Longtime English professor Andrew Osborn, PhD, discusses the “career-defining honor” of his appointment as editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal.
This interview has been edited for length and style.
I enjoy having the opportunity to improve already excellent scholarship. Sometimes what an editor does is offer a second set of eyes. For my first issue, a relatively young scholar had contributed an analysis of a WWII-era poem by Stevens in relation to contemporaneous statements published by German philosopher and social theorist Theodor W. Adorno. The submitted essay’s argument was consistently compelling, but where Stevens’s poem used the word “stanzas,” this scholar understood him to refer to the poetic structures that he was composing, which I, as a formalist (and Junior Poet instructor), distinguished as irregular verse paragraphs, not stanzas. With a few hours of research, I determined that whenever Stevens uses the term stanza—in his essays and letters, in his poetry—he’s referring to something like a tercet or a quatrain. My distinction between free-verse accumulations of lines and regular room-like stanzas was relevant to the argument about concentration camps and fascist organizations. Indeed, the scholar was able to revise a few sentences to incorporate the new reading of the word that secured his larger interpretive claims. I felt that this is exactly what an editor should be doing: adding value to an already really strong argument.
That’s 100-percent relevant to Wallace Stevens. Among Anglo-American modernists of the late 1910s and early ’20s, Stevens distinguishes himself not only by innovating prosodically but also by exploring lyric poetry as a substitute for religion. In his early poem “Sunday Morning,” you find a woman who is not at church on Sunday morning; instead, she enjoys her coffee and her oranges on her carpet with the cockatoo embroidered into it. She’s living a sensuous, not to say hedonistic life of contemplative leisure. She’s wondering how guilty she should feel for not participating in the “holy hush” of ritual, for not “giv[ing] her bounty to the dead.”
Stevens is clearly the mind behind the woman in that poem. I was drawn to his poetry in part because her questions are my questions. I am not a person of doctrinaire faith. I was raised as a Unitarian Universalist, and I ceased going to church. I don’t associate myself with any particular religion. But I have a profound need to be in touch with the sublime, with the ideational meanings and values that whelm the finitude of the human person and the body, and I don’t care about that kind of stuff or non-stuff any less than a convicted Catholic does. But I engage it through lyric poetry to a great extent. And I also know what I think I know about such meanings and values largely through lyric poetry.
Where do you learn about the sublime? Stevens has this great poem “The Man on the Dump,” which concludes: “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.” Period. He’s basically asking himself: Given that we don’t really deal in our mortal world with anything other than particulars, from where did the region of ideals, platonic forms, capital-b Beauty, the Good, the Truth—from where did any of that conceptual abstraction arise? A lot of what we know we know through our senses, and what we sense are always particulars.
I found myself operating similarly to the way that I imagined Stevens had operated. It’s interesting that Stevens now has a home at the University of Dallas because in some ways he was finding a substitute for religion. This is a place that does not seek a substitute for religion. It’s a religious place. But just as UD has been hospitable to me, and as I have found myself continuously engaged—by students available here, by colleagues available here—it makes sense that scholarship about Stevens can find a home here. And I hope that graduate students will choose to come to UD specifically to work with me and have access to the journal’s resources. That’s part of why I accepted the editorship and why I have enjoyed my academic communities in Rome and Irving.
Every undergraduate at UD reads two poems from Stevens’s first book, Harmonium. “The Snow Man” absolutely belongs in the Core; it’s a poem about what becomes apparent when you have a predisposition not to be imaginative because you have “a mind of winter” and then you further hibernate the imagination. He implies that it’s very human to hear misery in what is not human, nature. The Romantics do this all the time. They treat nature as if it has a capacity for expressions like pity and misery. Stevens thinks: well, that’s just part of what’s absolutely lovely about humankind, that it’s empathic in that way, that it wants to feather its nest and make the hostile world more comfortable by imputing to nature some of our own sensibilities. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s interested also in what you discover when you probe beyond such comforting fiction: to “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
I wish that, in lieu of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” we assigned “Sunday Morning” or “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” The latter is a short poem, the two stanzas of which correspond to two rooms in a house. In the kitchen, a wake is being celebrated. A muscular guy is urged to “whip . . . concupiscent curds”—ice cream—as “wenches dawdle” and “boys / Bring flowers.” The kitchen is a place of gusto, vitality. That’s where you want to be. But who’s the wake for? In the bedroom we find the corpse of a poor woman. Her dresser is made of plywood and lacks a few knobs; because the sheet is too short, the horny toenails of her feet show. The point of the poem, as I read it, is: hey, Platonists, hey, Christians, you’re putting all of your eggs in the basket of the afterlife. You’re calling the place of which you have no physical experience “the real,” and you’re saying that what we encounter here on Earth are mere simulacra, copies of copies, of the real elsewhere. Isn’t that obviously an inversion? Life is life (in the kitchen), death is death (in the bedroom). You can treat the empty tomb from which Christ appears to have risen as evidence of His eternal omnipresence if you wish, but a hollowed rock is more obviously symbolic of emptiness. Why isn’t vitality the best metaphor or image of vitality? Why aren’t fatty sweets, ice cream, a better symbol of the good life?
