The Sun that
Moves:
Contrasting Views of Light
Cast in Wallace Stevens’s
"The Common Life" and
"Of Hartford in a Purple Light"
Eric Wahl
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun.
(from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, by Wallace Stevens)
Las Vegas, NV—The entire trip was planned as a kind of joke, actually. What better place could there be to bear witness to the crass superficiality of American life at the end of the twentieth century than the city that made crass superficiality its thriving business? For a group of perhaps idealistic, definitely egoistic college writers of which I was a part, Las Vegas seemed the ideal city to visit over spring vacation simply as a source of arch, cynical whining about the sorry state of The Common Man and Woman. Indeed, first impressions yielded about what I expected: everything built beyond the wildest scale of a Teenaged Texas Cadillac Girl, bathed, striped, and punctured with millions of throbbing lights, "theme" hotels such as Paris, Venice, New York, and Treasure Island—microcosms of excess and promise and possibility unto themselves, mishmashes of some supposed collective Ideas of Paris, Venice, New York, etc. I felt sad, disgusted, and, strangely, humbled in this Unreality because it was a quite real Unreality. Here was a queasy place between fact and fiction in which I became increasingly aware of how the city functions much like the world in a Wallace Stevens poem—it is a vehicle accepting of vastly different perceptions while simply existing as what it is. I could see people at casinos who very much appeared to be living out long-held dreams to come to the City of Players—Bugsy, Sinatra, Wayne Newton, James Bond—simply to throw down wads of cash on the green felt of craps tables and relish the toggle of dice against the tablesides while others watched. I asked them about this. Some spent all they had and left feeling great. They felt, if briefly, as though they could have been part of the Rat Pack; they felt as though everything in their lives could change with a roll of the dice. Maybe so.
Still others came to the town with a sense of irony—Oh, the sham of it all. Let’s revel in the gimmicks and the phoniness. That is there as well, and as a student of the Post-Postmodern consciousness (call it what you like), that is exactly why I went. I could laugh at the garishness, worry over the existential implications of a hotel called New York New York that was a single building built to look like several potentially-familiar skyscrapers, drink alcohol from a giant plastic football while walking down the street past flaming volcanoes and swashbuckling pirates on trapezes and lighted water plumes surging to the dulcet tones of Lionel Ritchie . . . and still experience an odd transcendence of the arch variety while trying not to think of my impending Wallace Stevens paper. But every day in Las Vegas brought me back to Stevens. My God, what would he say about this place? Then, during my last night in the city, my friend and I had an experience that brought Stevens suddenly and strikingly to the front of my mind.
But now as in an amour of women
Purple sets purple round . . .
(from "Of Hartford in a Purple Light")
We went to a strip club. Now, I neither endorse nor condemn strip clubs or the practice of frequenting them, but as a Las Vegas Experience, it seemed necessary, and I want to stress that the connection to Stevens exists in such places in stark, almost heart-breaking terms. I write this not as a joke at all, but as an account of a chain of thought that I think Stevens may even appreciate.
The Palomino Burlesque Palace squats forlornly in the older section of Las Vegas—North Vegas, a dimmer, pawn-and-bail-bonds part of town. Its signs flash valiantly through the muck, somehow like a Christmas tree on the 26th of December. But this is why I am here. My friend and I enter the sinister red of the front corridor and are led by a badged "guard" into the heart of the club—a scattering of small, round tables around a runway that sprouts from a small stage. Most of the men in here are older than we, mid-forties and up, a few big-hatted cowboys, a Japanese couple. Some men sit in chairs along the runway waiting to give dollar bills to the woman on stage. We are seated at a table, two-drink minimum, both drinks served at once. Initially, I blush, avert my eyes—it is Amateur Night, and the woman who stalks the runway is an embarrassment of ill-chosen dips and lunges. She cannot get the momentum she had planned to get on the pole at the end of the stage, and so she stops and regards the pole as though it has done this to her while the music pounds almost as a joke to her inactivity. My partner-in-crime tonight begins to clap and cheer for this woman, calls her by "name," and she looks back at us, smiling. The music changes . . . and the lights shift from uncomfortable strobes to smoky purples. Everything has changed. The men in the club sit up. We start to clap in time as the stripper appears to gain new confidence, a surer step. The lights cascade across her in reds and violets, and everything in the room is now a suggestion, a dreamy imagination, a hazy wash of softened lines and smoothed edges. The woman onstage becomes Woman Onstage. She has become fantasy, imagination, maybe even someone’s ideal.
