Cubist Poetics: Wallace Stevens and Painting

Year 2002, Issue: 16, 17 - 30, 01.10.2002

Scott Pound

Abstract

Commenting on his own work and that of his contemporaries in the teens and early twenties, William Carlos Williams said "I think it was the French painters rather than the writers who influenced us and their influence was great. They created an atmosphere of release, color release, release from stereotyped forms, trite subjects" qtd. in Buttel 154 . Stereotyped forms, trite subjects; chiaroscuro, sentimentality? With regard to the development of the American avant-garde in poetry, it would seem that the painters, to paraphrase what Freud said about "the writers," were there first. Stevens likewise trumpeted the French influence and its usefulness as a tool for reorienting art. "There seems to exist a corpus of remarks in respect to painting," writes Stevens, "which are as significant to poets as they are to painters."1 Indeed, the influence of painting on Stevens and his contemporaries has never really been questioned. But how are we to discuss Stevens’ own peculiar and complex relation to painting?

References

• Babbitt, Irving. The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910.
• Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1976.
• Buttel, Robert. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967.
• MacLeod, Glen. Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.
• Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.
• Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage, 1990.
• ———. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966.
• ———. The Necessary Angel. New York: Vintage, 1942.
• ———. Opus Posthumous. Ed. Milton J. Bates. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage, 1989.
• Vendler, Helen. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986