Wallace Stevens – The “Emperor” Disrobed – The Fortress of Irony in “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”

First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl
Oh, la…le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.

The story, though first popularized by literary works, is told again and again in plays, films, and TV shows, whether dramatic or comedic, whether in country or city settings, where two or more women compete for the same man, or vice versa. The natural by-product of the competition in “Plot” is an elevated form of trash-talking with its sexual double entendres (e.g., “whetting his hacker,” “unsmelled flowers,” “arching cloths,” “curious puffing,” and “heavenly labials”)–a pastoral analogue to the singing competitions of the shepherds–which Stevens threads through the poem in order to describe the sexually-charged nature of the wooing by the country girls who, in competition with each other, chase the eponymous “giant.”  Stevens’ linguistic precision was too keen to have used these words without regard to their obvious sexual import. Indeed, Stevens entertains and shocks the reader in the spirit of the French fabliau^[4] employed by Chaucer (e.g., “The Reeves Tale”), Boccaccio, and other writers of the Middle Ages, opposing the bawdy wit of the country girls to traditional forms of “polite” discourse.

      The mock-pastoral is replete with examples of similar usages.^[5] At least as far back as ancient Roman poetry, the introduction of sexual imagery gave literary work an attractive spice.^[6] Even then, the pastoral mode was considered a pose and an artifice by the urban-dwelling Ovid, Virgil and Catullus, among others. We also see broad irony practiced in other archaic modes of poetic expression, as in the mock-heroic (e.g., Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” and its progeny) and the mock-elegiac (e.g., John Donne’s profane elegies and Robert Burns’ “Poor Mailie’s Elegy”). In “The Plot Against the Giant,” and “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” Stevens worked in the fertile tradition of poetry that is typically ironic when employed in an archaic mode.

     In Troubadours and Irony, Simon Gaunt makes two important points with respect to irony and sex in literary expression:

    First, irony is an ideal vehicle for sexual innuendo. In most cultures it is to a greater or lesser extent taboo to designate a sexual organ or act explicitly, depending on the context. When social decorum is being observed, for whatever reason, and sexual acts or organs are designated implicitly, irony will probably ensue. This is because the allusion must retain its ambiguity if it is to be socially acceptable, communicating two different levels of meaning.

    Secondly, a definition of irony which allows for a divergence between literal and intended meaning invites comparison with definitions of metaphor or allegory, both of which allow one thing to be said and quite another to be meant. The distinction between irony and other types of figurative speech lies not in formal differences, for metaphor, allegory, metonymy and synecdoche can all be used ironically, but in the ironist’s intentions.

    Since everyone has an equal opportunity to understand an ironist’s intended meaning, he does not set out to mislead any one member of his audience. But, as the intended meaning must be inferred, in some cases some people will fail to grasp it. In all the examples of irony from Guilhem’s poems discussed thus far, it is possible to imagine a listener or reader taking him literally and being duped by the pretended meanings: most meanings, pretended and real, remain possible. The ironist is implicitly dividing his audience into two groups: the initiated and the uninitiated. In Muecke’s words: “a sense of irony depends for its material upon a lack of sense of irony in others, much as skepticism depends upon credulity.”^[7]

     “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” like Stevens’ poetry taken as a whole, separates its audience from the initiated and uninitiated. The poem is not a narrative, but a system of images cast in the form of exhortations which reflect the emotional disposition of the speaker. A back story is vaguely discernible, but that story is not the focus of the poem and is not revealed in a systematic plotting of the various statements made by the poet. The poem is chiefly ironic expression with a highly dramatic and allusive textual surface which is steeped in a recognizable poetic tradition. As such, it stands as a great fortress of irony on the plains of realism ordinarily travelled by the naïve reader.

     Richard Ellmann correctly described Stevens’ voice in Emperor this way: “Here the poet is hortatory, not descriptive, and his tone is buoyant and defiant.”^[8] The speaker commands “Call the roller of big cigars”; “bid him whip”; “Let the wenches dawdle in such dress/As they are used to wear”; “let the boys/ Bring flowers”; and “Take from the dresser of deal/Lacking the three glass knobs”. The diction employed by Stevens is archaic, mock-heroic, attuned more to Shakespearian histories than twentieth century poetic expression. In fact, our ears expect the mock-heroic because it is signaled by the title of the poem.

