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The Figure Concealed
Wallace Stevens, Music, and Val–ryan Echoes

Lisa Goldfarb
Lisa Goldfarb. President of The Wallace Stevens Society and Associate Editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal (as of January, 2011), is Associate Dean and Associate Professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she teaches interdisciplinary courses focusing on poetry in English and French, music, and aesthetics. She has published essays on modern poetry in a variety of journals, including The Romanic Review, Journal of Modern Literature, and Fulcrum, and is a frequent contributor to The Wallace Stevens Journal. In March 2010, she organized the international conference, “Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism,” which drew scholars and poets to New York from North America and Europe.

In a letter of January 1955, Wallace Stevens referred to Paul Valéry as a “prodigy of poetry.” Although his correspondence reveals that he was long familiar with both Valéry’s poetry and prose, and scholars from the early days of Stevens criticism to the present – from Frank Kermode to Harold Bloom and Eleanor Cook – have acknowledged Valéry’s importance for Stevens and noted the mark of Valéry’s poetics on Stevens’ prose and poetry, until now there has been no comprehensive analysis of the affinities between them. The first full-length study of its kind, The Figure Concealed explores the multiple parallels between these two great 20th century poets.
…Lisa Goldfarb brings Valéry’s and Stevens’ poetics and poetry into conversation, and focuses on the resonance of Valéry’s musical ideas in Stevens’ poetic theory and practice. Early chapters focus on the interlacing of their work poetically and philosophically, while the later ones increasingly focus on readings of Stevens through the lens of Valéryan musical-poetic theory. Stevens’ letters, essays and poems are examined alongside Valéry’s Cahiers [Notebooks], essays, and poems to amplify the Valéryan echo throughout Stevens’ work. The Figure Concealed makes an important contribution to studies of modern poetry and to Stevens scholarship in particular. It offers a new and transformative comparative study and proposes a musical poetics which will be important for scholars of modern poetry, of Stevens and Valéry, and will appeal to all those interested in the relationship between music and poetry, the arts more broadly, as well as aesthetics and philosophy.

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Figure Concealed Chapter I Contours and Transformations: The Musical Poetics of Stevens and Valéry Chapter II Resonant Ideas: Philosophy and Music in Valéry’s Prose and Poetry Chapter III Philosophical Parallels and the Poetics of Variation Chapter IV On the Vocal Chord: Poetics of Voice in Stevens and Valéry Chapter V Words of the Exquisite Appositeness: “Credences of Summer” Chapter VI The Poetic Promise of Unreadable Moments: “Things of August” Chapter VII Eros and the Play of Sound in Wallace Stevens References Index
“Lisa Goldfarb has opened our ears and our minds to new dimensions of Wallace Stevens’ poetry, and to its formal and its philosophical aims. Her attention to Valéryan echoes takes us to that place where meaning and form, sensation and feeling, imagination and reason, meet to express the process of being. The Figure Concealed offers an excellent introduction to Valéry’s ideas about the affinities between poetry and music and the special kind of open, transformative thought that poetry can achieve when it puts aside the fixed positions and resolutions of traditional discursive philosophy. Even for those familiar with Valéry's ideas, the analyses of less familiar poems, such as ‘Un Feu distinct,’ refresh our experience of the French master. For readers of Stevens, this book offers the best study yet of how he understood poetic thought through an analogy with music – not just as patterned sound, but as a way of believing and becoming. Goldfarb puts the mystery back into Stevens’ poetry, not by mystification, but by rigorous comparison of poets and of media, and clear analysis of words freed of their verbality. Key ideas of variation, sonata form, abstraction and voice gain significance through brilliant close readings, not only of classics such as ‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’ but also of under-discussed poems of the Stevens canon, such as ‘Variations on a Summer’s Day,’ ‘Credences of Summer,’ and "’Things of August.’” Bonnie Costello, Professor of English, Boston University, author of Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry and Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life and the Turning World “Readers of Wallace Stevens have long recognized the important relationship between poetry and music in his work and, invariably, nods to the role of the French Symbolists have been offered in passing. But, until now, we have lacked an exhaustive treatment of the ‘musical Stevens.’ Lisa Goldfarb’s The Figure Concealed closes a major gap in Stevens studies, for this is our first full-length account of Stevens’ connection to the Symbolists in almost forty years and our first full treatment of the pervasive presence of Valéry’s poetics, consciously and unconsciously absorbed by Stevens. The Figure Concealed is not so much a study of ‘influence’ as a thorough-going disclosure of how Valéry’s complex system of sonic and musical images is evidenced over and over in Stevens’ poetic practice. This study, as perhaps no other work on either Stevens or Valéry, weaves together the threads of the philosophy of a world in flux, the musical modulations of language and the writing of poetry. For Stevens, Valéry was the poet ‘living at the center of the world.’ The book moves from direct ‘interlacings’ between the two poets and theorists to later treatment of major poems by Stevens through the lens of Valéryan musical and poetic theory. No one will read poems again by Stevens like ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds,’ ‘Credences of Summer,’ the often neglected ‘Things of August,’ and other poems without a new awareness of how musical variation and tonal modulation acting upon a dominant theme perform a Valéryan harmonic with remarkable fidelity.” George S. Lensing, Mann Family Distinguished Professor of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth and Wallace Stevens and the Seasons “In 2004, The Wallace Stevens Journal published an article on Valéry and Stevens . . . that became Professor Lisa Goldfarb’s book on the two poets, one that taught me much about Valéry’s poetics in theory and practice, expressed abstractly in many prose essays, letters, and notebook entries, and embodied in his own poetry. . . . Every time an ardent and competent reader offers her sense of a famous poem, it provokes thought in the rest of us, and Stevensians will be glad to have Goldfarb’s view of the Stevensian efforts she discusses. It is wonderful to have so much of Valéry’s poetics available for application to Stevens’ lectures, essays, and ‘Adagia,’ and to know that Valéry, like Stevens, thought of variants and variations as a form of intelligence.” Helen Vendler, The Wallace Stevens Journal (review, Fall 2011)

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