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Shakespeare as Relic in Wallace Stevens’ Late Poetry
Wallace Stevens: the interacting veins of life between his early and
late poems are an ever-continuing marvel to me.1
In a response to a letter from an American professor interested in Wallace
Stevens’ use of William Shakespeare’s work, Stevens replied, on 1 July 1953,
almost exactly two years before his death:
1. Is not Peter Quince in Midsummer Night’s Dream?
My Shakespeare is in the attic, which is hotter than the Sahara and I
could not bring myself last night to go up to look. I think you should
verify this under refrigerated conditions in the library at Harvard.2
Stevens, famous for his wry sense of humour, makes reference to Shakespeare
throughout his poetic career, but the following discussion begins with the ways in
which he employs the plays toward the end of his life, when the idea of
Shakespeare was at its most virile, burning hot in the attic of his imagination.
Shakespeare’s last plays hold a privileged place in Wallace Stevens’ late poetry,
and in this paper I will argue that Stevens’ appropriation of the play he
considered Shakespeare’s last, The Tempest, forms part of a constructed late
1
Marianne Moore, cited in Marius Bewley, The Complex Fate: Hawthorn, Henry James, and
some other American Writers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952), 171
2
Holly Bright Stevens, ed., Letters of Wallace Stevens, 2nd edn. (Berkley: University of California
Press, 1996), 786.
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style. Theodor W. Adorno coined the term ‘late style’, Spätstil, in the 1930s in his
essay on Beethoven’s final compositions.3 Regardless of whether or not Stevens
was familiar with this seminal essay, his final poetic compositions reveal that he
clearly understood the facets of aging and ending in literature in a manner that
were held synonymous with Shakespearean ‘lateness’ from the nineteenthcentury. I have two primary aims in this paper: the first is to demonstrate that
Wallace Stevens knew what lateness was and what it meant to have a literary
‘late phase’, as the idea had been fashioned through Victorian reception of
Shakespeare’s last plays, and the second is to reveal how employing late
Shakespeare helps him achieve a late style of his own. That Stevens secures a
place in the canon as a late poet is evidenced by a body of criticism that still
reveres his last poems as revealing an organic, transhistorical connection to
Shakespeare’s late phase. What will become clear throughout this discussion is
that his conception of lateness belongs to a masculine literary inheritance. For
Stevens, Shakespeare represents a significant male figure in the late canon, and
by uncovering the way Shakespeare’s works are used, and the possible
motivations behind using them, we gain further insight into the privileged place
Shakespeare holds in modernist poetics. By first shedding light on the way that
certain modernist writers see late style as a specifically male-dominated
phenomenon, this paper then questions the absence of women writers in late
style studies, uncovering the gendered nature of the construct.4
3
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Late Style’, in Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. by Rolf
Tiedemann, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 123–37
(124).
4
For an outline of the absence of women in late style criticism, see Gordon McMullan’s
introduction to Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of
Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), particularly 18–23.
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The OED defines a ‘relic’, among other things, as a surviving trace or idea of
something past, and it is with this in mind that I will discuss ‘late Shakespeare’ as
an idea that informs Stevens’ final poems. Gordon McMullan is apparently the
first to interrogate traditional perceptions of late style, redefining lateness as a
critical theory and construct applied to literary works. He traces its history in
Shakespearean scholarship, exploring traditionally and specifically ‘late’ ideas
and tropes, and the psychological and/or physical dispositions of the artist on
which they are predicated.5 The body of scholarship from which the concept of
late style emerged he refers to as the ‘discourse of lateness’, and criticism on
Shakespeare’s late style has contributed to this.6 I will show how appraisals of
Stevens’ final works that embrace the supposedly ‘organic’ nature of his late style
tout court are also a part of what we now understand as a ‘discourse’. A theory of
how writers might create a late style thus begins to come into view. In many
regards, it was precisely the prolonged lack of such a theory that enabled critics
and writers to attribute late style where, and when, they deemed appropriate.
