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ED HERMAN:
Welcome to Poetry Lectures, a series of lectures by poets, scholars and educators presented by poetryfoundation.org. In this program, Helen Vendler discusses the poetry of Wallace Stevens in relation to the paintings of Jasper Johns. Helen Vendler is a leading critic of poetry and has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker and the New York review of books. She has authored dozens of books, including two on the poetry of Wallace Stevens. She has taught at Harvard University since 1981. The talk you're about to hear was part of American perspectives, a collaboration of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the poetry foundation. She spoke at the Art Institute on October 18th, 2007. Here's Helen Vendler on Wallace Stevens, the poet as painter.

HELEN VENDLER:
I decided to restrict myself to the idea of still life in painting and poetry. And I recognized that Jasper John's paintings can be considered under many other genres landscape, even abstract self portraits, mixed genres of portraiture and domesticity. But I think that one can also look at many of them as still lifes and so that's what I've chosen to do tonight. Can there be a fruitful comparison of something we would call the still life of poetry saying Wallace Stevens to the still life of painting, saying, Jasper Johns? The remarkable exhibition of Jasper Johns Gray paintings about to be mounted by the Art Institute compels us to think again about the genre called by the French, by that sinister name (SPEAKS FRENCH) and or nature no longer living. And to see how Johns has contributed to and modified that genre. Since my own subject is lyric poetry, I'll be speaking today mostly about Wallace Stevens meditations on still life, but mentioning Johns along the way. In still life, flowers no longer grow in the earth, but have been put in vases.

Fruits are no longer on the vine, but on a charger, fish are sprawled lifeless on a plate, and rabbits and partridges hang mutely on the walls, their leaps and flights and their autonomous life subjected to the desires of man. In one of its conceptions then still life is an art of dying and ours (UNKNOWN) and it culminates in this view in what are called vanitas paintings, where time's hourglass warns that the sense of life will run out or wear a human skull like Yorick and Hamlet chills the mind to reflection. Yet in another of its conceptions still life is the highest place of the art of living. A painting by Fantin-Latour of a delicate bouquet and threatened by those caterpillars that haunt Vanitas paintings. Such a bouquet transmits the painter's delight in that fragile exquisiteness. When painters set before us the most beautiful of natural objects, flowers menaced by decay, or a gathering of fruits untainted by worms, they are giving us entry to a prolapse area in paradise. Of course, profusion, beauty and nourishment are evident in actual flowers and fruits.

But still life had something more, the principle of the arrangement of beauty, the ordering of profusion, the aestheticization of nourishment in still life, where the painting is always saying I am showing an arrangement, both the immobility of the subject and its visible stylization insist on the fact that all art is an art of arrangement. Still life is therefore, at least to our modern taste, the painters painting (UNKNOWN). I want to mention, especially with respect to Jasper Johns, the other central fact about traditional still life that it deletes people. Since all genres exist as implicit alternatives, even implicit critiques of their fellow genres. A still life says to us, the painter has for this moment chosen to paint me rather than a different kind of painting. Most of the other traditional genres history, painting, portraits, religious painting, genre pictures, even landscapes normally have people in them. What does it mean to delete people? What does it mean to delete people and show us, for instance, the back of a canvas?

Deleting even in one sense art itself, the front of that canvas. What qualities are deleted along with people? What gains, if any, follow from this huge thematic deletion? Let me emphasize the usefulness of people, the presence of the human figure in other genres of painting. A history painting, say an assassination of Caesar implies many things, the passage of time, the existence of narrative, a decisive action, the necessity of moral evaluation, and even a political theory. By contrast, in the pure still life such as Johns flags, time is suspended, narrative is banished, action is unimportant, moral evaluation is not in question, and social arrangements are at best implied. Although a traditional portrait doesn't have the narrative potential of a history painting, nonetheless, a portrait can imply social status, historical era, erotic potential, intellectual context, and even by its attributes a crown armor, social action. In a still life all this erotic, intellectual and social information is absent are at best say by the richness of the represented vessel's implicit.