     The archaism in “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” is notably distinguishable from that seen in Ezra Pound’s translations of ancient texts, such as “Homage to Sextus Propertius” and others that he incorporated into The Cantos. Pound’s use of archaic speech forms is largely pedagogical and employed with the intent of giving these ancient texts a voice that a modern audience could understand and enjoy. Pound wanted his readers to experience literature as a continuum of human expression with a universality of application. Therefore, the irony that would normally be evoked by archaic usage is inapposite to Pound’s works. By contrast, Stevens expects us to sense the traditional irony implied by the archaism of its rhetorical expression in the same sense that James Joyce’s Ulysses features Buck Mulligan’s outlandish rhetorical guises to poke fun at the religious and literary pretenses of Stephen Dedalus. By recognizing this change in tone we understand its dramatic and emotional purpose as light satire or even more lethal sarcasm.

     There is no indication in the first stanza that the poem is elegiac or that a death has occurred. The commands may be addressed to the reader as witness, someone who is not necessarily expected to carry them out, but most likely they are self-addressed and rhetorical. The speaker is not a real emperor, but he has adopted the diction and peremptory manner of an emperor, and therefore “emperor” is likely construed as self-referential. Even absent the mock-heroic dress, the “emperor of ice-cream” is an inherently ridiculous soubriquet; hence everything that precedes it must be necessarily viewed as tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic and rhetorical.

     The irony is further enhanced by the abundance of profane imagery. The “roller of big cigars” is “bid,” in a concatenation of alliterative “k” sounds (voiceless velar stops), to “whip/In kitchen cups” the “concupiscent curds” of ice cream phalluses (for what else would a roller of “big cigars” do?).^[9] The roller is “muscular,” inviting obvious connotations of sexual prowess. The women on the scene, phrased to mean all women, are “wenches,” not only low-class but promiscuous if we accept the preceding sexual imagery. The boys being summoned may seem to be in the person of youthful courtiers bringing flowers “in last month’s newspapers,” but a more plausible reading is that the flowers were appropriate “last month,” but not now, thus lending a stale odor to the scene.

     At the end of the first stanza we have the extraordinary iconic couplet. Stevens’ speaker issues another “Let” command, but it is absent of image and contains an apparent nonsense lyric that provides the hitherto unused device of rhyme:

Let be be finale of seem,
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

The primary interpretation of the line, “Let be be finale of seem” is something like: “Let’s abandon all pretenses.”^[10] Tonally, the line represents a self-conscious break from the mock heroic expression and irony preceding it, where a moral or code of conduct is being stated. Because of this departure in tone, readers reflexively consider the line more trustworthy, i.e., for it appears that the speaker/poet is stepping out of character, almost as a Shakespearean aside, to confide a truth. In effect this forces the reader to reflect back on the preceding images and reconcile their purpose in terms of the oddity of the ending couplet. The “essential gaudiness” of those images contrasts with the candor of “Let be be finale of seem” which, when combined with the refrain, “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream,” compels us to interpret the “narrative” aspects  as rhetorical  flourishes made by  the  speaker  for  the  purpose  of communicating his interior disposition, one likely filled with self-mockery and despair. In early twentieth century poetry, Pound and T.S. Eliot frequently employed rhetorical irony to evoke this dejected, self-directed sarcasm, an attitude they acquired from Charles Baudelaire and the French Symbolists, their literary antecedents, as well as from Latin poets such as Catullus. With the poem’s refrain (“The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream”), the speaker reassumes the mantle of the ironist,^[11] lending dramatic pathos to the poem. It is not party-time after all, and the morbidity that follows in the second stanza’s images continues this sardonic tone.

     In the second stanza the speaker renews his imperial commands, rhetorically directing the listener/reader and, particularly, himself, to take an embroidered sheet from a “dresser of deal” and cover the face of the woman who embroidered the sheet. This is the first reference in the poem to a particular woman who appears (from the context of the attendant descriptions) to be dead, and indeed a darker mood is cast over the poem at this point.

