THE IDEA OF A COLONY

By: Wallace Stevens
April 30, 2024

A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.

Nota: his soil is man’s intelligence.
That’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to
     find.
Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare
His cloudy drift and planned a colony.
Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex,
Rex and principium, exit the whole
Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose
More exquisite than any tumbling verse:
A still new continent in which to dwell.
What was the purpose of his pilgrimage,
Whatever shape it took in Crispin’s mind,
If not, when all is said, to drive away
The shadow of his fellows from the skies,
And, from their stale intelligence released,
To make a new intelligence prevail?
Hence the reverberations in the words
Of his first central hymns, the celebrants
Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength
Of his aesthetic, his philosophy,
The more invidious, the more desired.
The florist asking aid from cabbages,
The rich man going bare, the paladin
Afraid, the blind man as astronomer,
The appointed power unwielded from
     disdain.

His western voyage ended and began.
The torment of fastidious thought grew
     slack,
Another, still more bellicose, came on.
He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena,
And, being full of the caprice, inscribed
Commingled souvenirs and prophecies.
He made a singular collation. Thus:
The natives of the rain are rainy men.
Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes,
And April hillsides wooded white and pink,
Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white
And pink, the water bright that dogwood
     bears.
And in their music showering sounds
     intone.
On what strange froth does the gross
     Indian dote,
What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed
     gore,
What pulpy dram distilled of innocence,
That streaking gold should speak in him
Or bask within his images and words?
If these rude instances impeach
     themselves
By force of rudeness, let the principle
Be plain. For application Crispin strove,
Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute
As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.

Upon these premises propounding, he
Projected a colony that should extend
To the dusk of a whistling south below the
     south,
A comprehensive island hemisphere.
The man in Georgia waking among pines
Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive
     man,
Planting his pristine cores in Florida,
Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery,
But on the banjo’s categorical gut,
Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his
     bays.
Sepulchral señors, bibbing pale mescal,
Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,
Should make the intricate Sierra scan.
And dark Brazilians in their cafés,
Musing immaculate, pampean dits,
Should scrawl a vigilant anthology,
To be their latest, lucent paramour.
These are the broadest instances. Crispin,
Progenitor of such extensive scope,
Was not indifferent to smart detail.
The melon should have apposite ritual,
Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,
When its black branches came to bud, belle
     day,
Should have an incantation. And again,
When piled on salvers its aroma steeped
The summer, it should have a sacrament
And celebration. Shrewd novitiates
Should be the clerks of our experience.

These bland excursions into time to come,
Related in romance to backward flights,
However prodigal, however proud,
Contained in their afflatus the reproach
That first drove Crispin to his wandering.
He could not be content with counterfeit,
With masquerade of thought, with hapless
     words
That must belie the racking masquerade,
With fictive flourishes that preordained
His passion’s permit, hang of coat, degree
Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash
Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly.
It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was,
Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served
Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,
A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.
There is a monotonous babbling in our
     dreams
That makes them our dependent heirs, the
     heirs
Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not
The oncoming fantasies of better birth.
The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he
     dreamed
Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way.
All dreams are vexing. Let them be
     expunged.
But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.

Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets,
With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener?
No, no: veracious page on page, exact.

— Section IV (“The Idea of a Colony”) of “The Comedian as the Letter C,” from Harmonium (1923), Wallace Stevens’ first poetry collection. An anti-anti-utopian poem, perhaps. PS: “The man in Georgia waking among pines / Should be pine-spokesman.” — compare with “Anecdote of Men by the Thousand,” in the same collection.

The poem recounts Crispin’s voyage from Bordeaux to Yucatán to North Carolina, a voyage of hoped-for growth and self-discovery. (He is a valet, a kind of comic innocent — a Candide figure. “A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.”) As he travels, he tests and rejects various modes of expression: avant-garde, earthy and exotic. Each idea he hits upon to account for his experience turns out, upon being tested by his experience, to falsify it. He doesn’t want his poetry to be a “trinket pasticcio” — a bungled work, fanciful and insignificant.

After his travels, Crispin plans a colony of poets, which would allow “a new intelligence [to] prevail.” There would be representatives from various locales, from California to Brazil, from Mississippi to Florida — each of whom, having been shaped by his environment, will give voice to it here. Secular clerics — like Wells’s samurai — will mediate between experience and the understanding and expression of it.

Frustrated, however, he abandons this plan — which he has decided is “counterfeit,” perhaps because a utopian colony is overly idealistic and romantic; his goal all along has been through accurate depiction of reality — rejecting sentimentality, fancifulness, the stale impositions of the intelligence — to achieve rapport with it. The ritualization and socialization of his revelation, in the form of this polyphonic Argonaut Folly of poets, will falsify it. A utopia is a fantasy, and fantasy is sentimental. All ideas about reality are illusory; we are always learning how to see. He settles for a cabin, takes a wife, and they have children. Crispin embraces the quotidian; the denouement represents a reconciliation of the poet’s imagination with the quotidian — the particulars of reality exclusive of any theories about them. He renounces his overly ambitious speculation and his grandiose aesthetic stratagems. He has been clownish — struggling to come to terms with a world as indifferent to his struggles as it is unchangeably benign.

***

RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.