The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens

222 Pages·2022·3.053 MB·English

by  Bart Eeckhout, Lisa Goldfarb

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
MUSIC AND LITERATURE
The Poetic Music of
Wallace Stevens
Bart Eeckhout · Lisa Goldfarb
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature
Series Editors
Paul Lumsden
City Centre Campus
MacEwan University
Edmonton, AB, Canada
Marco Katz Montiel
Facultad de Letras
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Santiago, RM - Santiago, Chile
This leading-edge series joins two disciplines in an exploration of how
music and literature confront each other as dissonant antagonists while
also functioning as consonant companions. By establishing a critical con-
nection between literature and music, this series highlights the interaction
between what we read and hear. Investigating the influence music has on
narrative through history, theory, culture, or global perspectives provides
a concrete framework for a seemingly abstract arena. Titles in the series,
both monographs and edited volumes, explore musical encounters in nov-
els and poetry, considerations of the ways in which narratives appropriate
musical structures, examinations of musical form and function, and studies
of interactions with sound.
Editorial Advisory Board
Frances R. Aparicio, Northwestern University, US
Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, US
Barbara Brinson Curiel, Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies,
Humboldt State University, US
Gary Burns, Northern Illinois University, US
Peter Dayan, Word and Music Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Shuhei Hosokawa, International Research Center for Japanese
Studies, Japan
Javier F. León, Latin American Music Center of the Jacobs School of
Music, Indiana University, US
Marilyn G. Miller, Tulane University, US
Robin Moore, University of Texas at Austin, US
Nduka Otiono, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada
Gerry Smyth, Liverpool John Moores University, England
Jesús Tejada, Universitat de València, Spain
Alejandro Ulloa Sanmiguel, Universidad del Valle, Colombia
Bart Eeckhout • Lisa Goldfarb
The Poetic Music of
Wallace Stevens
Bart Eeckhout Lisa Goldfarb
Department of Literature Gallatin School
University of Antwerp New York University
Antwerp, Belgium New York, NY, USA
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature
ISBN 978-3-031-07031-0 ISBN 978-3-031-07032-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07032-7
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A
cknowledgments
So many years of collaborative work and intellectual exchange come
together in this book that we hesitate to draw up a list of institutional and
individual names to express our gratitude, as the list is bound to be
incomplete.
Over the years in which we prepared different components of our book,
we enjoyed the institutional support of our respective employers, the
Gallatin School of New York University (Lisa) and the University of
Antwerp (Bart). During the academic year 2016–2017, Bart was able to
plot and draft some of his contributions through a Residential Fellowship
of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and
Social Sciences, combined with a sabbatical fellowship of the Flemish
Research Council (FWO). Lisa received a Gallatin Faculty Research
Fellowship 2017–2019, which enabled her to work on the book proposal
and begin the research for some of her contributions, and a fellowship
from the NYU Center for the Humanities during the academic year
2020–2021 to work on her own chapters. We were also given the oppor-
tunity to try out early versions of our chapters at conferences and other
academic gatherings: a conference entitled “Melodies and Modernisms”
at Ghent University in 2007 (Bart); an annual symposium of the Flemish
Association for Literary Theory (VAL), entitled “Music in Literature—
Literature in Music,” at the Free University of Brussels in 2016 (Bart); a
panel on Stevens and music at the Modern Language Association’s annual
convention in New York in 2018 (Lisa and Bart); and two meetings of the
NYU Center for the Humanities, which hosted workshops first on the
birdsong chapter and then our introduction (Lisa).
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our deepest thanks always go to our families and friends for the pride
they have in our work, and the good cheer that they always provide. A
special thanks from both of us to George Burns, who read every chapter
in advance of the final preparation of the manuscript.
For more than a decade now, we have both been active as officers of
The Wallace Stevens Society and editors of both The Wallace Stevens
Journal and various volumes on the poet edited either for the Journal or
for separate publishers. These activities have allowed us to benefit con-
stantly from the inspiration and companionship offered by many col-
leagues who make the academic study of Stevens such a sophisticated,
witty, generous, and warm environment. We can do no more than honor
our longtime partners here through an alphabetical list of names: Charles
Altieri, Massimo Bacigalupo, Dennis Barone, Milton J. Bates, Jacqueline
Vaught Brogan, Stephanie Burt, Robert Buttel, Angus Cleghorn, Bonnie
Costello, Alan Filreis, Zachary Finch, James Finnegan, Florian Gargaillo,
Natalie Gerber, Thomas Gould, Gül Bilge Han, Anna Jamieson, Daniel
Jean, Lee M. Jenkins, George S. Lensing, James Longenbach, Glen
MacLeod, Rachel Malkin, Maureen N. McLane, the late J. Hillis Miller,
Axel Nesme, Marjorie Perloff, Justin Quinn, Edward Ragg, Irene Ramalho
Santos, Jahan Ramazani, Patrick Redding, Joan Richardson, Alexis Serio,
John N. Serio, Tony Sharpe, Laura Slatkin, Lisa M. Steinman, Juliette
Utard, Helen Vendler, and Krzysztof Ziarek.
At Palgrave Macmillan, we would like to thank Allie Troyanos (Senior
Editor), with whom we first discussed our project, and Vinoth Kuppan
(Project Coordinator), who has helped move the book to completion.
