Carnivalesque Imagery in Stevens’ “THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM”

In a letter to William Rose Benet in 1933, Wallace Stevens explained the reason why he considered “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” his personal favorite in Harmonium (1923) because the poem “wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry” (Letters 263). Stevens’ explanation concerns both the realistic touch and esthetic accomplishment of the poem. Noticeably, the word “gaudy” refers to a celebratory festival or feast. Coincidentally, this poem is teeming with carnivalesque imagery that seeks to cultivate, in Bakhtin’s words, “a deeper understanding of reality” (208), and, not surprisingly, Stevens also noted that “the consciousness of reality” was crucial to the understanding of this poem (Letters 500). A keen sense of reality features strikingly in Bakhtin’s carnivalesque theory and Stevens’ perception of the poem, which enables a carnivalesque reading of the poem to be an interesting way of exploring Stevens’ ideas concerning the reality of being. In the first stanza, the poet presents a typical party scene that can be considered a modern carnival. Stevens had “penchants for indulgence in food, drink, and cigars” (Bloom 16), and naturally the things he enjoyed enormously in life were consciously chosen as significant party imagery as follows: