliminal” (Kermode, ed. 712). The other theory – the one to which Stevens adheres – makes much grander claims. It considers “the imagination, he says, as a power within him to have such insights into reality as will make it possible for him to be sufficient as a poet in the very center of consciousness.” But the “power” is “within him,” not some external djinn or spirit.
So, when Stevens writes in poem XXII of Blue Guitar, “Poetry is the subject of the poem,” he is not thinking of poetry as indulging in Narcissistic self-reference. Far from regarding his own poetry as a poésie de luxe, he believes that it seeks “to create the poetry of the present,” a task which he says is incalculably difficult and is “rarely ... achieved, fully and robustly, by anyone.” For poets like himself, “the central problem is always the problem of reality.” Like the first group of poets (to which Valéry belongs), Stevens’ kind of poets “are also mystics to begin with. But all their desire and all their ambition is to press away from mysticism toward that ultimate good sense which we term civilization” (713).
We may fairly conclude then, that both Eliot and Stevens sought to reform, renovate, or expand the state of culture and civilization in which they found themselves. And it would seem fair to conclude that their respective goals were founded on the perception that culture and civilization are in need of repair; that they are in a state of crisis. Although they shared this perception with most of their contemporaries in Europe, most others chose ready-made solutions to the crisis – Marxism and its antagonist, Fascism, being the most potent. But there were other options: D.H. Lawrence’s eroticism, Bloomsbury’s mixture of Fabianism and aestheticism, Ezra Pound’s mixture of Fascism and Confucius, David Jones’ Catholicism. In retrospect, all of these “literary” remedies seem rather impotent when viewed from a socioeconomic or political perspective – especially in comparison to the formidable efficacy of Marxism and Fascism to alter (I would say “destroy”) human culture and civilization. Charles Maurras’ Action Française, which we have seen did attract Eliot, was another option. It mixed cultural, religious, and political ideologies, and foundered on its anachronism, opportunism, and racism.
Despite the quixotic nature of their enterprises, the poets of Stevens’ and Eliot’s generation were unwilling to accept either the activism or the quietism of the next generation. W.H. Auden’s justly celebrated elegy for Yeats on his death in 1939, just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, expresses such a quietism in denying the efficacy of poetry – to which both Stevens and Eliot were committed: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper.”2 Stevens confronted the abyss of unbelief, as well as the even more alarming abyss of false belief by resorting to Whitehead’s “flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization” in the hope that others would land “for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation” in the light of his flights. Eliot chose a different route: a robust, even muscular, embrace of a traditional faith that defined the culture he inhabited and loved. That he saw religious belief as such a heroic undertaking is clear from his remarks in “A Note on Poetry and Belief”: “It takes applications, and a kind of genius, to believe anything, and to believe anything ... will probably become more and more difficult as time goes on. But we are constantly being told how much more difficult in other ways with telephones, wireless, aeroplanes and future inventions to try our nerves, life is becoming; and the complication of belief is merely another complication to be put up with” (16).
Ash-Wednesday and The Man with the Blue Guitar illustrate the shared reformist zeal of the mature poetry of Stevens and Eliot as well as their contrasting modes and styles. Although both poems illustrate each author’s state of belief at the time of writing, the parallel is imperfect since “Blue Guitar” does not represent a watershed in Stevens’ spiritual or philosophical development as Ash-Wednesday does in Eliot’s. “Blue Guitar” is just a more elaborate and sustained exploration of the same themes that occupied Stevens’ entire poetic career, as he explains on the dust jacket: “The Man with the Blue Guitar ... deals with the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined.”
Of “Owl’s Clover,” which precedes “Blue Guitar” in the volume, Stevens says, it reflects “what was then going on in the world, [and] that reflection is merely for the purpose of seizing and stating what makes life intelligible and desirable in the midst of great change and great confusion” (Kermode, ed. 998). He is no doubt alluding to the rise of fascism in Europe and the gathering clouds of war in 1937, when the volume was published. A decade earlier when the first poem in Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday sequence was published – or even in 1930, when the entire sequence appeared – public events were not so pressing. Nonetheless, it is typical of Stevens’ poetry that, despite its self- reflexivity, it does respond to public events – in contrast to the almost hermetically sealed character of most of Eliot’s poetry, and certainly of Ash-Wednesday. Eliot, of course, had lots to say about public events in his prose, whereas Stevens seldom commented on them in his prose.
In the dust jacket statement Stevens offers “Blue Guitar” as a poem that might assist his readers in dealing with the public turmoil that everyone faces: “Since this is of significance, if we are entering a period in which poetry may be of first importance to the spirit, I have been making notes on the subject in the form of short poems during the past winter. These short poems, some thirty of them, form the other group, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” from which the book takes its title. This group deals with the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined. Although the blue guitar is a symbol of the imagination, it is used most often simply as a reference to the individuality of the poet, meaning by the poet any man of imagination” (Kermode, ed. 998). “Blue Guitar,” then, consists of “notes” on “what makes life intelligible and desirable in the midst of great change and great confusion,” and it is “the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined” that fill that need. It must be admitted that as consolatory poetry, “Blue Guitar” cannot be counted a great success. Yeats’ lyrics and Eliot’s Quartets are far more frequently cited to offer comfort in times of distress than is “Blue Guitar” – or, indeed, any Stevens poem. It seems that people do not take much comfort from being reassured that what they believe is not true, but that nonetheless they shouldn’t worry.
Ash-Wednesday is a very different sort of poem, being motivated by Eliot’s recent conversion rather than by public events. All the same, it shares with Blue Guitar a sense of “in between,” that I have discussed in connection with The Waste Land and “The Journal of Crispin.” The time “in between” is the period when a belief is uncertainly held.3 Presumably it is that aspect of Ash-Wednesday that led Eliot to insist in a letter of 1927 to William Force Stead (the Anglican priest who baptized him, and Eliot’s confessor) that it was not a devotional poem: “Some damned fool of a Cambridge paper referred to it as devotional poetry, which rather misses the point.” In the same year, Eliot defined devotional poetry in a review of Baudelaire: Prose and Poetry as “religious poetry which falls within an exact faith and has precise objects for contemplation.”4 It would seem, then, that Eliot would not claim exactitude or precision for Ash-Wednesday.
In a later letter to Stead, Eliot elaborated on the issue, telling Stead that he had “nourished for a long time,” a theory “that between the usual subjects of poetry and ‘devotional’ verse there is a very important field still very unexplored by modern poets – the experience of man in search of God, and trying to explain to himself his intenser human feelings in terms of the divine goal. I have tried to do something of that in ‘Ash-Wednesday’” (Schuchard and Kojecky 150–1). The “man in search of God” is, perforce, not a man who has found Him. Presumably it is that uncertainty or doubt that disqualifies Ash-Wednesday from being a devotional poem in Eliot’s mind. But, since it was written after Eliot’s baptism, the search for God does not imply doubt of His existence. The search, then, must be for some sort of contact or sign, some experiential confirmation of faith, perhaps even for some sort of mystical, direct experience of divinity.
In a March 1930 review, a month before the completed Ash-Wednesday was published, Eliot discriminated between religious and devotional verse: “I call ‘religious’ what is inspired by religious feeling of some kind; and ‘devotional’ that which is directly about some subject connected with revealed religion.” Most people, I think, would reverse this categorization, considering devotional verse to be “inspired by a religious feeling of some kind.” On this schema, Ash-Wednesday would qualify as “religious” rather than “devotional.”5 A review of 1932 finds Eliot still gnawing on that bone. His comments suggest that the reason he rejected the label “devotional” for Ash-Wednesday is the uncertainty of his faith at the time of writing: “All poetry is difficult, almost impossible, to write: and one of the great permanent causes of error in writing poetry is the difficulty of distinguishing between what one really feels and what one would like to feel, and between the moments of genuine feeling and the moments of falsity. This is a danger in all poetry: but it is a peculiarly grave danger in the writing of devotional verse ... verse which represents only good intentions is worthless on that plane, indeed, a betrayal. The greater the elevation, the finer becomes the difference between sincerity and insincerity, between the reality and the unattained aspiration.”6 Finally, in a lecture on George Herbert (delivered on 25 May 1938 to the Friends of Salisbury Cathedral), Eliot revealed his great respect for devotional verse, asking his readers to see Herbert as “a man of great intellectual gifts and great psychological insight: and to regard devotional verse like his, not as a pleasant by-path of poetry, but as the highest, if not the most comprehensive that a poet can attempt” (quoted in Schuchard, Varieties 184).7 This, too, suggests that Eliot thought “devotional” too honorific a term for Ash-Wednesday, as well as an inaccurate label.
