Robert Hass's Guilt or The Weight of Wallace Stevens

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

Hass's poems have always chafed against formlessness, against desires that are too immense to be called "human."16 This tension between magnitude beyond and scale that lies here, between the immensity of angels and human measure, between "desire / and dailiness" (to cite one of Hass's lines) should be traced back to a similar preoccupation in Stevens' work.'7 In "Esthétique du Mal"-a poem that lies behind Hass's "Privilege of Being"-Stevens conceives of "non-physical people, in paradise" who perhaps "experience / The minor of what we feel." Like Hass's angels, Stevens' "nonphysical people" look down on a "gleaming" world; its corn will ripen and be ready to harvest, but the angels will not change. And, as we know with Stevens, beauty hinges on the conviction "It Must Change." The "minor" of angels is thus both a darker key and an experience of lesser intensity. These are not creatures who recognize a "higher level of reality in the invisible," as Rilke wrote of his angels, but rather entities who, because they are invisible, miss out on fully felt pleasure.18 Even if Stevens' angels are able to feel with intensity, a possibility Stevens raises in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," it is only because a human being can imagine angelic experience. In the climactic canto beginning "What am I to believe?" Stevens concludes that if "the angel in his cloud" were to leap down, his pleasure in the earth would essentially belong to the poet who imagines him. Stevens' exalted conclusion collapses angelic superiority: "Whistle aloud, too weedy wren. I can / Do all that angels can."'9 "The Necessary Angel" in the title of Stevens' essay collection is ultimately, then, a kind of imaginative boundary, a figure for what humans can do.

Stevens of course can be cast in very different roles: as a poet of "ideas," a playful dandy, a late romantic, a meditative nostalgic, or as a poet of the commonplace. It is easy to make a case that Hass has developed as a poet in opposition to one strain in Stevens' work-his detachment from what critics might call the "real" world, or the temptation of a "supreme fiction" more valuable than the material earth. In a 1992 essay, Hass suggests something along these lines, describing his relationship to Stevens as "polemical."20 Hass explains how the political and social upheavals of the 1960s from which he emerged as a young poet complicated his early admiration for Stevens, whose work he loved for its musicality but distrusted for its "lordliness."2' Yvor Winters' verdict on Stevens' "hedonism" also made its mark on Hass while at Stanford. But when Hass wrote the poems that became his first volume, Field Guide (1973), Stevens was behind many of them, including "Palo Alto: The Marshes," which begins, "She dreamed along the beaches of this coast."22 Hass here transforms Stevens, taking "An Idea of Order at Key West" and launching a poem about the United States seizure of California after the Mexican-American War. Whereas Stevens' order lies "beyond," Hass pinpoints the particular names of things "along" the California coast: "explosive names of birds: / egret, killdeer, bittern, tern."23 The poem draws its charge from the particularity of geography; names sound out the violence of a recent past, not an idea. And yet, the "Blessed rage" that ends Stevens' poem-"The maker's rage to order words of the sea"-is the same imperative behind Hass's poem, to order the world in words. Admittedly, Stevens' language-even if we grant the "harshness" that Helen Vendler ascribes to it-maintains a level of abstraction distinct from the transparently autobiographical approach of Hass.24 The "startling becalmed clarity" of Stevens' work, from Hass's point of view, contrasts with the dramatic, personal intensity of another poet he admires, Stanley Kunitz, who chose Hass's first book for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973. 25 Hass is certainly drawn to both modes. While there are moments in Hass's poems when we hear the formal measure of Stevens' lines, the link between these poets does not wholly lie in image or linguistic echo. Rather, Stevens is diffused everywhere into Hass's work; indeed, Hass has "soaked him up like a blotter."26