Landscape, as another genre uses the human figure, even when it's small with respect to the landscape to emphasize our relation to nature, human presence in a sublime landscape registers emotional wonder. And those genre paintings that represent life indoors often include a still life. But the flowers of fruits are shown in a human context, and their domestic use more than their role in the composition, is stressed. And while genre pictures can contain comedy, still life and often contain comedy, still life normally does not. The non-vanitas still life sacrifices so much in turning away from narrative and the human form that it's no wonder that the vanitas still life smuggles back in so much of the human by way of its meditation on temporality, mutability, death and a judgment on the vanity of all earthly pursuits. As we contemplate the pure still life, we ask ourselves, what can be said for this subject matter that deletes action, moral valuation, politics, process, landscape transcendence, the sublime and the erotic?

Some still life, of course, refer to human life by their goblets and porcelain as well as by their plucked flowers or harvested fruit. The still lifes that aim at detachment from some domesticity are the more purely abstract ones. It is to this latter category that Jaspers still lifes, as I'm choosing to call them, of targets flags and radial devices such as the ruler you see here inscribing a circle. He uses that, those radial devices often. It is to the latter category of abstract still life that such paintings belong. In the gray paintings, Johns has renounced even the varieties of color displayed by the traditional still life, he shows us in the gray paintings that the nuances of gray are infinite. Since my subject tonight is the still life of poetry in the light of the still life of art, we might ask how a poet would suggest the relevance of still life to human experience. And would a poet such as Stevens ever think to depict the graying down of life that we see in the gray phase of Jasper Johns and how would such a poet convey it?

Still, life is hard to find in lyric poems. There are two reasons for this. The first is lyrics, supposed need of an addressee, addressed to someone. The second reason is the lyrics typically narrative sense of evolving human emotion. What would a poet be aiming at who would write lyrics comparable in their language to the restricted space, close focus, humble subject, exclusive of people and apparent absence of narrative proper to the normative still life. The poet recognizes the paradox that no genre more strongly intimates the existence of the human hand and eye and the exertion of the human will than traditional still life. Somebody made the arrangement, somebody put the cloth on the table and the apples are skulls on the cloth. Somebody assembled the bouquet. Yet it's also true that no journal more strongly expresses the power of natural life to move and interest us all by itself. Still life reflects on the freshness of flowers, the shadings of color in the skin of a ripe fruit, the look of a ladybug on a leaf.

Even the inorganic objects is still life say, representing scholarship. The scholar's terrestrial globe set of books and pen stand for the scholar's existence after he has vanished. Just as an assemblage of musical instruments speaks of absent musicians. Still life has its risks, there is a perilously thin line between still life and being dead. There is also a thin line between still life and a mere anesthetic obsessive-compulsive drive to arrangement. One risk of still life is to extinguish life, to make an (UNKNOWN) in every sense of the word. Deleting all relation of form to emotional coloration, exploiting arrangement at the expense of feeling. Another risk is to divert emotion so strongly toward the immobile object itself that its relation to human feeling becomes problematic. But when still life succeeds, as in the supreme example of Chardin, it stands revealed as an allegorical figuration of the aesthetic impulse itself. By suppressing the immediate human use of what is arranged and suppressing the person who arranged it.

The painter praises less the arranged or the arranger, the subject or agent than the stunning power of the will to arrange itself. And the will to arrange takes on an indisputable eminence when still life is done in series. Each of these variations, as we see them by Johns, by keeping the subject constant, whether its flag or a target by keeping the subject constant, emphasizes the variable emotional effect obtained less by the image itself than by its size or color or distortion of position on the canvas. The word targets set often enough or painted often enough becomes more a vehicle of sound or hue than of its original meaning. Eventually, as we know, Johns is still lifes are reproduced as they used to be, but with an addition of the animate, whether in the form of the artist's own arms and hands or in another set of paintings, the tantric paintings the still life has become a pair of detached and cartoonish testicles along with the skull. Other paintings, which I don't have examples of here, show sculpted heads in niches above the painting itself so that you have a combination of the still life and portrait heads sculpted portrait heads.