If we juxtapose these remarks with Stevens’ comment in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” cited in the previous chapter, the closeness of the two poets’ concerns is highlighted, while at the same time their resolutions of those concerns can be seen to be almost diametrically opposed: “If we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea ... and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished his purpose, would have seemed ... a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation” (Kermode, ed. 674). Stevens’ cautious adherence to hypothetical statements, coupled with his reiteration of his conviction that poetic invention is the core of religious belief, puts him at irreconcilable odds with the devout believer. On the other hand, his concern with the issue of belief in something “beyond ourselves” aligns him with such searchers after God as the Eliot of Ash-Wednesday.
Eliot’s use of Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, as the title of his first Anglican poem, alerts the reader to his intention that it be read as a search for belief, rather than a celebration of it. Within the liturgical year Lent is a period of waiting for the risen Christ’s manifestation on Easter morning as the Saviour. In that waiting the believer becomes a penitent, denying him- or herself the pleasures of the flesh as a cleansing, preparatory for the manifestation of the Saviour. Lent can be seen as a liturgical equivalent of the dark night of the soul experienced by mystics on their path to enlightenment. While on that path, there is no guarantee that one will ever reach the goal. It is in this sense, of the penitent’s search for a manifestation of divine grace, that Eliot can speak of the poem as expressing “the experience of a man in search of God.”
Ash-Wednesday was written over a period of about two and a half years. Part II – the first published section – appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature for December of 1927, about six months after his baptism on 29 June 1927. It had the title “Salutation.” Part I was the next published, appearing in the spring 1928 issue of Commerce, with the title “Perch’io non spero.” Part III was published in the same journal, in the Autumn issue of 1929 with the title “Al som de l’escalina.” The last three parts were not published until the whole poem appeared as a separate volume in April 1930. The sequence clearly represents the process of Eliot’s conversion – with all of the uncertainty and distress that accompanied that decision. His conversion was not a sudden revelation like Paul’s on the road to Damascus. It was a slow, deliberate process of inquiry, prayer, and contemplation.
“Blue Guitar” was also partly published in a literary journal before appearing in a book, but there was no parallel lengthy gestation – at least none marked by its publication history. Poems II, IX, XV, XVII, XVIII, XXIV, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, and XXXIII were published as “The Man with the Blue Guitar” in Poetry Magazine in May 1937, and then the entire sequence appeared in The Man with the Blue Guitar in the same year. Stevens told Ronald Latimer in March of 1937 that “during the winter” he had written “something like 35 or 40 short pieces of which about 25 seem to be coming through” (Letters 316). Holly Stevens identifies these poems as belonging to “Blue Guitar.” We can fairly assume then, that “Blue Guitar” was written reasonably continuously over a period of months rather than years.8
In the same letter, Stevens indicated that the theme of the sequence was the one that dominates much of his poetry: “They deal with the relation or balance between imagined things and real things which, as you know, is a constant source of trouble to me. I don’t feel that I have as yet nearly got to the end of the subject.” Not entirely content with that characterization, Stevens tried again: “Perhaps it would be better to say that what they really deal with is the painter’s problem of realization: I have been trying to see the world about me both as I see it and as it is. This means seeing the world as an imaginative man sees it.” By “the world as it is,” I take him to mean the world as the ordinary man or woman sees it, not some noumenal reality. No more is the “world as the imaginative man sees it” a noumenal reality. Both are imperfect, contingent, and even fugitive. The issue addressed in the sequence, then, is the conflict – or at least the disconnect – between the ordinary, instrumental view of the world in which we all participate, and the multifarious imagined view of which we are all capable.
So described, Stevens’ concerns are closer to Wordsworth’s than to Eliot’s. The purpose of the poems in Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth said in the famous 1801 preface, was to “choose incidents and situations from common life and to ... throw over them a certain colouring of imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way.” Wordsworth regarded such a practice not as an arbitrary or capricious exercise of imagination but as a revelatory practice in which the poet could trace “truly though not ostentatiously the primary laws of our nature” in ordinary things.9 Wordsworth’s poetic practice was grounded in the associationist psychology of David Hartley, which articulated the “primary laws” of human nature on Lockean principles. Stevens had no such mentor to guide his speculation – though he searched for one – nor did he have Eliot’s faith in the existence of a higher being.10 What he did share with Eliot was the need for belief, as he explained to Simons, in a comment on Poem IV of “The Greenest Continent”: “If one no longer believes in God (as truth), it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else. Logically, I ought to believe in essential imagination, but that has its difficulties. It is easier to believe in a thing created by the imagination. A good deal of my poetry recently has concerned an identity for that thing” (Letters 370).
Perhaps it would have been clearer if Stevens had said his search was for the characteristics, property, or status of “that thing” rather than its identity, since it is difficult to imagine how “a thing created by the imagination” could have an identity. In any case the central issue in “Blue Guitar” is the status of the invented world, as the first poem makes clear:
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
By “shearsman,” Stevens means a tailor, a craftsman who takes an already fabricated material and creates clothing from it by cutting and reassembling the fabric. He does not make the fabric, but finds it “ready-made” as it were. The artist does much the same thing with sensory experience, which also comes “ready-made.” There is also a similarity of posture between a tailor bent over his cloth and a guitarist bent over his guitar – as Stevens explained to his Italian translator, Renato Poggioli (Letters 783–4).
The general point insisted upon in the sequence is that life is made up of the externalities of the world – “things as they are” – and our relation to them; that relation is symbolized by the guitarist and his guitar. The tune that the guitarist plays is “beyond us” because the guitar itself (symbolizing the imagination) belongs to “things as they are,” that is, to the world external to ourselves. It is “yet ourselves” because we (that is our volitional selves) can express our thoughts and emotions by means of this humanly fabricated instrument. Thus our “fictions” – guitars, music, poems, and so on – both arise in the realm of “things as they are,” and reflect or represent “things as they are” – yet not without transformation: “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
Poem V explains that since we can no longer accept the fable of divine revelation, poetry must fill the void: “Poetry / Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns.” On this point there seems to be nothing to choose between Stevens’ position and Russell’s in “The Free Man’s Worship” that we should invest human inventions with the same cathexis or emotional intensity that society had previously invested in religious fables. Stevens’ explanation of these lines to Hi Simons supports such an interpretation: “Here is the right paraphrase,” he wrote; “we live in a world plainly plain. Everything is as you see it. There is no other world. Poetry, then, is the only possible heaven. It must necessarily be the poetry of ourselves; its source is in our imagination (even in the chattering, etc.)” (Letters 360). Notice that implicit in this remark is the understanding that heaven is neither a place nor a state of mind, but rather a desirable state or condition – a paradise – and that human kind needs the vision of such an attractive alternate world.
While it is true that “Blue Guitar” twists and turns in an arpeggio of evasiveness, I think there can be little doubt that in sum it recommends that we replace faith in a transcendent realm with a secular faith in “the only possible heaven” represented in art. I want to stress that in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” Stevens is in step with the general movement of Humanism as represented by Middleton Murry, Ramon Fernandez, Bertrand Russell, and Irving Babbitt – though he is at odds with the robust iconoclasm of J.M. Robertson and the hypocritical Catholicism of Charles Maurras. I say this despite the fact that Stevens denied a commonality of view with Humanism in the letter to Simons of 9 January 1940 cited above: “Humanism would be the natural substitute [for religion], but the more I see of humanism the less I like it” (Letters 346). Although this letter was written four years after the composition of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” there is no good reason to suppose that it does not represent his opinion at the time of composition.
