Teach The Canon, But Do Not Conduct Service.
The Whole Harmonium and the Yale Lecture series do as much damage to the reputations of Wallace Stevens and William B. Years as the people who want them canceled.
The garden variety college activist who demands Wallace Stevens shouldn’t be read because of racism and the biographers who treat him as a christ are kinfolks under the skin. Both are fringes of cultural movements, nether edges that do nothing but troll each other and contribute no good towards art or critical discussion. However, the activist will be shamed, ignored, and disposed of on account of the cynical factory dynamics of modern academic life( which is unfortunate because most of the people complaining are just kids, and every white person who gets a hard-on talking trash about black student activists act like they never made a mistake at 20.). Mariani’s devotion to Stevens( The Whole Harmonium) will have staying power and a stronger network of people in the right-wing academic community.
Stevens’ racism wasn’t a product of his time; it was openly reviled at the very moment he spewed it. His public racial abuse of Gwendolyn Brooks at the 1950 Pulitzer Prize Awards is one of the lowest moments in American Poetry history. If you don’t want to talk about that, that’s one thing: one should work to separate the artist from their art. ( EX: I like Philip Larkin’s poems even though Philip Larkin really didn’t like people who looked like me).
But defending “Nigger Cemetery” as a poem is neo-confederate gibberish. Stevens was probably the most sadistic racist to become a publicly known poet in the English language. Like so many of his white brethren, Stevens was acting on his most vicious impulses to imagine a black graveyard vandalization. The poem is sheer cruelty on the page. It was so cruel (even for its time) that it got ripped apart in The New Masses and was the reason that Stevens was treated as an eccentric creep for almost the duration of his poetry career.
When I taught an outlet poetry class in Tacoma, I taught everything. I taught would Harmonium, Ideas Of Order, Nigger Cemetery, and the later poems. I also taught him with Federico Garcia Lorca, Marianne Moore, Vicete Huidobro, Cesar Vallejo, and William Carlos Williams and asked my students to compare. I Asked them to Read and study the backgrounds of the Gypsy Songs, Trilce, and Observations. I asked them to see what was going on in each poem, form their own opinions, compare them to Stevens dicking around in a black graveyard, and discuss what works for them as writers. I asked them to note how many times in the later poems that Stevens leans on a similar, cliched language about ” The immortality of man” ” silly” women and “foolish” brown people; and I would ask them to read the aforementioned writers to see how they did not. I also asked them to look at the longer later poems and see what exists as narrative and as a statement. I didn’t do this because I wanted them to be pleasant minorities, but to teach them to deconstruct a bigot so they wouldn’t have power over them.
I’m not going to tell you Stevens wasn’t a great poet: Harmonium gave English language modernism lyrical and blank verse a music it hadn’t seen before. However, his genius is far more limited than Harold Bloom says, and it is “Nigger Cemetary” when Stevens stopped being an artist and became a glorified nature pamphleteer for the far right.
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Did I personally think someone like Yeats went from more strength to more strength as a writer? Absolutely. Yet the professors who treat Yeats as a saint do a much better job of turning people off him than any reductivist critic of the canon ever could. By reducing him to a more of a deity than any god, one loses sight of the questions his work asks, the turmoils of the soul he struggled with, and the evolving meanings of his stances regarding class and culture. Also, one loses his relationship to the word: the English language, what he did with beat, scansion, meter, and inflection.
The fact that so much attention was paid( in the lectures) to the horrific Swan poem and his maddening inability to let Maude Gonne go (plus the snickering the professor had in regards to the subject matter) made the discussions feel less like a commune of ideas, and more a crass Ivy League social. The young student who doesn’t know Yeats's work could easily come away from them thinking he was an Irish Tucker Max. And by god, if one wanted to make the case that Yeats wasn’t completely reprehensible, then teach about his collaborations with Lady Gregory! Yeats was often in his different Id’s, and when he was in a better Id, he could be more evolved than his rages. But by defending his rages so easily, those times when he went off the rails of human progress, the professor makes them the center of the discussion about Yeats, the man; and he does so more than anyone who thinks one shouldn’t read him because he was a problematic white man.
Eliot once said Yeats had the longest period of development than any poet that ever lived. In that development are some dark, ugly outbursts. Also in them are some of the most complex explorations of folklore written in one of the most gorgeous styles in the history of the English language. Like with Stevens, my answer would be to teach him. Teach all of his work. Put it on the table and allow people to process every aesthetic. Have discussions on what an intellectual can take from him and throw away. But if a professor at the helm of The Yale Lecture Series On Yeats will teach him as a cocksman-dork god, he might as well not teach him at all and preach. The Whole Harmonium and the Yale Lecture series score blows for their side in the culture wars. I don’t know how much they do for writing.
