“Blackbirds and Robins: the ‘America’ of Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson”

1Teaching American poetry in France provokes the question what is so “American” about it ? What exactly is this expatriated national tradition in European university curricula ? This question is particularly charged for me as an American teacher, as I find myself trying to tie trends together which, back home, might be left untied or unsaid-or even unperceived. While in American classrooms, the defining of the “American tradition” tends to focus on the myriad – and usually European-influences of particular authors and their “reworking” of these influences into a native pastiche, here in France, the reverse tendency seems operative, the onus to explain to French students what is so American-so particular-about this relatively recent literature.

2This paper takes Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens – two canonical American poets – as an example of how teaching American culture in France may establish a sense of context that is not apparent on the native soil. Much of American criticism currently underscores the Romantic, as well as Puritan, influences on the former while insisting, as always, on the French influences (i. e. Valéry, Mallarmé, Apollinaire) on the latter-overlooking any sense of commonality between the two poets. Critics seem absolutely adamant in fixing Stevens as a “European” poet, almost as if the old embarrassment with the unlettered, naive American continues, and this “intellectual aesthete”, as Stevens is called, honors the nation by being exceptionally un-American. It is a strange phenomenon, however, to symbolically expatriate a man whose life was almost as provincial as Dickinson’s, and whose poems revel in images of state boundaries, proposing, in the rendering, a parallel metaphor between nation-building and poetry-making. The dashing “firecat” in Oklahoma, the “barque of phosphor” in Florida and the “jar in Tennessee” equally refer, in Stevens’ poetics, to the power to take “dominion everywhere” – en fin, not such an un-American view.

3In presenting Stevens and Dickinson as “Americans” to a French audience, the most apparent link is, however, not the sense of domination, but their inheritance of a Puritan intellectual framework in which “mastery” is uncomfortably a problem. The question of positioning the “I” in relation with a “transcendent” is the primary enterprise for both poets. Dickinson’s spiritual quest to create an Antinomian link with God – the bridesgroom who awaits her-can be seen as analogous to Stevens’ quest to position the transcendent as a human creation, achieved through the use of the imagination. In effect, each poet is battling within the same theological system : Dickinson engages in the Puritan dilemma by stressing her own voice and her own personal connection to the transcendent, her own emotional relationship to the natural elements of her native Amherst : the birds, the flowers, the leaves, the bees. Stevens dialogues with this theological tradition by insisting on our willed choice “to play/The imagined pine, the imagined jay”. We note that in the American Puritan literature of the colonial period, much debate was over which aspect of the human being links us to the divine, the heart or the mind, the senses or the intellect (see “Cotton”, “Winthrop”, “Hooker”, “Edwards”). Dickinson and Stevens pose the same theological question implicitly, by answering, in Dickinson’s case, with sensation and emotion, and in Stevens case, with intellect and reason. In consensus with all the American Puritans, however, each gives precedence to “human will”, the choice to choose paradise-the land of poetry-in postlapsarian America. Indeed, both poets, despite a despondent tone in certain poems, belie, over and over again, a buoyant belief in the human capacity to experience and express joy – an echo, over all, of a general American faith in self-creation, whether to be achieved through the heart or mind, through faith or works.

4Moreover, the two poets share a strikingly similar poetics, each concerned with the creation of voice, the voice as a metaphysical experience, which subsequently becomes the voice of American literature. For both Stevens and Dickinson, being a poet is a matter of being “in tune” with a greater sound, although, as to be expected, each poet frames this relationship differently. Dickinson assumes the transcendent is the great sound, to which she has access, with her “Conscious Ear” (#733)1. Her confidence is that she can express and harmonize with this tune : “I will keep singing ! Birds will pass me/On their way to Yellower Clime –/Each – with a Robin’s expectation –/I with my Redbreast –/And my rhymes.” Indeed, in this poem, her confidence goes to the brink of where Stevens’ poetry takes off : “Late – when I take my place in summer –/But – I shall bring a fuller tune – /Vespers – are sweeter than Matins – Signor/Morning – only the seed of Noon” (#250). Stevens emphasizes this confidence to the extreme, protesting the idea of an original transcendent sound, before human sound, in poems such as “The Idea of Order at Key West” and “The Man with the Blue Guitar”. For Stevens, the poet sings “beyond the genius of the sea” (italics mine) : “It was she and not the sea we heard2.”

