Wallace Stevens Journal

MY FOCUS in this contribution adds another element to the mosaic of global figures in Wallace Stevens’s poetry: the figure of displacement. By displacement I mean the moving of something or someone from its place to another—or the condition of having been moved; and secondarily, the sense of something taking the place of something that was previously established. There are many kinds of displacement in Stevens. We might even talk about a poetics of displacement operating in various features of his writing: metaphoric displacement (“Oak Leaves Are Hands”); syntactic displacement (his love of chiasmus); lexical displacement (the sudden intrusion of foreign words, such as “savoir” in “The Plain Sense of Things” [CPP 428]); formal and metrical displacements (the sudden shift into a limerick or some other alien prosodic environment); permutational structures that create new environments for a few key terms (“Sea Surface Full of Clouds”); or the decoupage-like displacements of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” with its play on the words “play” and “place” (CPP 137). Representation itself is a form of displacement in Stevens (as in “Description Without Place”), and he often figures reading as an experience of displacement. I am not here concerned with displacement in the Freudian sense, though such displacement correlates with poetic strategy (as a form of metaphor or telling it slant). We recognize Stevens’s modernity through these images of displacement, which involve abrupt rather than gradual transition, for displacement implies not only change but also discontinuity. “[T]he scene was set; . . . Then the theatre was changed / To something else,” describes an abrupt displacement in place (CPP 218). Modernity requires that our inventions “Take the place / Of parents, lewdest of ancestors. / We are conceived in your conceits” (CPP 180).

In this essay, I will concentrate primarily on one aspect of Stevens’s poetics of displacement: types of displaced persons—the wanderer, the refugee, the exile, the expatriate, the nostalgic man. Even where the change of position is willed, the feeling of displacement, of being out of place, prevails, with discomfort alongside reorientation. Displacement is a human condition, the poems suggest, like the expulsion from Eden. These [End Page 149] are abstract figures in Stevens, but they reverberate a real and conspicuous condition of the war years.

Such a focus on displaced persons may seem surprising. Stevens famously declared that for him “life is an affair of places” rather than of people (CPP 901), and place-names are an essential element of his style. The word “place” as either verb or noun is everywhere in the poetry—I count at least 117 instances—whereas “displace” never appears. And, of course, Stevens chose a rooted lifestyle; he was anything but a displaced person himself. But several of his correspondents were displaced, whether willingly or by necessity. And Stevens says the poet must “learn the speech of the place,” implying that it is not native to him (CPP 218). There are indigenes in Stevens, and others who are assimilating, who have learned the speech of a place—“The man in Georgia waking among pines / Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man, / Planting his pristine cores in Florida, / Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery, / But on the banjo’s categorical gut” (CPP 31). These are instances of Crispin’s theory that “his soil is man’s intelligence” (CPP 29). But the strong desire for belonging often comes from speakers who are displaced. These images of alignment with place continue in the late poems, though mostly in the past tense as a lost condition of rootedness:

We were as Danes in Denmark all day longAnd knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen,For whom the outlandish was another day

Of the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alikeAnd that made brothers of us in a homeIn which we fed on being brothers, fed

And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb.

(CPP 361–62)

These lines come from “The Auroras of Autumn,” a poem of farewells, in which constant displacements and misalignments are the norm, a poem of “unhappy people in a happy world” (CPP 362). Many poems recall a “village of the...