Despite sharing the Humanist’s conviction that traditional religious beliefs are no longer possible – a conviction that is ubiquitous in his poetry – Stevens is nonetheless dissatisfied with the Humanist solution of worshipping at the shrine his own hands have built. He seems to be stuck on the need to believe in something, as opposed to merely entertaining a fiction on pragmatic grounds. Poem XX of “Blue Guitar” expresses this need in a typically enigmatic manner:
What is there in life except one’s ideas,
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Is it ideas that I believe?
Good air, my only friend, believe,
Believe would be a brother full
Of love, believe would be a friend,
Friendlier than my only friend,
Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar ...
Fortunately Stevens glossed these opaque lines for Renato Poggioli, his Italian translator: “I apostrophize the air and call it friend, my only friend. But it is only air. What I need is a true belief, a true brother, friendlier than the air. The imagination (poor pale guitar) is not that. But the air, the mere joie de vivre, may be. This stands for the search for a belief” (Letters 793. My emphasis). This need for a true belief separates Stevens from Russell and Humanists generally, whose defining characteristic is that they are content to rest with the stories we tell ourselves even though such stories can never command “true belief.”
Stevens’ position can best be described as “romantic” – despite his rejection of the label. In the “The Relations between Poetry and Painting” (read at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1951) he explicitly contrasts Humanism to art:
In an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent ... poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince. Consequently their interest in the imagination and its work is to be regarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains, if that remains. So regarded, the study of the imagination and the study of reality come to appear to be purified, aggrandized, fateful. How much stature, even vatic stature, this conception gives the poet! He need not exercise this dignity in vatic works. How much authenticity, even Orphic authenticity, it gives to the painter! He need not display this authenticity in Orphic works. (Kermode, ed. 748. My emphasis)
The vatic status he assigns to the imagination of artist is echt Romanticism. No other period in European history has held such a view of the poet. Certainly, classical poets pretended to be inspired by a Muse, and Milton appealed to the Paraclete to inspire him. But Stevens is not speaking of inspiration; he is speaking of discovery. When he says that the work of the imagination should be regarded “as a vital assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains,” the implication is that the work of imagination (that is, art) bears witness to something beyond the self.
Later in the essay, Stevens clarifies his understanding of the vatic role of the artist:
“Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in whatever yield we discovered it, is that man’s truth is the final resolution of everything” (750–1). Such a remark would occasion no difficulty if it came from the mouth of an avowed Humanist, but Stevens insists that his position is distinct from Humanism. What he seems to have in mind is a contrast between the personal and intensely felt revelations of the artistic imagination and the rational convictions with which the Humanist is content. The difference is parallel to that between the mystic and the devout church-goer. The latter does not feel any “vital assertion,” even though the church-goer believes the doctrines of religion just as truly as the ordinary Humanist believes the teachings of science, despite having no understanding of the intricacies of string theory or quantum physics.
Although Stevens repeatedly attempts to discriminate his position from that of the Romantics, he just as frequently restates their belief in the power of the human imagination. However, it is true that he does not share Wordsworth’s pantheism, Coleridge’s Anglicanism, or Shelley’s Neoplatonism. The rumour of his baptism in the Roman Catholic faith near the end of his life aside, Stevens publicly maintained an agnostic (not an atheistic) posture throughout his active life. In “Two or Three Ideas,” the talk he gave at Mount Holyoke (also in1951), he reiterated the posture we have found in both “Key West” and “Blue Guitar”: “But the truth about the poet in a time of disbelief is not that he must turn evangelist. After all, he shares the disbelief of his time. He does not turn to Paris [Bergson?] or Rome for relief from the monotony of reality. He turns to himself and he denies that reality was ever monotonous except in comparison” (Opus Posthumous 265. My emphasis). Stevens always comes back to the emotional relation of the individual to the world, especially to a world deprived of divinity. In an intriguingly evasive move, he defines divinity as “the creation of the imagination at its utmost” (“Two or Three Ideas,” Opus Posthumous 266), as opposed to the more typical definitions of divinity as a creator, guarantor of meaning or of beauty, or as a sanction for ethical commandments. Divinity for Stevens is not something apart from humanity, but the product of human interaction with the world – not a projection by the mind onto the world, but an imaginative response to it.
Such a reading of his belief is supported by Poem IX of “Blue Guitar” and his comment on it:
And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar
Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched
Above the arrowy, still strings,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;
The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe
Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk
Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.
To help Poggioli with his translation, Stevens wrote the following gloss on “the symbol of the actor”: “The imagination is not a free agent [.] It is not a faculty that functions spontaneously without references. In IX the reference is to environment: the overcast blue: the weather = the stage on which, in this instance, the imagination plays. The color of the weather is the role of the actor, which, after all, is a large part of him. The imagination depends on reality” (12 July 1953 Letters 789. My emphasis).
A helpful parallel to Stevens’ notion of the poetic fiction is the hypothesis of gravity. It was the product of Newton’s brain, but it was a response to observed phenomena. He projected it onto the behaviour of planets and apples and found that it was good. We still rely on this “fiction,” even though gravity remains unexplained to this day. (It was resisted in Newton’s day because it involves action at a distance, something alien to materialist science. Einstein explained the phenomenon of the apparent attraction between bodies as a “warping” of space, avoiding the heresy of action at a distance.) Stevens sees the artist doing the same thing as Newton. The imagination is stimulated by “things as they are” and reformulates them according to its own principles and parameters. It therefore alters our perception and understanding of the world, an alteration which amounts – so far as we can tell – to an alteration of the world itself. Of course, unlike scientific hypotheses, poetic fictions cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed – except (as Keats would say) on the pulses.
Late in his life, Stevens found philosophical support for the argument that there is an equivalence between poetic fictions and scientific hypotheses. In “A Collect of Philosophy” (the Moody Lecture he delivered at the University of Chicago on 16 November 1951), he draws attention to the hypothetical nature of scientific theories: “The first word of the philosophy of the sciences, today, is that science has no value except its effectiveness and that nothing, absolutely nothing, constitutes an assurance that the external world resembles the idea that we form of it” (Kermode, ed. 861). He cites Jean Paulhan the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française on the same page in support of this view. Stevens was in correspondence with Paulhan in the fifties, and apparently had not previously thought of this parallel: “It comes to this that philosophers (particularly the philosophers of science) make, not discoveries but hypotheses that may be called poetic. Thus Louis de Broglie admits that progress in physics is, at the moment, in suspense because we do not have the words or the images that are essential to us. But to create illuminations, images, words, that is the very reason for being of poets” (My emphasis).
The contrast between the confident – if convoluted – assertion of Stevens’ poetic doctrine in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” and the tentative exploration of Eliot’s belief in Ash-Wednesday could hardly be greater. Shortly after he had written the first section of the first part, (then titled “Perch’io non Spero”), Eliot was still in a very tentative mood. He told Stead: “[I feel] as if I had crossed a very wide and deep river: whether I get much farther or not, I feel very certain that I shall not cross back, and that in itself gives one a very extraordinary sense of surrender and gain” (Letter of 15 March 1928, cited in Schuchard 1999 152). Eliot is celebrating – in the liturgical sense of enacting – an irrevocable change in his life, rather than speculating about its merits, characteristics, or consequences. “Blue Guitar,” in contrast, is an exploration of the human condition rather than a celebration of a change of life.
Eliot does not seem very happy about his “new life” – in contrast to Dante in La Vita Nuova, a work Ash-Wednesday emulates. He was not much more cheerful a month later when he wrote to Stead “2 days after Easter”: “If Easter is a season of hope, it is also a season when one wants to be given hope ... I do not expect myself to make great progress at present, only to ‘keep my soul alive’ by prayer and regular devotions. Whether I shall get farther, I do not know ... I do not know whether my circumstances excuse my going no farther or not ... I feel that nothing could be too ascetic, too violent, for my own needs” (10 April 1928, cited in Schuchard 1999 157. My emphasis). Clearly Eliot regarded his conversion as a struggle, a spiritual agon, rather than a sudden, charismatic disclosure. Ash-Wednesday enacts that struggle, which is undergone in solitude.11 “Blue Guitar,” in contrast, is a sort of dialogue – though rhetorically mostly a dramatic monologue – involving the poet and a sceptical audience. If there is to be a conversion it is the audience that might experience it, not the poet. Like St Paul, he is already confident of his belief, and only wishes to persuade others of its merit. Ash-Wednesday is almost a penitential poem; “Blue Guitar” is more like a sermon articulating Stevens’ beliefs – much like Wordsworth’s Prelude, though without the device of autobiography that Wordsworth chose.
