How do we claim our space in the world? Action is certainly necessary, but what type of action is undertaken is subjective. Empires globally extend their militaries and, subsequently, their socioeconomic infrastructures; painters drape their world in contemplative strokes of color on local and international stages; writers and poets, on the other hand, envision a home in the world and attempt to relate the pith of their dreams to their audience through an imprecise language. Wallace Stevens believed that reality is a product of the imagination, and that imagination shapes the world, which is one of the main facets of Surrealism. Surrealist thought was and is a quest for justice in the face of ineffective sociopolitical affectations based on rationalized realities; the centrality of poetry to this movement positions Wallace Stevens’ work within the parameters of catalytic surrealistic quests for justice. Through an analysis of Stevens’ poems Of Mere Being, The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain, Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself, and The Idea of Order at Key West, a distinct notion of justice defined through the lens of surrealism is resonant, and offers an imagined world with enough intellectual space to dream of a revolutionary freedom applicable to reality.
To begin with, it is important to explain how the term surrealism is applied to the poems. According to Robin D. G. Kelley in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, surrealism is not merely an aesthetic methodology, but a revolutionary movement waged to emancipate thought. “Surrealism is about making a new life” and “invites dreaming, urges us to improvise and invent and recognizes the imagination as the most powerful weapon” in an individualized struggle to find a home in the world. As the Chicago Surrealist Group understood, the aim of surrealism is “to lessen and eventually to completely resolve the contradiction between everyday life and our wildest dreams.” Within this context, poetry is a central catalyst for the revolution of thought; poetry is not a simple textual composition, “but a revolt: a scream in the night, an emancipation of language and old ways of thinking;” it is a protest and a purchase of arable intellectual soil ready to be reaped and sown in order to feed the revolution. Wallace Stevens’ poetry is rife with a revolutionary framework for the expansion of the mind, and its attempt to initiate a discussion on the role of justice as it exists in reality by imagining its qualities in print.
Stevens examines the geography of the mind and delves into the importance of revolutionary surrealist thought in Of Mere Being, a poem laden with the hopeful anticipation of the imagined revolution waiting on the sidelines of reality. Employing classically militaristic and theological references, Stevens imagines vast recesses of the mind and details its content. He begins by identifying “The palm at the end of the mind” in which a “gold-feathered” phoenix sings. The palm tree in particular has a wealth of symbolic meaning. Secularly, the Romans used the palm branch to symbolize victory and triumph and the stalwart tree also appears on state flags in Haiti, Guam, and Florida. The palm also has religious significance. Christians selected the tree to symbolize Jesus’ re-entry into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday); it is also a symbol of peace and plenty in Judaism and it is especially significant as the Tree of Life in Cabala. The palm is used by Stevens to represent an imagined space for victory and peaceful regeneration in minds infiltrated with surrealist revolutionary fervor. He adds further pith to the image of regeneration with the phoenix, whose “fire-fangled feathers dangle down” as it intones the coming revolution. With all this potent imagery inundating his audience, Stevens explicitly implores the reader to remember “that it is not the reason/ That makes us happy or unhappy,” gently reminding us of the surrealist argument that logic and rationality will not transform our reality into our home—only a revolution of the mind will turn this world into a place in which we can truly live.
In The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain, Stevens supplants geographic reality with one imagined in the mind, and finds a home in the freedom of a surrealistic revolution. As Robin D. G. Kelley points out, poets have continually “succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements,” based on conceptions of justice, are capable of producing. In The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain, Stevens not only imagines the color of the sky, but also the very ground upon which he stands. Through the power of his mind, he is able to stand atop his creation “word for word,/ The poem that took the place of a mountain.” This new landscape is his creation, he “recomposed the pines/ Shifted the rocks,” all in an attempt to bridge the gap between his restructured mind and his reality. This mountain, with its mineral stairway to the sky, “reminded him how he had needed/ A place to go to in his own direction,” and allows Stevens to create a “unique and solitary home” in the world. This poem speaks to the revolutionary desire for territory—a desire for free space to convert imagined surrealistic plains into gloriously surrealistic realities, which Stevens accomplishes with the building blocks of language. The first step to creating the world in your likeness is imagining the silhouette of its form, and Stevens lays the foundation for that surrealistic revolution merely by describing that silhouette.
