“I Am (Not) This: Erotic Discourse in Bishop, Olds, and Stevens,” in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 234-54.

[In the following essay, Ostriker discusses similarities and differences in the erotic imagery of Bishop, Sharon Olds, and Wallace Stevens.]

Alas, Love, I would thou couldst as well defend thyself as thou canst offend others. I would those on whom thou dost attend could either put thee away, or yield good reason why they keep thee.

—Sir Philip Sidney, Apology for Poetry

Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

—Elizabeth Bishop, “The Moose”

                                                            But I have this,
so this is who I am, this body
white as yellowish dough brushed with dry flour
pressed to his body. I am these breasts that
crush against him like collapsible silver
travel cups …
                                                            … if you
want to know who I am, I am this, this.

—Sharon Olds, “This”

She is the day, the walk of the moon
Among the breathless spices and, sometimes,
He, too, is human and difference disappears. …

—Stevens, “World without Peculiarity”

I

I would like to talk about erotic discourse in poetry in its widest and most archaic sense, beginning with the proposal that what Adrienne Rich today calls “The drive / to connect[,] The dream of a common language” (“Origins and History of Consciousness”) has for millennia been understood and experienced as the body and soul's desire, as simultaneously natural and divine, and as source of intense pleasure, intense pain. As in the Song of Songs: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine. … Let my beloved come into his garden and taste his pleasant fruits” (1:2; 4:16). Or Sappho: “Mother, I can't finish my weaving. You may blame Aphrodite, soft as she is, she has almost killed me with love for that boy” (frag. 135). Or Catullus, inventing introspection and passionate ambivalence in the same moment: “I hate and love. I don't know how, but I feel it, and it is excruciating” (no. 85; my translation). Or Andrew Marvell, at the close of “To His Coy Mistress”: “Let us roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness up into one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife / Thorough the iron gates of life. / Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run.” In and from the poetry of the ages, I would stress the idea of connection, the impulse to connect, to perceive unities across the conventional boundaries of separation, as always implicitly erotic, always a form of making love.

Making love. Poetry. An odd combination, some will think. For in postmodern, media-drenched America, eros equals pornography, both for its advocates and its attackers. Pornography, or perhaps possession, a consumer product. Many poets, and almost all critics, avoid it (except in the special category of AIDS writing, where eros equals mortality). What most contemporary critics seem to want is less body and less feeling in poetry. Less sensuousness. Less desire—these topics are so sticky, so embarrassing, so impolite, so troublesome—can't we, please, have a poetry that's clean, with the messy and horrifying fluids and passions scrubbed off it?

Not that academic disapproval of eros is new. It is as old as the discontents of civilization and the need to subdue desire in the name of an efficient state. Freud properly observed that libido is precisely what socialization represses. Yeats rhymes entertainingly on the scandalousness of poets to pedants: “Lord, what would they say / Did their Catullus walk that way?” (“The Scholars”). The passage I quote above from Sir Philip Sidney suggests that the topic of love was slightly unacceptable to the scholarly mind at the very moment when Europe and England were being flooded with love sonnets. Modernist poetics, insofar as it pursues the ideal impersonality recommended by T. S. Eliot or bows to Pound's distaste for “emotional slither,” constitutes perhaps an apex of anerotic sublimation—however undermined by the practice of poets such as Frost and Williams. It is surely not coincidental that of the major women modernists, the only one to be respectfully canonized was the sexually respectable Marianne Moore, while the deviantly sexual H. D., Loy, and Stein—not to mention conventionally amorous lyricists like Millay—remain outside that particular pale. His impassioned and explicit exploration of the erotic is probably one of the many causes that keep Robinson Jeffers in critical limbo, a potential embarrassment. In our own time, as women poets occupy the terrain of eros in massive numbers, uttering both heterosexual and lesbian desire and drawing radical connections between love of bodies and love as a potential principle for the body politic, it is not surprising to find a backlash of critical opinion emphatically preferring the abstract to the sensuous, the cerebral to the emotional. In part for this reason, the austere poetry of Elizabeth Bishop is universally praised, and the physically and sexually charged poetry of Sharon Olds commonly attacked. At the same time, while critical discussion of Wallace Stevens has until very recently avoided or evaded the issue of the erotic in his poetry, it is interesting to note that several recent volumes of Stevens criticism address precisely—or almost precisely—this issue.

In the following triangulated discussion of Bishop, Olds, and Stevens, I will cite at some length the critic Vernon Shetley, who concludes his chapter on Elizabeth Bishop in After the Death of Poetry¹ by describing Sharon Olds as a representative mainstream poet (58) who fails to live up to the Bishop tradition. I will argue first that Shetley's view of Bishop is skewed toward the erasure of eros in her poetry; next that his dismissal of Olds derives from a horror of eros in hers; and third, I will suggest that notwithstanding apparently polar differences between Bishop and Olds, including where they locate themselves on a continuum of erotic desire and dread, the two poets share an understanding of what eros is. Finally, I will propose a tentative view of erotic discourse in Stevens that would locate him elsewhere.

II

The qualities Shetley praises in Bishop are familiar ones. He admires her reticence, her withholding of meaning, her “reluctance to moralize or draw conclusions,” and the closures that pose “undecidable alternatives”—though with a new twist. These qualities have, he claims, acquired greater resonance since our present knowledge of Bishop's unhappy childhood and her lesbianism enables us to perceive what the poems function to conceal. A votary of “difficulty,” Shetley demonstrates that Bishop employs figures of similitude (simile, metaphor, implied analogy) throughout her career to express or imply unlikeness, dissimilarity, skepticism regarding the possibility or desirability of connection. Under the banner of post-modernism, he admires, in other words, Bishop's resistance to the erotic.