The paper is whiter
For these black lines.
(from "The Common Life")
Wallace Stevens published Parts of a World in 1942, a meditation on his key themes of the uneasy relationship between reality and the imagination, and it is a collection regarded today largely for the poems "Man and Bottle," "Of Modern Poetry," and "Cuisine Bourgeoisie." Yet two other poems in Parts of a World strike me as particularly worthy of examination— "The Common Life," a poem about which quite a bit has been written already, and "Of Hartford in a Purple Light," a poem about which practically nothing has been written. These two pieces share some of Stevens’s typical imagery, light, architecture, men and women . . . and shades of the color violet. However, the manner in which purple is employed in each poem, respectively, is quite different. In "The Common Life" violet is a color whose light creates mystery and passion—it is the impetus for imagination, and it is imagination which takes us away from often-bleak reality. The shadings and rounded-edges under a violet light in this poem allow us to bear reality. In "Of Hartford in a Purple Light" purple is also associated with the feminine, yet here it weakens reality, it throws fact into question and makes theatrical—almost humorous—what had been strong, clear, and masculine. In "Of Hartford" we witness something of an acknowledgment of the necessity of reality (the thing for what it is) while in "Life" we see just the opposite, a weary sigh at too much reality at the expense of imagination. Is this evidence of a contradiction in Stevens’s own book of poetry? A mistake or miscalculation? Why on earth would a clearly gifted poet include both of these poems in the same work? Surely, I contend, "The Common Life" and "Of Hartford in a Purple Light" were published in Parts of a World together on purpose.
Stevens has always been regarded oddly in critical circles—both as a strikingly gifted modernist poet and as a mind-numbingly confusing wordsmith. Parts of a World was met, generally, with warm critical reception. Ruth Lechlitner, in her review for Books, noted that "[o]nce again.. . . . Stevens, engaged during a time of total war with images ‘filling the imagination’s need,’ has produced a book of cream out-of-this-world for poets. Always the independent master-musician . . . he remains a craftsman holding the respect of all" (26). Hi Simons was similarly effusive in his review of Parts of a World for Poetry:
Mr. Wallace Stevens is one of the few living poets who have constructed, each of them, a complete world for his imagination to inhabit. Minor men, half-poets, write out of more or less temporary adjustments between their personalities and their environments. Stevens writes from a unique, whole vision of life, that is revealed in Parts of a World. . . . Often in the past fifteen years Wallace Stevens has been called the foremost living master of his art in America. (61)
But not all who read Parts of a World regarded it so fondly. August Derleth, in his review for the Madison Capital Times quipped:
[I]t is difficult to say of Wallace Stevens that he communicates anything like a well-rounded philosophy, but only postulates, sometimes in part, premises for a philosophy of poetry and/or life. The misty obfuscations, the surrealist images, the inappropriate references and symbols, the off-key similes which Parts of a World abounds do not help the problem of communication. (13)
And Howard Benjamin of The Los Angeles Times felt the need to parody Parts of a World in his review, snidely titled "Poet Pounds and So Does Critic":
The acrobat, the Ezrapoundish poet
Handstanding on one hand, strophe grasped
In Tseliotly grasping hand, chattering epiglots
Running wild, world running wild, whirling
Dervishly. Haloo, halay, pick up the pieces, boys!
