Modern American Poetry

(^240) Eleanor Cook
Châtillon is, I think, a family name, or at least a desired family name, for
Stevens liked the thought that this Protestant reformer was among his
ancestors.^7 Some random names give a flavor in themselves; their function is
generic (Bonnie and Josie, Mrs. Dooley, Swenson, Solange).^8 Stevens can
play with the authority of names and titles, as we know from his Canon and
Professor and Herr Doktor. As for the name of greatest authority, the name
of God, Stevens sometimes treats it with humor, genial and other (“the Got
whome we serve,” “Herr Gott”). God’s name for himself, “I am that I am,”
echoes through Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,together with some of our
human echoes of “I am” (those of Coleridge and Descartes). In the late
poetry, he returns to it in The Sail of Ulysses (OP99): “As I know, I am and
have / The right to be.” (He is punning on “as,” revising Descartes’s “ergo,”
and using enjambment to play on the verb “have.”) He was always as
interested in American place names as Milton was in English or Latin ones.^9
And he always enjoyed inventing place names, including typic place names
like Indyterranean, on the model of Mediterranean. He invents allegorical
and onomatopoeic rivers in the late poetry, with no loss of the sense of actual
flowing water: the z sounds of a river in Brazil, “the river R.”
It is Stevens’ invented personal names that especially surprise and
delight us as we look back over his poetry: Chief Iffucan, Bawda, Nanzia
Nunzio, Mr. Blank, Madame la Fleurie, Mac Mort, Mr. Homburg, Hoon,
Flora Lowzen, General du Puy, Mrs. Alfred Uruguay, Berserk, Augusta Moon
and Alpha and Omega. Lulu Gay and Lulu Morose are wonderfully funny,
though their poems are strained (OP26–27). Stevens invented them after he
received from Harriet Monroe a book called Lillygay: An Anthology of
Anonymous Poems(L221, March 14, 1921). Lulu Gay is l’Allegro, 1921 style,
female version, with a refrain of ululate, sung by eunuchs. Lulu Morose is Il
Penseroso, 1921 style, female version. Stevens’ “diva-dame” (CP353) is
presumably a late form of the sybil—Dryden’s “mad divining dame” (Aeneid
VI.54) in operatic mood. Phoebus Apothicaire (CP105) should be Phoebus
Apollo—or Apollinaire, but what the connection is with Guillaume, I must
leave to others.
Stevens is especially inventive in names for his (and our) various public
and private selves, as well as his poetic selves. His early poetic selves are like
Chaplin characters: the bumbler, the modest poet, the clown. They come out
of Shakespeare or Dickens or old comedy, and they come with c-sounds, on
which Stevens commented, and with p-sounds, on which he did not: Peter
Quince, Pecksniff, Crispin. Later, Stevens invents names, still with c- and p-
sounds: a clerical figure for an aspiring self, Canon Aspirin; a professor for
an earnest self, Professor Eucalyptus. Stevens figures as Pierrot in letters to