Two main tools used to support the idea of a naturally occurring late style in past
scholarship have been the notion of charting literary patterns through the lifetime,
and the belief that the writer’s psychology unconsciously informs the work. The
idea that late style is a naturally occurring phenomenon with a biographical
imperative still persists in scholarship on Shakespeare and Stevens today, and
for my purposes here I will simply clarify that the ‘late style’ that has been
attributed to Shakespeare and Stevens refers to a natural, unconscious shift in
5
McMullan has written extensively on the problematic nature of Shakespeare’s late style in early
modern England, a culture in which the process of play writing was collaborative, and the notion
of the ‘author’ as we know it today did not exist. See in particular Late Writing, Chapter 4, ‘Last
words/late plays: the possibility and impossibility of late Shakespeare in early modern culture and
theatre’, 190–258.
6
Late Writing, 5. Emphasis his.
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both verse style and thematic, which arises from contemplation of death, or a
direct closeness to it, through ill health, retirement and in Stevens’ case, old age.
In order to assess where Stevens’ idea of ‘late Shakespeare’ had its conception,
it is necessary to first briefly outline perhaps the most influential critical position in
nineteenth
century
Shakespearean
scholarship.
Thomas
Campbell
in
his Dramatic Works (1838) is apparently the first to claim that the character of
Prospero is based on Shakespeare himself.7 The Victorian scholar Edward
Dowden develops this notion. He writes extensively on the playwright’s final
phase, and these appraisals contribute to, and exemplify, an idealized
nineteenth-century image of late Shakespeare.8 His discussions of serenity and
biographical meaning in the final plays have a decisive influence on the
modernist works that employ them, and on succeeding generations of
Shakespearean scholars. In Dowden’s essay entitled ‘The Serenity of The
Tempest’ (1875) he writes,
Forgiveness and freedom: these are the keynotes of the play. When it
was occupying the mind of Shakespere, he was passing from his
service as an artist to his service as English country gentleman. Had
his mind been dwelling on the question of how he should enjoy his
7
Thomas Campbell states: ‘[h]ere Shakespeare himself is Prospero’. ‘Remarks on the Life and
Writings’, in The Dramatic Works of W. Shakespeare, 2nd edn. (Paris: Baudry’s European
Library, 1843), 1–49 (44). Also cited in Gordon McMullan ‘“The technique of it is mature”:
Inventing the Late Plays in Print and in Performance’, in From Performance to Print in
Shakespeare’s England, ed. by Peter Holland, and Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 243–60 (246). See in particular 244–47, where Shakespeare is discussed as a
late artist in criticism.
8
See McMullan, Late Writing, particularly 152–60, for further discussion of the shaping of
Shakespearean lateness through Victorian critiques.
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new freedom, and had he been enforcing upon himself the truth that
the highest freedom lies in the bonds of duty?9
Shakespeare himself is reflected in the ‘forgiveness and freedom’ of the play
Dowden considers his last.10 ‘Our first and our last impression of Shakespere’, he
writes ‘shall be that of Shakespere in his period of large, serene wisdom, and that
in the light of the clear and solemn vision of his closing years all his writings shall
be read.’11 A few years later in his ‘Literature Primer’, Dowden underlined these
points, bestowing the epithet ‘[o]n the heights’ to the last phase.12 His
assessment of the ‘calm-souled’ Shakespeare began a critical culture that gained
widespread acceptance in later scholarship.13 Dowden’s critique is, of course,
dependent upon a specific conviction about Shakespeare’s chronology. Edmund
Malone in the late 1770s was the first to attempt the task of chronologically
ordering the work, and it is enough here to state that in asserting the order of the
plays, the foundations for the conception of Shakespeare’s late style were laid.
The supposed trajectory of his career, the possibility of viewing his works as an
oeuvre, and the ability to privilege the later work as his serene integration of the
artistic and the personal, all depend upon a chronological documentation that has
its roots in the eighteenth century.14 This chronological documentation, then, has
9
Edward Dowden, ‘The Serenity of The Tempest’, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: A Casebook,
ed. by D. J. Palmer (London: Macmillan & Co., 1968), 72–8 (78).