    Deal, as legend has it, is the type of pine wood from which Christ’s cross was made.^[12]  But here the deal dresser is missing “three glass knobs,” which Vendler interpreted as a sign of a neglected house occupied by a “poor old woman.”  But more likely this is religious or mythic symbolism. Rather than describing the dresser simply “missing knobs,” the “three glass knobs” points us to the Holy Trinity or the mythological Three Graces (fertility, beauty and charm).^[13] If so, this sacred symbolism, when juxtaposed to the profane imagery that precedes and follows it, gives rise to the inference that the woman, like the wenches in the first stanza, has “lost” her virtue.

     Indeed, this train of thought proves out when an “embroidered” sheet is used as a winding sheet, suggesting that the woman was virtuous “once,” for embroidery was traditionally associated with a woman’s femininity and virtue. The deliberate placement of the word “once” at the end of line 11 (where both meter and grammatical placement lend added stress) acts to emphasize the past tense status of her virtue. The covering of the woman’s face is an act that hides her shame. The speaker portrays the woman in representational language, but, in keeping with the interiority of the portrait, she embodies shame that, because of the implied association between the woman and speaker, also reflects the shame of the speaker.  [Later, when we accord her a deeper significance as muse, her winding sheet of “fantails” (pigeons) becomes an analogue for the type of embroidered poetry that became associated with poets of the Romantic and Victorian eras.]

     Aside from their obvious meanings in the text, the words “fantails,” “horny” and “come” are also crude sexual double entendres.^[14] The speaker uses the conditional tense, “If her horny feet protrude,” to signal that he is imagining the scene only for rhetorical purposes. Because of the emotional nature of the portrait, there does not have to be a deal dresser, missing glass knobs or an embroidered sheet in reality, as these are merely projections of a scene used to describe the repulsive face of death and, in particular, the death of the muse. With the conditional usage, we likewise understand the speaker is not certain that the sheet will not cover her, as if no ordinary sheet could be big enough and capable of hiding her shame.

     The strength of the emotions on display, intensified by the profane and sexual imagery, suggests that the lady’s loss of virtue has been recently discovered (perhaps within the period defined by “last month’s newspapers”) and that the veil has been suddenly lifted from the speaker’s eyes. The lamp must be allowed to “affix its beam” on the woman and the speaker (and all else), and show things for what they are. As he has been betrayed, the poet’s imagination colors his reality. Whether or not he is the emperor of the poem, in his mind the quality of life has been reduced to temporal and insubstantial pleasures and animal passions, to a naked reality stripped of the finer things, whose emblem is now the ugly corpse of a once virtuous and beautiful woman. In this context, the mock eponym, as the mock-heroic language in the refrain, is sarcastic and despairing. The speaker, his alter ego, and the woman have all become debased subjects in the realm of ice cream.

     In terms of the ironic rhetoric of the interior, it is possible that the woman is actually alive and only described as dead in order to suggest that she is dead to the speaker. She is “cold” as a lover who betrays her suitor. Consider how a spurned Venus addresses Adonis, who is very much alive, in Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” (lines 211-214):

Fie, lifeless picture, cold, and senceless stone,
Well painted idol, image dull, and dead,
Statue contenting but the eye alone,
Thing like a man, but of no woman bred.

Poets traditionally described their unresponsive or unfaithful lovers as “cold,” usually intending to mean hard-hearted, lifeless, and emotionally unavailable, but sometimes extending the meaning to “barren.” Here, the crude and unforgiving portrait of the woman and her surroundings, the wild speculation (on whether the sheet will cover her or not), and the sexual epithets all leave a reader with the impression that the speaker has been rejected.  Symbolically, especially for a poet, one can see the figuration of the woman as the muse who has betrayed the poet. Adopting such a reading would put Stevens squarely within a tradition of poets who complained of being abandoned by the muse.

     If we were to (1) cast aside the clear sexual imagery of the first stanza, (2) determine that Stevens’ word choice is devoid of sexual connotations and (3) disregard the symbolism in “deal” and “three glass knobs,” the resulting description of the “poor old woman” would render Stevens’ portrayal insensitive and undignified. Such an interpretation would lend a disjointed character to the poem, albeit one some critics have nevertheless embraced. In no other poem has Stevens’ seemed to violate decorum or display the heavy-handedness of a boor as he does here under the traditional reading. But, if we accept the poem as a projection of the poet’s emotional interior, in a way that makes use of profane imagery, religious symbolism and symbolic elements, then all disparate aspects of the poem cohere.

