Sound as Structure

Especially useful, when teaching Stevens in the context of a poetry writing workshop, is the fact that his deployment of both similar and dissimilar sounds becomes a structural element of his poems—in the same way that a movement between metrically loose and metrically regular lines or between syntactically complete and syntactically broken lines may also structure our linear experience of a poem’s language unfolding in time. (CPP 477) And the final line of the late poem “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself” (“A new knowledge of reality”) feels revelatory because it suddenly refuses to participate in the swirling web of similar sounds (precede, sun, surround, still—cry, chorister, choir, colossal) from which it is extruded: (CPP 452) Reading lines like “A chorister whose c preceded the choir” or “The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down,” we feel a density of similar sounds, but more importantly, we feel the poems moving towards or away from that density, just as we may also feel a poem’s rhythm moving towards or away from regularity or a poem’s syntax moving towards or away from the drama of subordination.