10
In ‘The Tempest we find the ideal expression of the temper of mind […], the pathetic yet august
serenity of Shakespere’s final period. For the purposes of such a study as this we may look
upon The Tempest as Shakespere’s latest play’. See Edward Dowden, Shakespere: A Critical
Study of His Mind and Art (London: Henry S. King, & Co., 1875), 380.
11
Ibid., 403.
12
Edward Dowden, ‘Shakespeare Literature Primers’, ed. by John Richard Green, 2nd edn.
(London: Macmillan & Co., 1922), 60. Emphasis his.
13
Ibid.
14
In the late 1770s Malone published An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays
Attributed to Shakespeare Were Written, as cited in McMullan, Late Writing, 131. For a
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widespread implications. One of them, if not the most problematic element of
‘late style’, is perhaps unsurprisingly style itself. The relationship between the
privileging of an artist’s ‘late phase’, and the shift in verse style that invariably
accompanies and signifies the late period, involves a number of complex issues
(far more than I have scope to reproduce here). Notably, Stevens’ apparent shift
in style has been used as evidence for his organic ‘late phase’. Russ McDonald
subtly and usefully elucidates these issues in relation to Shakespeare’s late
verse style, attempting to take the idea of ‘late style’ out of a study of verse
altogether:
The use of the adjective “late” implies a way of thinking about the
style, acknowledges a category separating it from the expressive
forms discernable in earlier plays, but such groupings need not be
sentimentalized, nor must the style be considered necessarily
superior, the plays regarded as wiser.15
As I shall demonstrate, Stevens attempts to replicate such stylistic shifts and
create linkages across his poetic career, arguably according to the verse change
in Shakespeare’s later plays that he perceived to have a psychological
imperative.
Modernist critics later endorse a Dowdenesque view of Shakespeare’s final
artistic integration. G. Wilson Knight’s The Shakespearian Tempest (1932) claims
that The Tempest is ‘[o]ne of the shortest of the plays’, yet it ‘distils the poetic
discussion of the development of Shakespeare’s chronology on which his late style is predicated,
see Late Writing, particularly 3.1 ‘“Dramatick Perfection”: Malone and the Establishment of a
Chronology’, 128–36.
15
McDonald, Russ, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9.
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essence of the whole Shakespearian universe’.16 He also links Prospero with
Shakespeare in ‘the “rough magic” of Shakespeare’s art’, and argues that the
tempest motif informs the complete works:
From the beginning to the end of Shakespeare’s work all “projects” are
associated with sea-adventures; adverse fortune with tempests, but
happiness with calm seas and the “gentle breath” of loving winds. So
the poet prays that his work, too, may have a prosperous voyage.17
For Knight the plays are all thematically joined with one another: Shakespeare
thus becomes a self-conscious author aiming for artistic longevity – the
‘prosperous voyage’ of his work – and it is for this reason that the Epilogue has a
‘very personal’ sense.18 In an essay published two years later T. S. Eliot makes a
similar interpretation, claiming that the order of Shakespeare’s works is
paramount in assessing the state of his ‘emotional maturity’:
The full meaning of any one of his plays is not in itself alone but in that
play in the order in which it was written, in its relation to all of
Shakespeare’s other plays, earlier and later: we must know all of
Shakespeare’s work in order to know any of it.19
16
G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearian Tempest: With a Chart of Shakespeare’s Dramatic
Universe, 2nd edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 247.
17
Ibid., 266.
18
Ibid. Knight later linked Shakespeare as Prospero again in The Crown of Life (1947) stating
that Prospero, who ‘controls this comprehensive Shakespearian world, automatically reflects
Shakespeare himself’. See The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final
Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 220.
