American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). THE GRANGER COLLECTION (Cordon Press)
At a time when the convenience of teleworking is being debated, the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is a prime example of the special virtues that face-to-face work can offer: he wrote his poems mentally on his daily walks back and forth the office in the city of Hartford, Connecticut, and the rhythm of his walking served as the basis for the musicality of the verses.
Stevens was an ordinary gentleman, in the few surviving photographs he appears in a gray suit, red tie, plump, with well-groomed and well-cut gray hair. He woke up at six o’clock and went to bed at nine o’clock at night. He worked as an attorney for an insurance company, the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, of which he was vice president for three decades. He did not like to talk about poetry, literary acts or interviews. But in this gentleman was one of the seminal poets of the 20th century. “The world is ugly / and people are sad,” he wrote in one of his lyrics.
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The documentary A Foreign Song, directed by César Souto and produced by Daniel Froiz, is not so much inspired by the writer’s biography (which, by the way, is nothing special) but by his character and his poetry. At the last Gijón International Film Festival (FICX) in November, he was awarded the prize for the best Spanish film and the RCService prize for the director of the best Spanish film.
“I was interested in the idea of making a film based on an ordinary person, rather than the flamboyant artist who has a compelling personality,” says the filmmaker. “An existence that seems more to do with prose than poetry.” Stevens didn’t even like to talk about his work because he felt poetry was not personal, but the voice of someone else speaking through his verses. That poetic delight, that sense of being the instrument of strange and unfamiliar voices, will be familiar to almost anyone who writes, but Stevens met it with utter humility and honesty. Something Souto appreciates in “a time marked by the cult of outstanding personalities and by the permanent exposure of the self”.
Still from ‘A Foreign Song’ by César Souto, a film based on the character and work of poet Wallace Stevens.
Stevens was an “inexplicable blend of two seemingly irreconcilable facets of the American experience: business and poetry,” notes Milton J. Bates in the book Wallace Stevens. A Mythology of the Self (University of California Press). In A Foreign Song there are no talking heads to gloss over the poet, nor too much biographical data, dominating shots of the spaces through which he traveled, from the New York of his youth to the peaceful suburbs of the Hartford bourgeoisie that he traversed work areas accompanied by an off-commentary, sometimes by the poet, sometimes by other moderators reciting poems or reading letters. At two hours in length, the imagery and leisurely pace invite the viewer to enter a state of contemplation perhaps benevolent to Stevens’ poetics, so concerned with imagination and nature. “It strikes me that moments that we think of as mundane, like commuting to and from work, are actually a very important part of our lives,” says the director, “that’s where poetry is sometimes born.”
Much of the footage is from American home cassettes obtained over the Internet. “I wanted to go to the origin of the native material: the moment Stevens published his first book was also the moment Eastman Kodak released a 16mm camera for hobbyists. It’s like a fundamental point of cinema. There’s a way to represent the world as if it’s owned,” says Souto. Other images were shot by the team on site or come from historical documentation.
The Ice King
Stevens had a strong influence on English language poetry, which was reflected in the works of later great names such as John Ashbery, Mark Strand and Anne Carson. His readings included the classics, the romantics, especially Wordsworth, or the French tradition, especially the symbolists. Also the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. “All American poetry of the second half of the 20th century is influenced by him,” says Andreu Jaume, responsible for publishing Stevens’ Poetry reunited (Lumen), with his own translations and those of Andrés Sánchez Robayna and Daniel Aguirre Oteiza. “In a way, he was a poet who helped break the impasse of modernity [en el sentido anglosajón del término] by TS Eliot and Ezra Pound,” adds Jaume.
Wallace Stevens, pictured in 1950. Walter Sanders (GETTY IMAGES)
Stevens was also a late poet, at least in terms of publication, as he produced his first anthology of poetry, Harmonio (1923), at the age of 44. It contains one of the author’s best-known poems, The Ice Cream Emperor, which narrates the death of his mother in a tremendously ambiguous manner, with a disturbing refrain that twice changes tone: “The only emperor is the ice cream”. It is the perplexity sometimes caused by this author, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955. “For death is the only mother of beauty,” he wrote elsewhere.
Stevens’ poetry is complex, mysterious, and at times incomprehensible, at least to the untrained reader. If we divide poets into two camps, those grasped by emotion or by the intellect, and there is a range of shades of gray in between, perhaps we should classify Stevens closer to the latter, more intellectual. Not all readers will say the same. “Stevens is not a hermetic poet in the sense that his poetry hides an encoded meaning,” says Jaume. “He just thinks so. He is a poet of the spirit, a great singer of the imagination, but he is also very warm and conveys a strange and immediate emotion. As such, I don’t think it fits into any camp.” In 2020, Javier Marías edited and translated Stevens’ long poem Notes for a supreme fiction for his publishing house Reino de Redonda.
One of the few fervent moments in the life of the quiet Stevens, recounted in the prologue to his Poetry together, was when, in 1936, during a cocktail party in Key West, Florida, notoriously drunk, he spoke very badly about his brother, the sister of Ernest Hemingway. Disgusted, she set off to find the writer, who came to find Stevens angry, probably with a few too many drinks. The poet, who was 56 years old and 20 years older than Hemingway, tried to hit him on the jaw but missed and fell to the ground. Hemingway got up and punched him in the face, and Stevens did the same but broke his hand. “It is not surprising that the most introverted and sedentary poet would want to break the face of the most physical and adventurous writer. It feels like a metaphor between one extreme and the other of American literature,” says Jaume.
Wallace Stevens, canonical poet, was otherwise a regular guy. “The 20th-century poet is no longer a heroic figure in Lord Byron’s sense,” Jaume continues. “Stevens is responding to the nature of his time and country: someone who has never left the United States and has only traveled reading. Kafka was already a similar author in this respect. Behind the insurance, the laws, the working days and the salaries, the epic of an indomitable imagination”.
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