James Longenbach (1959-2022) , a beloved member of our community, distinguished scholar, critic, teacher and poet, was the author of many books of poetry and literary criticism. His later work focused on contemporary poets, but his earlier critical studies were of W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, including “The Plain Sense of Things” (Oxford University Press, 1991), an in-depth study of Stevens.

Here, offered in tribute to James Longenbach on this one-year anniversary of his death, is a look at three poems of summer by Wallace Stevens.

Stevens’ life was shaped by two World Wars and the Great Depression. Throughout his career as a poet he explored, and questioned, the function and uses of poetry in the face of world disorder, seeking, and, as he wrote in the last line of his last poem, “Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself,” perhaps finding “A new knowledge of reality.

In his poems we see what Stevens called “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” Poetry, imagination, he wrote “the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.” (“The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” last para.; from “The Necessary Angel, Essays on Reality and the Imagination,”1942).

In a review of “Transport of Summer” in The New York Times in April 1947, F.O. Matthiessen said that Wallace Stevens wrote his poems “against the realization that we live in a time of violent disorder” and that out of his imagination “a man can recreate afresh his world.” Matthiessen described Stevens as a poet who expressed such truths with “gaiety of language” and “with the mellowness and tang of a late-summer wine.”

The first of these poems is “Variations on a Summer Day,” written in 1942 and published in the same year in “Parts of a World,” a world shaken by the “violent disorder” of the Second World War. The title evokes a musical composition as much as a poem, the two being inextricably entwined in form and sound:

I

“Say of the gulls that they are flying

In light blue air over dark blue sea.

II

A music more than breath, but lessIIII

A music more than a breath, but less

Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech,

A repetition of unconscious things,

Letters of rock and water, words

Of the visible elements and of ours.

V

The leaves of the sea are shaken and shaken.

There was a tree that was a father,

We sat beneath it and sang our songs.

VII

One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls,

When it sings. The gull sits on the chimney-tops.

He mocks the guinea, challenges

The crow, inciting various modes.

The sparrow requites one, without intent.”

There is a tenderness in that last line that, for this reader,

calls up those sparrows in the New Testament:

“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? …. ye are of more value than many sparrows.” (Matt: ch 10. v.29-31)

And again an arresting musical image in canto VIII:

“But one looks at the sea

As one improvises, on a piano.”

And in canto XIV:

“Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle

Of mica, the dithering of grass,

The Arachne integument of dead trees,

Are the eye grown larger, more intense.”

We have, indeed, “gaiety of language” in these “Variations”.

These images and ideas are pursued in “Transport of Summer” in his long poem “Credences of Summer.” Written in 1947, the summer that followed the end of the war, when people might, as we now might, just for a moment, suspend disbelief and believe in the promises, the credences, of summer, when “the mind lays by its trouble” even as we know, as Stevens’ knew, in Shakespeare’s words, “summer’s lease has all too short a date.”

I

“Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered

And spring’s infuriations over and a long way

To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods

Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight

Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.

And here we have that “eye grown larger…”

II

“Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.

. . . . . .

Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky

Without evasion by a single metaphor.

Look at it in its essential barrenness

And say this, this is the centre that I seek.

Fix it in an eternal foliage.

And fill the foliage with arrested peace - “

In the same collection, he wrote of that “arrested peace” of summer in his lyric “The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm.” Written in eight non-rhyming iambic pentameter couplets (with Stevensian variations) the repetitions of words and phrases suggesting both a villanelle and a sestina, without being quite either one of these, the poem conveys that sense of perfect form with variations found in “Variations” and “Credences”, “that mellowness and tang of a late-summer wine”:

“The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

. . . . . . .

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.”

The calm, and sense of oneness, that this lyric conveys, recalls Jim Longenbach’s beautiful lyric “Thursday” from his last book, “Forever” (Norton, 2021) - a poem about making, about making poetry, about making risotto:

“Because the most difficult part about making something,

also the best,

Is existing in the middle,

Sustaining an act of radical imagination,

I simmered a broth: onion, lemon, a big handful of mint.

. . . .

The miracle, it’s easy to miss, is the moment when the husks

dissolve,

Each grain releasing its tiny explosion of starch.

If you take it off the heat just then, let it sit

While you shave the parmesan into paper-thin curls,

It will be perfectly creamy,

But will still have bite.

There will be dishes to do,

The moon will rise,

And everyone you love will be safe.”

In the simplicity of this, and all Jim Longenbach’s carefully crafted lyrics, “The miracle, it’s easy to miss.” It is good to be able to say that a new collection of his poems will be forthcoming. Something to look forward to - poems to “help us to live our lives”!

And in grateful tribute to this scholar poet, here are these lines from Wallace Stevens’ “Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour”:

“We say God and the imagination are one….

How high that highest candle lights the dark.”

Calendar note

ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 13TH AT 5PM IN THE LIBRARY, JONATHAN POST WILL READ AND DISCUSS POEMS FROM THE WORK OF ANTHONY HECHT IN A CELEBRATION OF THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH. PROFESSOR POST IS EDITOR OF THE SELECTED LETTERS OF ANTHONY HECHT (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) AND AUTHOR OF “THE THICKNESS OF PARTICULARS: A CRITICAL STUDY OF ANTHONY HECHT’S POETRY” (Oxford University Press, 2015).