<i>Paradise Lost</i>’s ‘Sad Cure’ as a Source for Wallace Stevens’s ‘Cure Beyond Forgetfulness’ in ‘The Rock’

Wallace Stevens was a great enjoyer of John Milton’s poetry, describing it as ‘heavenly’ in a journal entry.1 He also alludes to Milton’s poetry with some frequency in his own verse. Eleanor Cook is a prodigious cataloguer of Miltonic allusion in Stevens’s oeuvre, with the index of Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens listing forty-eight sections of her monograph that discuss the Puritan Poet.2 In addition to the numerous allusions suggested by Cook and other scholars of Stevens, I would like to suggest another. Namely, that the ‘cure beyond forgetfulness’ in the second section of Stevens’s ‘The Rock’, ‘The Poem as Icon’, derives from the ‘sad cure’ in a speech by Milton’s Belial in Paradise Lost.3 A reader that recognizes this allusion will find that this rather optimistic poem by Stevens is set against a gloomy background, which makes its proffered hope appear all the more luminous due to the juxtaposition. According to Harold Bloom, Stevens’s titular ‘rock is the reductive gray particular of man’s life’.4 As far as it goes, that statement is accurate. But it may be taken further—the rock is not simply ‘reductive’ and ‘gray’ but hellish. The rock, Stevens writes, is not something that can simply be ‘covered’ but something that ‘[w]e must be cured of’: Stevens’s ‘cure beyond forgetfulness’ alludes to Milton’s Belial, who finds a possible ‘sad cure’ to the devils’s hellish condition in the oblivion of annihilation: In Paradise Lost, the idea of forgetfulness is heightened by the nearby presence of Lethe, which Milton, following Dante,5 appropriates from the classical tradition for his Christian hell. Milton’s epic alludes to a Lethe-like body of water as the ‘oblivious Pool’ and a ‘forgetful lake’ (1.266; 2.74), as well as to Lethe itself (2.583–614).6 While Moloch is willing to risk annihilation by a renewed war with God, cravenly Belial is unwilling to imperil the ‘thoughts’ of his ‘intellectual being’ that ‘wander through Eternity’ even as he suffers in hell (2.147–48). This passage was to find many resonances within English poetry, as Bloom demonstrates (159). Bloom in particular notes how these lines ‘contribute vitally to Wordsworth and to Keats’, and he cites passages from The Prelude and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ as examples (159). In the nightingale ode, the speaker seemingly sinks ‘Lethe-ward’ before choosing to ascend ‘on the viewless wings of Poesy’.7 The ‘Ode on Melancholy’ opens with a similar injunction: ‘No, no, go not to Lethe’ (1). Rather than wane to forgetfulness, to become a sod deaf to the nightingale of Poetry, Stevens turns to ‘The plenty of the year and of the world’ via the imagery of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’, as Helen Vendler identifies.8 Vendler further notes Stevens’s crucial shift away from Keats: ‘It is written to give credence to the plenty of the world as it is preserved not on the earth but in the mind, always Stevens’s chosen territory’ (259). Stevens, an adept tracer of poetic tradition, would have been familiar with the contours of this genealogy. By associating ‘the reductive gray particular of man’s life’ with the words of one of Milton’s devils (Bloom 455), Stevens expresses a similar sentiment to an apothegm from Christopher Marlowe’s Mephistopheles: ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it’.9 His solution to this infernal predicament is precisely that of Milton’s Satan: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’ (1.254–55). To cure one’s ground, one’s environment, whether it be hell or a hellish earth, one must cure one’s mind. Of course, while Milton’s Satan and Stevens have the same solution to cure their grounds, which is to cure their minds, they have different ways of curing their minds. While Satan turns the whole of his being towards revenge, Stevens turns towards poetry. Cook correctly points the reader of ‘The Rock’ towards one of Stevens’s adages: ‘Poetry is a cure of the mind’.10 The cure of the mind, for Stevens, as for the Romantics, and perhaps for Milton in his blindness, is poetry. Such is the alternative to the sad cure of forgetfulness. Bret van den Brink is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (207-2024-2025-Q2-00941).

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