Item: verbal cataclysms gone shuddering
Downwind, I stay outside, I stay
Inside looking at the pretty pieces,
Pretty pieces, veritable eggplants I
Gathered out of shattered hen shells. (np)
That Stevens’s work can often be confusing is true enough; many of his poems seem hyper-referenced, obscure, and easily misinterpreted should the meaning of a single word or phrase (image) be assumed merely because that word or phrase (image) appeared in other of his works. Ronald Sukenick elaborates on what many have called Stevens’s "almost impenetrable phrases" (vii):
Explicating a poem by relating it to one of Stevens’ general themes, or by comparing it to another of his poems, can be misleading, and may further obscure the text at hand. Stevens works through nuance, variation, and sudden reversal on a theme, requiring on the part of the reader an absolute attention to the specific text . . . Similarly, Stevens’ images cannot be frozen into static symbols: even the color blue, and the moon, which usually represent the imagination in his poems, do not do so invariably, or in exactly the same way. Stevens’ images must be understood ultimately in terms of the nuances of context; an image in one poem does not necessarily mean the same thing in another--it may mean the opposite. (vii-viii)
Sukenick’s points are necessary in grappling with any explication of Stevens’s works, and I took his points to heart when diving into "Of Hartford" and "Common Life," for I am yet struck that these two poems, which concern themselves with similar themes and employ similar imagery, still come to different conclusions. And I do not feel that an explication of either poem yields imagery that is, in itself, wildly different from poem to poem. In this way, Stevens may confound. One may inquire of Stevens, "You say purple light is a positive force of the imagination here, yet you decry the very same light as an impediment to the appreciation of reality there. What gives?" Let us now look more closely at each poem.
The Common Life
That’s the town frieze,
Principally the church steeple,
A black line beside a white line;
And the stack of the electric plant,
A black line drawn on flat air.
It is a morbid light
In which they stand,
Like an electric lamp
On a page of Euclid.
In this light a man is a result,
A demonstration, and a woman,
Without rose and without violet,
The shadows that are absent from Euclid,
Is not a woman for a man.
The paper is whiter
For these black lines.
It glares beneath the webs
Of wire, the designs of ink,
The planes that ought to have genius,
The volumes like marble ruins
Outlined and having alphabetical
Notations and footnotes.
The paper is whiter.
The men have no shadows
And the women have only one side.
In the first stanza we are presented with what could be a painting or photograph of the skyline of a town, uninspiring in its cold reality, colorless and without vitality. The church steeple holds prominence--a construction pointed to the sky which is emblematic of the town’s religious faith. In this sense, a kind of spiritual light. Nearby is the stack of the electric plant--another construction, perhaps more utilitarian in function, which aids in providing electric light to the town, man-made light, if you will (it could be argued both spires reflect ideas of man-made light). In any case, both the church steeple and the electric plant stack are described blandly. To be seen this way, simply as the constructions that they are, is debilitating to the imagination.
Stanzas two and three continue this notion. To view the town skyline antiseptically as merely a collection of constructions which simply are is like turning an unnatural (electric) light on a page of fact, of mathematics--the mystery-less world of Euclid and plane geometry. When things and people are viewed in such a light all sights are stateable answers without shades or suggestions. A woman in such a light, "without rose and without violet"--colors of passion, sensuality, life, and blood--loses the very qualities which make her desirable to a man. A woman seen in a Euclidean light is utterly without mystery or passion, and the poem relays a palpable sense of sadness in this realization.
In the last stanza, words on a page are related to the description of the steeple and the electric plant stack--the stark contrast of black against white. The paper, a world perhaps, like a field of snow, often cannot be contemplated for what is in front of it--text on paper, spires against hazy backgrounds. In a world of fact and the glare of electric light there is no mystery, no imagination, and this is conveyed by Stevens as a loss somehow endemic to the common life, an uninspiring life indeed. Sukenick calls it "a scene that resists the imagination" (213) adding that "perceptions with the physical eye or the senses alone signifies a loss of sensibility, because imaginative perception is creative, metamorphosing the object of perception . . . the eye sees, but the mind begets in metaphor, or resemblance" (129), and when this does not occur we are left with the cold blandness of "The Common Life." Others agree:
The common life . . . is here seen as bloodless, sexless, a function of the mechanized abstraction of modern industrial society, a rational catastrophe. We are in the two-dimensional realm of absolute fact. The only color is a contrast in colorlessness. What is lacking is imaginative life . . . Wistfully, an image of learning and myth is evoked, the three-dimensionality of which is insisted upon. The condition here, however somberly set forth, is ameliorated by the vivid caricature of it. (Fuchs 95-6)
In essence, what is set forth by Stevens in "The Common Life" is the lamentable possibility inherent in people to desire only for fact (or to think that they do), and this is no fertile ground for a poet or other artist. As Fuchs and Sukenick point out, a life devoted exclusively to the interpretation of people and things as utilities and functions, as explainable objects, is no life. Harold Bloom adds that, in attempting to convey the bleakness of a world of perception without imaginative life in a poem, Stevens has set up a unique task:
In a first reading, reality is made more "accurate" by the poetic image. But if the paper is reality, the black lines fail to impose a pattern. "The paper is whiter," but "The men have no shadows/ And the women have only one side." The creative act does not give of bird or bush, and the metaphoric posing is as one dimensional as a painting by Seurat without shadow and without volume, the poetic image serves only to make more "accurate" its unreality and to allow the whiteness of the paper to cover the possible design. (55-6)
This could be viewed as a slight to Stevens, but I do not see it as such. What Bloom is highlighting, I think, is that Stevens has touched upon a dilemma—Euclidean "accuracy" finds no place in acts of imagination yet the imagination relies on the sights of things as they are for birth into otherness. This is a theme that will come up again in "Of Hartford in a Purple Light."