Shetley's discussion concentrates on four poems. In “The Monument,” he argues, Bishop, like Eliot, implies a poetics of “artistic impersonality as a defense against painful personal history.” Attributing life to an artifact is “a means of evading questions of human agency. … [T]he poet can conceal herself behind the objecthood of the artwork” (41). “The Weed,” a counterpoem of the creative moment, appears to recoil from its narrative of fertility, variety, and motion. Covertly, the poem “explores the uneasy territory of feeling associated with the fear of and repulsion from pregnancy” (42). “At the Fishhouses” extends these anxieties regarding the female body to anxieties about the poet's relation to a female-coded nature and a looming maternal sea. Lastly, “In the Waiting Room” is read as describing a “fall into connectedness” (57) that can only be experienced as horrifying.

These are strong and persuasive readings that add up to a plausible account of the force of alienation in Bishop as a postmodern poet.² Shetley's picture coincides, moreover, with the view of astute critics such as Bonnie Costello, who notes Bishop's “impersonal mode” and “variety of distancing techniques”; or Robert Pinsky, who asserts that Bishop “saw the world with … preternatural clarity in order to distinguish herself from it.”³ Yet these readings omit something crucial, which in each case touches on the erotic potential of likeness. It is this erotic potential, then, however guarded and oblique, that I hope to recover. To put it another way, I want to suggest how needy Bishop's texts are; how variously they reach toward tenderness, connection, communication, touch; how armored and veiled that neediness is—lifting only at moments in the late poems—and yet how impossible it is to imagine Bishop as a poet of the isolated, autonomous self.

Of the four poems Shetley discusses I will discuss two, one from the beginning and one from the close of her career. “The Monument,” one of Bishop's earliest poems on the problematics of art, takes the form of an implied dialogue between an insistent instructor and a resistant pupil (who might also stand for two halves of a self or two theories of art—one sophisticated and one naive). The instructor addresses a “you” who is, however, never personally spoken to; the speech concentrates on its “object” as if illustrating the very principle of objectivity:

Now can you see the monument? It is of wood
built somewhat like a box. No. Built
like several boxes in descending sizes
one above the other.
Each is turned half-way round so that
its corners point toward the sides
of the one below and the angles alternate.
Then on the topmost cube is set
a sort of fleur-de-lys of weathered wood,
long petals of board, pierced with odd holes,
four-sided, stiff, ecclesiastical.

([Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems, 1927-1979; hereafter cited as EBCP] 23)⁴

While the speaker's attention shifts from the monument's geometry toward its possibly “melancholy or romantic” intentions, its need “to cherish something,” its relation as artifact to nature, and its function of sheltering “what is within,” which may or may not be the artist-prince's invisible bones, the questioner remains stubbornly literal:

“Why does that strange sea make no sound?
Is it because we're far away?
Where are we? Are we in Asia Minor,
or in Mongolia?”

(EBCP 23)

Where Shetley with other critics privileges the former's aesthetics and scorns the latter's naive and irritable queries, an equal and opposite reading is also possible. We can see the instructor as pompously insensitive to the personal needs of the questioner, and the poem as a wry mockery of how aesthetic and academic pretentiousness crush human tenderness. When the questioner, sulking like a child or like anyone who's been dragged to do something educational and uplifting, says, “‘Why did you bring me here to see it?’” the instructor, like many an authority figure, refuses to respond. From the instructor's point of view, discourse is appropriately monologic. Aesthetic discourse excludes “you” or “me.” But what if the poem, unlike the instructor, invites us to take both sides of its frustrated dialogue seriously and personally? In that case we must yearn along with the questioner for personages and art objects less abstract and more tender, while yearning along with the instructor for a student better able to appreciate the unseen behind the seen. As a genuinely dialogic poem about the value of culture, “The Monument” subtly anticipates the reversals of Adrienne Rich in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” with its ironic responses to poetic passages by Horace and Campion, as well as suggesting a companion piece to Stevens' “Anecdote of the Jar,” with its nature/artifact dialectic, or “The Idea of Order at Key West,” with its assertions and unanswered questions, as well as its peninsular setting. Or perhaps Bishop's poem is a wry deflation of the monumental magnificence in Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium.” One might trace all five of these poems back to Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where the opposition of art to life and the identification of that opposition with the stasis of ever-unfulfilled “happy love” versus the rot and decay of fleshly sexuality are made explicit. Again, if “The Monument” projects onto visual art the problem of inferring subjectivity from the object and achieving intersubjectivity in aesthetic dialogue, it constitutes a rejection (determined? sad? resigned?) of Whitman's promise:

Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, …
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand …
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

(Song of Myself, section 2)

None of what Whitman offers is possible in the world of “The Monument,” yet to read the poem fully is to experience that impossibility as a genuine loss.

Neither speaker in “The Monument,” curiously, is gendered. Either might be of either sex. What is gendered—gendered and classed—is the hypothetical creator, an “artist-prince” (EBCP 24), whose theorized motives explicate the monument's paradoxically gimcrack appearance. Gendered as well is the artifact itself, a “stiff, ecclesiastical” sort of phallus from which four slanted “poles spring out … like fishing-poles or flag-poles” from which in turn “jig-saw work hangs down” in “four lines of vaguely whittled ornament … to the ground” (EBCP 23). A wooden ejaculation, then, which poignantly reveals itself as “having life, and wishing … to cherish something,” but also rather comically “may be solid, may be hollow” (EBCP 24). By the poem's close, the instructor shifts from speculating on the artifact's past to proposing that it has a future:

It is the beginning of a painting,
a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument,
and all of wood. Watch it closely.

