Helen Vendler's Great "Stevens and Keats's 'To Autumn' " (Contra Mark Jarman)

Mark Jarman, in his “The Judgment of Poetry” (The Hudson Review, Autumn, 2015), praises Vendler as “one of the best close readers of poetry today.” But his treatment of her great “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ ” seems peevish. He writes,

In her discussion of Keats’s “To Autumn,” she hears the great ode in Stevens’ poetry, especially in the final strophe of “Sunday Morning.” Her argument is illuminating, and yet it seems as if no other modern poet read Keats as Stevens did. She believes the central problems of Keats’s ode “become central to Stevens’ poetry as well.” But what about the fact that Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” gathers together two of Keats’s great odes, “To Autumn” and “Ode to a Nightingale” and links sleep, poetry, and imagination in similar ways?

At no point in “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ ” does Vendler argue that Stevens is the only poet to rework the materials of Keats’s ode. But I think it’s safe to say, based on Vendler’s essay, that the magnitude of Stevens’s rich reworking of it is unmatched by any other poet. Frost may have had “To Autumn” in mind when he wrote “After Apple-Picking.” But his poem doesn’t come close to reinterpreting, reusing, and recreating “To Autumn” the way that, say, Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” does. Vendler writes,

The resemblances have been often remarked. Both poets use successive clauses of animal presence (gnats, lambs, crickets, redbreast, and swallows in Keats; deer, quail, and pigeons in Stevenson; both poems close with birds in the sky (gathering swallows in Keats, flocks of pigeons in Stevens) and with the sense of sound (including a whistling bird in each); Keats’s soft-dying day becomes Stevens’s evening.

Vendler shows that the end of “Sunday Morning” is a rewritten version of the close of Keats’s “To Autumn.” But what’s even more arresting is her analysis of how Stevens, in his rewriting, made the materials of Keats’s great poem distinctly his own:

Keats writes a long clause about the gnats, then follows it with shorter ones dwindling to “hedge-crickets sing,” then broadens out to end his poem. Stevens writes short clauses followed by a final long one. The result is a gain in climactic force and explicit pathos, but a loss in stoicism and discretion of statement. Keats’s pathos (at its most plangent in the small gnats who mourn in wailful choir, helpless in the light wind; less insistent but still audible in the bleating lambs; but largely absent in the whistle and twitter of the closing lines) reaches us with steadily diminishing force, in inverse relation to Keats’s recognition of the independent worth of autumnal music, without reference to any dying fall. Stevens’s pathos, on the other hand, is at its most evident in the closing lines. In short, Stevens has adopted Keats’s manner – the population of animals, the types of clause, the diction, even the sunset landscape – without embracing Keats’s essential stylistic argument against nostalgia. Nor has he imitated Keats’s reticent diction and chaste rhetoric; instead, he writes with an increasing opulence of rhetorical music, and imposes explicit metaphysical dimensions on the landscape.

Jarman calls Vendler’s discussion of “To Autumn” and “Sunday Morning” “illuminating.” Yes, it certainly is. But it’s more than that. It’s an extraordinary work of comparative analysis. Jarman doesn’t do it justice.

Postscript: Helen Vendler was The New Yorker’s poetry critic from 1978 to 2001. Her work is one of this blog’s touchstones.

Helen Vendler's "The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar": "Stevens and Keat's 'To Autumn'"

Reading Helen Vendler’s excellent new essay collection, The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, I encountered an old friend – her great “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn.’” I first read this piece thirty-five years ago when it appeared in her wonderful 1980 collection, Part of Nature, Part of Us. “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn’” is quintessential Vendler – intensely descriptive, powerfully analytic. It’s a detailed study of the ways Wallace Stevens reworked the materials of John Keats’s ode “To Autumn.” Vendler says, “It seems, as we read Stevens, that each aspect of the autumn ode called out to him to be reinterpreted, reused, recreated into a poem.”

Comparing The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar’s “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn,’” with the version in Part of Nature, Part of Us, I notice at least a dozen changes. For example, the Part of Nature version says, “The end of ‘Sunday Morning’ is a rewritten version of the close of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’; such risk-taking in a young poet argues a deep engagement with the earlier poem.” In the Ocean, Bird and Scholar version, this is changed to “The end of ‘Sunday Morning’ is a rewritten version of the close of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’; such obvious and unashamed risk taking in a young poet argues a deep engagement with the earlier poem” (my emphasis). One alteration puzzles me. In the earlier Part of Nature version, Vendler says of Stevens,

His attempts to go “beyond” Keats in various ways – to take the human seasons further, into winter, into boreal apocalypse, into inception; to find new imagery of his own, while retaining Keats’s crickets and bees and birds and sun and fields; to create his own archaic forms in the landscape – define in their evolution Stevens’ own emerging originality. (My emphasis)

In the Ocean, Bird and Scholar version, this is changed to

His attempts to go “beyond” Keats in various ways – to take the human seasons further, into winter, into boreal apocalypse, into inception; to find new imagery of his own, while retaining Keats’s crickets and bees and birds and sun and fields; to create his own archaic forms in the landscape, defining in their evolution Stevens’ own emerging originality. (My emphasis)

In the first passage, the words within the break marked by the dashes appear to refer to (and amplify) the ways Stevens attempts to go “beyond” Keats; the verb “define” after the second dash picks up the point (interrupted by the first dash) that Stevens’s attempts to go “beyond” Keats in various ways “define in their evolution Stevens’ own emerging originality.” But the deletion of the second dash in the Ocean, Bird and Scholar version, the insertion of a comma in its place, and the conversion of “define” to “defining” seems to me to break the sentence’s logic. The words “defining in their evolution Stevens’ own emerging originality” now appear to refer only to one of the ways that Stevens attempts to go “beyond” Keats.    

Perhaps the most significant change in the Ocean, Bird and Scholar version of  “Stevens and Keats’s ‘To Autumn’” is the revision of its description of Stevens’s late poem “The Hermitage at the Centre.” In the Part of Nature version, Vendler says,

Nonetheless I close not with this last successful meditation but instead with a poem that in its own relative failure shows Stevens’ stubborn ambition, even at the expense of violent dislocation of form, to have plenitude and poverty at once, to possess Keats’s central divine figure opulently whole and surrounded by her filial forms, while at the same time asserting the necessary obsolescence of her form and of the literature about her. (My emphasis)

In the Ocean, Bird and Scholar version, this passage now reads,

Nonetheless I close not with this last successful meditation but instead with a poem that in its own interlacing of lines shows Stevens’ stubborn ambition, even at the expense of violent dislocation of form, to have plenitude and poverty at once, to possess Keats’s central divine figure opulently whole and surrounded by her filial forms, while at the same time asserting the necessary obsolescence of her form and of the literature about her. (My emphasis)

The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar shows a master stylist tweaking one of her finest essays. I find the changes fascinating.