Such paintings with animate figures become mixed forms of still life. Recalling those earlier mixed still lifes that included among their finely rendered textiles, fruits and vessels a dead fish or a pheasant. And then, putting aside for a time vivid color as he has used so much in the past in favor of expressive grays both in his pure and his mixed still lifes, Johns finds Gray suitable not only to desolation and depression, as in the (UNKNOWN) painting called Liar, an accusatory painting, a gray painting so we can see gray used not only for desolation and depression but also for the purpose of a deep rejoicing in hue by means of a rich and almost tactile gray. John's sometimes remarkably combined in his still lifes, an asceticism, a total asceticism of subject, say an ordinary number. It's a beautiful tool which has been aggrandize into a kind of god of numbers or the beautiful softer for. So, he remarkably combines an asceticism of subject, say, a mere number and a monumentalizing of that stripped subject.

Who could have imagined that a single number could be made so individual alive and thing like? We perhaps looking at the paintings in the gray phase long to see a relenting from gray in Johns's career and eventually we do. Yet once the relenting occurs, we miss the gray, its depth and paradoxical opulence. John's favorite modern poet was Wallace Stevens, and he paid homage in his great painting winter, which we'll see in a while, to Stevens landscape in the snowman. By including in the painting winter A Child's Primitive Sketch of a Snowman. Johns has confirmed that it refers to the Stevens great landscape poem. Stevens saw a landscape and still life as existing in tension with each other. The fertile and organic landscape rebukes the infertile, inanimate and often inorganic still life. In a famous and comic early poem, Stevens enacted his own dilemma that of a cultivated writer in an uncultivated country, that perennial subject of American writers Henry James and so on. He enacted his own dilemma by putting a humble work of art a jar into a resistant sprawling landscape the Tennessee wilderness.

He plays here on the European notion of the American poet as incompetent by breaking all the rules of rhyme and diction as he does his ode to a pottery jar in Tennessee. Anecdote of the Jar. I remember when I walked into a classroom and heard someone teaching this, I thought it was so idiotic that I left. I no longer think that, but still. And I didn't understand then what it was expressing about European scorn of American skill. I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness surround that hill. No, no, no, says the English poet, you can't rhyme the same word with itself hill, hill the word has to be different. Oh, says the American poet. The wilderness rose up to it and sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground. See, I did it I made two rhymes, not the same one. No, no they come at the ends of line, says the English poet exasperatedly. The job was round upon the ground and tall and of a port in air. Where did you get that from?

Suddenly round and on ground and suddenly of a pause. That's a (UNKNOWN) Shakespearian expression and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. No, no, you don't do rhymes over a stanza break, says the English poet. Really? OK. I won't do it over a stanza break again the jar was grey and bare. No, it's supposed to be every other lines, it's not supposed to be two lines in a row. It's like a deliberate provocation of course, this poem, because he can't write a note on a Grecian and in a wilderness. It took dominion everywhere, the jar was grey and bare. It did not give a bird or bush like nothing else in Tennessee, you haven't rhymed that, says the English poet. You try finding a rhyme for Tennessee, says the American poet. It's a very funny poem. The problem, the focus lies behind this comic poem, the normal thing to place in a landscape, given the history of painting, is a human figure or at least a monument of some sort. A jar is absurdly small, just as in this context still life is an absurdly small genre within which to contain or by which to symbolize the organic wilderness of human feeling.

Yet by virtue of its aesthetic intention expressed by it's deliberately shaped in organic form. The jar is more human than the organic slovenly, slovenliness of the human unintended, the mere aboriginal wilderness of the soul. In this brief anecdote, Stevens says he has not yet found the way to make the jar redolent of the wild soul to let the wilderness harbor the jar and yet remain wilderness. You notice he takes the wild out of wilderness and sprawled around no longer wild. Wilderness without wild is an erness that won't do either. The poet's conjunction here of wilderness and grey Jar might remind us of that arresting grey painting by Johns that parts or is parted in the centre to reveal a ball. The sphere as one of the basic geometrical forms appears in isolated purity, yet also in its human dimension, suggests an eye piercing and opening up the resistance of matter. When Johns pulls apart the vertical axis axis of this grey painting to insert a ball as if it were a point of vision and penetration right in the centre.