(EBCP 25)

To watch is to anticipate motion, but nothing in the poem permits us to know whether motion will or will not occur, whether the absurd effigy lives. We have been teased out of thought, as with Keats's “Cold pastoral,” but in place of romantic epiphany is postmodern discomfort. If refined aesthetic perception and speculation require and/or produce human impersonality, “The Monument” permits us to feel both the necessity and the terrible pity of that remoteness. It is a poem of deep and disappointed erotic yearning.

From “The Monument,” I turn to a vastly different poem, Bishop's late masterpiece “In the Waiting Room.” The voice heard when opening her last published volume, Geography III, is the voice of a child of almost seven, who sits reading the National Geographic on a winter evening in a crowded dentist's office while waiting for an aunt. The magazine contains photos of a volcano's “inside … full of ashes” and in eruption, and some primitive women whose “breasts were horrifying” (EBCP 159). Suddenly, “from inside”—the second time this word appears in the poem—the child hears a cry of pain. She identifies the voice at first as her foolish aunt's and then with surprise as her own, coming from her own mouth: “Without thinking at all / I was my foolish aunt, / I—we—were falling, falling. …” When she tries to remind herself who she is, disorientation increases: “I felt: you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them,” and the unanswerable question surfaces:

Why should you be one, too?
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities—
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts—
held us all together
or made us all just one?

(EBCP 160-61)

For Vernon Shetley and other critics, this “fall” into identity with others is experienced as repellent. Shetley remarks how disagreeably mediocre and ordinary the other people in the poem are. Yet part of what the child Elizabeth intuits and the adult Bishop implies is that the emergence of a self-conscious individual identity can never be separable from an experience of merging and identification with others. The child has heard a voice “from inside,” and we discover along with her that “inside” may be something external, or may be something hidden within one's own throat. What emerges “from inside” is the unacknowledged, irrational universal, described here as “a cry of pain that could have / got loud and worse but hadn't,” registered by the suddenly emergent “I.” Identity, the having and being an “I,” is what separates me from all others, and also what unites me with them. Is it also what saves me from “worse?” Does it save Bishop from identifying too fully with her mad, forever-lost mother? Self is self-in-relation: no other kind exists.

Or, perhaps, no other kind exists for women. For a whole literature has lately come into existence arguing that the construction of self as self-in-relation is gendered female, while the self as autonomous is gendered male.⁵ Applying this principle to culture as well as to individuals, androcentric criticism unsurprisingly tends to privilege conceptions of the solitary, detached individual, to disparage representations of affectional relationships as “sentimental,” and to read poems such as “In the Waiting Room” as expressions of terror and disgust at one's place in a human community. But if we are tempted to think that the mysterious “similarities [that] … held us all together / or made us all just one” can only be disgusting, we forget the alternative. As the child returns to ordinary consciousness, she notes “the War was on.” War, in this poem and all Bishop's work beginning with “Roosters,” epitomizes the egoistic sublime of lives, and nations, that cannot perceive themselves with due modesty and due empathy as “just one.” If Bishop both yearns for and fears the erotic, experiences it as actual or potential pain, and produces screens to disguise the experience, we as readers need not be equally shy. We may let ourselves see the ubiquity and ambiguity of intimacy in Bishop, noting its obliquely imagined presence in the figures of “The Map,” its teasing affectionateness in “Invitation to Miss Moore,” the surreally articulated pain of its absence in poems such as “The Man-Moth” and “Insomnia,” its tentative consummation in “Shampoo,” and numerous unfinished or unpublished explicit love poems in Bishop's Notebooks. “Love should be put into action!” (EBCP 8) screams the old hermit in “Chemin de Fer,” shooting off his shotgun in crazy confirmation of desire, or loneliness, or perhaps masculinity, early in Bishop's career. But she herself could never put it into such direct poetic action.

As many commentators have noticed, several poems in Geography III, published in 1976 at a high-water mark of the women's poetry movement from which Bishop distanced herself, approach to a certain extent the personal openness that was a hallmark of that movement. “In the Waiting Room” is one such poem. Another is “Crusoe in England,” which uses the persona of the male castaway to articulate intense loneliness and longing—and hint shyly at homoerotic tenderness in the portrayal of Friday, “Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body” (EBCP 166). A third, “The Moose,” locates the speaker in a night bus en route from Nova Scotia to Boston, swathed half asleep in the murmurings of passengers that collectively exemplify the cycles of village life, interrupted by a female moose who sniffs at the bus, looks and is looked at. “Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?” (EBCP 173). Is the moose a figure for the missing mother, returned from “the impenetrable wood,” now “safe as houses” yet also “grand, otherworldly” (EBCP 172-73)? Is it this imagined return that allows Bishop so confidently and uniquely to state a collective joy? “The Moose” contrasts sharply with Frost's “The Most of It,” in which an isolated male self fails to achieve “counter-love, original response” from the buck who represents wilderness. Here, a relaxed acceptance of communal sensibility enables the further recognition that what we joyfully recognize in nature is ourselves. For many readers, the signature poem of Bishop's late period is the villanelle “One Art,” a tour de force of form and a stellar instance of rhetorical indirection. The power of “One Art,” and its closing confession, which stumbles so tellingly over the almost untellable fact of love—

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster

(EBCP 178)—

lets us know how difficult, and how central, love was to Bishop's art: to write it, without writing it, was a lifelong task.

