Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism by Goldfarb Lisa; Eeckhout Bart;

Author:Goldfarb, Lisa; Eeckhout, Bart;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

The description typically evokes the kind of architecture Stevens will con-tinue to be attracted to: the early-twentieth-century Beaux Arts style of the City Beautiful movement that sought to inscribe bourgeois values all over the urban landscape through a classically oriented civic aesthetic—the style we associate with the many landmark constructions by McKim, Mead, and White in New York, those by Burnham in Chicago, and, most permanently, those in the public heart of Washington, D. C. (see Rybczynski 131–48). The description briefly conjures up this style, yet it also displays an idiom-atic inflection in Stevens’ attention: his perception is spontaneously directed at the pastoral context of the library. The surrounding flowers in Stevens’ description turn the library into a perfumed building. This perfuming of architecture will recur several times in his later writings, including depic-tions of his flower-filled home in Hartford. Like his enchantment over the birdsong that simultaneously surrounds the building with natural music, it already shows Stevens’ preference for dynamic aesthetic sensations that are ephemeral and fleeting—a preference clearly marking him as more of an heir of the romantic tradition than a budding architectural engineer of the modern future.

Thus, it is probably no coincidence that when Stevens will come to write, eighteen years later, a poem called “Architecture,” the descrip-tion there will entirely ignore the opportunity to evoke instances of tech-nological modernity, opting instead for a freewheeling evocation of an imaginary, naturally organic, and ceaselessly fluid building that seems to be more interested in responding to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s visions in “Kubla Khan” than to processes of technological modernization. And it may be equally significant that Stevens will then go on to denounce the poem’s attempt at materially embodying his aesthetic ambitions: the two-page “Architecture” is one of only three poems in Harmonium he chose not to reprint in the second 1931 edition.

If we were to require a concrete anecdotal origin for Stevens’ lack of special affection for skyscrapers, we can find it already within his first two weeks in the city. In the same journal entry of June 28, 1900, in which he records the depressing experience of Stephen Crane’s anonymous funeral, he recalls a particularly terrifying moment after scaling the heights of one of the taller buildings in the city. “Yesterday afternoon,” he writes,

I went up on top of the World building in Park Row to get a look at the city. It had been sultry all day and here and there were masses of shadowy cloud. Suddenly a stroke of lightning struck a flag-staff on the building of the Tract Society a short distance off and knocked me down. I was up again in a minute, however, and did not waste much time getting down into the street. (SP 78)

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