The Place of the Neighbor in Harmonium

Abstract

The Place of the Neighbor in Harmonium Julia Houser, Nora Pehrson, and Griffin Shoglow-Rubenstein IN A 1906 JOURNAL entry, the twenty-six-year-old Wallace Stevens expressed a sentiment that would go on to become something of a commonplace in his reception both as a poet and as a literary personality: “I detest ‘company’” (L 89). But if the young Stevens’s asociality here sounds absolute, the scare quotes also indicate a possible interest in alternative notions of what company could be. Must it be human? Some fifty years later, Stevens would attest to his enduring ambivalence about his fellow humans in a letter to Robert Pack in which he reported having long considered making humanness the fourth essential feature of modern poetry: “For a long time, I have thought of adding other sections to the NOTES [i.e., ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’] and one in particular: It Must Be Human. But I think that it would be wrong not to leave well enough alone” (L 863–64). The attraction of the human was almost enough to make it as important as the other three criteria he had already elaborated: abstraction, change, and giving pleasure. But Stevens ultimately chose to leave it out. We would be mistaken, however, to view this demotion or diminution of the human as tantamount to a total rejection of sociality. Although Stevens’s poetry has often been read as a “Place of the Solitaires”—to borrow the title of a poem from Harmonium—his first volume in fact displays a multifaceted attitude toward the possibilities and prospects of intersubjective connection. From images and sounds to objects and creatures, allegories and ideas to environments and worlds, Stevens produces a vibrant ecology in which entities human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, real and fictive commune. That communion isn’t always harmonious. “Earthy Anecdote,” the collection’s opening poem, stages a confrontation between the “bristl[ing]” antagonism of the firecat and the avoidant “swerv[ing]” of the bucks (CPP 3). The bucks continually turn this way and that, attempting to shake the firecat off, but it anticipates their reactions, coercing them into an exhausting game of evasions. A mood of hostility dominates the episode; but at the same time, a sense of cohesion and regularity emerges from the predictability of the interaction between these apparent opponents. What appears to be a confrontation turns out to be cooperative as well, taking on the aspect of a hypnotic choreography. The consistency and interdependence [End Page 230] of the animals’ movements is reflected in the poem’s neatness and organization at the level of the line. “Every time” the bucks go clattering across Oklahoma, they get diverted by the sight of the firecat bristling in their path, and the lines themselves repeatedly stop short and change course in anticipation of prepositions and conjunctions: Wherever they went,They went clattering,Until they swervedIn a swift, circular lineTo the right,Because of the firecat. (CPP 3) In the stanza that follows, Stevens recycles these last four lines, modifying only two words, to capture the symmetry and potentially infinite iterability of the bucks’ maneuvers: Or until they swervedIn a swift, circular lineTo the left,Because of the firecat. (CPP 3) Though the firecat interferes with the bucks’ activity, the poem’s rhythm and affect show this moment of discord to belong to an encompassing, cohesive whole. In the poem’s final two-line stanza, it is almost as if a spell has been broken: “Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes / And slept” (CPP 3). The spirit of perverse collaboration, of tense partnership, that has energized the poem until this point has subsided. It is also the case, though, that the solitariness and self-satisfaction of the firecat does not necessarily free it from the larger cycle; the firecat’s isolation remains poised between retreat from and reentry into this briefly constituted social world. Stevens describes the episode as an “anecdote,” and indeed the genre of the anecdote occupies a conspicuous position in Harmonium, furnishing several poems with their titles—“Anecdote of Men by the Thousand,” “Anecdote of Canna,” “Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks,” and “Anecdote...