ABSTRACT
Afrequent complaint against modern poetry is that it doesn’t make sense. But making sense in a literal and linear way is not what a poet is trying to do. The ambition is different. Here’s a famous formulation (from an earlier epoch) by the English Romantic poet John Keats—from a letter of his written in 1817:
[…] at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason […] with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
There’s no better example of a modern master of “negative capability”, of a poet rising above “any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, than Wallace Stevens. This is his “The emperor of ice-cream” (1954), published originally in 1922, a puzzling poem, greatly admired in the modernist canon and wonderful for its sense of beauty. <target id="page_119" target-type="page">119</target>The Emperor of Ice-cream Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Of course, for a poet to rely on negative capability, means that the reader will be expected to rely on it too (this is not unlike the demand on the viewer to appreciate the conventions of the art that a cubist painting makes). And the reader will need to know and to remember that the textual distortions and discontinuities are deliberate. Here, Stevens’s surprising shifts from vivid image to abstract rhetoric, and his absurd exaggeration (“The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream”) are of the essence. This is an experience he is creating, not an argument he is making. “The emperor …” evokes a feeling-image and a rich sense of time and place. It makes me think of a Hopper painting, of his scenes of America in an age gone by, the familiar “Nighthawks”, for example (and, more contemporaneously and more personally, I think of Eddie’s Sweet Shop, an 120old fashioned ice cream parlour near my home in Forest Hills where you can see Eddie—my own nominee for emperor of ice cream—whipping the cream with a huge wire whisk in a copper bowl).