Of Hartford in a Purple Light
A long time have you been making the trip
From Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil,
Bringing the lights of Norway and all that.
A long time the ocean has come with you,
Shaking the water off, like a poodle,
That splatters incessant thousands of drops,
Each drop a petty tricolor. For this,
The aunts in Pasadena, remembering,
Abhor the plaster of the western horses,
Souvenirs of museums. But, Master, there are
Lights masculine and lights feminine.
What is this purple, this parasol,
This stage-light of the Opera?
It is like a region full of intonings.
It is Hartford in a purple light.
A moment ago, light masculine,
Working, with big hands, on the town,
Arranged its heroic attitudes.
But now as in an amour of women
Purple sets purple round. Look, Master,
See the river, the railroad, the cathedral . . .
When male light fell on the naked back
Of the town, the river, the railroad were clear.
Now, every muscle slops away.
Hi! Whisk it, poodle, flick the spray
Of the ocean, ever-freshening
On the irised hunks, the stone bouquet.
The speaker addresses the sun, Master Soleil, as a bringer of changing, colored light, a light which comes to Hartford from Europe. The light from this sun brings with it ocean rains and mist, the droplets of which catch light and refract it into bits of color--and the image here is of small French flags, tricolors. As the imagination, the sun—its light—colors reality, gives it shades and tones that inspire poets to their craft. Yet here, another sense emerges. Memories of the sight of sea mist caught in the sunlight prompt "the aunts in Pasadena" to view representations of reality such as "western horses" (models of which are typically idealized constructions of an idea of the Wild West of movies and lore) with abhorrence, perhaps because of their idealized construction. Such representations of reality as the western horses have been relegated to a museum—a repository for things as they were. Think, for a moment, of the practice of taxidermy: an animal killed in a hunt is cleaned, gutted, etc., etc., and eventually mounted over a form and posed to appear "real." Moreover, taxidermied animals are often posed to appear far more ferocious, far more wild than, in fact, they ever actually appeared at the moments of their deaths (imagine mounting an animal exactly the way it looked when it was killed!). In a museum diorama, animals of the Wild West are often portrayed as majestic beasts in majestic settings—a representation of a hyperreality. It could be said that imagination is necessary to construct such a hyperreality, and perhaps this is what Stevens is lamenting. The poet who attempts to capture reality exactly never can, and for this, the aunts in Pasadena look back to Europe, hoping for something more. Perhaps.
But, we are told, as the speaker continues to address the sun not as the thing for which it is but as a personified Master Soleil, there are different kinds of light, different kinds of imagination: masculine and feminine. But wait, here is where Sukenick’s warnings against easy interpretations based on what has gone before returns to mind. If, as Stevens appears to suggest, light is a symbol for the imagination, could there be good and bad, rather, effective and ineffective imagination? This is a possibility, but if we look back to "The Common Life" we can see again two kinds of light—the matter-of-fact light of an electric lamp on a page of Euclid and the suggested light that is colored, rose and violet. If we choose to assume that in "Of Hartford" masculine light is like that electric, Euclidean light which offers no mystery or suggestion but fact, reality, we must then assume that feminine light represents the converse—mystery, suggestion, implication. Yet, to look at these two kinds of light as described, it seems perhaps odd to consider them each as types of imagination. A Euclidean imagination? I think not. The implication, then, must be that for Stevens light is not always a representation of the imagination itself. Rather, certain kinds of light take on the function of imagination while others take on the function of fact/reality.
