Right, Sam Falk/The New York Times; left, Andrew Sullivan for The New York TimesRight, Wallace Stevens in 1951. Left, the first few lines of Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” with the Hartford insurance company, where he worked, in the background.As I explore in this weekend’s Travel section, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Wallace Stevens made a comfortable living as an insurance executive in Hartford. Many of his poems surfaced in his mind as he ambled along the sidewalks of Connecticut’s capital on the way to his office.
When Harold Bloom, the Yale professor and 81-year-old lion of American literary scholarship, was a 17-year-old freshman at Cornell University, he took a trip to Connecticut to experience an encounter with Stevens.
One day in 1947, Stevens was scheduled to do a reading at the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences in New Haven. Mr. Bloom had become so enamored with the poet’s mysterious, mesmerizing work that he found his way to the gathering. Mr. Bloom did not intend to talk to Stevens — “I wanted to bask in the presence,” the professor told me on the phone recently — but fate led him into a conversation with the Hartford insurance man, who was nursing a martini.
Mark Mahaney for The New York TimesHarold Bloom, photographed last year at his New York City apartment.“I crashed the thing, and I was in awe of the great man,” Mr. Bloom recalled. “I told him how much I loved his poetry, and that I hoped to live to write a book about him, which I finally did, of course.”
Stevens, who would die eight years later, asked the young student which poets he was fond of. Mr. Bloom mentioned Blake, Whitman, Shelley. Stevens had a reputation for being icy in social situations, but “he couldn’t have been sweeter” in that private chat, Mr. Bloom said.
Nevertheless, the reading itself posed a few challenges.
“I still remember listening to him,” Mr. Bloom told me. “Even I, who knew the poetry so well, found it almost incomprehensible. And I think the audience was absolutely baffled.”
That’s a common reaction, of course. Stevens’s poems can be simultaneously sensual and inscrutable. And I’m afraid that taking a nice stroll on that Wallace Stevens walk in Hartford isn’t going to untangle them for you.
So what’s the best way to approach Stevens? Here is a good place to begin: stop hunting for “meaning,” per se, and simply look at the poems as imaginative brain-clouds you get to ride along on.
“Stevens’s poems force us, as great poems always do, to live in the occasion of their language — not simply to extract a ‘meaning’ from the language,” James Longenbach, a poet and the author of a book about Stevens, explained to me in an e-mail. “The point is not so much to understand the poems (for when we understand something, we don’t need it anymore, and we don’t read it again); the point is to inhabit the poems. By doing so, we recognize that our humanity is not constituted by our ‘mastery’ of something. It is constituted by our willingness to humble ourselves to the ‘mystery’ of something.”
Or to paraphrase a different kind of poet — the singer and songwriter Iris DeMent — just let the mystery be.