19
T. S. Eliot, ‘John Ford’, in Elizabethan Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 135–52 (135–6).
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Eliot draws attention to Knight’s work in the Elizabethan Essays, and such
privileging of psychological factors in Shakespeare’s oeuvre appears to have
been common practice in this period – the ‘development’ of Shakespeare’s ‘state
of feeling’.20 It is clear, then, that the ‘standard set’ by late Shakespeare in the
twentieth century evolved out of a Victorian tradition in which Dowden was a key
figure.
I have provided an overview of where the characteristics of Shakespeare’s ‘late
style’ developed in scholarship, the different attributes with which critics have
imbued it, and their justifications for these interpretations that were largely
founded
on
conjectural
assessments
of
the
playwright’s
psychological
disposition. In determining the way that Stevens appropriated Shakespeare’s last
work, it is necessary to clarify the specific late tropes, motifs and concepts that
can often seem oblique. They include, but are not limited to, verbal or thematic
echoes from earlier to later work, abstract or fantastical themes, and the
presence of binaries such as despair/hope or fracture/unity which relate to a
broader belief that early and late works are connected in a cyclic process on the
artistic journey. The shift in style is coupled with an oxymoronic sense that the
final work is expressing something new. As my discussion unfolds, structures
such as these will be uncovered in Stevens’ work, making it ever harder to read
Shakespearean citation as an unconscious or motiveless transhistorical
occurrence in modernist writing.
20
See Elizabethan Essays, 137, for Eliot’s mention of Knight’s work.
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Hanging ‘lateness’ on the sea: Stevens’ late Shakespeare
Several poems of Stevens’ Late Poems volume, written from 1950-55 in the last
five years of his life, suggest that he has a detailed conception of the traditional
ideas of ending and renewal, and what it means to have ‘lateness’ attached to
the author. The opening poem of this volume entitled, ‘The Sick Man’, evidences
Stevens’ desire to shape his final poetic in terms that resonate with a gendered
sense of finality:
Here in the North, late, late, there are voices of men,
Voices in chorus, singing without words, remote and deep,
Drifting choirs, long movements and turnings of sounds.
And in a bed in one room, alone, a listener
Waits for the unison of the music of the drifting bands
And the dissolving chorals, waits for it and imagines.21
The ‘voices of men’ in this ‘late, late’ scene suggests a timeless trajectory
dominated by men. The speaker in the North – perhaps connotative of ‘hope’ –
invokes an idea of both North America (where Stevens resided) and may also
represent the West, where the voices of men resound in the Western literary
canon. The poem revolves around music, the sick man as the listener ‘[w]aits for
the unison of the music of the drifting bands’, a completion in the ‘dissolving
21
Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. by Frank Kermode, and
Joan Richardson (New York: The Library of America, 1997), 455. All references to Stevens’
poems will be cited from this edition henceforth.
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chorals’ of the men that sing ‘without words’ creating ‘turnings of sounds’. The
‘[v]oices in chorus’ evokes imagery of a chant of the male ‘choirs’. In another
composition, ‘The Role of the Idea in Poetry’, this theme of the male chant
returns once again. Here Stevens writes of ‘lateness’ belonging to a male literary
lineage. The poem reads:
Ask of the philosophizer why he philosophizes,
Determined thereto, perhaps by his father’s ghost,
Permitting nothing to the evening’s edge.
The father does not come to adorn the chant.
One father proclaims another, the patriarchs
Of truth. They stride across and are masters of
The chant and discourse there, more than wild weather
Or clouds that hang lateness on the sea. They become
A time existing after much time has passed.22
Stevens describes a lineage of masters connected with what we now understand
as a ‘discourse of lateness’. Stevens reveres Shakespeare in his poetic,
envisaging him as such a ‘patriarch of truth’; more than hanging ‘lateness on the
sea’, these great writers become an idea and time of their own, still ‘existing after
much time has passed’. The poets of the past are ‘a form’ on a ‘pedestal’,
representatives of ‘greatness’. For Stevens, Shakespeare is a fatherly ghost
keeping the transhistorical literary canon flowing – one father, indeed, ‘proclaims
22
Collected Poetry, 457.