5Differences aside, it is significant that for both poets it is in the voice that the transcendent transpires – a miracle in any event, whether it arises through the love of witnessing God, as for Dickinson, or because of “the ears that made the blowing hymns they heard” (“Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”) as in Stevens’ case. Stevens is no less metaphysical or religious than Dickinson. Even as he makes the “modernist” proposition that the ears make the sound they hear-rather than, as Dickinson would have it, “admitting” an external greater sound (#733) – Stevens finishes his rational exegesis by pondering, in stunned poetic wonder, where this ability to create sound came from : what originates this sensation of hearing and voicing ? Yes, his narrator concludes in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”, “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw/Or heard or felt came not but from myself ;/And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

6The two poets’ contrasting, yet similar, emphasis on sound as the vehicle-or creator-of truth is paralleled by their distinctive use of bird imagery, another indication that they work within the same religious frame – albeit with unique revisions – and do so through particularly “American” imagery. For both poets, the “bird” – and a common bird at that – links humans to the transcendent, and bears, in its fleeting poetic presence, the trace of a mysterious realm beyond the visible “undulations”. Dickinson’s poetry abounds with sweet feminine “robins” as Stevens’ abounds with ruffled “cocks”. For Dickinson, the bird is clearly the poet’s pal – “we share the Crumb” (#579). Establishing a sense of intimacy, she writes : “I have a Bird in spring/Which for myself doth sing” (#5). The poet and the bird are in harmony with a sense of God as responsive, the father of sound himself. When the bird leaves her, she does not “repine”, because she knows the bird has flown “beyond the sea” to bring a new melody for her. Beyond the sea, for Dickinson, is the realm of God, and the bird is her winged angel connecting her, through sound, to this “beyond”. Dickinson’s relationship with the “bird” alternates between thankfulness and competition (“Summer for thee, grant I may be… Thy music still, when Whippoorwill/And Oriole – are done !” [#31]). She expresses sorrow, then, if the voice does not sing, if the bird is dead (#1102).

7Stevens casts “the bird” in more complicated poses, shifting its identity, fluffing its wings, revealing coppery keen claws or brilliant panache, as he turns the relation between the “I” and the “transcendent” between his hands. The “thirteen ways to see a blackbird” become, for Stevens, thirteen ways of experiencing the sensation or desire for mystery, the various ways the human links her or himself to transcendence beyond death, or to death itself. While for Dickinson, who similarly sees the bird as a frontier between the human and death (see poem #221, where the blackbirds sing before death), the bird is always distinctly other, for Stevens, the bird can be the poet, or it can be the act of poetry, or even death itself. At times, for example, the poet makes the bird in his own image : the “cock” awaiting his “slipper green queen” in “Depression before Spring” is the poet awaiting inspiration, the “rou-cou to his ki-ki-ri-ki”. Similarly, in “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”, the red bird that “flies across the golden floor” is “a red bird that seeks out his choir”. To stress that this bird is identical to the poet seeking his voice, the narrator adds : “Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing ?” At other times, the birds are distinct from the poet, just as in Dickinson’s poems ; they are his friends, pursuing the same “sweet questionings” (“Sunday Morning”). The bird though can turn vicious and strange, as it does in stanzas IV, XI, and XIII of “Thirteen Ways to See a Blackbird”. It becomes creepy not because of what it is, but of what it suggests : its shadow, its innuendo seems to refer to something impenetrable and dark. The “ambiguous undulations” of the bird are indicative of Stevens’ own suspect relation to the transcendent. While Dickinson is sure of the bird – as she is sure of the beyond – Stevens rests, after each pose, in suspension with watchful eyes, as if he, like the pigeons, is going “downward to darkness, on extended wings” (“Sunday Morning”). The bird marks the edge of each circle, and each stanza as the fourth dimension, the blind spot.