While Stevens describes the terrain of the mind in Of Mere Being and carves out a theoretical niche in the world by replacing geographic obstacles with words—and thus becoming soul owner of that domain—in The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain, Stevens describes the dawn of a surrealist revolution that is on the horizon in Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself. If poetry is a scream of revolt, then the faint bellowing in this poem is the beginning of the revolution. “At earliest ending of winter,/ In March, a scrawny cry from outside/ Seemed like a sound in his mind;” The harsh winter of reality is thawing and the screaming surrealism of his mind is breaking through the thick ice that separates reality from the imagination. At first, however, he is not sure if the cry exists only in his imagination, but he soon realizes it is “not from the vast ventriloquism/ Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…/ The sun [is] coming from outside.” This imagined world is no longer merely crafted of papier-mache—a French phrase meaning chewed up paper; The space he created in his mind is no longer the cud of his dreams dreamt for so long they began to lose their color. His dreams have ushered in the dawn like a surrealist, poetic Chanticleer, “A chorister whose c preceded the choir.” This “colossal sun” that has begun to climb the sky creates “A new knowledge of reality,” which is the fundamental drive of surrealist revolutionary ideology.
With the foundation set for an understanding of Stevens’ revolutionary surrealism, an explanation of justice can be discussed. Revolutions are attempts to impose particular conceptions of what is right onto a system of governance perceived to be unjust, and the surrealist revolution of the mind is no different; instead of fighting a tyrannical government, however, surrealism seeks to emancipate the imagination, which has been shackled by logic and rationality. The Idea of Order at Key West applies the surrealist desire for freedom to the Cuban desire for the freedom to govern itself in its own fashion. To explore these concepts of freedom, in which the role of justice is central and overriding, Stevens personifies justice and details Lady Justice’s journey from the shores of America to the turbulent beaches of a Cuba engulfed in revolution. Key descriptions within the poem are clues that reveal Lady Justice’s identity. As she crosses the Atlantic towards Cuba, her sleeves flutter much like the voluminous sleeves of a judiciary robe. “She measured to the hour “ the solitude of the sky with the scales she holds in her left hand, and “She was the single artificer of the world / In which she sang.” Justice and the way it manually constructs the architecture of our world—setting legal boundaries and moral parameters—is, in many ways, one of the few jurisdictions in life that is adhered to. In Stevens’ world, however, Justice is not impartial, as “The sea was not a mask./ No more was she.” What Stevens is implying is that Justice is not blind to her surroundings—she is not passive—as the role of imagination is not passive in its attempt to surrealistically revolutionize the world through thought.
In this poem, the cry that ushered in the dawn in Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself is soldered to the song of the phoenix found in Of Mere Being to create the melodic voice of Lady Justice, which rings out over the roar of the sea. “She was the maker of the song she sang” and “It was her voice that made/ The sky acutest at its vanishing.” This resonant song of justice, once it illuminates the sky brings the outline of the dark horizon into sharp relief. When the surrealist implementation of the imagined revolution failed, as it did in Cuba when Ramon Fernandez and his Cuban army successfully stifled her song and turned away the invading American forces, the colossal sun that was previously heralded dips below the sea as the “Blessed rage for order” wages on.
Within Wallace Stevens’ four poems—Of Mere Being, The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain, Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself, and The idea of Order at Key West—the arch of a surrealist attempt to define the freedom that is possible through a revolution of thought is clearly seen. In Of Mere Being, Stevens elucidates the terrain of the mind and the vastness of its ability to imagine other realities. In The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain he describes how replacing geographical realities with those constructed in the recesses of the mind allow one to truly find a home in the world; In Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself Stevens places the reader at the dawn of the surrealistic revolution and attunes the ear to the oncoming cry of revolt; And in The Idea of Order at Key West, Stevens completes the arch by introducing the reader to a surrealistic Lady Justice and woefully relating her journey and eventual surrender on the shores of Cuba at the feet of Ramon Fernandez. Although the optimistic birth of the arch was not sustained in the end, one ideological loss on the surrealistic revolutionary battlefields does not mean the war between what is imagined and what is real has been won by neither side. As the war continues to canter along, the words of poets and writers will sustain the fight, and the words of Cat Power will resonate: “We can all be free. Maybe not with words. Maybe not with a look, but with your Mind.”
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