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another’. In a passage from his diary written in 1899, the not yet twenty-year-old
Stevens already placed Shakespeare in his idea of a male chronological lineage:
Poetry and Manhood: Those who say poetry is now the peculiar
province of women say so because ideas about poetry are effeminate.
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Browning, much of
Tennyson – they are your man-poets. Silly verse is always the work of
silly men. Poetry itself is unchanged.23
In ‘Farewell Without a Guitar’ also from the Late Poems, we witness further
constructions of ‘male reality’ intertwined with the notion of ending:
Spring’s bright paradise has come to this.
Now the thousand-leaved green falls to the ground.
Farewell, my days.
[…]
The reflections and repetitions,
the blows and buffets of fresh senses
of the rider that was,
Are a final construction,
Like glass and sun, of male reality.24
Stevens captures in poetic form the essence of a traditional understanding of
lateness. The ‘reflections and repetitions’, the autumnal texture of falling leaves,
23
24
Letters of Wallace Stevens, 22.
Collected Poetry, 461.
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and the ‘green’ youth resound with cyclic themes of ending and renewal; the
‘rider that was’ looking back nostalgically upon an imagined past. Yet Stevens
here acknowledges that these facets of finality are all ‘construction[s]’ ‘of male
reality’, revealing his awareness of the privileged position that the ideas of ending
and regeneration held in literature. This position is, furthermore, reserved for
men: it is a specifically masculine reality in which lateness resides. The poem
‘Americana’, also in Late Poems, further demonstrates the connections in
Stevens’ literary imagination to the male lineage of which Shakespeare was a
part. With tones of aging he writes of ‘all men / In a health of weather, knowing a
few, old things’. The speaker continues: ‘[t]hat which is human and yet final’, like
A man that looks at himself in the glass and finds
It is the man in the glass that lives, not he.
He is the image, the second […]25
The poem continues, ‘[h]e inhabits another man / Other men’, and the
connections between men through ‘the image’ become a reflection of the
beginning: ‘[i]n a returning, a seeming of return’, it ‘[f]launts that first fortune,
which he wanted so much’. Stevens uses traditional themes and motifs
associated with lateness to elucidate this return through the masculine figures of
the past. This stanza is particularly evocative. The ‘man in the glass’ lives, and
the man that looks at himself in the glass is now the image, ‘the second’.
Reciprocity exists between the images, in which the men of the past who ‘know a
few old things’, ‘inhabit’ the men of the future through the image. In this way
25
Collected Poetry, 456–7.
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Stevens writes of a masculine tradition that lives on through the modern poets,
existing – in essence – within them.
Leaving a rack behind: Shakespearean citation in late style construction
These analyses elucidate Stevens’ understanding of the characteristics of late
style in literature, and I have demonstrated that the poet thought of lateness as
belonging to a literary inheritance dominated by male authors, with Shakespeare
as a part of that lineage. But perhaps the most convincing evidence for contrived
lateness is to be found, ironically, in an absence. That is, women are almost
completely without mention in late style studies. This continues to go largely
unquestioned in criticism, and despite women modernists producing work with
similar techniques to their male modernist counterparts, in general scholars have
not attributed a ‘late phase’ to such writers. The gendering of lateness thus belies
the constructed nature of the concept, and this is a point to which I will return.