III

Nobody would say Sharon Olds disguises the erotic in her poems. The erotic in her work is ubiquitous, joining bodies of flesh, generations, natural cycles of procreation and decay, human to animal, animal to vegetable, male to female, profane to sacred, life to art, sex to food to writing. The title poem of Olds's first book, Satan Says, announces the program of her art. Trapped inside an ornamental box she is trying to “write [her] way out of”—her childhood, her body, a sentimentalized tradition ornamented by tacky shepherds—she is tempted by Satan to escape by saying things like “fuck,” “shit,” and cursing her parents; she obeys, but as the lid of the box opens and she is about to exit into Satan's mouth, she remembers, “I loved / them, too,” and the lid closes. The poet will remain locked in the box that is now her coffin, but she hardly cares, as freedom to articulate rebellious hate precipitates “the suddenly discovered knowledge of love” ([Satan Says; hereafter cited as SS] 4).⁶ Olds chooses to be a poet ambivalently but firmly attached to parents. Several other poems about writing in this first volume announce corollary facets of her agenda. In “Nurse Whitman,” Whitman's and Olds's love of men is at once compassionate and sexual, embodied and imagined, while a fusion of present and past joins a fusion of genders in an act of writing that is also an act of conception and birthing:

We lean down, our pointed breasts
heavy as plummets with fresh spermy milk—
we conceive, Walt, with the men we love, thus, now,
we bring to fruit.

(SS 13)

In “The Language of the Brag,” a poem that follows several poems describing the intensely absorbed animal life of “Young Mothers,” Olds asserts the act of childbirth as a “heroism” equivalent to phallic power (“I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw … the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock”) and to the creation of poems. Having lain down and passed blood, feces, water, and a new person covered with “language of blood like praise all over the body” into the world,

I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.

(SS 45)

That the poems are intended to be both transgressive and sacred is made clear. “Station” describes the poet's husband, left to mind the children while she writes, gazing at her with “the poems / heavy as poached game hanging from my hands” (SS 29). “Prayer,” the final poem in Satan Says, defines “the central meanings” through linked images of copulation and childbirth, closing with a Whitmanlike vow: “let me not forget: / each action, each word / taking its beginning from these” (SS 72).

Where Bishop writes as a voice of loneliness, fearing and desiring connection, the self in Olds is never represented in isolation but always in relation, penetrated and penetrating, glued by memory and gaze to others. She scandalously eroticizes the bodies of children and parents, genitals and all, describes the sex act with explicit attention to a variety of orifices, is obsessed with the foodlike and procreative possibilities of human bodies, loves images of animals, soil, blood and eggs, represents her sexually greedy body as a tiger's, an anteater's, that which “takes him in as anyone in summer will / open their throat to the hose held up / hot on the edge of the sandlot,” and insists “I am this, this” ([The Gold Cell; hereafter cited as GC] 63). Cross-gendered imagery recurs through her work, as she invokes “My Father's Breasts” ([The Dead and the Living; hereafter cited as DL] 43), or speculates that her mother made her deliberately in the image of the powerful father: “I feel her looking down into me the way the / maker of a sword gazes at his face in the / steel of the blade” (GC 33). Sperm is recurrently described as milk, sexual gratification as eating and drinking, sex as power: “The center of your body / will tear open, as a woman will rip the / seam of her skirt so she can run,” she tells her daughter (DL 65). Olds's sacralizing of the sexual and procreative body is sometimes explicit, sometimes textually hinted, as when the daughter's maturing body is described as rising bread in a way that half represents the girl as Christ (“Bread,” DL 77).

Olds's critics complain at times that she sensationalizes the dysfunction of her natal family—cold, alcoholic grandfather and father, searingly clinging anorexic mother—overlooking the complication of the daughter's insistently expressed desire for, worship of, and identification with the father's body, which persists throughout her recent volume about his dying and death. The sensuous profusion in Olds stands in stark contrast to the austerity of a writer such as Bishop. Some readers conclude that such rich surfaces cannot possibly coexist with depth. Yet there may be important unsaid, unsayable, matter in Olds just as there is in Bishop. Consider “Sex Without Love,” the single Olds poem Shetley discusses, which he claims uses metaphor merely ornamentally:

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the                    come to the                    God                    come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health—just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

(DL 57)

The poem's opening “How do they do it?” may be construed as wondering either about technique or about morality. The question lets us know that the speaker doesn't do it, but not whether she envies or deplores. The following swift succession of similes implies a slippage from admiration—what we might feel if our ideas of sex without love came from watching, say, James Bond movies—to something closer to horror or pain. Sex without love is attractive in the style of art or sport, athletically and socially attractive, then it is a bit like the hanging carcasses in a Francis Bacon painting, then it parallels food, then for a brief instant it shockingly resembles the most shameful abandonment of the helpless. Significantly, Olds does not dwell on this instant, although in another poem (“The Abandoned Newborn,” GC 7) her topic is the condition of an infant left wrapped in plastic in a dumpster. The simile nonetheless jars and reverberates, for the mother-infant image simultaneously connotes and negates the vulnerable and utterly satisfied infantile eroticism that we strive to retrieve in adult sexuality (several other Olds poems also make this connection). The line-break reinforces the poignance of expectation dashed, the full stop signals a dead end along one line of thinking. At the edge of the image, or our consciousness of it, especially if we happen to be mothers ourselves, might be the fact that all mothers (including the mother of Jesus, who was Love) give their babies away, if not sooner then later. The pain of this abandonment is not accidentally but systematically a corollary of a culture in which sexual pleasure is divided from procreation, and motherhood is sentimentally honored but institutionally disempowered and without status. It is, in other words, a real effect of “sex without love.” Shetley's comment on this simile calls it “entirely gratuitous; since babies whose mothers are going to give them away are exactly as wet, no more and no less, as babies whose mothers are going to keep them, this elaboration serves no purpose but to remind us that sex without love may lead to unwanted pregnancy, a message better suited to public service announcements than poetry” (59). Both tone and content of a sentence like this suggest to me a reader deeply out of touch with his topic.

