Robert Hass's Guilt or The Weight of Wallace Stevens

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2007 by Olson, Liesl

Many are making love. Up above, the angels

in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing

are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond

and the texture of cold rivers.

- Robert Hass. "Privilege of Being"'

Perhaps.

After death, the non-physical people, in paradise.

Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe

The green corn gleaming and experience

The minor of what we feel.

- Wallace Stevens, "Esthétique du Mal"7

1.

Robert Hass's angels recall Rilke's angels. They are pure; they need nothing. In "Privilege of Being," from Hass's third collection, Human Wishes (1989), angels look down on a couple "making love," and they "are desolate. They hate it.'M With their luminous hair and intimacy, the angels watch the mess of sex that lies below: a yearning for total unity performed by the force of bodies. Hass's angels are appalled by the drama beneath them. Like the angels of the Duino Elegies (1923), they live in an ideal world for which humans long, of "cold rivers" that might quench immeasurable thirst. Personal rather than Biblical, the angels project Rilke's desire to transcend the mortal body, to experience total ecstasy. As Rilke imagines them, the angels are complete in themselves, like "mirrors, which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face / and gather it back, into themselves, entire."4 When the speaker of the first elegy cries out who will hear me? the implicit response to his call is no one, as Hass himself noted in his 1982 essay on Rilke.5 Hass's angels, on the other hand, are fascinated by the couple's violent self-absorption. Hass deftly reverses Rilke's comparison between angels and humans by figuring the couple's fixation on each other, not on angels: his couple is mirrored in the sexual act, "they look at each other; / two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious."6 Rarely a lone RiIkean wanderer, Hass examines longing's fold back into the world, its origin in other people.

If Hass's humans seek Rilke's transcendence, then they are also shrewdly aware of its limitations, sex that lasts only "for an hour or so."7 As in much of Hass's work-including his substantial, longawaited new volume, Time and Materials: Poems 10.0,7-2005-what the poem seeks is the right relation to an animal drive, a measurement that can be called "human," an understanding of desire that might be found, for instance, in a book. "What are the habits of paradise?" Hass asks in a new poem that wonders about the method and belief of other poets-here, Michael Palmer and Czeslaw Milosz. The end of the poem borrows Milosz's image of the dead disguised as returning birds, eating strewn millet.8 "Privilege of Being" ends with the couple reading magazines on the beach "about intimacy between the sexes / to themselves, and to each other, / and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels."9 The couple's limitations, however ironic, are still preferable to the angels' illiteracy. In an angelic universe, there is no reason for reading, for there is nothing further to learn. Why then, Hass implies, do we want to live there? Whereas "The Duino Elegies are an argument against our lived, ordinary lives," according to Hass, the poet finds himself rooted more solidly in the partial fulfillments in life, not beyond it.'° Hass's birds return to the earth.

His suspicion about angels comes closer to the position taken by Wallace Stevens, a poet whose influence can be traced in each of the five volumes Hass has published over the past thirty-five years. Emphasizing Hass's interest in "lived, ordinary lives," however, may seem like a surprising way to suggest a shared poetics with Stevens, whose influence on Hass looks less profound than Whitman's, Pound's, or Wordsworth's. Indeed, contrast might seem a first note between the poets. Hass began his poetic career by placing domesticity against a backdrop of social unrest and foreign war, whereas Stevens is rarely read as a political poet." Hass has cultivated a west coast literary lineage-Duncan and Jeffers, in particular-whereas Stevens' roots, despite his love for Florida's "venereal soil," are firmly in New England. Moreover, Hass's language is speech-based, against Stevens' exotic flare and dazzle. But easy distinctions soon come undone. The relationship between Hass and Stevens deserves attention, especially as Stevens has emerged as one of the most important modernist influences on both mainstream and experimental contemporary American poetry.12 Furthermore, reading Stevens through Hass makes Stevens look less abstract, a poet who fiercely engages with the material world, "Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal, the moving grass," as he writes in "The Auroras of Autumn. "'* This take on Stevens suggests a subtle influence whose reverberations reveal something of T. S. Eliot in their dimensions-"the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past."'4 Hass's handling of Stevens compels a particular reading of Stevens' central preoccupation with here and beyond. While there is no doubt that Stevens could imagine a heavenly existence beyond this one, Stevens' late poems, in particular, are conflicted about the possibility of world stripped of human desire, where frailty and pain do not exist. An unknown place "In its permanent cold," as Stevens writes in "The Rock," ultimately lacks the pull of experiences marked by constant change, by physicality, by the temporality of ordinary life.15