Stevens’ “faith” involves the celebration of the beauty that the artist creates through an imaginative encounter with “things as they are.” That encounter borders on the ecstatic, if we can think of ecstasy as a continuum running from the erotic ecstasies celebrated in various pagan cults and Gnostic sects through the ecstasies of the saints, and the aesthetic ecstasies celebrated by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy through various diminutions to the minor tingles of the speaker and the elders in “Peter Quince at the Clavier”:
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna.
Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders watching, felt
The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.
To call such “throbbings” ecstatic is perhaps too emphatic a term, but I can think of no better label for the tinglings, the raising of the hair on the back of the neck, and so forth, that the arts produce in their audience. In the last tercet of “Peter Quince” Stevens conflates sexual excitation with religious transport, supporting my claim that he regards the simple sensual pleasures as of the same kind as more aesthetic transport:
Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death’s ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.
“Peter Quince” celebrates the permanence of beauty despite its evanescent instantiation in such fragile vessels as Susanna’s body, and the elders’ lechery. That Stevens describes bodily beauty and the lust it inspires as making “a constant sacrament of praise” is remote from the ascetic renunciation of Ash-Wednesday.
“Blue Guitar” has little explicit celebration of beauty, concentrating instead on the relationship between the artist, the world, and the audience. Poem XVIII (first published in Poetry 52, May 1937) comes closest of any in “Blue Guitar” to articulating Stevens’ sense of the ecstatic:
A dream (to call it a dream) in which
I can believe, in face of the object,
A dream no longer a dream, a thing,
Of things as they are, as the blue guitar
After long strumming on certain nights
Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand,
But the very senses as they touch
The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,
Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,
Rising upward from a sea of ex.
It is not obvious that these lines represent an ecstatic experience, but Stevens’ gloss for Simons, (in a letter of 8 August 1940) leaves no doubt that such was his intention: “The imagination takes us out of (Ex) reality into a pure irreality. One has this sense of irreality often in the presence of morning light on cliffs which then rise from a sea that has ceased to be real and is therefore a sea of Ex. So long as this sort of thing clearly expresses an idea or impression, it is intelligible language”12 (Letters 360). This “sense of irreality” is the kind of experience Stevens recurrently celebrates, and no doubt experienced. It is something that many of the denizens of his poetry also experience – whether dimly or intensely – from the woman in “Sunday Morning” through the youths and girls in “The Emperor of Ice Cream” and the elders in “Peter Quince” to the poet himself in Poem III of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”:
The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea ... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.
No such transport is to be found in Ash-Wednesday. “Salutation” – now the second poem in the sequence, but the first published – begins with a startling and gnomic image of mortification:
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull.
Although “Salutation” clearly invokes Dante’s Vita Nuova – both in sentiment, and in detail – the imagery of these opening lines is more reminiscent of the Inferno. The leopards consume only the body of the speaker, releasing spirit: God asks, “Shall these bones live?” but there is no answer. Instead “that which had been contained / In the bones,” speaks; asserting that because of the virtues of the Lady, it, together with the Lady, shines “with brightness.” As in Stevens’ “Notes,” the speaker is taken back to “an immaculate beginning,” but in how different a manner. Eliot’s persona has died to the world and hopes to be reborn in the spirit. It is the “dissembled” – that is, disembodied – spirit that speaks, and determines to turn its back on the world:
And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
The last clause is very cryptic. By proffering his “deeds to oblivion,” Eliot appears to be renouncing the fame his poetry has brought him. Proffering his “love / To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd” is more opaque. Perhaps he is renouncing any hope of siring children. It seems no great stretch to read “posterity of the desert” to mean no posterity at all. “The fruit of the gourd” is a more problematic phrase, but might be an allusion to Book Four of Jonah. If so, its fruit would be submission to the will of God.13 The hope for redemption in Ash-Wednesday is anguished and painful – so unlike Stevens’ winging “by an unconscious will / To an immaculate end.”
The bones then sing to the Lady of the Garden “where all loves end,” reinforcing the theme of renunciation that dominates the entire sequence. The marrow, “that which had been contained / In the bones,” – for some reason construed as plural – rejoice that “We shine with brightness.” Lower down, the empty bones (the body) profess themselves to be content with their abandonment by the marrow (the spirit?):
Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert.
There is an odd ambivalence in the taxonomy of flesh, bones, and marrow that the poem presents. A dualism of flesh and spirit is standard for Christian thought, but the triadic set of flesh, bones, and marrow is eccentric. Since it is the marrow that speaks – it is no longer in the bones, which are said to be “already dry” – the marrow seems to represent the soul, since it has left the bones as the soul is said to leave the body on death.
Eliot’s taxonomy has a precedent in St Paul, who twice speaks of the triad: spirit, soul, and body (1 Thesallonians 5:23 and Ephesians 4:17–24). The latter occurrence certainly fits the “feeling” of “Salutation,” where Eliot is doing precisely what St Paul recommends:
This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind.
Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:
Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.
But ye have not so learned Christ;
If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus:
That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts;
And be renewed in the spirit of your mind;
And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. (Ephesians 4:17–24. My emphasis)
The Catholic Encyclopaedia cautions that this passage has led to the error of the Trichotomists, that is, bifurcating the supra-physical into soul and spirit.14 This translation obscures the heresy by the use of “mind” instead of “soul.” Of course Eliot’s trichotomy is not St Paul’s. Paul divides the soul into two parts: soul and spirit. Eliot divides body into two parts: bones and marrow.15
Perhaps Eliot was thinking in philosophical rather than theological terms, as when he compared Milton and Dryden to the metaphysical poets in his 1921 review of Grierson’s anthology of metaphysical poets by invoking a triadic view of the human psyche: “Those who object to the ‘artificiality’ of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to ‘look into our hearts and write.’ But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tract” (Selected Essays 290). The heart, conventionally the seat of the emotions, is irrevocably put aside in “Salutation”: the bones perhaps represent those other aspects of corporeal sensibility, characterized in the review by the cerebral cortex (mind/soul), the nervous system (emotion/feeling), and the digestive tract (body/appetite). The soul is independent of all aspects of corporeality, but perhaps the Pauline “spirit” is not. Whatever the ultimate meaning of Eliot’s cryptic lines might be, they are certainly antipathetic to the sentiment expressed in “Peter Quince”:
Beauty is momentary in the mind –
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
“Salutation” was even more bleak in its first version than it is as revised for Part II of the completed poem. In the litany Eliot had the line “Spattered and worshipped” after “Rose of forgetfulness.” It is difficult to be certain what he had in mind, but the line suggests disapproval of the prominence that Catholic Christianity has given to the Blessed Virgin – though, technically, she is not “worshipped” by Catholics. The same negativity is evinced by another suppressed line, “With worm eaten petals,” which follows “The single Rose” – a designation of the Virgin.16 Finally, Eliot suppressed two lines following “Grace to the Mother”: “For the end of remembering / End of forgetting.” These lines suggest that he longs for a kind of Buddhistic annihilation in “the Garden / Where all love ends.” By the time he came to publish the sequence as a whole, Eliot seems to have mellowed somewhat, and perhaps also to have become less anxious for oblivion.
The sense of an irrevocable “turn” or decision in Ash-Wednesday is reinforced by the second published poem, “Perch’io non spero,” now the first poem in the sequence. It rings changes on the line from Cavalcanti’s “Ballata”– “Because I do not hope to turn” – even though the Italian phrase has been suppressed:
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things.