The gray organizes itself around that ball as the wilderness organized itself around the jar. How does a still life turn an ordinary object into a focus of surrogate emotion on the part of the artist and a focus of absorbed attention on the part of the viewer? Reflecting on this question, Stevens invents the existence of what he calls a third planet. The visual imagination which, like the sun and the moon, his two other called planets, they're not really, of course, but the third planet is the visual imagination, which, like the sun and the moon, our other two planets can cast its transforming light upon an object. And just as an object will look one way in sunlight and another way in moonlight. So, it will reveal new aspects of itself in the living changing light of the imagination, which constantly seeking for resemblances is able to see a single object. Johns's flag as a target and now Stevens pineapple in a theoretically infinite number of ways. Behold the pineapple, says Stevens, what are its salient features to the eye?

Its shape, a solid oval bulk, its color yellow brown, its surface a set of crisscrossing lines intersecting in lozenge shapes, its crest a green crown of leaves. The eyes plain version will give us that factual summary. But let the planetary light of the imagination send out its beam and the pineapple takes on a set of successively different personalities, each of which would produce in a painter a suggestively different representation of the pineapple. And we see Stevens suggestions of 12 of them, under the light of the imagination shining in 12 successive ways on the pineapple. The hut stands by itself beneath the palms, the green crest out of their (UNKNOWN). The green (UNKNOWN) come. A vine has climbed the other side of the wall. The sea is spouting up upward out of rocks, the symbol of feasts and of oblivion, that's the pineapple, the hospitality symbol. White sky, pink sun, trees on a distant peak, its Hawaiian origin. These lozenges are nailed up lattices. The owl sits humped, it has 100 eyes.

The coconut and (UNKNOWN) in one. This is how yesterday's volcano looks. There is an island, (UNKNOWN) by name, an uncivil shape like a gigantic whore. Steven still life pineapple like Johns flags can be diminished or grandest at will, it can be made comic or pathetic or absurd, monumentalized to an island or a gigantic hall. It can be made animate like an owl or inanimate like a lattice or emblematic as a chimaera combining coconut and cockerel. Although the tension between an organic object and organic field is the primary problem of the anecdote of a jar little object, huge wilderness as the ground. Stevens decides later to set aside the problem of pairing huge nature and tiny art in favor of the problem of aesthetic fidelity. In a later poem entitled as a still life might be study of two pairs, which I'll read in just a second. To what extent, Stevens asks, is the still life artist free to depart from an accurate description of the two pairs before him? Departure from fidelity to the real was posed as a problem both by cubist still lifes and by the tendency of modern painters to press representation towards abstraction.

In his minute tracing of the eyes notations on the two pairs, Stevens seems at first to insist that the observer, whether we think of the observer as a mere viewer or as the viewer who is going to paint or as the person who is looking at the painting. Stevens seems at first to be insisting that the observer, whether painter or poet, must be as faithful as Dürer to the smallest visual fact. You might see this at first as an anti-modernist poem (UNKNOWN), a little book for teachers. The pears, he says, thinking of the cube, the modernist, the French modernist. The pears are not viles, nudes or battles. Some of you know that famous Edward Weston photograph of the back of a nude woman that sort of turns her into a vile. They resembled nothing else, stop making your metaphors of making still lifes look like girls. And then, this rather strict and austere teacher says, what are they? Let's keep our eye to the object, they are yellow forms composed of curves bulging towards the base. They are touched red, they are not, he corrects himself, flat surfaces having curved outlines.

