Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium recently turned a hundred. When Knopf published this brashly youthful and original first book of poems in September 1923, the poet himself was hardly youthful, and he was known only to a few modernist cognoscenti from his poems in little magazines such as Poetry, Others, and The Little Review. Nor did Stevens look like a poet. A firebrand on the page, in person Wallace Stevens in 1923 was a portly, clean-shaven, forty-four-year old executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, working hard to support his wife in a comfortable house in Hartford. “I am far from being a genius — and must rely on hard and faithful work,” he had explained to her, referring not to his poetry, in which she had little interest, but to his legal labors with bonds and surety claims. Stevens, the unlikely modernist, had not sprung out of nowhere. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1878, to modest parents, both teachers. His father, from a farming family, had scrabbled a law degree for himself and practiced law, so he was able to send his son to a local private school and then to Harvard, where young Stevens met poets, wrote poetry, and became president of the Harvard Advocate. While knocking around New York City in low-level jobs in journalism and earning a law degree, he began making friends in avant-garde circles, and by 1914 he was getting to know William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. And so began the double life, even more doubled because of his marriage to Elsie Moll, a young woman from Reading who played the piano and sold sheet music at the local department store. Elsie was classically beautiful — her profile appears on the Mercury dime — but she was ill-educated, anti-social, and increasingly reclusive. At home and in the office, Stevens was the dependable, jowly, suited paterfamilias and man of business. In his poetry, he was a wild man. And with the publication of Harmonium, he went head to head with the younger, reigning Modernists, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore. One way to read the whole arc of Stevens’s poetry would be to trace it from the Baroque profusion of Harmonium in 1923 to the austerities of The Rock in 1954, from the Keatsian splendor of “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” (“This luscious and impeccable fruit of life”) and the razzle-dazzle of “Bantams in Pine-Woods” (“Chieftain Iffucan of Axcan in caftan”) to “The Plain Sense of Things”: “After the leaves have fallen, we return/ To a plain sense of things…” And one way to tell that story would be to see it as a Modernist redemption of the pentameter line, a way Stevens found, in a century of adventurous vers libre, to re-engineer the traditional cadence to serve radical and abstract purposes. But that isn’t the story I want to tell. Harmonium, in 1923, already contained those contrary forces, the extravagances and the ascetic refusals, and set them into a dizzying counterpoint. It is true — it would have to be true in a first book — that notes are sounded which will be elaborated and revised in later work. “The Snow Man”’s “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” will reverberate throughout the later books — say, in “Man Carrying Thing” from Transport to Summer (1947), where “We must endure our thoughts all night, until/ The bright obvious stands motionless in cold” ; or in “The Man on the Dump” from Parts of a World (1942): “Where was it we first heard of the truth? The the.” And the hymns of “Forms, flames, and flakes of flames” from Harmonium’s “Nomad Exquisite” will echo in all kinds of later prodigalities and jubilas, like “The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window” in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (Transport to Summer). The fascination of Harmonium, for me, is listening to the new poet testing his enormous acoustic range, adjusting inherited magnificence to a harsh new century. “What manner of building shall we build?” he asks in “Architecture.” “In this house, what manner of utterance shall there be?” Keats echoes through Stevens in ways we don’t