Harmonium (poetry Collection) - The Musical Imagist

The Musical Imagist

The critic Paul Rosenfeld described Stevens as "the musical imagist". "To The One Of Fictive Music" is one deep and difficult justification for this description, invoking the muse of poetry for "an image that is sure" in a kind of music that "gives motion to perfection more serene" than other forms of music summoned by the human condition. This primacy is given an exaggerated statement in the Adagia aphorism, "Words are the only melodeon."

Stevens might also be called the Vivaldi of poets because of the importance to him of the seasons and weather generally. Harold Bloom chides Vendler for writing in On Extended Wings that "the only phenomenon to which he is passionately attached is the weather", replying, "If Mrs. Vendler were wholly correct, readers deeply moved by Stevens might have to murmur that never has so much been made out of the weather.". Responding to the seasons, nature, and the world generally is the work of the imagination, whether the poet's or anyone else's, and failure of imagination is associated with death, as in "Another Weeping Woman". The seasons also serve for Stevens's musings on the passage of time, as in "The Man whose Pharynx was bad". Sebastian Gardner shows that the four seasons can be understood as fundamental to Stevens's poetic project, and that a corresponding philosophical project is implicit in his work, assigning different metaphysical import to the aspects of reality brought out in the poetry of each of the seasons.

The Vivaldi of poets has also been accused of "some hazy notion of an analogy between music and poetry." Whether hazy or not, the notion colors such poems as Harmonium's "Peter Quince at the Clavier" and "Infanta Marina", which Vendler likens to a "double scherzo". She also observes that for Stevens "looking and hearing, imagery and musicality, occupy equal ground". Essayist Llewelyn Powys also pursues this notion, finding that "each unexpected verbal manipulation conceals some obscure harmony of sense and sound which not only provokes intellectual appreciation, but in the strangest possible way troubles the imagination." Anca Rosu gives priority to sound: "To Plato's metaphysics of sight Stevens responds with a metaphysics of sound."

See Michael O. Stegman's "Checklist of Musical Compositions Relating to Stevens" for a considerable number of musical tributes to Stevens, such as John Gardner's "Five Partsongs to Poems by Wallace Stevens".