They are round tapering towards the top in the way they are modeled there are bits of blue, a hard dry leaf hangs from the stem. The yellow glistens, it glistens with various yellows, citroen's, oranges and greens flowering over the skin. The shadows of the pears are blobs on the green cloth. The pears are not seen as the observer wills. If the pears refused to be depicted photographically as the observer wills, what has deflected the painter's intention and being so absurdly precise here, Stevens knows that he risks pedantry as we can see from the Latin of his first line. Yet a sense of the actual, he asserts, is the first sense an observer or painter must possess. If the still life painter begins by thinking of his pears as nudes or vile or is lost, he must first see them as pears before he trains the planetary light of the imagination on them. Stevens must find a way to depict the painter's intention of fidelity being transformed by his emotional investment in the objects themselves.

In describing the two pears Stevens eye first remarks, the basic elements of color, yellow and two dimensional lines curves subsequently refines on the color touched red and remarks volume, round. But then, although the poet seems to be continuing in a factual vein, we noticed his first imaginative revision. What the eye has originally perceived as in the fruits that they bulge towards the base could equally well, he says to himself, be imagined as tapering toward the top. The alliteration of the binding alliteration as a present to demonstrate to us that each delineation is in its way. Correct? You can see them either way. Yet a painting that was weighted downward towards a bulging base would be conceptually different, at least from a painting that was directed upward to a tapering top. How odd? And yet how inviting to conceive of each as a way of doing the pears. Next, the eye perceives the pears as sculpture, they have been modeled into volume and with the word modeled aesthetic intentionality enters the poem.

The creator of these pears liked his bits of the complementary color blue against his original yellow. The poet's mention of the hard dry leaf hanging from the stem satisfactorily puts some astringency against the poet's luxuriance. Yet in the next stanza, the color yellow begins to take on an organic life of its own, displaying an active verbs, all the various hues that inhabit the color we reductively call yellow. Finally, the outermost contextualization of the pears is given by the cloth on which they have been placed and the shadows they cast on that cloth. The moment of glowing inner energy which happened in stands of five. The yellow glistens, it glistens with various yellows, citrus oranges and greens flowering over the skin, anything but the acute hardness of the beginning. Finally, their moment of glowing inner energy in the last stanza subsides. If the painter Stevens implies, has not seen these actual facts about the actual pears and begun to model them and has not felt their color come alive under his brush becoming many colors.

A spectrum of yellow eventually, sorry, the eventual nudes of viles that he imagines will not be convincingly related in their abstraction to their visual origin in the pears. In this small (SPEAKS FOREIGN LANGUAGE), Stevens acts out the principle he recorded in one of his aphorisms. The real is only the base, but it is the base. Yet in the gradual, widening and deepening of perception in this poem, and in its eventual introduction of such aesthetic issues as the conception of structural movement as upwards or downwards, the modeling of volumes and the gaiety of hues within a single descriptive word yellow, we see the kind of looking and thinking demanded of writer and painter alike as they contemplate the objects of their world. Though the objects beloved of the painter are also objects of affection to the poet, they do not suffice for the poet, says Stevens, because they lack two indispensable qualities imperfection and language. By its nature, a classic still life exhibits aesthetic perfection, and human nature, after all, is radically imperfect.

In the critique of still life voiced in another (SPEAKS FOREIGN LANGUAGE), The Poems of Our Climate. Stevens first presents to us a composition very much like (UNKNOWN) painting of white flowers in a porcelain bowl. I'm only going to read part of this, clear water in a brilliant bowl, pink and white carnations. The day itself is simplified, a bowl of white, cold, a cold porcelain low and round with nothing more than the carnations there. But these descriptions have been interrupted in the poem by a (UNKNOWN) flicker pink and white carnations. One desires so much more than that. What is it that we desire that aesthetic perfection cannot encompass? For Stevens, it is what he calls the evilly compounded vital eye. The never resting mind the restless mind cannot find its hope, its home in the static still life, nor can evil find its symbolic equivalent within the conventional still life with its compulsion towards the beautiful. Stevens concludes, looking at this perfect white porcelain bowl of white flowers, that it is not the sort of still life a poet can imitate.