If we are to accept this notion, that masculine light (say, electric light, maybe even noon-day sunlight) represents reality, fact, and lack of mystery while feminine light represents the shadings of the imagination, then how must we view what comes next in "Of Hartford"? We see purple, a parasol, and stage lights—suggestions of things feminine, French, and electric (man-made). The parasol is used by ladies as shade from the sun, perhaps shade from the harshness of reality. J. Hillis Miller and Roy Harvey Pearce, in their The Art of the Mind, discuss Stevens’s use of the parasol as image:
[Stevens] played with the parasol as symbol of the imagination for a long time. It first crops up in the best of his undergraduate poems, "Ballade of the Pink Parasol." It crops up again in "The Comedian as the Letter C" at the moment when Crispin is about to renounce the imagination for his peculiar kind of realism and still later in "Of Hartford in a Purple Light". . . . But a parasol inevitably suggests artifice and fiction; it makes the imagination an ambiguous power. Like Pascal, whom Stevens greatly admired, he was something of two minds about the imagination. (58-9)
Oh dear. A conundrum. The purple light in "Hartford" certainly seems to be implied as artifice, as something less than poetically inspiring. The scene of Hartford in a purple light is a thing on a stage wincing in an uncomfortable light. "It is like a region full of intonings" or reachings for the right notes, but it is not the reality of Hartford itself. It is other; it is not unlike those western horses. The purple light here seems unnatural, seems somehow to imply a dis-ease with its effects.
When, earlier, masculine light fell on the town, a light perhaps more direct, more "clear," its offerings were plain, stark, even heroic. The landmarks of the town could be seen for what they were, could be seen in the direct light of the real. But the light shifts, the seasons change, the sun moves, such as at dawn and at dusk. Purple light falls on Hartford, feminine light, and "[p]urple sets purple round." The town’s landmarks are changed in a way quite unlike the way in which purple light is suggested in "The Common Life." There, it is rose and violet which create passion and desire, which seem a respite from the harshness of cold reality. Here, the purple light is a questionable passion, an uncomfortable, ill-suited theatricality. Whereas under male light all in the town was clear, under female light Hartford loses its muscle tone, weakens. What must Stevens be saying?
My house has changed a little in the sun.
The fragrance of the magnolias comes close,
False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.
(from Stevens’s Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction)
Perhaps Stevens is of two minds about the imagination, or perhaps he is considering, in "Of Hartford," something about how the imagination is employed. A possible clue is the poem’s final stanza. The speaker calls for the waters of the ocean, its spray, to be flicked off the back of a poodle onto "the irised hunks" and "the stone bouquet." The speaker has called for water from the ocean to be applied to, if you will, a "femaled" male thing and a "maled" female thing. Possibly, this is Stevens’s way of saying that, for the poet, some kind of integration is necessary between the masculine light and the feminine light in trying to understand, conceive, and represent the world. The sun may always be the sun, but as we shift under its light, its light changes in angle, tone, and color. In turn, the sun’s light changes that which it shines upon, behind, and beside. The "ever-freshening" waters of the ocean seem to serve as some kind of equalizing agent, as there are relatively few-to-no "shadings" of the condition of being wet. A. Walton Litz, in his book, Introspective Voyage, comments that " in ‘The Common Life,’ Stevens . . . dramatizes the world without imagination. . . . By way of balance . . . ‘Of Hartford in a Purple Light’ speak[s] of the freshening imagination. . . . The sun, Master Soleil, is ever the same and ever new, making us abhor the ‘souvenirs’ of empty rhetoric with the light of coastal transformation" (262-3). And this could be true, indeed. Stevens may have given us a portrait of what can happen when the imagination is ineffective or overly precious such that poetic reachings become leanings toward overripe fruit, thus not at all refreshing. The whisk of sea water against the things empurpled by the shifting sunlight reminds us that the poet needs reality to have imagination in the first place. As Stevens himself reminds us in The Necessary Angel, there is "an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals" (27), a notion which, when forgotten, yields subjects which may appear as though they have been thrown up on a stage under ill-suiting lights or, worse, subjects which appear taxidermied.