     Therefore, “Emperor” may be taken as ironic hyperbole and a portrait of the stricken soul of the poet. The factual representations are purely rhetorical gestures in the service of a greater truth which, on one level, is about seduction and betrayal: we are seduced by the beauty of life and betrayed by its mortality. The “ice-cream” is all the sweetness of life, but in the end a seductive pleasure and temporal. Louise Glück reaches for a similar sentiment in “The Sensual World”.

     Yet this reduction of the poem’s symbolism is misunderstood unless we combine with it the preposterous irony of a virtually impossible emperor lording over his ice-cream domain. This is the tragic-comic face of poetry, a burlesque of the poet’s fate. It is Stevens’ own version of Leoncavallo’s “Ridi Pagliacci,” where Pagliacci’s last words, “La Commedia è finita!” (literally “the comedy play is over,” but figuratively, “let’s be serious now”), serve the same function as “Let be be finale of seem” and “Let the lamp affix its beam.” The tragic irony is that the poet must trade in illusion in order to avoid the common elusions (evasions) of life. Stevens admits as much in his February 18, 1942 letter to Hi Simons:

      When a poet makes his imagination the imagination of other people, he does so by making them see the world through his eyes. Most modern activity is the undoing of that very job. The world has been painted; most modern activity is getting rid of the paint to get at the world itself. Powerful integrations of the imagination are difficult to get away from. I am surprised that you have any difficulty with this, when the chances are that every day you see all sorts of things through the eyes of other people in terms of their imaginations.  This power is one of the poet’s chief powers.

      About escapism: Poetry as a narcotic is escapism in the pejorative sense. But there is a benign escapism in every illusion.  The use of the word illusion suggests the simplest way to define the difference between escapism in the pejorative sense and in the non-pejorative sense: that is to say: it is the difference between elusion and illusion, or benign illusion. Of course, I believe in benign illusion. ^[15]

     Unlike previous interpretations which generally hold that “Emperor” exhorts us to “seize the  day” (carpe  diem),  the interior monologue of the poem’s narrator,  exorcising  his  demons, is not sanguine in its crude presentations of life and death. It describes a world without poetry. The poem, therefore, does not merely stand as a lament on the illusive nature of love and life, but bitter commentary on the poet’s status. Indeed, Stevens may have well been thinking of Emerson’s essay, “The Poet,” when creating this poem:

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right.^[16]

Assuming that Stevens was responding to Emerson’s overweening portrait, this “emperor” poet would appear to be little more than a purveyor of life’s sweet delicacies which, in the scheme of things, have no lasting value. But can ice cream be anything more than a symbol of the temporal confections that delight young and old? Is it possible, against the weight of 100 years of commentary on the poem, that it is a symbol of the “absolute good”?  Apparently Stevens had contrary opinions on the subject.  

     Almost a decade after the original publication of “Emperor,” R.P. Blackmur prepared a critical essay (“Examples of Wallace Stevens”) and sent it to Stevens for review. Blackmur had written that the final line in the both stanzas seems to mean “that the only power worth heeding is the power of the moment, of what is passing, of the flux.” Stevens’ response, by letter of November 16, 1931, first states that “one of the essentials in poetry is ambiguity” (notably, one of the main themes of Blackmur’s essay) and then proceeds to break down some of those ambiguities in ways that are both revealing and confounding in equal measure, especially in light of other statements he made about the poem. 

As for details: the dresses are the dresses of every day, work clothes; cast off newspapers contribute to the staleness; let be be finalɇ, etc. – let us have a respite from the imagination (men who are not cigar makers, blondes, costumes, theology), and, in short, suppose we have ice cream. Not that I wish to exalt ice cream as an absolute good, although my little girl might. It is a symbol, obviously and ironically, of the materialism or realism proper to a refugee from the imagination. The second verse is a little closer approach to the center. That sheet, that tissue of fantails, spread it over this burly body, the blunt physical, and in that death, in the clarity and steadiness of a light affixed, let us take life as we find it, see it as it is, and in that mood, if there is an emperor, why be absurd about it, why not be quite sure of him as he manifests himself, say, in ice cream? The oddity of association, while deliberate, is an attempt to be natural. One of the great fecundities is the way things are associated in the world about us. To state these associations veraciously does create something eccentric. It can often result therefore that in the effort to be natural one appears to be just the opposite: that is to say, one appears to be eccentric. But that is due to the form of the statement. Please don’t change anything that you have written because of this letter. Let me say that I very much dislike explaining a poem. If I am right in identifying a certain ambiguity as essential to poetry, then I am wrong in explaining, because, if I destroy the ambiguity I destroy the poem.^[17]

(Emphasis supplied).

