WALLACE STEVENS: Collected Poetry and Prose.<i> By Wallace Stevens</i> .<i> Library of America: 1034 pp., $35</i>

Literary anecdotes abound with traded rhetorical punches; a celebrated exchange in American literature is that between Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, the latter observing (as he had at the opening of his wonderful story “The Rich Boy”) that the very rich are different from us, and Hemingway presumably winning the two-blow bout by his debunking, “Yes, they have more money.” They were both right, but perhaps the reader has to work through the truth of the punch line to emerge with his or her own “And yet, and yet. . . .”

In Key West in February 1940, Wallace Stevens reportedly said to Robert Frost, whom he had first met there five years previously, “Your trouble, Robert, is that you write poems about--things.” Frost replied, “Your trouble, Wallace, is that your poems are about bric-a-brac.”

The two great poets were flinging at each other the most reductive critical cliches about their respective bodies of work, representing such instructively different relations between poetic work and literary career. Certainly a poem by Frost allows for its being said (however, ultimately, mistakenly) to be “about” something. This is seldom the case with all but Stevens’ earlier poetry, and even there his titles are enigmas. (In this only he is perhaps more like Emily Dickinson, and Frost more like Whitman.)

Frost had a constituency including many more or less superficial readers of poetry who thought of him as mending and tending a wall of tradition and American values against the assaults of modernism, complexity and the intellectual groundswell under it. Stevens had a smaller readership, consisting more of good poets and, eventually, some extremely perceptive critics. (Until both poets encountered critics worthy of them, Stevens was thought of as difficult and trivial and Frost easy and profound.) Frost, who taught somewhat informally in New England colleges, was a literary eminence. Stevens, who after 15 post-Harvard years as a lawyer in New York spent most of his life as an executive of an insurance company in Hartford (his specialty was surety and fidelity bonding), was never much of a public figure. Frost was misconstrued during most of his life as writing direct unproblematic poetry, full of the clarity of exposition and what William Carlos Williams once scornfully referred to as “the cultivated patter of iambic pentameter” and defying modernist experimentalism. Stevens was long misread as being some kind of Frenchified aesthetic dandy, full of glitter and high-toned joking and guarded Caribbean exoticism.

By the early 1950s, powerful and subtle readings of both poets by literary scholars had begun to correct these views, but the epithets exchanged in the anecdotal bout in Florida were less brickbats than the loud but painless slapsticks of what each understood to be reviewers’ stereotypes. (This sharply contrasts with the occasion four years previously in Key West when Stevens had broken his writing hand on the jaw of Ernest Hemingway in a drunken brawl, the point of which now seems impossible to establish.)

Stevens, when more serious, could characterize what he felt lacking in the work of another major poet (probably Eliot) as poems that “do not make the visible a little hard / To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind / On peculiar horns . . .” which is quite a different matter. Just so could W.H. Auden in his celebrated poem “In Praise of Limestone” (1948) express his anxiety about Stevens’ kind of poetry by invoking: “The poet, admired for his earnest habit of calling / The sun the sun . . . [with reference to the opening section of Stevens’ remarkable and central “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”] . . . his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy / By these marble statues which so obvious doubt / His antimythological myth . . . .” It is certainly true that for Stevens, statues, public, immovable, set up in a mood of unquestioning veneration--for example “The great statue of the General Du Puy” in part II of “Notes”--negatively invoke what Emerson in “The Poet” calls “The quality of the imagination to flow, and not to freeze.”

Unlike Frost in his earlier meditative eclogues, Stevens has no interest in inventing people through their individual ways of addressing each other. His personages, rather, are remarkable but enigmatic symbolic forms, personifications of conditions and states of consciousness and relations of thoughts and feelings and perceptions. They are not like Truth, Freedom, Beauty, Power, Nobility, but the lady in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” or his complex “Snow Man,” at once subject and object of consciousness, or his “Canon Aspirin”--these are more like places than like fictional characters.

To this degree, Frost is like a novelist, Stevens like a narrator of romance such as Spenser or Hawthorne. And even the actual places in his poetry become fictive, or at least co-exist with their imagined counterparts. Oley in Pennsylvania and Haddam in Connecticut seem to be exotic realms if you haven’t heard of them--Stevens never helps the reader by glossing allusions--or his personified Mount Chocorua giving implicit revisionary answer to Emerson’s Monadnoc, or his Connecticut River becoming in “The River of Rivers in Connecticut” something more than that, a river “that flows nowhere, like a sea.”

“It’s a complex fate being an American,” wrote Henry James in a letter, “and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.” Frost, albeit that his first two books were originally published in England, writes as if he had escaped that fate. Stevens never traveled to Europe at all but, in his own words, “he had studied the nostalgias,” and we feel always in his poetry the real presence of otherwise unreal imagined places and things, as in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”:

Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven

Before and after one arrives or, say,

Bergamo on a postcard, Rome after dark,

Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes

Or Paris in conversation at a cafe.