Shetley fails to comment on lines 8-13, in which the speaker cannot quite articulate what sex with love is. But this is the core of the poem. “Come to the come to the God” works doubly. It stumbles over the inexpressible and exclaims over its own inarticulateness, much as Bishop stumbles and exclaims in “One Art.” It also half implies that what love “comes” to is, precisely, God. “Still waters” reinforces and deepens this implication while echoing and redeeming the wetness of sexuality and of the newborn. Each a pool from which the other drinks, we taste a shared water of life. Sex, the speaker suggests, brings us to the pastoral oasis of the Twenty-third Psalm, our animal innocence, our divine protection. It restores our souls. Loving whoever comes to such a space with us would itself be natural. Sex, birth, nature, innocence, God, and a revisionary re-reading of scripture are all involved here. The image of light rising like steam from the lovers' “joined skin” imaginatively turns the fact of perspiration into a signal of the holy. The experience lies, however, outside the poem's discourse: the poem offers a silence that the reader must fill in.

The remainder of the poem appears to repudiate or transcend the oasis experience. Loveless lovers know better, we are told: they don't make the mistake of substituting the priest (the sexual partner) for the god (the pleasure). The true religion of eros is strenuously self-absorbed; the extended final metaphor of sex as running against one's own best time (one's own best orgasm) insists on our absolute isolation.

Shetley's comment on Olds's “Sex Without Love” calls its metaphors “descriptive rather than cognitive” (59). Clearly they have not made him think; the assumption that women who write about sex must be brainless is a very old one, which I have documented elsewhere. His commentary concludes as follows:

But ultimately, the poem's challenge to conventional values, both sexual and poetic, is recontained through the distance and isolation in which the poem envelops these in some sense unimaginable persons. The poet professes to admire these exemplars of lucidity. … But ultimately, [she] consigns them to their aloneness, professing her incomprehension; she … prefers to remain within the emotive comfort of false beliefs. By the poem's end, its initial challenge to conventional values of emotional warmth and mutuality has been entirely defused.

(60)

This reading seems willfully incorrect in several respects as well as tautological. Olds's “in some sense unimaginable persons” certainly exist, and sometimes might be any of us; the poet initially professes incomprehension but in the end undertakes to explain them rather convincingly. More interesting is that the sharp, best-case understanding of the loveless lovers whom she continues to call “they” means the speaker simultaneously is and is not like them. It might seem that her empathy overrides and invades their loneliness, in order to understand their experience from within. Or is it rather that their perfect and superior loneliness rebukes and explodes her empathy? Two kinds of lovers, two concepts of God, two ontologies of self, constructed as “undecidable alternatives” not unlike those we admire in Bishop, govern this poem. And although it is an atypical poem for Olds because it does not use the first-person singular, it is typical in its capacity to represent sexuality as both desirable and frightening.

IV

In the final portion of this essay I wish to ask two questions. What sort of erotic discourse do Bishop and Olds share? And can Wallace Stevens be seen as belonging to the same general discourse, or must he be otherwise located? The first question can be answered briefly on the basis of my readings. Bishop mostly evades, Olds mostly asserts erotic connection—but for both, the erotic is a power preceding and defining the self; for both, it exists at the liminal border between language and the unsayable; for both, it abuts on a realm we may call spiritual. Technically, the metaphors of both poets enact the erotic. Olds's do so, as I hope I have shown, first of all by their excess, which is mimetic of the procreativity Olds identifies with eroticism; second by requiring us constantly to register interplays of likeness and difference across categories, and in particular by repeatedly collapsing the categories of the human, the natural, the divine, and the artistic while reminding us of their conventional separation. To say “I am this,” and mean the body, is in Olds to claim complete connection with the world. Bishop's metaphoric technique works differently and so subtly that one of her most characteristic and unique strategies has scarcely been noticed. From the beginning to the end of her work, Bishop has a habit of letting metaphor attribute life and motivation to the inorganic, humanity to the inhuman. In “The Map,” which begins Bishop's first published volume, “These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods” (EBCP 3). In her final published volume, the final poem, “Five Flights Up,” posits a dog and bird querying the day and knowing “everything is answered, / all taken care of” (EBCP 181) by the day—radically unlike the speaker. Because her tone is always conversational, whimsical, modest, we perhaps fail to notice her passion for violating categories, joining the separated. “Somebody loves us all,” she remarks humorously at the end of “Filling Station” (EBCP 128), attributing to an unknown other what is really an attribute of her own imagination.

In a very early poem, “Casabianca,” Bishop tells us that the boy who stood on the burning deck, obstinately and stammeringly “trying to recite ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’ … while the poor ship in flames went down,” is love: “And love's the burning boy” (EBCP 5). If Bishop alludes simultaneously to the child god Eros and to the incarnate Jesus, she is doing no more than was done by the seventeenth-century devotional poets she so admired. Robert Lowell, notwithstanding his great admiration for Bishop, thought “Casabianca” trivial. But the Song of Songs tells us, as Bishop would have known, that many waters cannot quench love. One hopes not even the discomfort and incomprehension of critics in an age of intellectual drought can do that.