Having an artistic ‘late phase’ is to be placed in a desirable sub-category of
genius: Stevens’ work arises out of a tradition that revered Shakespeare as poet,
and maps his psychology through the plays. For Stevens, Shakespeare’s mind
was thus a trace in his own works, something that is extracted and applied in his
own poetic to create a transhistorical connection to the ‘master’. Understanding
this, the reasons behind Stevens’ use of the late plays become far clearer. The
poems of Stevens’ last volume The Rock - written between 1950 and 1955 contain direct references to The Tempest. In ‘Note on Moonlight’ the quotation is
an echo of Prospero, ‘[l]ike a cloud-cap in the corner of a looking glass’. The full
stanza reads:
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In spite of the mere objectiveness of things,
Like a cloud-cap in the corner of a looking glass,
A change in colour of the plain poet’s mind,
Night and silence disturbed by an interior sound.26
This trace directly echoes Prospero’s ‘revels’ speech in Act IV:
[…] like the baseless fabric of this vision –
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
(IV. i. 151–4)27
Atop this direct verbal reference, Stevens also writes in language textures that
resonate with Prospero’s speech. Stevens attempts to re-create Shakespeare’s
baseless vision through the motif of the cloud-cap through the looking glass, and
the globe dissolving is echoed in Stevens’ next stanza, ‘[l]ike a plain poet
revolving in his mind’. Importantly, Stevens connects ‘Note on Moonlight’ and
‘Americana’ through the references to ‘glass’: the ‘looking glass’, and the ‘man
that looks at himself in the glass and finds / It is the man in the glass that lives,
not he’. The ‘image’ links the poems, and in doing so Stevens evokes Prospero,
holding up Shakespeare in particular as a male figure through the transhistorical
literary looking glass that resides within. In this way, Stevens directly reveres
Shakespeare as a past literary master. Stevens was not alone in his admiration
26
Collected Poetry, 449.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. by Virginia Mason Vaughan, and Alden T. Vaughan
(London: Arden Shakespeare Series 3, 2005). All references to The Tempest will be cited from
this edition henceforth.
27
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of this particular passage in The Tempest. Virginia Woolf had used it over a
decade before him in the posthumously published Between the Acts, her last
completed novel before she took her own life. The point at which Shakespeare
can be heard most directly is at the finish of Miss La Trobe’s pageant, where the
actors display pastoral scenes from English history: 'Isa had done with her bills.
Sitting in the shell of the room, she watched the pageant fade. The flowers
flashed before they faded. She watched them flash.'28 As in Stevens’ ‘Note on
Moonlight’, this refers explicitly to the ‘revels’ speech, in which Prospero watches
the pageant fade:
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. (IV. i. 154–8)
Why did Stevens and Woolf evoke this scene in their final work? Both writers
identify a type of ‘Shakespearean lateness’ in this passage, and isolate
fragments from the speech that evoke ideas of transcendence and finality: the
‘cloud-cap’ and the ‘pageant faded’. Through this imagery of termination
(‘dissolve’, ‘faded’, ‘sleep’), it is paradoxically the sense of artistic awakening and
growth in this passage that resonate with their conceptions of artistic longevity.29
From their apparently nineteenth-century perspectives Stevens and Woolf see in
Prospero’s ‘revels’ speech the point at which Shakespeare most directly writes
28
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, ed. by Frank Kermode (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992), 195.
29
For a description of Prospero’s ‘higher levels of moral attainment’ in this speech, see
Dowden, His Mind and Art, 418.
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himself as magician. The mention of ‘the globe’ may be read as an allusion to the
Globe theatre (the language itself appears to be outside the play-world), and
Shakespeare’s apparently personal voice is heard. The idea of Shakespeare-asProspero, then, informs this passage, and it is such a reading that may in part
explain why the writers employ this particular speech to construct lateness in
their works.30
The late trope of cyclic renewals is a thread sewn throughout The Rock volume.
In the poem ‘The Planet on the Table’, Stevens writes ever more direct traces of
Shakespeare.
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
[…]
30
The connection between Shakespeare as Prospero in this speech had been made indirectly in
visual art, before Thomas Campbell in 1838 connected character and playwright. As McMullan
has documented, a monument dated from 1740 in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey ‘features
a casually posed Shakespeare’ with ‘his left hand pointing to a scroll inscribed with (mislineated)
lines from Prospero’s ‘revels’ speech’. See Late Writing, 147.