The theme is continued in Part III, which had two alternative titles – both suppressed in the final version: “Som de l’Escalina” and “Jausen lo Jorn.” Both are Provençal phrases taken from Arnaut Daniel’s speech to Dante in Purgatorio XXVI. Dante is nearing the entrance to Heaven. The circle of Purgatory in question is one where souls purge themselves of sexual sins; bisexualism is specifically mentioned (“Nostro peccato fu ermafradito” l. 82).
Ieu sui Arnaud, que plor e vau cantan;
consiros vei la passada folor,
ev vei jausen lo joi qu’esper, deman.
(Purgatorio XXVI ll. 142–4)
[I am Arnaud, who weep and sing as I go.
I see with grief past follies
and see, rejoicing, the day I hope for before me.]
This particular scene had a strong fascination for Eliot. He had taken the title for his 1920 collection of essays, Ara vos Prec, from the next line in the same passage:
“Ara vos prec, per aquela valor
Que vos guida al som de l’escalina,
sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.”
Poi s’ascose nel fuoco che gli affiina. (ll. 145–8)
[And so I pray you, by that virtue
which leads you to the topmost of the stair –
remember my pain from time to time.’
Then he dove back into the fire which refines them.]
Part III articulates Eliot’s tortured rejection of the pleasures of the flesh, ending with the refrain, “Lord I am not worthy.” These are the words spoken by the faithful before receiving communion, acknowledging that although we are all in a state of sin, Christ’s sacrifice has nonetheless redeemed us. The entire phrase is, “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof; speak but the word and my soul shall be healed.” They are the words of the centurion at Capernaum reported by Matthew, asking Christ to cure his servant of an illness. The point of the parable is that the Roman soldier renounced his superior status with respect to a Hebrew subject (Matthew 8. 8). The liturgy substitutes “soul” for “servant.” Since Eliot places himself as in the position of Arnaud rather than that of Dante, he is portrayed as still susceptible to the pleasures of the flesh, though desirous of rising above them.
It would of course scarcely be possible for Eliot to imitate Dante’s ascent into Heaven in the twentieth century.17 The parallel aspiration for Eliot – or any believer – would be unquestioned faith, something like the conviction of a born-again or charismatic Christian. Such a state could be expressed poetically, but it is available only to a charismatic Christian, and Eliot was certainly not that. His understanding of belief is totally antipathetic to charismatic practices, as his response, contemporary with his baptism, to I.A. Richard’s assertion that The Waste Land expressed the contemporary sense of desolation clearly indicates: “A ‘sense of desolation,’ etc. (if it is there) is not a separation from belief; it is nothing so pleasant. In fact, doubt, uncertainty, futility, etc., would seem to me to prove anything except this agreeable partition; for doubt and uncertainty are merely a variety of belief “(“A Note on Poetry and Belief”16. My emphasis).18 Eliot goes on in the note (in a passage I have cited earlier) to discuss the complexity of the very notion of belief, and also on its inescapability, concluding: “We await, in fact (as Mr. Richards is awaiting the future poet), the great genius who shall triumphantly succeed in believing something. For those of us who are higher than the mob, and lower than the man of inspiration, there is always doubt; and in doubt we are living parasitically (which is better than not living at all) on the minds of the men of genius of the past who have believed something” (17. My emphasis).
In this remark, Eliot was not far from the position on belief that Stevens articulates in “Blue Guitar” and elsewhere. Although the note was published just six months prior to his baptism, Eliot insisted on doubt, rather than belief. The Gospels are careful to insist in an egalitarian spirit – as are both Catholic and most Protestant theologies – that belief comes from divine grace, rather than from the superior wisdom of the believer. For Trinitarian Christians, the Holy Ghost, or Paraclete, is assigned the task of distributing such grace. Unitarians, of course, abolish the Paraclete, and with Him, divine grace. Perhaps it is a residue of his Unitarian upbringing that prevents Eliot from seeking such grace, and speaking instead of the witness of “the men of genius of the past who have believed something.”19 Eliot, then, remains a “thinking” believer rather than a charismatic one, and hence remains within the horizon of doubt.
In “Blue Guitar” Stevens also longs for belief. Although he calls the adequacy of ideas into question (implicitly rejecting Eliot’s notion that belief requires genius) he does not invoke divine grace, relying on his own resources, as in the lines cited above from Poem XX: “What is there in life except one’s ideas, / Good air, good friend, what is there in life.” He characterizes air as “joie de vivre” suggesting that it stands synecdochically for the world of things as they are and the pleasure one takes in it, a supposition corroborated by Poem XXI:
A substitute for all the gods:
This self, not that gold self aloft,
Alone, one’s shadow magnified,20
Lord of the body, looking down,
As now and called most high,
The shadow of Chocorua
In an immenser heaven, aloft,
Alone, lord of the land and lord
Of the men that live in the land, high lord.
One’s self and the mountains of one’s land,
Without shadows, without magnificence,
The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.
Chocorua is a mountain in New Hampshire, one of “the mountains of one’s land.” The last line recalls the triad of flesh, bones, and spirit in Ash-Wednesday II, but here it is a quaternary: flesh, bone, dirt, stone. The first two belong to the human or animal, the second pair, to the inanimate. The point would seem to be that there is no Cartesian gulf between mind and body, spirit and flesh, but a continuum from inanimate through animate to conscious life. One is tempted to invoke Teilhard de Chardin’s schema of geosphere, biosphere, and noösphere with God beyond all three.
When Eliot speaks of “the minds of the men of genius of the past,” he seems to be thinking in terms of the romantic genius, the exceptional individual who can see into the heart of things, who possesses a special sensitivity, as opposed to the analytic skill and penetration characteristic of the scientific “genius.” If so, he and Stevens are on the same page on this point, for in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” Stevens explicitly endorses the romantic genius (even though he is anxious elsewhere to distinguish his views from Romanticism21): “The genius, because of abnormal ranges of his sensibility, not only accumulates experiences with greater rapidity, but accumulates experiences and qualities of experience accessible only on the extreme ranges of sensibility” (Kermode, ed. 684). This remark is scarcely distinguishable from Wordsworth’s characterization of the poet in the 1801 Preface to Lyrical Ballads as “a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm, and tenderness” (Poetical Works 737).
If we take Eliot’s remark, “we await, in fact ... the great genius who shall triumphantly succeed in believing something,” at face value, and remember that it was made some six months prior to his conversion, it is reasonable to suppose that such sentiments contributed to his conversion. Given that he shortly thereafter succeeded in believing in Anglican Christianity, such a supposition tempts one to think that “the great genius” Eliot had in mind was himself. But the tone of Ash-Wednesday belies such a thought. There is nothing triumphant about Ash-Wednesday. Indeed, it is characterized by hesitation, remorse, and guilt, and is primarily backward – rather than forward – looking, as the opening line of both Part I (“Because I do not hope to turn again,”) and Part VI (“Although I do not hope to turn again,”) emphatically insist.
The only important exception to this tortured nostalgia is Part IV. In the draft version it was given another Dantescan title, “Vestita di Color di Fiamma” (“Robed in the Colour of Flame”). This is Dante’s description of Beatrice as she first appears to him near the end of the Purgatorio, after Dante has met Matilda in the earthly paradise:
sovra candido vel cinta d’uliva
donna m’apparve, sott verde manto
vestita di color di fiamma viva.
(Purgatorio XXX 31–3)
[girt with olive over a white veil
a lady appeared to me, under a green mantle
robed with the colour of living flame.]
Her appearance is followed by a little scolding of Dante, leading to his confession in canto XXXI:
Piangendo dissi: “Le presenti cose
col falso lor piacer volser miei passi,
tosto che ‘l vostro viso si nascose.”
(Purgatorio XXXI ll.34–6)
[Weeping, I said: “Present things
with their false pleasure turned my steps
as soon as your face was hid.”]
