Research Paper

Blue Order: Wallace Stevens’s Jazz Experiments
Corey M. Taylor

Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 32, Number 2, Winter 2009, pp. 100-117 (Article) Published by Indiana University Press DOI: 10.1353/jml.0.0048

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jml/summary/v032/32.2.taylor.html Access Provided by Purdue University at 08/22/12 4:11PM GMT

Blue Order: Wallace Stevens’s Jazz Experiments
Corey M. Taylor
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Wallace Stevens, one of America’s most recognizable modernist poets, separated himself from social, political, cultural, and even aesthetic milieus of the modernist era. His aloofness notwithstanding, modern tenets such as meditations on reality, debates about culture, and experimentation with music occur in Stevens’s poetry. Critics often, and rightly, align the musical qualities of Stevens’s verse with classical motifs. This article places the musicality of Stevens’s poetry in a jazz context, and contends that poems from throughout his career — especially in Harmonium (1923) and Ideas of Order (1936) — contain jazz elements and can be read as jazz texts. Stevens employs linguistic repetitions, thematic variations, improvisatory flourishes, allusions, and wordplay that indicate the influence and presence of jazz, without ever mentioning the music by name. Ultimately, Stevens can be considered a poet who experimented with jazz, giving his work additional sonic and contextual resonance. Keywords: Wallace Stevens / modernism / jazz / poetry / improvisation

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n 1900, a degree from Harvard in hand, Wallace Stevens lived in Lower Manhattan and worked the graveyard shift at the New York Tribune. He enrolled in New York Law School in 1901, graduated in 1903, joined the New York bar in 1904, and traded law for the insurance business in 1908 (Kermode and Richardson 960–61). Despite his formal education and employment, Stevens lived like a bohemian during these years. He

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