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It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.31
Of Stevens referring to himself as Ariel, critical reception suggests several
explanations, all grounded in the idea of Stevens (and Shakespeare's) organic
late style: As Louis A. Renza expresses it, ‘“Ariel” of course explicitly alludes to
Shakespeare's active, essentially genderless sprite in what many take to be his
valedictory literary work,’ and the allusion ‘serves as a trope of the poet's feeling
himself near to finishing his artistic career’.32 Here the assumptions regarding
Shakespeare's lateness, his ‘valedictory work’ in The Tempest, are linked with
Stevens’ perceptions of aging and ending. Isabel G. MacCaffrey also merges the
two writers. Prospero’s ‘revels’ speech appears to have had a particular salience
for critics too. She connects ‘The Planet on the Table’ with this passage, even
when there is no direct citation of the ‘revels’ speech in the poem. She states
whimsically, ‘[a]s Prospero resumes his mortality, he releases Ariel; the planet on
the table becomes part of the greater planet whose “lineament or character” it
bears’.33 She further links the works:
31
Collected Poetry, 450.
Louis A. Renza, ‘Wallace Stevens: Parts of an Autobiography, by Anonymous’, Journal of
Modern Literature, 31:3 (2008), 1–21 (12).
33
Isabel G. MacCaffrey, ‘A Point of Central Arrival: Stevens’ The Rock’, ELH, 40:4 (1973), 606–
33 (607).
32
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Shakespeare’s globe becomes Stevens’ planet. To see in “the great
Globe itself” a dreamlike insubstantiality is to lend planetary
substantiality to the dream; since neither leaves a rack behind, they
can be said to share also the ambiguous immortality of mere being.34
Even without a direct citation, Stevens evokes a response from criticism that
connects his final compositions to Prospero’s speech. In this way, MacCaffrey
subtly links the supposedly last works of these two writers as artists connected in
their transhistorical lateness. As I have demonstrated, these interpretations
based in the idea of Shakespeare and Stevens’ naturally transcendent end points
are contrasted with the anxiety of the language itself. Of Stevens’ last poems,
‘The Planet on the Table’ assures the reader that ‘[i]t was not important that they
survive’ whilst clearly employing the precise techniques that ensure they do. This
has not gone entirely unnoticed in scholarship on Stevens, as Lee M. Jenkins
notes ‘[i]n spite of its professed humility, the poem raises questions of mastery’.35
Yet she then puts forward that Stevens’ use of The Tempest, ‘inevitably suggests
that the poem may be read in terms of Stevens’ epilogue to art. […] Stevens,
then, is something of a Prospero, as well as being Ariel, the Prospero who, his
work done, calls to be released from his “bands”’.36
Stevens may indeed have envisaged ‘The Planet on the Table’ as a tribute to a
lifetime of poetic composition, however evidence for wilful construction reveals
that this is far from the only noteworthy element in his use of late Shakespeare,
and cannot be critically overlooked. One way that late style has been read as a
34
Ibid., 608.
Lee M. Jenkins, Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order (Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2000),
110.
36
Ibid.
35
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genuine phenomenon is through tracing themes and references from early to last
work, and marking these traces as natural evolutionary processes of the gifted
artist. Developments away from such appraisals in late style studies are
particularly recent. For modernist writers however, the continuity and evolution of
Shakespeare’s artistic lifespan was a prominent perspective. As discussed, in
modernist thought there exists a pervasive privileging of Shakespeare’s later
work through documenting the chronology. As Eliot puts it, the ‘standard set by
Shakespeare’ can be seen in Stevens, where links have been drawn across his
artistic lifespan, inspiring the notion of artistic and personal integration in the late
phase. At the start of his career in 1908, Stevens gave one of his poems to his
future wife, Elsie Moll, in courtship. In this poem he refers to himself as Caliban.
Part of it reads:
There is my spectre,
Pink evening moon,
Haunting me, Caliban,
With its Ariel tune.
It leads me away
From the rickety town,
To the sombre hill
Of the dazzling crown.37
It might seem improbable that from the earliest stages of his career Stevens
attempted to chart his entry into the canonical halls of the male poets he so
37
Holly Bright Stevens, Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens (California:
Knopf, 1977), 194.