The imperfect is our paradise, he says, in closing, defining the poems of our climate. The imperfect is our paradise. Note that in this bitterness delight, since the imperfect is so hot in us, lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds. Against the purely pictorial still life then Stevens sets the recalcitrant words and sounds of the temporal art of lyric. The poems of our climate is not Stephen's only comment on still life. Like Johns, he suspected early that the European's still life will not do for the new world. Stevens begins to speculate on what a new world still life would require of the painter. Instead of beginning with plums, a conventional fruit of Europe, a painter living in the Americas might well have to begin with bananas. And Caribbean bananas would demand their coordinate tropical flowers, certainly not the roses and eglantine of the European pastoral. Bananas would equally require a suitable setting, something different from (UNKNOWN) chaste porcelain bowl. Most dangerously, the invisible hand arranging the tropical bananas would not be the hand of a Bourgeois chatelaine who might have arranged the (UNKNOWN) flowers but of a creative and unexpected word ogre.

The hidden women suitable to this new world still life lurk in the background. Every still life, Stephen suggests, presumes a congruent eroticism. And what would the eroticism belonging to bananas be? Even in his comic treatment, we can see his fear of violent still life. Here are Stephen's serial comic instructions to the painter using a Shakespearean comic mode of address (UNKNOWN). And he's addressing a Europhile American painter who wants to do a delicate still life of the (UNKNOWN) he has seen in Paris, a fruit with floral decorations. Stephen's ironic term of embellishment. Floral decorations for bananas. Well, knuckle this plainly won't do. These insolent linear peels and sullen hurricane shapes won't do with your eglantine. They require something serpentine, blunt, yellow in such a room. You should have had plans tonight in an 18th century dish and petty fogging buds for the women of primrose and pearl. Good God, what a precious light. But bananas hacked and hunched. The table was set by an ogre, his eye on an outdoor gloom and a stiff and noxious place pile the bananas on planks.

The women will be all shanks and bangles and slatted eyes. And deck the bananas in leaves plucked from the Carib trees, fibrous and dangling down, oozing cantankerous gum out of their purple maws, darting out of their purple cross, their musky and tingling tongues. In this sardonic manifesto, in this sardonic manifesto, Stevens both believes in the Americanisation of European taste and also fears it as a threat, perhaps as a threat from an Afro-Caribbean Afro-Caribbean, sorry, aesthetic that he had seen at second hand in Florida. Much as he repudiated the restrictions on sensibility and on the erotic implied by a white bowl of white flowers, an archetypal symbol of virginity. He could not quite reconcile himself to women with shanks and bangles and slatted eyes, and to what they implied of oozing purple maws and musky and tingling tongues. Rightly viewed, Stevens knows and he still life will speak not only of the painter's desire to represent, but also of the desire within the painter that has shaped the appearance of the still life objects.

Things seen, he says in one of his aphorisms are things as seen. Both the poet and the mystic, he remarks in one of his essays may establish themselves on herrings and apples, adding that the painter may establish himself on a guitar, a copy (SPEAKS FRENCH), and a dish of melons. Poet, mystic and painter alike resist seeing the world as their contemporaries see it. Yet it is not another world they would present, but rather their contemporary world, rightly seen, the only possible resistance to the pressure of the contemporaneous, Stevens adds, is a matter of herrings and apples, or to be less definite, the contemporaneous itself. Steven's example of a painter establishing himself on a guitar (SPEAKS FRENCH) and a dish of melons, recalls, of course, Picasso. But he could as well have cited in our day. Jasper Johns is establishing himself on targets and flags and beer cans. Once those objects were Johns, representation of the contemporary world rightly seen. But as Johns ages, he adds more and more symbols to his still lifes ambiguous profiles, flagstones In Harlem, the floor plan to the left of his grandfather's house, a reduction not in this painting, but elsewhere of a Holbein.