Yet what, to come round at last, about the erotic in Stevens? As noted at the beginning of this paper, it is no longer possible to see Stevens as a figure of pure impersonality, just as it is impossible to see him as a dandy or exotic. “Stevens' readers have liked nothing better than to bypass the personal and material levels of his writing,” as Frank Lentricchia has observed.⁷ But Helen Vendler in her most recent, major work on Stevens finds the emotional Stevens beneath the cerebral one, and argues that his greatest work inscribes a “fundamental donnée—the disappointments of desire,” or “catastrophic disappointment,” or, most precisely, a courageous “unwillingness to abandon either of his two incompatible truths—the truth of desire and the truth of the failure of desire.” If Stevens' poems have seemed cold to readers, it is because they are “second-order reflections on the stormings of first-order sensation. They are distillations. … It is only after Stevens' fierceness of desire has finished its initial storming into despair that its essence is expressed in the poems.”⁸ Mark Halliday proposes a Stevens who resists the invasiveness of interpersonal relations, “not so much as a man indifferent to love … but rather as a man intolerably disturbed by love and its demands … a frightened man.”⁹ Several of the authors in Melita Schaum's recent collection, Wallace Stevens & the Feminine, similarly locate Stevens' power not in the poet's serenity but rather in lifelong, desperate struggle. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan sees a continuing and self-conscious agon between a controlling “male authorial voice” and a repressed female whose silencing is his own silencing because she is part of himself: “the uncomposed and, therefore, potentially destructive aspect of his creative energy is perceived or figured by Stevens as a (threatening) woman” whose “white writing” or “trace” presence frustrates his desire to become the self-sustained “virile poet.” Only in a few, later lyrics, like “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” does Stevens achieve a relaxation of his defenses and an acceptance of the feminine within himself which enables him to sound “fully human and humane.”¹⁰ Mary Arensberg tracks Stevens' need “to re-experience ‘the mother's face’” through the many mythic muse figures in his oeuvre whom he first projects as external, but ultimately learns to accept as interior.¹¹ C. Roland Wagner, commenting on Vendler's characterization of Stevens as a poet of “distillation” or “second-order reflection,” asks why this should be so, and proposes, again, a poet racked by emotional contradiction:

I would suggest that his primal hunger is for union with the ideal regressive and forbidden object, and that this hunger for first-order experience, or, better, for the foundation of all first-order experience, is defensively transformed into a second-order experience of meditation and poetic dialectic. But Stevens' second-order poetry is not philosophical in the sense of a Lucretius or a Dante: it is a poetry of endless struggle with the naked wishes of the first level.¹²

Of this “second-order” discourse, which refuses to represent either an individuated self or individuated others, which instead of describing specific experiences or actions finds and arranges a seemingly inexhaustible array of vivid images, rhetorical gestures, and abstractions to denote them, one might say that it is a discourse of ultimate control, precisely because it fears loss of control. One might also say that Stevens' poetry habitually reveals what it conceals, affirms what it denies. Of such quarrels with the self is high art composed, and we may understand (and love) Stevens far better when we see the fire within and behind his ice. Like scenes in Matisse, scenes in Stevens rely on a radical flatness to create an idea of fullness.

What is quarrel is also romance. Saturated in erotic longing (and dread, and disgust, and despair, and occasionally fully realized delight), Stevens retreats—or advances—to the awareness that his problem is most fundamentally the problem of unity and difference. Here is where his writing becomes unique. Evoking “reality” and “imagination” as ostensible, conceptual opposites standing for the external world and the world within a human mind, they actually situate themselves at a kind of borderless interface between the two. Whatever is represented by Stevens as external to the mind can as well be understood as a mental projection, while what is represented as mental and interior can be interpreted as introjected from without. And, at times, “difference disappears” (CP 454).¹³ Two things become, or are seen to have always been, one thing.

This duplicity or fusion or interchange of opposites commonly insinuates itself through ambiguities of diction and syntax. So, for example, in “Two Figures in Dense Violet Night,” one of the many Floridean poems of Harmonium that turn on suggestions of erotic intrigue, the “you” and the imperatives imply one human speaking to another:

I had as lief be embraced by the porter at the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Than your moist hand.
Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.
Use dusky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.

(CP 85-86)

This seems initially a refined version of “talk dirty to me,” but modulates first into a request for a mysterious combination of mind-reading and ventriloquism, then into a stanza that, pivoting on “as,” simultaneously proposes an analogy (“as” = in the same fashion as) between microcosmic human and macrocosmic inhuman thought and utterance, and simply continues (“as” = at the same time as) the nocturnal scene-setting:

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,
As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,
And out of their droning sibilants makes
A serenade.

(CP 86)

“Conceiving words” may be the act of the speaker or the listener, or the phrase may be the object of the verb “speak” or “spoke.” That is, either persons or words are “conceiving,” and the double entendre of mental and biological conception will color the remainder of the poem. By the end of the poem, the “two figures” of the title may be either “real” external or “imaginary” interior human beings; but they may also be the figures of death and beauty—buzzards and nocturnal palm trees with moon—of the final two stanzas. Blurrings and branchings such as these are endemic in Stevens, and their proliferation constitutes a level of the erotic independent of (if also figured by) the usual semantic signifiers of erotically twinned male and female. At the same time, withdrawal and distance are enacted by the poem's shift from tactile to visual imagery, by the fact that the “more” the speaker wants to “get” is verbal not physical intimacy, by the sustained imperative address, and by the contemptuous throwaway “puerile” of the penultimate stanza.