8The choice of both poets to use common birds to voice the issue of “sound” is echoed in their use of their own sound, and both choices evoke a singularly American identity. Many, although by no means all, of Stevens’ poems have the same sing-song lullaby quality that characterizes Dickinson’s poetry. Compare Stevens’ “I sang a canto in a canton, Cunning-coo, O, cuckoo cock” (“Country Woods”) to Dickinson’s upbeat “Put up my lute ! What of – my Music !” (#261). The childlike skip can be heard in both. The freedom to adopt a child’s singsong voice while proclaiming serious truths seems to be the freedom of American writers to assert their own original orality, defiant of the ancient written tradition of Europe. As Stevens asserts : “Remus blow your horn !/I’m ploughing on Sunday/Ploughing North America. Blow your horn ! /Tum-titum, Ti-tum-tum-tum !” (“Ploughing on Sunday”). The poet can, like Robert Frost after him, and Dickinson before him, use the common ground of America — and the common voice of the yeoman — to “blow his horn” “I am a yeoman”, Stevens asserts in another poem, distinguishing himself from “the fops of fancy” who leave “memorabilia” “in their poems”. As he puts it, “I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs/No silvery-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits”. This naive oral tone is deemed superior as it brings the poet to closer proximity to the “tree that bears a semblance to the thing I have in mind”, the proverbial tree of knowledge. More significantly, it is also a means to recreate the child’s position before the divine, the American Puritan paradox of proud humility while poised on the hill that all are watching — and listening to. As Dickinson writes, “The Child’s faith is new/Whole-like his principle” (#315), and so is the nation.

9The myth of America is the majestic and unspoken background for both poets, all the more present and potent because it manifests itself in few markers. America is powerfully evoked-and yet not named – in the repeated images of shores and frontiers, in which the poet asserts her presence – her I – between these borders. Compare Stevens “The world washed in his imagination/The world was a shore... To which his imagination returned” (“The Man with the Blue Guitar”) to Dickinson’s similar enthusiasm for a pristine shore in the following poem :

On this wondrous sea
Sailing silently,
Ho ! Pilot, ho !

Knowest thou the shore
Where no breakers road –
Where the storm is o’er ?

In the peaceful west
Many the sails rest –
The anchors fast –
Thither ! pilot thee –
Land ho ! Eternity !
Ashore at last !
(#4)

10While the religious meaning here and in Stevens’ poetry differs, what is significant is the similar sensation the poets give of a new land, of a pioneer setting out to sail, exuberant in the possibility to “retrim” the “masts” of the ship and shoot “exultant on !” (#30) with the sense of the shore extended deliciously beyond reach. In “Sunday Morning”, Stevens questions whether paradise has “rivers like own own that seek for seas/They never find, the same receding shores/That never touch with inarticulate pang”. Similarly, Dickinson questions : “So set its Sun in Thee/What Day be dark to me – /What Distance – far – /So I the Ships may see/That touch – how seldomly – Thy Shore ?” The poems, whatever their intent, are sweet with the mood of a fresh, Edenic America, a promised land that, of all lands, comes closest to reaching for the ever-receding shore.

11It is not to be forgotten that the American sea bewilders Stevens in a way distinct from Dickinson, marking a new chapter in the evolution of an American poetics. Stevens takes issue with the Puritan tradition in which he was raised, rearranging, through his modernist sensibility, the relationship of the singer to the “shore”, even introducing the Spanish “Ramon Fernandez” in “Key West” to share the eternal questions of the sea. For him, the singer or poet is “tired of the salty harbours” and is “eager for the brine and bellowing/Of the high interiors of the sea” (The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage). She wants more than the edge of the sea, she wants the sea itself – the “centre of sea-green pomp”. She “would have purple stuff upon her arms” — and accomplishes her mission by creating her own “circle of her traverse of the sea”, her own poem or vision, her own compass extending to the clouds.

12The following remarkably similar poems bears out Stevens’ departure from Dickinson :

Dickinson :

Whether my bark went down at sea –
Whether she met with gales –
Whether to isles enchanted
She bent her docile sails –

By what mystic mooring
She is held today –
This is the errand of the eye
Out upon the Bay.
(#52)

Stevens :

Barque of phosphor
On the palmy bech,

Move outward into heaven
Into the alabasters
And night blues.
Foam and cloud are one.
Sultry moon-monsters
Are dissolving.

Fill your black hull
With white moonlight.

There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.

(Fabliau of Florida)

13In Dickinson’s poem, the uncharted voyage of the ship – or the soul – inspires wonder ; the sails bend in deference to the greater mystery, and the eye’s task is to admire the mystery of the arbitrary mooring. Stevens’ boat is more masculine in its self-assertion : it will move outward into heaven and fill itself with moonlight, not wait for moonlight to come to it. In this poem, as in others, the foam and clouds are one ; if a heavenly reality exists – always a question – it is equal to if not created by the clouds themselves, i. e by our own impressions (clouds being a metaphor for human sensibility throughout Stevens’ opus). The American landscape – the Puritan tradition – has been once again rearranged, with a rebellious son denouncing the power of the law-decreeing father, the heavens that have so decided, the God who causes us to question our own election. And yet one may permit an incidental thought : didn’t Stevens allow his father to choose his direction towards a legal profession, after he himself voiced, following his Harvard graduation, a desire to live as a writer in Paris ? The rebellion remains abstract, after-hours, directed towards issues of transcendence.