And until such symbols and such paintings no longer have the austerity of the grey paintings. The problem of the overburdened the (UNKNOWN) is visible in Europeans still lifes, too, and it's not certain that still life can bear this degree of overloading. Posterity is judgement on earlier and later Johns is yet to be given. But the gray paintings are likely to be seen, I think, as superb instances of refinement of still life unexpected in a genre traditionally associated with color. They assert for their moment that the nuances of the modern of the modern real are paradoxically best represented by the infinite modulations of a single colorless, you might say, colour. Stephen's original primary colors were red for the sun, blue for the sky, green for grass and white for clouds naturally, red sun, blue sky, green grass, white clouds. In poem 22 of the man with the blue guitar, the visual primaries, what the eye is actually looking at, you might say, are the actual red sun and white clouds.

(UNKNOWN), that's what's up there. The red sun and the white clouds. When the poet plays these things on his blue guitar, they take on strange new colors. Poetry is the subject of the poem. From this, the poem issues and to this returns between the two between issue and return there is an absence in reality things as they are, also we say. But are these separate? Is it an absence for the poem which acquires its true appearance there? Sun is green clouds, red earth feeling, sky that thinks. From these it takes perhaps it gives in the universal intercourse. While the poet's natural sense perceptions here are of sun is red, cloud is white, his poetic representations of them turn out to be sun is green and cloud is red. The inevitable double distortion of nature first by the psychological sense reactions of an individual human being and secondly, by the laws of art. Reminds us of Jasper Johns distortions of capital letters stencils of the names of the colors. Sometimes, as in the famous painting false start, the name is spelled out in its appropriate color, blue in blue.

But we may also see in the same painting blue written in yellow or black or orange written in white or white written in red. As semantics of the law of the painting coincide or differ. When Johns decides to turn away from the vigorous colors of false start, and into the realm of grace. The stenciled names of the primary colors are not only grayed down even to black, but are also broken into pieces. In the masterful periscope Hart Crane, you can see fragments of stencil letters being used with expressive force. Blue appears as itself at the bottom in a gray blue, but then it breaks up into tipped and broken letters underneath in dark gray, yellow and dark gray in the middle has acquired a second initial Y like an extra Y chromosome. Stevens two has to confront the graying down of the world as he ages and his life grief increases in a wonderfully inventive poem called The Green Plant, spoken by a ghost of his former tropical (UNKNOWN) self. When he was speaking as a tropical self, he called himself (UNKNOWN) or some other Hispanic name.

Here he alludes to the name of the month October in a sort of deformed Hispanic way to show you that he has previously been living in the tropics but now the tropics have dwindled. This poem reveals how in old age, his primaries have dwindled down. It's a terribly sad poem and also terribly funny in this almost posthumous season of his life. The Hispanic October has gone by, we are in the last quarter of the year. The floors have withered and the trees have shed their leaves. No longer can the world speak the colors of summer, the red of its sun, the yellow of its flowers, what colors? There are now a red that seems to have darkened into brown, yellow that has been contaminated by orange are themselves deceptions, falsifications since the sun that originated the red and the yellow. The sun is now only a reflection in a mirror, no longer a source of warmth, merely a visual object rather than a heating or energetic object. The first 12 lines of the poem describing the draining of color seem at first to bear no relation to Stevens titled The Green Plant.

Silence is a shape that has passed (UNKNOWN) roses have turned to paper and the shadows of the trees are like wrecked umbrellas. The effete vocabulary of summer no longer says anything. The brown at the bottom of red, the orange far down in yellow. A falsification from a sun in a mirror without heat in a constant secondariness, a turning down towards finality. This state of affairs is here, represented as though it were the objective truth. As the poet surveys his stage of life, he recalls by implication that once he lived in a vivid forest of bright red and green, then the forest darkened down by degrees to maroon, the red became maroon, the green became olive as the original colors faded out until all memory of the red and green forest vanished. Then the maroon and olive forest itself faded and became only a memory. But eventually, even that actual memory vanished, and all that was left was an unverifiable legend that once upon a time there was a maroon and olive forest. Not even a legend remains of the original red and green forest gone so long now that it has passed not only from memory, but also from the hazy genre of legend.