Additional thanks go to Heather Dubnick (independent editorial ser-
vices), who prepared our index.
We would like to thank all editors and publishers who provided invalu-
able input on and gave permission to reprint components of this book in
earlier stages of its development. A much briefer, preliminary version of
Chap. 3 appeared as “Wallace Stevens’s Modernist Melodies” in Texas
Studies in Literature and Language (vol. 55, no. 1, Spring 2013,
pp. 53–71). Portions of our introduction and of Chaps. 5 and 6 appeared
as “‘In, on, or about the Words’: The Latent Music of Stevens’s Poetry”
and “Stevens and Stravinsky: Shared Aspects of a Musical Poetics” in a
special issue, “Stevens into Music,” that we guest-edited for The Wallace
Stevens Journal (vol. 43, no. 2, Fall 2019, pp. 191–213 and 214–33). A
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
succinct version of Chap. 7 was first published as “‘Things as they are /
Are changed upon the blue guitar’: Learning from Ned Rorem’s Last
Poems of Wallace Stevens” in a thematic issue, “Literature and Music,”
guest-edited by Inge Arteel and Bruno Forment for Cahier voor
Literatuurwetenschap (vol. 10, 2018, pp. 65–76).
Finally, the authors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following
for permission to reproduce copyright material.
Stevens, Wallace. “Of Modern Poetry,” copyright © 1923, 1951, 1954
by Wallace Stevens; “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” copyright © 1937
by Wallace Stevens; “The Plain Sense of Things,” copyright © 1952 by
Wallace Stevens; “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” copyright © 1942
by Wallace Stevens; “Credences of Summer,” copyright © 1954 by Wallace
Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens; “Poetry Is a
Destructive Force,” copyright © 1942 by Wallace Stevens, copyright
renewed 1970 by Holly Stevens; “The Creations of Sound,” copyright ©
1947 by Wallace Stevens; “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing
Itself,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “Esthétique du Mal,”
“Autumn Refrain,” “Vacancy in the Park,” “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,”
“Long and Sluggish Lines,” “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of
Fine Ideas,” “A Primitive Like an Orb,” “Anglais Mort à Florence,”
“Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial,” and “Two Tales of Liadoff” from
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace
Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed
1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint
of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC, and by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.
Stevens, Wallace. “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” and
“Effects of Analogy” from THE NECESSARY ANGEL: ESSAYS ON
REALITY AND THE IMAGINATION by Wallace Stevens, copyright ©
1942, 1944, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Used by per-
mission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing
Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Stevens, Wallace. Excerpt(s) from THE LETTERS OF WALLACE
STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens, copyright © 1966
by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of
the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC. All rights reserved.
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Stevens, Wallace. “Of Mere Being,” copyright © 1967, 1969, 1971 by
Holly Stevens; “The Dove in Spring,” “The Irrational Element in Poetry,”
“Poetry and Meaning,” and “Adagia” from OPUS POSTHUMOUS by
Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1957 by Elsie Stevens and Holly Stevens.
Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights
reserved.
Praise for The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens
“Almost all talk about musicality in poetry concentrates on specific aural effects.
But surely there are possible questions about ways that melody, tone, pacing, and
harmonic structure can illuminate the relationship between the two arts. Then
there are questions about how a poet engages the ideas of musicians, especially a
poet like Wallace Stevens intensely concerned to escape Romantic emotion for
Modernism’s hard-edged constructions. This book heroically both engages these
questions and shapes possible ways of answering them. I think Bart Eeckhout and
Lisa Goldfarb’s The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens is an instant critical classic
because of the depth of its exposition, its loving and often stunning attention to
particular Stevens poems, and its combination of careful pedagogical presentation
with totally engaging flights of critical imagination liberated by the sharpness of its
framing questions.”
—Charles Altieri, Stageberg Professor of English,
University of California, Berkeley, USA
“There have been numbers of case studies and theoretical frameworks offered by
literary critics and art historians that have enriched the way exchanges between the
visual and literary arts are now treated, but until recently there has been far less
work done on the relationship between music and poetry. The Poetic Music of
Wallace Stevens admirably fills this gap. Erudite, lucid, and nuanced, this volume is
not simply six case studies in alternating voices, but a polyphonic rethinking of an
undertheorized area of study that offers multiple ways of approaching poetic musi-
cality and of considering exchanges between poetic and musical practices. Although
more than one hand was involved in writing The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens, it
seems apt to quote the following lines from Marianne Moore: “To explain grace
requires / a curious hand.” Eeckhout’s and Goldfarb’s curiosity is everywhere on
display in this book. Their rigorous but open-minded study is a treasure.”
—Lisa M. Steinman, Kenan Professor of English
and Humanities, Reed College, USA