“A poem is a letter”: Stevens, Thomas McGreevy, and Susan Howe
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WHEN PETER BRAZEAU was compiling his oral biography, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, he wrote a letter to Stevens’s friend John L. (Jack) Sweeney, telling him that “Stevens’ late poems were influenced by his contact with you, your brother, and Thomas McGreevy” (Sweeney and Sweeney). The Irish-American Sweeney brothers—John L., curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard, and James Johnson, curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—were, like the Irish poet, art critic, and director of the National Gallery of Ireland Thomas McGreevy, members of Stevens’s friend Henry Church’s cosmopolitan cultural circle. With McGreevy, the Sweeney brothers also formed what Brazeau, in his article of that title, calls Stevens’s “Irish Connection.”
Stevens’s contact with the Sweeneys and McGreevy, although interpersonal on occasion, was, for the most part, epistolary. The Irish Connection was kept up via correspondence, in letters that involve a closer and more complex imbrication with Stevens’s late poems than Brazeau’s vertical line of influence may indicate. In the Irish Connection, letters and poems become constitutive of each other and are interchangeable, with poems taking the place of letters (and postcards) and letters (and postcards) of poems. Poetry and correspondence combine and recombine, reminding us that, etymologically, “Letters” is a synonym for literature.
“The Irish Cliffs of Moher,” in Stevens’s last sequence, The Rock (1954), is a product of the transatlantic nexus between poetry and the post that is the stamp of the Irish Connection. In a letter to Henry Church’s widow, Barbara, of January 28, 1953, Stevens explains that Jack Sweeney “sent me a photograph of the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland last summer which eventually became a poem” (L 769–70; italics added).1 “We have Tom McGreevy in common,” Stevens remarked to Jack Sweeney in a letter of April 6, 1951, and in a letter to McGreevy himself of October 24, 1952, Stevens would tell him that “Your reference to the cliffs of Moher caught my eye, since Jack Sweeney had sent me a photographic postcard of these rocks which I had placed in my room where I could see it” (L 714, 762). Sweeney’s picture postcard of the dramatic shale and sandstone rock formation on [End Page 225] the Atlantic seaboard of Co. Clare is the visual-verbal pretext for Stevens’s poem, and yet in the poem that took the place of Sweeney’s postcard, Stevens insists that “This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations / Of poetry” (CPP 427). A reverie neither on “landscape” nor on “poetry,” “The Irish Cliffs of Moher” is, rather, a meditation on what David La Guardia calls “the generative center” where “The poet’s genealogical chart . . . begins” (157):
This is my father or, maybe,It is as he was,
A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earthAnd sea and air.
(CPP 427)
In a reverse trajectory to that of Sweeney’s postcard, Stevens sends his poem-reply across the Atlantic to the west of Ireland, recasting genealogy as geology and stripping back his longstanding preoccupation with paternal and parental origins to the primal elements themselves.
“As we grow old we return to our parents,” Susan Howe says in her essay on Stevens, “Vagrancy in the Park” (12). A remarkable meditation on “Late writing,” both Stevens’s and her own, Howe’s essay, like Stevens’s poem, returns to “parents”—literal and figurative, Irish and American—who, in Howe’s case, are her mother, the Dublin-born novelist and playwright Mary Manning, and Stevens himself, the “Predecessor” to whom, “As a North American poet writing in the early twenty-first century,” Howe “owe[s] . . . an incalculable debt” (Howe 26, 27, 3). In its turn, Stevens scholarship owes a considerable debt to Howe’s critical and creative remediations, given that, as Al Filreis points out, “Any consideration of what has happened to Stevens since the mid-1970s must eventually return to Howe” (“Stevens Wars” 137).
Howe’s essay “Vagrancy in the Park” opens with the words “Singeth...