This endlessly elaborating poem

Displays the theory of poetry,

As the life of poetry. A more severe,

More harassing master would extemporize

Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory

Of poetry is the theory of life,

As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,

In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,

The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.

****

Even Harold Bloom, the critic who for the last half-century has most eloquently admired it, admitted that, once the many mistaken readings and constructions of Stevens’ poetry have been dealt with, “How many qualifications can you get in a single poem and still have a poem? Do we not get enough of these interjections that Stevens himself describes as ‘a few words, an and yet, and yet and yet--’?”

And yet: the corpus of Stevens’ poems--he had wanted to call it “The Whole of Harmonium”--communicates always the vigor of consideration. Stevens’ formulation of modern poetry as “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice” highlights this matter of process: the “fluent mundo” as he put it elsewhere, so central to all his poetry. In this he again recapitulates. All of this, of course, helps make Stevens’ poetry difficult. Consider part of a line quoted above: “the intricate evasions of as.” The very phrase is pregnant with self-qualification: Is it that the imagination’s work, seen here as a sort of eternal propounding of simile, of “as”-ing, is thereby evading some condition of confrontation, denial, destruction, etc.? And, if so, is this the evasion of a great running-back or the “evasion”--as opposed to legal “avoidance”--so mercilessly pursued by the IRS? Or, given either of these, does it mean what in life or in the poetry of life evades “as,” or the evading that “as” itself accomplishes?

It is in the very process of considering these alternatives that the power of the phrase lies, and in the way that it points beyond reductive assertions about reality. His poems after “Harmonium,” including those which have become relatively popular, like “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “Sunday Morning,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” come more and more to confront the Protean falsifications of our very conceptions of the real and the imagined, to help preserve the freedom of invention from the traps of script written for it by others, to reinvent, from time to time, invention itself.

“Poetry,” he said in an aphorism, “is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.” “Realism is a corruption of reality,” in part acknowledging that isms, as the political theorist George Kateb has observed, become wasms all too soon. Similarly--and perhaps recalling Oscar Wilde--”Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.” Stevens frequently makes poetry the locus of his continuing quest for representations that will suffice, even as the American imagination generally has sought to redeem conceptions of nobility, honor, beauty from the older, European, aristocratic statues of them, as it were. But the matter of the quest points beyond the making of poems. His marvelous long poems, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “Esthetique du Mal,” ’Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “The Auroras of Autumn,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” represent this questing in modes of progression and sequence beyond those of narration. And, as at the conclusion of his meditation on a bowl of pink and white carnations in “The Poems of Our Climate,” certainly this is not the world of bric-a-brac:

There would still remain the never-resting mind,

So that one would want to escape, come back

To what had been so long composed.

The imperfect is our paradise.

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,

Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

****

The Library of America (for whom a good number of writers, myself included, have consulted on particular projects) has brought out, fittingly within a few years of a similar volume of Frost, a canonical collection of Stevens’ poetry and prose. Until now, readers have had to move back and forth between the 1954 “Collected Poems,” the essays in “The Necessary Angel” (1951); the additional poems, plays and some prose gathered in the “Opus Posthumous” volume of 1957 (then corrected and eked out with additional material in 1989), among other volumes. Now all of this material, including a great many uncollected and unpublished poems and a large number of prose writings and a sampling of journals and letters, newly edited from manuscripts is gathered in one book. It is simply invaluable.

The material for this authoritative volume was selected by Stevens’ biographer, Joan Richardson, and Sir Frank Kermode, the distinguished scholar and critic (this reviewer is closely acquainted with both of them). The helpful apparatus includes elaborate textual information, a biographical chronology and occasional notes on the texts themselves.

A word about these: it is the textual policy of the Library of America format not to comment interpretively in the notes (but, indeed, only to gloss terms, foreign words and names not to be found in standard desk dictionaries). And thus a phrase like “presence is Kinder-Scenen” is glossed only as scenes from childhood. It probably invokes the title of Schumann’s set of piano pieces (harder pieces for grown-ups, rather than those in his album for the young). Consequently, this splendid and authoritative volume provides the basis for a much-needed glossorial handbook:

“They will get it straight, some day, at the Sorbonne,” Stevens wrote toward the end of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” Given the baleful influence of the literal Sorbonne on the teaching and critical reading of poetry in America today, this may look like a forlorn hope. Stevens is a poet who requires rereading after rereading, and new discoveries in his work keep interacting with new knowledge we keep acquiring of ourselves and the rest of the world. But for a figurative Sorbonne of poetically wise readership and vivid interpretation in our culture generally, the text of some terribly important poetic “it” has been gotten more than straight in this most valuable volume.