Harmonium (poetry Collection) - Meaning and Syntax

Meaning and Syntax

Stevens is often called a symbolist poet. Vendler notes that the first task undertaken by the early critics of Stevens was to "decode" his "symbols". (The scare-quotes are Vendler's.) Color symbolism is a vital part of Stevens' poetic technique, according to the symbolist critic Veena Rani Prasad, who proposes the following color scheme for reading Stevens.

blue - imagination;
green - the physical
red - reality
gold - sun
purple - delight in the imagination

Vendler accuses the decoders of producing "some commentary of extraordinary banality", and favors appreciating Stevens's poems by understanding their syntactical novelty rather than by decoding the meanings of their symbols. Stevens lends support to this position, or at least expresses skepticism about 'decoding', when he writes in Adagia, "A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have." The upshot of Vendler's syntactical approach is to situate his poems in the realm of possibilities and potentialities, according to Beverly Maeder, who credits her with pointing the way.

Meaning or semantics is fundamentally about word-world relationships, which are particularly problematic in Stevens's poetry. His syntactical innovations are employed to frustrate simple answers about the relationship between language and reality. For instance, his use of the verb seem gives priority to appearances or aspects: "Let be be the finale of seem". Also orienting the poems away from certainties about an unproblematically given world are similes with like or as, the hypothetical as if, the modal might, the conditional, sentence fragments, optatives, questions, and protean usage of the verb to be (as when an observer beholds "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is".