No American poet had better titles than Wallace Stevens. Never mind that the titles often had no bearing on the poems that followed. Their very gorgeousness made relevance seem suspect. Who would complain that the “Dance of the Macabre Mice” had little to do with those pesky rodents, or that the austere couplets of “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” disdained all allusion to soul food? We don’t know who “the emperor of ice cream” in the poem of that name might be, but the succulence of the epithet suffices.

Stevens was something of a connoisseur of modern art, and his titles tantalize in just the way an abstract painter might beguile us by affixing an absurdly specific name to some geometric phantasmagoria. In “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” Stevens gives us no clue who or what “Hoon” may be, nor does he explain his spelling of “palace” (needless to say, there’s not a whiff of Orange Pekoe), but he does acknowledge his own solipsistic oddness:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Stevens’s panache with titles afforded him a chameleonic focus; like that lizard, he could aim each turreted eye in a different direction at once. His titles prompted expectations that his poems routinely hijacked. But as he grew older the titles, if not the poems themselves, grew simpler. In “The Rock,” the last collection published during his lifetime (in “The Collected Poems,” Vintage, 560 pages, $16.95), a new and rather unexpected plainness of address predominates.

Of course, for all his espousal of an “essential gaudiness” in poetry, Stevens from the beginning had shown himself to be a powerfully declarative, if not downright declamatory, poet, as in the beautiful lines from “Sunday Morning”:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?

In his 70s, after the grand summations of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and “The Auroras of Autumn,” Stevens waxed less philosophical; his voice became almost disarmingly personal. No longer the poet with “a mind of winter,” he turned into one with a late winter mind; a mind perfectly in keeping with the scrappy dwindling of March, when neither the world nor the imagination – those two worrying poles of his poetry – can be neatly disentangled:

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

That “scrawny cry” may seem “like a sound in his mind,” but it comes from outside him. Teatime is over in the palace of Hoon; the rough unknowable fact of the unimagined world reasserts its claims. “The Rock” contains a poem with the most beautiful title Stevens ever conceived, his “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” We might expect from this a poem that goes ever more deeply inward; and yet, just the opposite occurs. “The world imagined is the ultimate good,” reads the third line of that poem. It might stand as the credo to which Stevens had subscribed over the five decades of his poetic career; and while he doesn’t reject this principle, he allows it to be superseded by something larger, more capacious of reality, as though the “interior paramour” glimpsed the shadow of what he elsewhere calls “the celestial possible”:

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous,
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one …
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Stevens is often presented as an artist who substituted poetry for belief. In one of his notebook jottings, he once wrote, “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” And in another aphorism he recast the First Commandment in aesthetic terms: “In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas, the images and the rhythms with all your capacity, to love anything at all.” But here, twenty or so years later, he seems to be moving, with that stealthy stateliness that characterized the various turns of his restless imagination over a long life, towards something beyond the purely interior, whether you call it “the Thing itself” or bluntly, “the rock.” What’s important, he tell us, is that “We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough.”

Even more remarkably, in “The Planet on the Table,” Stevens says of his own poems:

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

In “Harmonium,” his first, and perhaps greatest, collection of 1922, Stevens’s linguistic voracity seemed bent on supplanting the world of fact with a world of ravishing, self-tipsy syllables; but 30 years later, his tone is playfully chastened. A year before his death, he is seeking what he calls “a new knowledge of reality.” The gaudiness remains but has become darkly festive, “The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring, / Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself.”

In his late work Stevens revealed himself as the religious poet he had always, perhaps unwittingly, been. In “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” his lovely tribute to George Santayana, Stevens speaks of “The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome / Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind,” and he exhorts himself to “be orator but with an accurate tongue / And without eloquence.” This aspect of Stevens – which many of his admirers prefer to ignore – has been treated with insight and tact by Charles Murphy in his “Wallace Stevens: A Spiritual Poet in a Secular Age” (Paulist Press, 129 pages, $4.75), which is also one of the best introductions to his poetry.

Stevens died on August 2, 1955. On his deathbed he was formally received into the Catholic Church. One of his biographers has opined that this was little more than “a prank.” “A Prank on a Deathbed” could be a crude parody of a Stevens title; and yet, for all his verbal high jinks, Stevens was a profoundly thoughtful man, and to me, at least, his conversion seems the natural consequence of the meditations of his later years. His playfulness, which gives his poetry its unforgettable luster, never betokened insincerity, but in the later poems, paradoxically enough, artifice itself is embellished by depth. Stevens put it exactly: “His actual candle blazed with artifice.”

eormsby@nysun.com