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admired. But if the early Stevens saw himself as Shakespeare's Caliban, and the
late Stevens had transformed into Ariel, one would think that at the very least
acknowledging this as an inherently conscious construction would be necessary.
Helen Vendler, however, reads this connection as further evidence for a form of
transcendental coming of age. She writes that ‘[i]n his twenties, he had written an
early poem in which he called himself Caliban’, ‘the name was chosen, we may
conjecture, partly out of sexual guilt and partly out of dismay at his always heavy
appearance’.38
But now, in his seventies and already unwell from the fatal disease
that was to be diagnosed six months later, he gave himself, for the first
time […], the name appropriate to his ethereal soul, and called himself
Ariel, the airy spirit trapped in an earthly prison.39
Evoking an ideal of late serenity, Stevens’ ‘ethereal soul’ ‘trapped in an earthly
prison’ also carries Christian overtones, notwithstanding the tangible fact of
Stevens’ illness that makes any reading of dispassionate harmony in his writing
significantly problematic. Regarding stylistics, like Shakespeare, Stevens’ late
work presents a late shift in verse style. Marius Bewley notes that
something has been added to the late work that was not present, in
however piecemeal a state, before. What this addition is may be only
a complex balance, an infusion of remarkable poise, but it is new.40
38
Helen Vendler, Words Chosen Out of Desire (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984),
37.
39
Ibid.
40
Bewley, 171–172.
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This shift connects images from the old and new work. Stevens’ late work
presents
a new dimension of poetic reality […], and occasionally one could turn
aside and look downward from the new use to the old use of an
identical image, and realize with a sense of delicious discovery that
one now, perhaps, really read the earlier poem for the first time.41
Four decades on, this is the sense in which Vendler views ‘The Planet on the
Table’ – the later work now allows one to ‘really read’ the earlier poem, in its
cyclic completion, ‘for the first time’. Vendler arguably sees ‘the new use to the
old use of an identical image’, as the other side of the Caliban/Ariel binary. For
Stevens, this idea of cyclic completion in the late work has its roots in
Shakespeare. Bewley’s critique, however, merely highlights the constructed
nature of late style. He writes in 1952 of Stevens’ shift in verse, before the works
now considered his ‘late poems’ had even been published. The inability to
establish a stylistic definition or boundary-point of the ‘late phase’ is thus drawn
sharply into focus. Like MacCaffrey, Vendler finishes by merging the two writers,
echoing Prospero as she states that Stevens’ ‘book is for him the planet on the
table’.42
The relics of Shakespeare that Stevens left in his work did not fall there by
accident; they were carefully constructed traces, designed to evoke those
passages and personages of The Tempest that most convey a sense of the
ethereal and the timeless. This in turn has led to critics reading the late poems
41
42
Ibid.
Vendler, 37.
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just as Stevens desired: mapping him as a late artist, in company with one
particular writer he so admired, adhering to an already established ‘discourse’.
Interrogating the way Stevens revered Shakespeare as a figure with a late style
sheds further light on his perceptions of lateness as belonging to a specifically
male-dominated canon, the final stages of the creative life continued through a
patriarchal lineage. This analysis thus opens possibilities for further research into
the absence of women in late style studies, and I suggest that Virginia Woolf’s
final work might be a profitable starting point for such an investigation.43
Demystifying the Shakespearean legacy left by modernist writers who draw
inspiration from his works allows for an appreciation of the last plays on their own
terms. At the same time, it enables a more valuably complex understanding of
the convergence of life experience and wilful citation that appears to constitute
that phenomenon called late style.
43
The issue of her suicide has been perceived to complicate matters of late style inasmuch as it
clouds a perspective of the aging artist: did she know she was going to die when she wrote the
novel? But this question only matters if we understand late style as an organic phenomenon,
arising without conscious consideration or construction; late style may still be constructed, among
other things, as a response to the contemplation of death, with or without old-age or the actual
threat of death itself.
© Kathryn Crowcroft