But the poet wonders, is the graying down, is this graying down of nature truly happening, or is the Earth's vocabulary really still just the same red and green as it was when he in youth when he first entered it? But is it now seeming gray merely because of his depression in old age? For a moment he looks outside the window of his melancholy and sees barbarous youth in full vigor, just waiting to take his place. A turning down towards finality, except that a green plant glares as you look at the legend of the maroon and olive forest glares outside of the legend with the barbarous green of the harsh reality of which it is part. The young coming up is always a wonderful object of attention for the old. They're just waiting to hop into place, the green plant. Some of Johns gray paintings have an effect resembling Steven's mention of the legend of the maroon and olive forest, creating a memorial still life of once colorful objects targets flags now bleached or darkened. Stephen's green plant is the symbol of a youthful, competitive, abundant and fertile life that the depressed can no longer feel, manifest or join.

Stevens writes his last still life poem when he sees the publication of his collected poems. He had refused all his life to let (UNKNOWN) publish his collected poems because, of course, then he thought he would die, many poets think that, or else they anticipated by publishing collective poems when they are 45, when they know they're going to live for a long time. Anyway, he gets his collected poems from (UNKNOWN) I believe that's the subject of this poem, though he left no letter saying so. He looks at the collected poems and everything he knows of the Earth is in that book. What could properly represent that book in symbolic terms? The planet on the table are still life chooses for its contemplated object. A school teachers terrestrial globe, the little one on the desk. A map standing point by point for the contours of the world, just as a book corresponds poem by poem to the lived experience, real and imagined, of the poet. Seeing his entire earthly life gathered into a single book lying on a table, Stevens knows that these organic territories on the book globe are intimately linked to the organic world that is given life by the sun's warmth.

But unlike the organic shrub out there in the natural world, this book will not writhe and die, at least not immediately, as natural plants do. As Stephen sums up his feelings towards his life work, he takes as his persona Shakespeare's Ariel, that spirit, all air and swiftness. The planet on the table. Ariel was glad he had written his poems. They were of a remembered time or something scene that he liked, other makings of the sun were waste and welter and the ripe shrub writhed. Himself and the sun were one, and his poems, although makings of his self, were no less makings of the sun. It was not important that they survive. What mattered was that they should bear some lineaments or character, some affluence, if only half perceived in the poverty of their words, of the planet of which they were part. The artist is always too poor to replicate the spontaneous affluence of nature. But one way by which to represent that affluence is to take severe words, as in this case or many grays in the case of Johns, and give them a surprising range as Stevens here ranges from Shakespeare to planet Earth to a thriving shrub to a terrestrial globe to a table.

Stevens affirms in this final still life, the certain relation of all inorganic art, poetry, painting to organic life. The (UNKNOWN) that ultimately permits the existence of life generates both the poet and from him, his poetry. Poetry, then, is not inorganic, but partakes of all that comes from life gladness. Ariel was glad he had written his poems, the affections, lineaments and character, both poverty and affluence. In the extraordinarily nuanced individuality of Jasper Johns's gray still lifes, one can see ratified Steven's conviction that art always replicates and transforms ordinary reality with the idiosyncrasy that we call personal style. It is possible to feel looking at these multiple gray inventions that still life paradoxically, is the most human of the genres of painting and is the right match among the visual arts for lyric most intimate of the genres of poetry. Thank you. (CLAPS).

ED HERMAN:
That was Helen Vendler speaking at the Art Institute of Chicago on October 18th, 2007. As part of American perspectives, a collaboration of the Art Institute, the Chicago Symphony and the Poetry Foundation. You can read some of the Wallace Stevens poems that Helen Vendler discussed by going to poetryfoundation.org. You'll also find articles about poetry, reading guides and other audio programs to download. This has been Poetry Lectures from poetryfoundation.org.