14Nevertheless the alternating sense of rebellion and submission does not figure abstractly in the poetry ; the transcendent is personified in Stevens’ poems as an ever-desired “She”, the “leaf-green” feme, in the same way that for Dickinson, the transcendent is established as an authoritative and romantic “He”. Indeed, the most obvious comparison between Dickinson and Stevens is that they address their poems to the opposite sex, each seeing in the gender of choice all the virtues (or vices) of transcendence and poetry. For Stevens, the woman is a muse : it is she who sings, who like the sweet Susanna in “Peter Quince at the Clavier” inspires elders to feel “the basses of their beings throb/In witching chords”. For Dickinson, “He” inspires poetry by his absence : he reveals himself only in parts-in his royal feet, his Sovereign’s face, His side. A father figure for Dickinson, a mother figure for Stevens ? It seems true that each poet posits the power of their muse as that of a parent, one who can either allow entrance to the domain of poetry, or deny it with forbidding silence. Dickinson wonders, for example, if the gentleman in “the White Robe” will open the door or forbid it to her (#107). Stevens questions whether the mother is generous with her breast, accusing her in poem after poem of having the ambivalent power to give or deny nurture : he berates his “Timeless mother” asking “How is it that your aspic nipples/For once vent honey ?” (In the “Carolinas”) as well as the mother who is stone in “The Man with the Blue Guitar”, the mother who does NOT catch men as they fall. The horrific mother is, however, all the more sublime for her association with death. The lyric narrator actually wants his muse to wear on her pale head, “a band entwining, set with fatal stones” (“To the One of Fictive Music”). It is this deathly female crown that represents for Stevens “the imagination that we spurned and crave”. This association between female, death and creativity is explicit in “Sunday Morning” : “Death is the mother of beauty, hence from her/Alone shall come fulfilment to our dreams… She causes boys to pile new plums and pears/On disregarded plate.” (“Sunday Morning”).

15The disdainful mother – the mother of death – inspires, by her own coldness, her sons to pile up plums, to write their ditties, in the same way that the deathly unseen bridgegroom inspires the white bride of Amherst to create her lauds to heaven. Positing themselves as naive children, prostrate or rebellious before a greater transcendence – mother or father, God or sea – the two American poets assert their own vital sounds and independence, echoing across America, towards the shores of the Western sun.

16The Western sun : how often does that image recur in Dickinson’s and Stevens’ poetry ! Followed closely – and inevitably – by the image of “Purple”. For Stevens in “Tea in the Palaz of Hoon”, the purple figure is a poet-Christ descending to earth to be a man, to be himself : “Not less in purple I descended/The western day through what you called the Loneliest air, not less was I myself.” For Dickinson, the purple figure is the poetess excited to be a queen, despite her simplicity and her hometown warble : “the Housewife in the Evening West” drops a “Purple Ravelling” (#219). Now, are these two speakers-speaking in different centuries to their Male Muse and Female Muse, respectively-speaking… to each other ? Is it a coincidence that each wears purple, regal as an annointed king or queen, or bishop, that each is awed by the setting sun, by the shadow of Death, that “Ethereal Blow” of “full music” (#315) – but not so awed as to not sing ? These two poets echo each other, each so alone in their poetic mission, alone on the shores of the American tradition, alone in their metaphysical questionings, in their flights of fancy, their longing for “A fairer House than Prose”. Perhaps Stevens, who feared that even the imaginary would become calcified and part of the real, just like the ivy becomes part of the stone, just as the land of citrons is, in the hands of sailors, redescribed in “dark-coloured words” (“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”), perhaps this questioning poet could have used a bit more of Dickinson’s optimism that the birds do continue to sing beyond themselves-that “seem” is truly the “finale” of be ? Could Stevens, this “Man with the Blue Guitar”, reluctant to sing things as they are, have benefited from the irony of Dickinson’s quip, “Touch lightly Nature’s sweet Guitar/Unless thou know’st the Tune” (1389) – and responded in kind ? Could these two similar and yet dissimilar birds of fancy have sung to each other ?

17In fact, did they ?