These allusions, however, do not fit the mood and tone of Part IV of Ash-Wednesday, which is more like canto XXVIII of Purgatorio, where Dante encounters Matilda in the Earthly Paradise, than it is like the penitential canto XXXI. Eliot recalls the pastoral scene glimpsed through the “slotted window” in Ash-Wednesday III, although the current scene is dominated by females, instead of the Satyr-like “broad-backed figure drest in blue and green” who “enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.” In Part IV the pagan paradise is modified – somewhat awkwardly and programmatically – into a Christian world, with a silent female figure suggestive of the Virgin Mary, who stands modestly “behind the garden god”:
The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word
But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken.
Eliot returns to a penitential mood in the last two poems. The suppressed title for Part V is “La Sua voluntade è nostra pace” (His Will is Our Peace”), taken from Paradiso III 85. It is the act of submission to the will of God required of every Christian believer. Part V echoes the well-known opening of the Gospel according to St John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But Part V is dominated by images of darkness, silence and deserts unrelieved by the Word:
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise
and deny the voice.
(11–19)
Here the poem is less personal than elsewhere, and expresses distress at the world’s failure to hear and heed the Word, rather than expressing the mixture of anxiety and hope of the penitent Eliot. Penitent submission dominates the later sections – an attitude and posture not to be found in Stevens’ more pagan and immanentist imagination.
Part VI, the last part, was never given a title. It was first published in 1930 and was probably written almost two years after Part I (first published in the spring of 1928). As already noted, Part VI begins with a reminiscence of the opening line of Part I: “Because I do not hope to turn again.” But Eliot changes the conjunction from one indicating a causal relation to one indicating a subjunctive relation: “Although I do not hope to turn again.” The difference is significant. Now the choice of faith is no longer represented as irrevocable but as freely chosen. Even though the speaker is no closer to the journey’s end than at the beginning of the sequence, the way is certain:
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
...
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
....
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will.
(ll. 4–5, 20–1, 25–30)
Ash-Wednesday highlights two aspects of Eliot’s piety: his strong sense of sin, transgression, and guilt arising from an ascetic distaste for pleasures of the flesh and a longing for deliverance from these worldly entanglements. These ascetic attitudes are characteristic of the Christian mystic – although, as we have seen, Eliot does not permit a blurring of the lines between prayer and poetry on the lines proposed by Abbé Bremond. And we have seen him bristle at a reviewer’s characterization of Ash-Wednesday as a devotional poem, characterizing it instead as “the experience of man in search of God.”
For Eliot the world and its temptations block the road to God. For Stevens the world is a blank slate on which the human imagination is free to inscribe any image it pleases, as he has his auditors explain in Poem XXVI:
Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,
Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.
The interlocutors appear to contradict themselves in that they caution the guitar player against praising poetic fictions, but conclude nonetheless – in a characteristic Stevensian posture – that poetry “must take the place of empty heaven.” The paraphrase cited above that Stevens gave Hi Simons ignores this apparent contradiction. The phrase, “torches wisping in the underground” is a little idiosyncratic for Stevens. He does not speak of torches elsewhere in his poetry – though he does speak of the underworld. In “Sunday Morning,” where the woman is denied “the golden underground ... where spirits gat them home,” the underworld is synecdochic of worn out imaginings.
To get a sense of Stevens’ notion of the afterlife – toward which Eliot so earnestly strives in Ash-Wednesday – we must turn to Stevens’ two elegies: “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” and “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.” “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” as Stevens told Barbara Church, is a meditation on death, following the death of her husband and his friend, Henry Church (on Good Friday, 4 April 1947): “The October number of Horizon is to be an American number. I expect to have a poem in it: ‘The Owl in the Sarcophagus.’ This was written in the frame of mind that followed Mr. Church’s death. While it is not personal, I had thought of inscribing it somehow, below the title, as, for example, Goodbye H.C., but it was hardly written before I received Horizon’s letter and as it would not have been easy to talk to you about it at the time, I omitted the inscription” (5 September 1947. Letters 566)
Harold Bloom has found “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” to be “not wholly available to even the most prolonged and loving of readings” and “the least accessible of Stevens’ major poems” (Bloom, Wallace Stevens 292). But despite his puzzlement, I think we can find in it some illumination of Stevens’ thoughts about death.22 In this poem he re-imagines the underworld, providing it with candles, though not torches, and peopling it with three figures, two of whom are brothers: “sleep,” and “peace after death”:
And a third form, she that says
Good-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there,
To those that cannot say good-by themselves.
This last, female, figure is surely the surviving bereaved – in Henry Church’s case, his wife, Barbara. The figure is given the properties of a mourner:
she that in the syllable between life
And death cries quickly, in a flash of voice,
Keep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as
My memory ...
The continuation, “is the mother of us all, / The earthly mother and the mother of / The dead,” prompted Bloom to identify this figure as “The Mother” – presumably thinking of the Oedipal mother, for he later speaks of “the family romance,” a Freudian cliché (Bloom 282 and 292). He is followed in this idiosyncrasy by most subsequent commentaries. Although she is enfolded into the archetypal female by these lines, the reference is surely to Barbara Church. It is excessive to completely occlude the grieving wife as all commentaries I have seen do.
While Eliot – by way of Dante – does, as it were, speak of “torches wisping in the underground,” Stevens’ underworld is peopled by echoes or remembrances of the world. He reminds us that “one day / A man walked living among the forms of thought,” but now in death “a likeness of the earth, / That by resemblance twanged him through and through, / Releasing an abysmal melody ... A dazzle of remembrance and of sight.” The sentiment expressed here is much the same as that of “Sunday Morning” written more than thirty years earlier: “Alas, that they should wear our colors there, / The silken weavings of our afternoons, / And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!”
Stevens’ afterlife is rather closer to the annihilation of the self in the Underworld than it is to the vision of Beatrice and Paradise that Eliot invokes. Stevens’ deceased is imagined as observing Sleep, the brother of Peace:
There he saw well the foldings in the height
Of sleep, the whiteness folded into less,
Like many robings, as moving masses are
We are told that the manifestation of Sleep “Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect, / A diamond jubilance beyond the fire, / That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye.” Having observed this negative or Buddhistic apotheosis, the deceased “Then ... breathed deeply the deep atmosphere / Of sleep, the accomplished, the fulfilling air.” These lines read like an attempt to articulate the featureless nirvana that lies beyond the grave – though in Stevens’ case the deceased retains consciousness, but a consciousness of nothing.
Having achieved this species of transport – which is more like a Swedenborgian vastation than a Christian beatific vision – the deceased must now confront Peace, the brother of Sleep. This confrontation implies a persistent consciousness in the deceased, and a memory of the world he has left:
There peace, the godolphin23 and fellow, estranged, estranged,
Hewn in their middle as the beam of leaves,
The prince of shither-shade and tinsel lights,
Stood flourishing the world.
I can only guess that by “shither-shade” Stevens has in mind the shifting, partial shade offered by a deciduous tree such as a maple or plane tree – a reading supported by the preceding phrase, “beam of leaves.” His characterization of peace as the prince of “shither-shade and tinsel lights,” who stands “flourishing the world” suggests a sort of domesticated Anima Mundi or Gnostic Adam Kadmon, or perhaps the Green Man of northern mythology, a supposition supported by the continuation:
Peace stood with our last blood adorned, last mind,
Damasked in the originals of green,
A thousand begettings of the broken bold.24
This is that figure stationed at our end,
Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed
Out of our lives to keep us in our death,
To watch us in the summer of Cyclops
Underground, a king as candle by our beds
In a robe that is our glory as he guards.
(Collected Poems 434–5)
Peace, then, is not just the oblivion that awaits us at death but is also the traces that our life has left in the world: “Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed / Out of our lives to keep us in our death.” The sentiment is not unlike that of the closing lines of “The Emperor of Ice Cream”:
Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
The sheet embroidered by the dead woman is a more modest version of “the figure stationed at our end” that is “formed / out of our lives to keep us in our death.”
