Wallace Stevens and Modern Science 2

in the mind of the observer. This is in a sense exactly what Stevens
century physics, concluded that an event cannot be said to have
happened, or be "real," until it registers in the mind of the observer.
This is in a sense exactly what Stevens means, with the qualification
that for Stevens the mind does more than "register" the event; it
helps to create it. Further, Neils Bohr pointed out early in the
discussion of quantum physics' philosophical implications that one
of the major problems with talking about the "reality" depicted in
quantum findings is that language as it now exists is inadequate to
do anything except present the findings: nothing that can be said is
its solid self, perhaps, but only a "seeming."
With all this in mind, we can see how the 31 cantos of "An
Ordinary Evening in New Haven" are efforts to shape the universe
out of the meeting of the external facts of the universe (such as New
Haven) with the internal ordering force of the imagination. The
poem has a sense of sadness which springs mainly from the
expressions of difficulty and even futility with words. If "it is a
world of words to the end of it," but things cannot be described or
approached directly, only through "the intricate evasions of us,"
then things can never be directly apprehensible or knowable, as we
would perhaps like
them to be.
But solutions are proposed, even though they are admitted to be
tentative:

Professor Eucalyptus said, "The search
For reality is as momentous as
The search for god." It is the philosopher's search

For an interior made exterior
And the poet's search for the same exterior made
Interior.
(CP 481)

The proposal, or the frame of reference of the personal, is that
interior and exterior meet. The world of words - of the poet, or
creative consciousness - is the nexus of that meeting.
At the end of the poem comes an assertion which is downright
hopeful:

It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

This is hopeful because it implies that our description of reality
need not be fixed and settled. We need not continue to think of
reality, in its difficulty and futility, as being necessarily a physical
place or having a "solid self"; we can make radical changes in the
quality of reality by making radical changes in what we say is true
of it. We may find, Stevens says in a late essay, that "man's truth is
the final resolution of everything."
Further, the words "solid" and "force" in this stanza imply ideas
from physical science. "Force" is a technical term in physics, and
"solid" suggests atomic physics' description of all material reality as
un-solid, composed of whirling particles with huge spaces between
them. It also recalls Stevens' essay "The Noble Rider and the Sound
of Words," where he quotes Joad as saying, "'Philosophy has long
dismissed the notion of [solid] substance, and modern physics has
endorsed the dismissal..,'" (NA p. 25). Even his terminology is
parallel to - and sometimes the same as - the terminology of
modern science.
But for Stevens as well as for many physicists, even the proposition
that reality somehow occurs as a whole but unexplained activity of
exterior made interior (or vice versa) rather than exists statically as
a set of objects or events, is rationality insufficient. This is reflected
in the tentative quality of the language in those closing lines of "An
Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Stevens presses this rational
insufficiency, late in life, by carrying the discussion beyond simply
the problem of language to what he calls "the irrational element in
poetry." For Stevens (as he says in his essay of this title), the
irrational element involves what "takes place unaccountably" in the
human mind, and the major part of what takes place is the search for
meaning.
Stevens' characteristic rationality leads him not only in the
direction of science, but also in a (perhaps) more unexpected
direction: the problem of God returns from rational exile to both the

physicists' discussion and to Stevens's, after apparent detours
through the worlds of Crispin and the languishing woman of
"Sunday Morning." The search for reality, noted Professor
Eucalyptus (quoted above), is as momentous as the search for god.
Section VI of "The Irrational Element in Poetry" focuses his ideas
concisely:

Why does one write poetry? I have already stated a number of
reasons, among them these: because one is impelled to do so by a
personal sensibility and also because one grows tired of the
monotony of one's imagination, say, and sets out to find variety. In
his discourse before the Academy, ten years ago or more, M.
Bremond elucidated a mystical motive and made it clear that, in his
opinion, one writes poetry to find God. I should like to consider this
in conjunction with what might better be considered separately, and
that is the question of meaning in poetry. M. Bremond proposed the
identity of poetry and prayer, and ... eliminated reason as the
essential element in poetry. Poetry in which the irrational element
dominated was pure poetry ... Ail mystics approach God through the
irrational. Pure poetry is both mystical and irrational. If we descend
a little from this height and apply [a] looser and broader definition
of pure poetry, it is possible to say that, while it can lie in the
temperament of very few of us to write poetry in order to find God,
it is probably the purpose of each of us to write poetry to find the
good which, in the Platonic sense, is synonymous with God. One
writes poetry, then, in order to approach the good in what is
harmonious and orderly. Or, simply, one writes poetry out of a
delight in the harmonious and orderly.
(OP 227-28)

Here Stevens will not speak directly of God's existence, as
Bremond did. But he does say indirectly that a poet aspires to "the
good," which in Platonic terms is God, or the One. It would seem at
this point that Stevens departs from the spirit of the scientific age,
which has nearly done away with any serious consideration of the
existence, presence or possibility of God. But in another sense,
Stevens here intersects with the ideas of a number of major modern
physicists. Like Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrodinger, David Bohm
and Heisenberg, Stevens expresses the proposition - or clear
implication - that the physical universe in conjunction with human
consciousness displays a property of wholeness or unity.
Schrodinger (for example) in his essay "Mind and Matter" carefully
demonstrates that "Subject and object are only one" (127) and,
following this line of reasoning, later remarks that the experience of
God is "an event as real as an immediate sense perception" (138).
The ideas that the universe is whole or unified and God is real are
tenets of the "perennial," or mystical, philosophy whose main
elements are common to many cultures.
Although there is not space to document the remark here, I will
note that Schrodinger and Bohm in their later writings express
views about reality remarkably similar - even in articulation - to
those expressed by Stevens about the relation of the imagination to
the physical world. "Nature will respond in accordance with the
theory with which it is approached" says ... Stevens, or Bohm?
Theory of poetry or of quantum physics?
The "circumstances and psychology" of the modern age, in other
words, are characterized not merely by fragmentation and social
and personal disjointedness. Rather, they reflect the turbulence of a
transitional time for western culture, which in the twentieth century
has been making its way out of a decayed and static way of
understanding the universe, through a period marked by an
overemphasis on rationality.
There is powerful evidence to suggest that the creative imagination
of the human mind is an activity as real as a sense perception; the
mind and its experiences, including the emotions, are of an order of
reality different from that described by classical science. Stevens
and Schrodinger - along with other prominent modern scientists -
suggest, in other words, that the modern world need not ground
itself absolutely in a materialistic
view of nature. Material science seems to come to a stop at its
analysis of physical facts, but Stevens and some physicists point
toward the spiritual implications of those facts, and they move
toward a way of speaking of the spiritual reality inside human
beings - and of God - without recourse to the stagnant religious
myths of the pre-modern culture.
The intersection of Stevens' poetic ideas with both the