Watchers of this space will remember that, about a month ago, I declined to say who "won" in the contest between William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens — a pair who are always linked in my mind, somehow, maybe as the two "outsider Modernists" whose reputations actually improved after mid-century rather than declining. (Pound sort of belongs in this category, but only sort of.) And of course they were mutual admirers, as well, perhaps realizing that each were doing something for which the other had absolutely no talent. In a 1927 letter to Marianne Moore responding to a request to review WCW for The Dial, Stevens wrote that "[w]hat Columbus discovered is nothing to what Williams is looking for."
Well, without reservations, I'll say that in the 30s Williams beats Stevens hands down. This is largely because the field of American culture in that decade more closely resembled Williams' pre-formed vision of it than it did Stevens', I think. At the risk of generalizing wildly (you know you love it), I'll say that it's sort of a situation where Williams' long-imagined "America," the one the pure products of which go crazy, suddenly has direct reference to something — where the field his poetry has been gesturing toward suddenly fills up with content. (One could say, too, that a similar thing happened with Communism in the 30s: theories of Marx's that had seemed purely intellectual — to Americans, anyway — now seemed to directly address and describe current conditions, in a way that made them all but irresistible.)
In any case, WCW is on fire in the 1930s: the poems in An Early Martyr, Adam and Eve in the City and The Complete Collected Poems are, ironically, invigorated by the symptoms of material devastation that Williams records in them, from the old woman "munching a plum on / the street" (casting back to his own "This is Just to Say," the private domestic moment replaced by a public scene of degradation) to the pitch-perfect dramatic monologue concerning "The Raper from Passenack" to his at-once-Marianne-Moore-ish-and-militant (tough combination!) "The Yachts" to the "rumpled sheet / of brown paper / about the length // and apparent bulk / of a man" that is just symbolic enough to be moving in "The Term" (take that, American Beauty!). Best of all, maybe, is "The Crimson Cyclamen," an eight-page description of a blooming flower that also manages to be a meditation on Williams' own career, the process of poetic thought, the development of American culture in the Depression era, and an elegy for its dedicatee Charles Demuth, all without sacrificing the teensiest bit of grace or specificity. "It's the anarchy of poverty / delights me," Williams admits in "The Poor," but what impresses me most is his intuitive understanding of the structure underlying the anarchy, the distinctly American values and self-understanding that are not lacking in the poor (as Stevens seems to often imagine) but which display themselves more obviously in them, in both their positive and negative aspects, because they are unprotected, naked, left out in the sun. This compassionate humanism — not humanitarianism — is what impresses about Williams, as well as the sophisticated simplicity he invents and masters in order to express it. This attitude is to be preferred to Pound's bullying or Eliot's despair or Stevens' appalled detachment, but it's also better than the earnest but ultimately unconvincing work of other socially commited poets like Muriel Rukeyser (cp. 1938's The Book of the Dead): for her the poor are heroes, martyrs, victims. For Williams they're Americans, and so is he.
Stevens, on the other hand, runs into a twofold problem in the 30s. First, the constant flow of material and cultural amusements which supplied his 1920s poetry ebbs somewhat; thus the astounding catalogue of improbable nouns that filled Harmonium regularizes itself into a stock repertory of suns, moons, birds, books, masks, rabbits and guitars. (It's possible too that this represents a deliberate paring-down of his materials, in order to develop them into a somewhat coherent symbolic system in the manner of Yeats or Blake.) In that sense, then, the area that his poetry seems to be pointing to becomes less crowded, not more, as with Williams. More disastrously, though, the reigning assumption of Stevens' earlier poetry — that of the poet as a detached aesthete negotiating his relationship with the larger, essentially sympathetic culture carefully and almost disinterestedly — starts to fall apart around him. The evidence is rather that Stevens began to feel more and more alien in American culture, and interpreted events such as the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism in Europe as evidence that his early vision was unshared and unshareable. If he had remained happy to play around in his own imagination this would be fine, and if he had meaningfully synthesized his skepticism into his personal artificial vision (as did Eliot) it would be even better; but unfortunately (in my opinion) he makes the disconnect between his sensibility and the state of American political and poetic culture the theme of his poems in Ideas of Order and The Man with the Blue Guitar, rendering them, as a mass, colossally redundant. How many statements of the idea, "The kind of art I make and like seems useless today; I may be a bad person for making and liking this kind of art; but maybe if I just keep making the kind of art I make and like it will seem useful some day again" do we need from one poet? (This is a major component of at least 14 of Stevens' published poems from this period: "A Fading of the Sun," "Evening Without Angels," "The Reader," many sections of "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery," "The American Sublime," "Mozart, 1935," "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz," "Dance of the Macabre Mice," "Anglais Mort à Florence," "Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue," "Farewell to Florida," "The Men That Are Falling," "A Thought Revolved," and "The Man with the Blue Guitar" — in other words, a little less than half of them.) As a moral, poetic or philosophical stance, this is defensible; but as subject matter for poetry it's tame and dull and, after the dozenth revolution of Stevens' elaborate self-pity mechanism, starts to seem rather hypocritical as well. Over and over, Stevens fashions a gorgeous mental image, compares it to what he sees around him, despairs at the non-homology, and ends by drawing conclusions about the beautiful and/or impossible relationship of non-relationship between the Mind/the Self and the World. I'm not attacking the philosophical validity of such a view (though I could, I could) I'm just saying it's a boring basis for poetry. And Stevens, with some unerring self-sabotaging instinct, makes it more and more important to his work, as if forcing himself not to find a subject. (Well, we'll see if he turns it all around in the 40s.)
Other random notes I couldn't work in above: Stevens' style gets more epigrammatic in the 30s, more "French" in a classical sense, writing poems that often verge on being nothing more than strings of elegant pensées (and some which more than verge); also easier, a little more willing to telegraph the significance of his private ruminations. It's not a good look for a poet whose virtue is in being "fascinating."
God, I love value judgments.
