Pfau 1 Thomas Pfau Confluences: Reading Wallace Stevens The notion that Wallace Stevens is a dense poet, difficult to comprehend, has become a critical commonplace. Indeed, interpreters often approach Stevens as a poet of ideas, one whose poems “resist the intelligence / Almost successfully” as Stevens himself states in a much quoted phrase. That “almost” encourages us with the hope that if we are sufficiently rigorous and tenacious we will “get it,” and come to some satisfactory conclusion. This sort of reading process is common enough too, a process in which the end of literature is understanding, a finding of ourselves and meaning, a clarification of the heart and mind. And certainly, much of Stevens’s work seems to do just that: it appears to shore up the self with some seeming stability, even if fictive, as is witnessed by poems such as “How to Live. What to Do.” Yet there is another Stevens that may be located as well, the Stevens who chants in “The Creations of Sound” that “speech is not dirty silence / clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.” Stevens suggests that language does not necessarily lead to understanding, but instead leads to further confusions. Here I follow an intuition, one prompted by readings of Stanley Cavell, Richard Poirier and a few others, that there are forms of fruitful bewilderment in which our notions of self and world are unsettled. Losing the self can be as invigorating as finding the self, perhaps even more so. Stevens affirms this with his sense that “there are words / Better without an author . . . intelligent / Beyond intelligence.” We acknowledge a surrender of control, of authority, of the self-possession of thought: understanding reaches its limits and