Instead of being the source for, or model of, the multifarious manifestations of the mutable world, like the Anima Mundi, Adam Kadmon or the Green Man, Peace is the product of the human imagination, a composite of all the imaginings of mankind. And notice that Stevens once again employs the metaphor of a worked fabric, like the sheet on which the dead woman “embroidered fantails once,” and recalling the shearsman or tailor of “Blue Guitar”:
Generations of the imagination piled
In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread,
In the weaving round the wonder of its need,
And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet
By which to spell out holy doom and end,
A bee for the remembering of happiness.
This particular turn is of considerable interest, for it modulates the “oceanic” or immanentist tendency that is never too far away from Stevens’ formulations – as it was not for the nineteenth-century Boston mandarins, most particularly Emerson. The “bee for the remembering of happiness” invokes the sort of collective endeavour common in rural New England known as a “bee” – as in a quilting “bee” or a barn-raising “bee.”25 In such collective endeavours, one does not lose one’s individuality, but at the same time that individuality is submerged in a joint endeavour that will fully occlude individual contributions. It strikes me as a wonderful analogy for the collective nature of culture and civilization, of belief and ideals. It is so much more heimlich than Eliot’s more elitist – though related – notion of tradition articulated in “Tradition and Individual Talent”: “We shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his [the poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” In Eliot’s version the co-operative nature of an individual’s imagination is a kind of co-optation of all that went before him. The Eliotic heir of tradition stands on the shoulders of his predecessors, or to their side, in a sort of splendid renovation of what went before. Both men see the individual as embedded in a collective endeavour, but Stevens’ analogy of the quilting bee leaves the individual entirely occluded, while Eliot’s heir of tradition stands out from his predecessors.
The next section describes the third, female, form as “she that says good-bye.” Since “she” stands “on the edges of oblivion,” it is plausible to identify this figure (as I did above) with the bereaved wife. She is portrayed as a sort of anti-Beatrice in that she remains alive, while her beloved is deceased, whereas in the Commedia, Beatrice is deceased and Dante is alive. All the same, like Beatrice, she remains a potent presence in the underworld where she “stood tall in self not symbol, quick / And potent, an influence felt instead of seen.” Stevens concludes with the declaration: “This is the mythology of modern death / ... The mind, among the creatures that it makes, / The people, those by which it lives and dies.”
In sum, then, Stevens self-consciously departs from standard literary depictions of the world after death – though not without allusions to, and remembrances of, them. Eliot, in contrast, co-opts the Dantescan account of the afterlife to meet his own very different needs. It would be nugatory to assess one approach as superior to the other, but it is nonetheless worth discriminating between them. Following Bloom, the tendency in recent assessments of “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” is to accommodate Stevens’ “modern mythology” to antique and traditional mythologies (see especially Carroll 212–36). It is, of course, virtually impossible entirely to avoid traditional features. The human mind is not that allotropic. In any case, if Stevens had succeeded in being totally original, we could not understand him.
“To an Old Philosopher in Rome” stays even further away from the Underworld. It was written for George Santayana, who had encouraged Stevens’ poetic ambitions when Stevens was a young undergraduate at Harvard, but with whom he had not had any relations since. It was published in the autumn 1952 issue of the Hudson Review (one of “Eight Poems”), and was written some time before Santayana’s death on 26 September 1952.26 When Stevens expressed his sorrow at Santayana’s death in a letter to Barbara Church on 29 September, however, he made no mention of the poem: “I grieve to hear of the death of George Santayana in Rome. I knew him well, in Cambridge, when he often asked me to come to see him. This was before he definitely decided not to be a poet. It is difficult for a man whose whole life is thought to continue as a poet. The reason (like the law, which is only a form of the reason) is a jealous mistress. He seems to have gone to his rest at the convent, in which he died, in his sixties [sic], probably gave them all he had asked them to keep him, body and soul (Letters 761–2). It is odd that Stevens would have thought the eighty-five-year-old Santayana was actually younger than his own seventy-three years. Perhaps he was in denial about his own age.
Whereas with “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” Stevens tried to imagine the experience of death rather than the nature of the Afterworld, in this poem he imagines a man on the margin between life and death. Although Santayana, like Stevens, was an agnostic, Stevens exploits the fact that he resided for the last decade of his life in a convalescent home in Rome run by the Blue Nuns (not a convent). He imagines Santayana as “on the threshold of Heaven,” but instead of gazing upward toward heaven, he is looking back to “the figures in the street” who “Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement / Of men growing small in the distances of space, / Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound.” This “vision” is gnomically characterized as an “Unintelligible absolution and an end –.” So, as with Henry Church, the deceased leaves this earth with regret – or at least with nostalgia, although Stevens now adds the notion of absolution, that is, forgiveness – but for what it is not clear.
The poem returns constantly to the mundane circumstances – analogous to the “dresser of deal” in “The Emperor of Ice Cream” – which form the context in which the dying Santayana finds himself: “The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns, / The candle as it evades the sight.” And, surprisingly, he declares that “these are / The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome / A shape within the ancient circles of shapes.” The “shape of Rome” cannot be taken as just the physical city, but must also be the institution of the Catholic Church, which – in the form of the nuns – presides over Santayana’s death, for the poem continues:
And these beneath the shadow of a shape
In a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,
A light on the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that of which
Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
But still, the poem refuses to look, except metaphorically, beyond the mundane and quotidian: the candle light, “moving transparence of the nuns,” and a “hovering excellence” symbolize “the celestial possible” – all surrounding the “shadow of a shape” of the dying – not dead – philosopher.
Since he was still alive at the time of writing, Santayana is imagined as being at death’s door but not yet having passed through:
Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive
Yet living in two worlds, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,
Impatient for the grandeur that you need
In so much misery;
It is presumably this world about which Santayana is said to be impenitent. But he is penitent about the other world, and hence in need of that “unintelligible absolution.” It seems that it is not sin and transgression that are at issue, but the failure of vision to imagine “the grandeur” that we all need when mired “in so much misery.”
Nonetheless, we must find that grandeur in the “misery” that flesh is heir to:
and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,
As in the last drop of the deepest blood,
As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,
Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.
The implication is that we are all “citizens of heaven,” even though the young and healthy are less aware of that status than the dying – or than poets. Santayana is said to speak “poverty’s speech,” that is, “the profound poetry of the poor and of the dead.” But in fact, he does not speak; surroundings do – the room and the city outside:
The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered.
The life of the city never lets go, nor do you
Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.
Its domes are the architecture of your bed.
These mundane sounds and sights provide the “total grandeur” that heaven would provide if there were such a place or state. Instead of Santayana being transported to another place, the place in which he is dying is transformed by the “inquisitor of structures”:
It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immensest theatre, the pillared porch,
The book and candle27 in your ambered room,
Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself.
Stevens, too, stops short of death’s door in the poem:
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.
Ash-Wednesday, of course, is about conversion, not death. Nonetheless, Eliot represents his conversion as the renunciation of life, of any hope of joy or pleasure, as if on his deathbed: “In this brief transit where the dreams cross / The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.” There is no gesture toward the rebirth of Easter that another might have invoked as an entry into a brave new world given meaning by his new-found faith. Instead Eliot’s poem concentrates on the difficulty and pain of the route he has chosen – much as in the contemporaneous “Note on Poetry and Belief” cited above. Indeed, Easter seems absent from Eliot’s Christianity. He seldom invokes it in his prose, and has no poetry explicitly concerned with Christ’s resurrection. The closest he comes is the allusion to Christ’s appearance to the apostles on the road to Emmaus in The Waste Land. In “Little Gidding,” where one might expect an allusion to the Resurrection, we have Pentecost instead – the manifestation of the Holy Ghost seven weeks after the Resurrection.
Eliot’s only prose reference to the Resurrection that I have found emphasizes the failure of Christ’s redemption of mankind to alter the human condition, rather than its miraculous transformation of the world that Christians celebrate at Easter: “I think also of the words of Pascal, to be recalled even, and perhaps especially, on the day of the Resurrection: ‘The Christ will be in agony even to the end of the world.’ For sin and evil-doing we cannot abolish; but we can surely labour towards a social justice in this world which will prepare more souls to share not only here but in the Resurrection” (“Building up the Christian World” 502). His letter to his confessor, Stead, two days after Easter (10 April 1928) just as he published “Perch’ io non spero,” similarly lacks any sense of celebration: “If Easter is a season of hope, it is also a season when one wants to be given hope ... I do not expect myself to make great progress at present, only to ‘keep my soul alive’ by prayer and regular devotions. Whether I shall get farther, I do not know ... I do not know whether my circumstances excuse my going no farther or not... I feel than nothing could be too ascetic, too violent, for my own needs” (cited in Kojecky 157).