If we assume that the “figures” in the poem are indeed a man and woman—they are in fact non-gendered—it is of course because Stevens understands so well how to manipulate our culture's sex-gender codes. It is staggering to realize how various the figurations of femaleness are in Harmonium, and how effectively they register the complexity of these codes, usually in the service of showing how frustratingly unsatisfying they are. One of the poet's lifelong pursuits, then, involves using these same codes to gesture toward states of being that lie beyond or prior to gender. Man and woman, man and woman and blackbird “are one” very early in Stevens' pantomime, and the moments when “difference disappears” become for him gratifying emblems of achieved humanity.

“Two Figures in Dense Violet Night” is one of Stevens' simpler lyrics. A quite different, perhaps inverse, sort of ambiguity rules the far more complex section X of “Esthétique du Mal,” Stevens' homage to and profound deviation from Baudelaire. Here the poem begins with the announcement of an internal as opposed to an external drama, while at the same time it indicates that sentiments are objectifiable to the thinking man as a body of knowledge: “He had studied the nostalgias” is not at all the same thing as “he felt nostalgia.” The pluperfect verb and the plural noun enforce immediate, chilly distance; “the nostalgias” might be literary as well as personal. As the passage proceeds, it evokes continuing sets of contrasting, coexisting emotions:

He had studied the nostalgias. In these
He sought the most grossly maternal, the creature
Who most fecundly assuaged him, the softest
Woman with a vague moustache and not the mauve
Maman. His anima liked its animal
And liked it unsubjugated, so that home
Was a return to birth, a being born
Again in the savagest severity,
Desiring fiercely, the child of a mother fierce
In his body, fiercer in his mind, merciless
To accomplish the truth in his intelligence.

(CP 321)

The move from “studied” to “sought” to “assuaged him” recognizes the initially cool protagonist's need for solace, assuagement, and relaxes him from a dominant to a passive state—although the speaker's own voice undergoes no such slackening. Then, the “grossly maternal” figure is both comforting and threatening, though the threat is as “vague” as her mustache. The split between a superlatively soft phallic mother and the “mauve / Maman” might be between interior and exterior images of the feminine, or between natural “creature” and social artifice, or (as object-relations psychology would obviously tell us) between Good and Bad introjected mother. The complacency of “His anima liked its animal / And liked it unsubjugated” tells us that mother has effectively nurtured infant, prior to and/or at the conclusion of his search. Meanwhile, the sophisticated wordplay is the opposite of (and defense against) infantile vulnerability.

At this point in the passage, syntactic ambiguity floods the evocation of rebirth. In “a being born / Again,” “being” syntactically parallels “home” (Gr. nostos, home) while “being born” is appositive to “return,” and the whole phrase connotes salvation—not through Christ, however, and not through surrender. More important, “the child of a mother fierce / In his body, fiercer in his mind” gives us a physically and mentally fierce newborn, like Blake's infant “fiend hid in a cloud” in Songs of Experience, but also an introjected mother maintaining that fierceness within him. What he has just emerged from is contained inside him; the paradoxical psychic geometry here is not unlike the use of “inside” in Bishop's “In the Waiting Room.”

At this point the poem offers a contrast: there are “other mothers” besides the primal one. These “other mothers,” who seem like figures of myth, might be “fantastic” in the sense of being imaginary or in the sense of being sexually enjoyable. Then, when the primal “reality, / The gross, the fecund” in the closing portion of this passage “proved him against the touch / Of impersonal pain” (CP 322), we may understand “proved” to mean either protected or, on the contrary, tested; impersonal pain might be the evil that happens to others (which is part of the theme of “Esthétique du Mal” as a whole) or the indifference of pain itself to the damage it does; i.e., the moral indifference of the universe (which is another main topic). What the protagonist learns to “understand” at the end of section X may be the necessity of accepting pain and death as morally neutral concomitants of life, or may on the contrary be merely that to “say” so, contrafactually, is the price of freedom:

                                                            That he might suffer or that
He might die was the innocence of living, if life
Itself was innocent. To say that it was
Disentangled him from sleek ensolacings.

(CP 322)

From whose solace is he freed? That of the “softest woman,” or that of others? Has the protagonist at the close of this passage emerged from his “nostalgias,” proof against pain, death, incest fantasies, and illusion in general, into an external world? Or is the conclusion one more illusion? In what sense is it possible to identify one's maternal “anima” with “reality”? As the drama of section X of “Esthétique du Mal” is and is not merely “inner,” so the whole poem's insistence on affirming a world without God or ideology, and with all its evil and pain—affirming it as beautiful—is and is not to be accepted.

It has become customary to claim that the obscure objects of Stevens' desire are essentially interior and that “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” simply names explicitly what has been the case throughout his career. If it were that simple, Stevens would be vastly less intense than he is. Inner and outer construct each other, feed each other, are mutually present, continually in his poetry—just as they are in our own psychic, social, and political worlds, only our ordinary language is too clumsy to let us perceive this. More than any other modernist, Stevens picks up the threads left dangling by Whitman and Dickinson, which ask us to question the unity and impermeability of the self and, along with that, the fixity of gender. Nothing about sex is pure or natural in Stevens. Everything is psychologically and culturally constructed and constrained. It is this perhaps that enables him to be so unsentimental, so uncompromising in his portrayal of gender war (or, at least, of the ways men are wounded in it; he is considerably less conscious of women's wounds), and it is this that leads him to fantasies of gender neutrality.

Is it time to say that “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” may be one such fantasy? Because “paramour” implies illicit love, we leap to the conclusion that Stevens here names at last his incestuous desire. Or that the paramour in question is the Muse whom the poet's wife correctly believed to be her feminine rival. Yet the text of the poem itself contains no gender markings, unless the encircling “shawl” be one and the “candle” of thought another. Yes, the paramour may be feminine, and the term may pun on darkness (moor), stable anchorage (also moor, as in Dickinson's “Might I but moor—tonight—in Thee”), and death (mort). But if she is feminine, she divests herself of female coding in the text. More interestingly, she (or it) is divested of the solitude connoted by “Soliloquy.”