       Eight years later, on June 1, 1939, Stevens wrote to Henry Church regarding corrections in the French translation of the poem, suggesting that “concupiscent curds” was better translated as “Des laits libidineux” (libidinous milks) rather than “Des crèmes déletables” (delectable creams), and that “wenches” should be “souillons” (sluts) rather than “gamines” (female street urchins or tomboys), clearly stressing the sexual nature of the imagery. Doubtlessly forgetting what he had written to Blackmur, Stevens then contradicted himself when he wrote:

[T]hings that have their origin in the imagination or in the emotions very often take on a form that is ambiguous or uncertain. It is not possible to attach a single, rational meaning to such things without destroying the imaginative or emotional ambiguity or uncertainty that is inherent in them and that is why poets do not like to explain. That the meanings given by others are sometimes meanings not intended by the poet or that were never present in his mind does not impair them as meanings.^[19]

     The final irony, whether intended or not, lies in this: With his command, “Let be be finale of seem,” Stevens’ emperor is much like King Canute, who, in order to teach his subjects about the limits of human power, attempted to command the sea to stop moving. Stevens’ injunction to “Let be” is as futile a universal goal as it is a temporal model for human behavior. Milton Bates put it this way:

At the level of argument, it exhorts us to confront the squalor of life without any illusions. At the level of style, however, it virtually turns that argument on its head: some kinds of seem can sustain and even delight us in the daily struggle with be. Poetry is one of these, which is why Stevens liked to say that it helps us to live our lives.^[20]

     As he instructs us in The Idea of Order at Key West, the mind’s “rage to order” instinctively constructs fictions, paradigms that delight and satisfy, but which may ultimately deceive us upon the realization of another, more embracing paradigm of the truth.^[21] “Being so” can never be the finale of our “seeming to be so,” because we are human and not capable of the complete abstraction required by the ethical absolute. This applies not only with respect to our view of the external world, but that more penetrating regard of ourselves.

________________________________

Footnotes

1. Letter to William Rose Benét, dated January 6, 1933, printed in Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966, p. 263. A little more than two week later, Stevens wrote a follow-up letter to Benét, elaborating on the poem’s creation:

I do not remember the circumstances under which this poem was written, unless this means the state of mind from which it came. I dislike niggling, and like letting myself go. This poem is an instance of letting myself go. Poems of this sort are the pleasantest on which to look back, because they seem to remain fresher than others. This represented what was in my mind at the moment, with the least possible manipulation.

2.  Helen Vendler, Words Chosen Out of Desire, Univ. of Tennessee P, 1984, 50-51. A short-hand version of this account by her is stated in another one of her commentaries on Stevens: “The famous poem, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” resisted explication for some decades, perhaps because no one took the trouble to deduce its implicit narrative from its stylized plot. (The Russian formalist distinction between “story” and “plot” is often useful for this and other Stevens’ poems.) The basic “story” of “The Emperor” is that of a person who goes to the house of a neighbor, a poor old woman, who has died; the person is to help “lay out” (arrange for decent viewing) the corpse in the bedroom, while other neighbors are sending over homegrown flowers, and yet others are preparing food, including ice cream, for the wake.” Vendler, Helen. “Wallace Stevens,” The Columbia History of America Poetry. Columbia U P, 1993. Eds. Parini and Miller. 382.

3. See Jahan Ramazani’s empathetic reading of the poem as a mock-elegy in Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (University of Chicago Press 1994), p. 92. “Unctuous in sound, the poem not only delights in sensuality but uneasily exaggerates it: witness the lingering r-sounds, heightened in such words as cigars, curds, and newspapers, each dragging out the line’s final syllable.”