I believe the decision to include "The Common Life" and "Of Hartford in a Purple Light" in the same collection was quite deliberate. Stevens never purports to have the answers to questions about our existence which are enduring. His poems are themselves searchings, meditations. That they contain imagery and ideas which are often contradictory, or which seem to be contradictory, speaks more to the poet’s attempts at accepting that perhaps imagination and reality do not exist as poles which must be reconciled, but as mutually-dependent forces to be experienced and relished and questioned and, most of all, examined through art. Stevens, again, in his own words:
[T]he best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar’s art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives—if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary. Like light, it adds nothing, except itself. What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact [.] (63)
And so for Stevens we can see that a world in which nothing exists for us but the clear light of fact is an existence without joy, while a world in which the light is a constant, garish violet makes us forget what we appreciate as real in the first place. It is the interrelationship of reality and the imagination that is to be savored for Stevens and for his work.
It is a morbid light
In which they stand,
Like an electric lamp
On a page of Euclid.
(from "The Common Life")
Near closing time, my friend and I sit at a table with two strippers and a cocktail waitress. We have lied that we are on assignment for Harper’s to write about spring vacations. The town, or our idea of the town, seems to have given us permission to weave such a tale, and I am surprised by how many people we talk to accept this without question—of course it is possible. Two women we have just seen completely naked tell us about their lives under flashing lights: one, whose name we do not get, has six children who live with her ex-husband. She says she enjoys her job "for what it is." She writes poetry and likes Keats. She hates the girls who get breast-jobs. "It’s so unnatural," she says. The other dancer, whose real name is Linda, is a young student trying to pay her bills. She hates her job and doesn’t want anyone she knows to find out she works at the Palomino. She was in the amateur competition—she says all the girls in the competition actually work here. Linda is called back onstage for her last performance. She asks us to come cheer for her so we do. She moves around the small stage under the violet lights to the music, moves from pole to pole. We clap and call her by name in a now-completely self-reflexive manner. Linda smirks at us, jokes with us, rolls her eyes. I wave a dollar bill jokingly, and Linda is required to grasp it between her breasts. She leans in to me and says, "Thanks, Eric. God, I hate this job." It is like watching my sister act silly.
We talk to Tammy, the cocktail waitress who might as well be a stripper for all the nothing she’s wearing as a uniform. A haggard-looking twenty-eight, even in the dim, rosy lights, Tammy does not know what she will do after this job. She says she "can’t afford to think like that right now." All the women say they know their jobs are about fantasy, about desire and the unobtainable. They laugh about most of the Palomino’s clientele. "But it’s nice when somebody treats you like a person," Linda says. "I would hate for any of the guys in here to see me under real light," the other stripper says. "That pretty much kills the illusion," Tammy adds.
At 6:00 in the morning the Palomino must close. Tammy walks us to the door. We give her our thanks and best wishes. "Take care of yourself," I say with a hug. Tammy’s voice cracks through her thanks, adding, "It was really nice to talk to you guys." She gives us the club’s number, says to call anytime. Then we open the door to a shock of morning sun which literally stabs into the heart of the room like a spear. Tammy turns her head, a hand to her face, and suddenly I know we must leave. And there is no mystery to the Las Vegas Strip’s skyline at 6:00 in the morning—a Euclidean light on joyless plastic. It is not a woman for a man. But the landscape moves under the sun allowing the sun to move us when its light mutes, alters, and suggests. Reality and imagination remain engaged in a dance, and the sun both colors and reflects them back to us as parts of our world necessary to bear life.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Howard. "Poet Pounds and So Does Critic." Los Angeles Times. 12
September 1942.
Bloom, Harold, Ed. Wallace Stevens. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.
Derleth, August. "Poet as Philosopher." Madison Capital Times. 25 October, 1942.
Fuchs, Daniel. The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1963.
Lechlitner, Ruth. Review. Books. 8 November 1942.
Litz, A. Walton. Introspective Voyager. New York: Oxford UP, 1972.
Miller, J. Hillis and Roy Harvey Pearce. The Art of the Mind. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1965.
Simons, Hi. Review. Poetry. November 1942.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1990.
- - - . The Necessary Angel. New York: Vintage, 1951.
Sukenick, Ronald. Musing the Obscure. New York: New York UP, 1967.