While, even as a Christian, Eliot skirts around Easter and the Resurrection, Stevens is positively dismissive of this central Christian festival. As a still single young lawyer in New York, he mused on Easter in his Journal entry for 30 April 1905. He had been home in Reading for Easter, the previous Sunday – mostly in order to see his fiancée, and future wife, Elsie Moll. On the following Sunday he tells his diary that he feels “a loathing (large + vague!), for things as they are; and this is the result of a pretty thorough disillusionment.” Recalling the Easter service of the previous week, he registers a profound disconnect from the celebration of Easter: “Last Sunday, at home, I took communion. It was from the worn, the sentimental, the diseased, the priggish and the ignorant that ‘Gloria in excelsis!’ came” (Letters 82).
Eleven years later, then on the road as a lawyer for the Hartford Indemnity Company, he wrote to Elsie from Miami on Easter Sunday. On this occasion he irreverently contrasted pagan celebrations of spring with the austere Christian rite – although he refrains from the stark contrast between the Christian focus on Christ’s death and the erotic pagan rites of spring: “There is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of spring in our blood. Why a man who wants to roll around on the grass should be asked to dress as magnificently as possible and listen to a choir is inexplicable except from the flagellant point of view” (Letters 193). Admittedly, Stevens says nothing about the doctrine of the Resurrection, but it seems fair to infer that he found little to admire in it, a supposition supported by “Sunday Morning,” published between the journal entry and the letter (Poetry 1915). There, Stevens unequivocally dismisses the Resurrection, having a voice declare: “The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” And he does invoke in the poem erotic pagan rites, only lightly suggested in the letter to Elsie: “Supple and turbulent, a ring of men / Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn / Their boisterous devotion to the sun.” He strikes much the same attitude in “A High-Toned Christian Woman” (1922): “Thus, our bawdiness, / Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, / Is equally converted into palms, / Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, / Madame, we are where we began.”
While Stevens’ rejection of the Resurrection is hardly surprising, it is odd that Eliot should be so cautious about this central Christian dogma – especially since he had no such hesitation about the doctrine of Incarnation. It is surely just as scandalous to the modern sensibility as Resurrection, but it is unequivocally endorsed in “Dry Salvages” V :
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled, [.]
In the nearly contemporaneous (1931) introduction to the Everyman edition of the Pensées of Pascal, Eliot explains the necessity of that doctrine for him. “The Christian thinker,” he wrote, “finds the world to be so and so ... and ... by what Newman calls ‘powerful and concurrent’ reasons, he finds himself inexorably committed to the dogma of the Incarnation. To the unbeliever, this method seems disingenuous and perverse: for the unbeliever is, as a rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally concerned (in modern terms) to ‘preserve values’” (Selected Essay 408).
So for Eliot, the doctrine of the incarnation – that is, that Christ redeemed the world by entering it – is central to his faith. If further testimony is needed, one can point to the series of Ariel poems celebrating the Incarnation. There are no Easter poems in the Eliot canon – perhaps, as I argued earlier – because he sees mankind as still in the Time Between Christ’s death and his Return. The doctrine of the Resurrection – asserting as it does that the world is redeemed – offends common sense, as well as scientific reason, in the light of the clearly unredeemed state of mankind.
Stevens was attracted to the myth of the life of Jesus, but it seems he never regarded it as anything but a myth – at least once he became an adult. In a letter of May 1909 to Elsie, he reported on the mood prompted by a visit to St John’s Chapel in New York and his reading of a life of Jesus “last night at the Library.” He does not say which one, but a likely candidate is Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus, which treats Christ as a man, rather than a divine incarnation and debunks the miracles attributed to Him.28 In any event, the book he read prompted Stevens to visit the chapel “to see what symbols of that life appeared.” He was disappointed to find only a gold cross, and compares this bareness unfavourably with medieval churches “built by men who felt the wonder of the life and death of Jesus – temples full of sacred images, full of the air of love and holiness – tabernacles hallowed by worship that sprang from the noble depth of men familiar with Gethsemane, familiar with Jerusalem.” He attributes the decline of the church to this loss.
Still musing of Christ and Christianity, he returns to the life of Jesus he had been reading in the library. He says: “[It] makes one distinguish the separate ideal of God. Before to-day I do not think I have ever realized that God was distinct from Jesus. It enlarges the matter almost beyond comprehension. People doubt the existence of Jesus – at least, they doubt incidents of his life, such as, say, the Ascension into Heaven after his death. But I do not understand that they deny God. I think everyone admits that in some form or other. – The thought makes the world sweeter – even if God be no more than the mystery of Life” (Letters 139–40. My emphasis). Although Stevens does not mentions the Resurrection as one of the doubtful incidents in the life of Christ, he is clearly registering an important moment in his spiritual life. He has come to realize that renouncing Christianity – which he had apparently done some years earlier – does not require one to renounce God, “even if God be no more than the mystery of Life.” The key word is “mystery.” Although in 1909 he could be reasonably confident that most of Western culture’s traditional beliefs were false, he could not be confident that there were not truths still to be discovered. Those “undiscovered truths” Stevens is content to call “mysteries,” but that is not a term that he uses frequently. It is their contrary, “fictions” that preoccupy him, and sustain him above the “dumbfoundering abyss.”
Eliot’s view is very different. Quite apart from the question of his own beliefs, Eliot is of the opinion that Western civilization is so thoroughly imbued with Christian values that it could not survive their extinction. Toward the end of the Second World War, he attempted to articulate his views on culture and civilization in Notes Toward a Definition of Culture. Those “notes” were written over a period of several years, the first components appearing in January and February of 1943, and the latest in October 1945 – all in the New English Review. He represents them as his effort to define “culture.” Interestingly, he still sees European culture in a state of decay, much as Julian Benda had done in 1914: “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago” (19).
Eliot’s declared purpose was to articulate the relation between culture and religion, but Eliot feared that the relationship is so subtle as to defy comprehension: “The way of looking at culture and religion which I have been trying to adumbrate is so difficult that I am not sure I grasp it myself except in flashes, or that I comprehend all its implications” (30). Of course, it is not difficult for most observers, who would agree with Matthew Arnold that religion is an aspect of culture and no more – a view Eliot scornfully rejects as “facile” (28). But he admits that the “sort of identity of religion and culture which we observe amongst peoples of very low development” is not possible in advanced civilizations – not only because of the sophistication of such civilized people, but also because a “higher religion is one which is much more difficult to believe” (67).29 In a talk broadcast on German radio in 1948, which he appended to the New English Weekly articles in Notes, he stated his position more bluntly, asserting that he did “not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith ... If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made” (122).
Although all of these remarks were made during and shortly after the most destructive war in human history, which came close to destroying what Eliot regarded as Western civilization, he made no direct reference to the war. Perhaps having in mind that his German audience had survived a regime that could be seen as having jettisoned Western civilization, he repeated the point at the end of his talk: “The Western world has its unity in this heritage, in Christianity and in the ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome and Israel, from which, owing to two thousand years of Christianity, we trace our descent ... If we dissipate or throw away our common patrimony of culture, then all the organisation and planning of the most ingenious minds will not help us, or bring us closer together” (123).
Eliot returned obsessively to the role religion and poetry must play in the life of society – a role which he believed was essential to preserve civilized life. Stevens – perhaps in part because he lived in the safe redoubt of North America – insofar as he was a poet, was unconcerned with the life of society. His task is to sing, and in singing to replace the vacuum left by the loss of belief in the fables that created European civilization: “The theory of poetry is the life of poetry. Christianity is an exhausted culture” (“Adagio” Opus Posthumous 202).