Students at UD are liable to offer counter-arguments as they do when they read James Joyce’s Portrait. It’s no doubt true that eternal paradise would beat out a dish of Rocky Road. But I like for my serious students to contemplate seriously how they may secure their hopes. They need to push for themselves past skepticism, to earn the safe space of their doctrines. Discernment is not for the blinkered.
My dissertation was on the uses of difficulty in 20th-century American poetry. At its heart was a question that I had been pondering for some time: Why are so many of the most esteemed poets of my own century, especially those whom I admire—why are so many of them egregiously difficult to read? Why are their poems so hard to feel any confidence about one’s capacity to understand? It makes sense that new ways of writing may be hard to understand, that when poets mean in new ways, what they mean may not be immediately clear.
But it seemed to me, as it seemed to some others, that modernism was a period when the difficulty didn’t arise solely from innovative practices, but was something that was being branded as itself a value. And I wanted it to be that. I wanted the difficulty that I was discerning not to be entirely dissolvable or something that would disappear with time. Think about T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Now, we’ve celebrated the centennial of that poem’s publication recently. Books about it have come out. But do people find it an easy-to-read poem now, after they’ve had a hundred years of figuring out how to deal with it? No, they still don’t. I mean, people can speak authoritatively about it, and write whole books about it, but if I show it to my undergraduates, they’re going to have nearly the difficulty that I had back in the day, that people when it first came out had. Some of the difficulty disappeared because it was contingent difficulty, which is a matter of things that just need to be looked up. If Eliot quotes without citing Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, you may not recognize it as such. Or if he gives you six lines of medieval Tuscan in “Prufrock” and you don’t recognize what part of the Inferno that’s from so you can go look up the translation, then you’re just out of luck. In those cases, it may seem more than difficult—indeed, impossible—to get to the next step. But in the days of search engines like Google, if you don’t recognize a sequence of quoted words, if you don’t know a foreign language, you go on the internet and find out what’s up. Easy peasy. So a lot of that difficulty has gone away.
I was actually not so interested in Eliot’s and others’ contingent difficulties. I was interested in what I was speaking about earlier with respect to the sublime and something that seems more spiritual, which is the knowledge that really is beyond humankind’s ken, at least during their mortal existence. And yet poets seem to have a capacity to nose around in those realms and to, if not articulate, at least gesture toward such things. And I found that Stevens did that a lot. He was more elusive than allusive. And Stevens also acknowledged, fairly frequently in his poetry, that clarity wasn’t always a virtue. He writes about a “venerable complication.” He says, “The imperfect is our paradise.” It was just clear to me that Stevens was treating a certain kind of unclarity, a certain elusiveness, a certain blurriness, not as something inadvertent or unfortunate, but as part of the message. Just as Milton wants Paradise Lost to be difficult and thus cause the reader to make errors of interpretation—because it’s a poem about our fallenness, about why we are fallen readers—Stevens, not for the same reasons but similarly, wants us to struggle a bit with the unclarities of his poetry. The unclarities are not temporary or unmeaningful; they’re useful, meaningful.
More recently I have been writing about the drama of Edward Albee and working on a monograph about the contemporary poet (and my former professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) Jorie Graham. I like also to review new books of poetry and books about poetry.
My job is not only to edit what comes in but also, almost more importantly, to get top-notch submissions to come in. I’m beating the bushes. Shortly after the graduation ceremonies in May 2024, I chaired two panels on Stevens and “Little Magazines” (like Poetry Magazine) at the American Literature Association conference in Chicago. I’m chairing a panel on Stevens and Classicism at the 2025 Modern Language Association conference in New Orleans. That topic arose from a conversation I’d had with IPS doctoral student Peter Tardiff. He had written about Stevens and The Metamorphoses for Scott Dupree’s course on Ovid and, shortly after talking to him about it, I broadened the scope and sent out a call for papers. We received many, many responses internationally and Peter’s proposal was among those I selected. From the participants’ presented papers, and perhaps from several proposals that did not make the MLA cut, I’ll try to cultivate larger academic articles that may be peered-reviewed for publication in the journal.