4. See Melhado White, “Sexual Language and Human Conflict in Old French Fabliaux,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Apr., 1982), pp. 185-210.

5. See, e.g., Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd To His Love and his translation of Ovid’s Amores; Virgil’s Burcolica 2 and 3, John Donne’s Epithalamium Made at Lincoln’s. Inn; and Simon Gaunt’s discussion of the compagho poems of Guilhem IX in Troubadours and Irony (Cambridge Univ. Press 1989).

6. A discussion of the sexual imagery of classical Roman and Greek poetry appears in Foulmouthed Shepherds: Sexual Overtones As A Sign Of Urbanitas In Virgil’s Bucolica 2 And 3, by Stefan van den Broeck, published by Electronic Antiquity (May 2009), 12.2,(http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ElAnt/V12N2/vandenbroeck.html); citing Catullus 16, 5-9 (“nam castum esse decet pium poetam/ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est;/qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem,/si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici,/et quod pruriat incitare possunt.” [‘because a pious poet should be chaste, but there is no need for his verses to be; they only have wit and grace if they are a bit loose and not too modest, and if they can excite what is itching.’]).

7. Simon Gaunt, Troubadours and Irony (Cambridge University Press 1989), p. 22 (italics supplied).

8. Richard Ellmann, “Wallace Stevens’ Ice-Cream,” in Aspects of American Poetry: Essays Presented to Howard Mumfrod Jones, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Ohio University Press.1963) (originally printed in Kenyon Review 1957), p. 207.

9. I note that many contemporary bachelorette parties often feature cakes and other delicacies in the shape of phalluses. However, the sentiment in this poem is not so playful or sanguine.

10. “Let be be finale of seem” may be an extension of the Latin motto, esse quam videri (“be rather than seem to be”), which derives from Cicero’s speech “On Friendship” (Cicero, De Amicitia, chapt. 26). Esse quam videri is a well-known motto that has survived the ages into the present day, having a recognized meaning, and would have been especially familiar to Stevens who studied Latin and Greek.  Contextually, Cicero instructs: “there are not so many possessed of virtue as there are that desire to seem virtuous.” In other words, they would rather seem virtuous than be virtuous.

11. Daniel Fuchs’ observation is pertinent: “Stevens’ wit, although it is often directed at himself, is mainly directed at the fictions which have failed him. His brilliant comic sense has allowed him the boon of equilibrium, as he sifts out the old to come to the new. There is indeed feeling, if not always in the lines themselves, then between them.” Fuchs, The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens (1653), p. 30.

12. See, e.g., Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, A Dictionary of Miracles (1894), p. 269; Louis de Combes, The Finding of the Cross (1907), p.223. This may have been the legend that caused Stevens to choose deal as the dresser’s wood. [I have not overlooked the fact that deal was also considered a cheaper type of wood when compared to other hardwoods like oak and mahogany, or that this feature supports the theme of impoverishment that cloaks the woman’s quarters. Yet I find the religious symbolism more compelling here.]

13. Even if one did not know that deal was the wood of Christ’s cross, it is difficult to miss the patent symbolism of “the three glass knobs.”

14. Without going into an exhaustive recitation of the etymologies of each word, all such connotations would not have been novel to Stevens. Notwithstanding my inclination to read double entendres into the text, I am not alone in exploring the sexual content of Stevens’ imagery, as Thomas Dilworth does so admirably in his essay, “Death and Pleasure in Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”  The Wallace Stevens Journal, Fall 2010, Vol. 34, No. 2.

15.  Letters, p. 402 (emphasis supplied).

16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, New York, 2010. 194 (emphasis supplied).

17.  Letter of 16 Nov., 1931; reprinted with an Introduction by Holly Stevens in “Flux²,” Southern Review 15 (1979): 773-74. 

18.  Letters, p. 341.

19. Wallace Stevens, The Explicator, November, 1948.

20. Milton Bates, “‘The ‘Emperor’ and Its Clothes,” Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1994.

21. See, generally, Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (U of Chicago P, 1962). Kuhn discusses the evolution of scientific discovery in terms of the adoption and replacement of successive paradigms for explaining natural phenomena.

© Steven M. Critelli 2009, 2020, 2021