Someone speaks a line gently and intimately to another, and thereafter there is a “we” in the poem. The “we” thinks as one, which is the condition of its being able to think of the imagined world as “good” while understanding it to be a fiction. It is a move like Eliot's “Consequently I rejoice having to construct something / Upon which to rejoice” (“Ash-Wednesday”). The humbleness of Stevens' “we,” ultimate obverse of his “vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X” (CP 288), and of all his dominating males, enables a mutual self-forgetfulness in which a cosmic order is obscurely felt, first as external, then as internal, then both: “We say God and the imagination are one …” (CP 524). And that thought brightens: “How high that highest candle lights the dark,” a dark that then returns to “dwelling.” We are asked to think of Portia's beautiful “How far that little candle throws his beams! / So shines a good deed in a naughty world” (V.i.89-90). The tender discourse of self with soul—another name for anima, or mother, or muse, or paramour—is in this poem “enough,” and sheds light on many of Stevens' late poems.

Both in violence and tenderness, then, Stevens explores eros in one of the senses I began by suggesting. To assert connection over difference, to want to blur rather than reify categories (including gender categories) is to engage in erotic discourse. Stevens does so the more passionately as he recognizes the imprisonments of categories (including gendered ones). That readers until recently have overlooked his doing so is partly due to our literary and philosophical culture's bias against the erotic, and partly to Stevens' own screens and disguises. Like Bishop's, his doubleness wears its cool side outward.

In other respects, Stevens does not sail in what seems to me the main channel of erotic poetic discourse. The absence of an individuated self and individuated others (who may be fictions, but these are the fictions most love poetry relies on) links with other absences. We cannot feel, in Stevens, that the power of eros precedes, defines, overwhelms him; there is too much control and containment, too much insistence that it is all in the head. The disembodied nature of Stevens' work is a serious stumbling block. True, he is not all cerebral, he is passionate—but without much in the way of flesh and blood, without the sensuous details that most poets (including austere ones such as Bishop) find so precious. Stevens does not give us penises and breasts, as does Sharon Olds, but he also does not give us funny perforated wooden boxes, or National Geographic photographs and people's boots in a dentist's office, or Esso cans, or mooses big as houses, as does Elizabeth Bishop. Neither his imaginary nor his real worlds struggle with detail. Neither, on the other hand, does he associate the erotic with the sacred. He rejects (and I think this is a real rejection) the possibility of a transcendent divinity too emphatically for that. Lastly, and crucially, Stevens is overwhelmingly a poet of metonymy rather than metaphor. But metaphor remains the poetic device that most persistently teaches us to enjoy a world of phenomena partly alike, partly unlike. With Stevens one finds little middle ground. “Things as they are” are either different or they are “one.” If difference in likeness, and likeness in difference, is what most of us need to love, we cannot learn how from Wallace Stevens. What we can learn, if we try hard, is to love what seems absolutely Other.

Notes

1. Vernon Shetley, After the Death of Poetry (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). Hereafter cited in the text with page numbers in parentheses.

2. Reasons for Bishop's resistance to the erotic are not far to seek: loss of a mother to madness, self-censorship regarding lesbianism, internalization of a moral training that stressed control, the stigmatizing of sexuality in women poets, and so on. Everyone recalls how Bishop had to take a stand against the disapproval by her mentor, Marianne Moore, of “water-closet” in “Roosters.” Less well known is the fact that the first more-or-less explicit love poem Bishop tried to publish, “The Shampoo,” was turned down by both Poetry and The New Yorker and politely ignored by friends. I am indebted to Victoria Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 70-73, for pointing this out. Of the selection of Bishop's letters recently edited by Robert Giroux (One Art: Letters [New York: Farrar Straus, Giroux, 1994]), the reviewer Adrien Oktenberg remarks that Bishop appears in it as “a woman almost without libido,” despite her love affairs with Lota de Macedo Soares and others, and pertinently asks, “is Bishop the only poet in the history of the world never to have written a love letter?” (The Women's Review of Books XI.10-11 [July 1994]: 28). The same reviewer notes that a collection of feminist essays on Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, has almost nothing concrete to say about her lesbianism.

3. Bonnie Costello, “The Impersonal and the Interrogative in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,” in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 109; Robert Pinsky, “Elizabeth Bishop, 1911-1979,” The New Republic (November 10, 1979): 32-33.

4. Citations of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry in this essay are from Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983).

5. Among the key works arguing this position are Dorothy Dinerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and the Human Malaise (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

6. Citations of Sharon Olds's poems are to Satan Says (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980) SS; The Dead and the Living (New York: Knopf, 1984) DL; The Gold Cell (New York: Knopf, 1987) GC.

7. Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 217.

8. Helen Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 4, 11, 28, 39.

9. Mark Halliday, Stevens and the Interpersonal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 44.

10. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, “Sister of the Minotaur: Sexism and Stevens,” Wallace Stevens & the Feminine, ed. Melita Schaum (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 12-13, 17.

11. Mary B. Arensberg, “A Curable Separation: Stevens and the Mythology of Gender,” Wallace Stevens & the Feminine, ed. Melita Schaum (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 24.

12. C. Roland Wagner, “Wallace Stevens: The Concealed Self,” Wallace Stevens & the Feminine, ed. Melita Schaum (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 121.

13. Citations of Stevens' poems are to The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954).