Wallace stevens and the aesthetics of abstraction

‘The Public Square’ 1923 with its ‘slash of angular blacks’ is, perhaps, an early exception; but the mature Stevens was motivated by ideas concerning abstraction rather than the realizat

Wa ll ace Stev enS a nd

the a eStheticS of

a bStr action

edward ragg’s study is the first to examine the role of abstraction throughout the work of Wallace Stevens by tracing the poet’s inter-

est in abstraction from Harmonium through to his later works, ragg

argues that Stevens only fully appreciated and refined this interest within his later career ragg’s detailed close-readings highlight the poet’s absorption of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century painting, as well as the examples of philosophers and other

poets’ work Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction will

appeal to those studying Stevens as well as anyone interested in the relations between poetry and painting This valuable study embraces revealing philosophical and artistic perspectives, analysing Stevens’ place within and resistance to Modernist debates concerning litera-ture, painting, representation and ‘the imagination’

edward r agg is a poet and teaches at tsinghua University,

beijing he is co-editor of Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (2008).

Wa ll ace Stev enS a nd the a eStheticS of

a bStr action

edWa r d r agg

Tsinghua University, Beijing

São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

First published in print format

ISBN-13 978-0-521-19086-2

ISBN-13 978-0-511-78951-9

© Edward Ragg 2010

2010

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521190862

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provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy

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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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eBook (NetLibrary) Hardback

The poet striding among the cigar stores,

ryan’s lunch, hatters, insurance and medicines,denies that abstraction is a vice except

to the fatuous These are his infernal walls,

a space of stone, of inexplicable base

and peaks outsoaring possible adjectives

one man, the idea of man, that is the space,

The true abstract in which he promenades

from ‘a Thought revolved’ (1936), Wallace Stevens

1 The abstract impulse: from anecdote to ‘new romantic’ in

2 The turn to abstraction: Owl’s Clover (1936) and the ‘un-locatable’ speaker in The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937) 55

3 The ‘in-visible’ abstract: Stevens’ idealism from coleridge to

3.1 romantic adaptations: Wordsworth, coleridge, Stevens 78

3.2 abstract analogues: blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, Stevens 88

3.4 coda: the new criticism and abstraction 107

4 abstract figures: the curious case of the idealist ‘i’ 110

4.1 taming ‘the guerrilla i’: the early poems of Parts of a World (1942) 110

4.2 from ‘robust poet’ to idealist ‘i’: ‘The noble rider and the

Sound of Words’ (1942) and ‘The figure of the

4.3 The human abstract in ‘landscape with boat’ (1940) 129

5 abstract appetites: food, wine and the idealist ‘i’ 136

5.1 tasting ‘certain Phenomena of Sound’ (1942) 136

5.2 hartford bourguignon: ‘Montrachet-le-Jardin’ (1942) and

6 The pure good of theory: a new abstract emphasis 166

6.1 ‘Major man’ revised: ‘Paisant chronicle’ (1945) and

‘description Without Place’ (1945) 166

6.2 Writing ‘beyond’: ‘repetitions of a Young captain’ (1944) and

6.3 Pragmatic abstraction v metaphor: ‘The Pure good of Theory’

Acknowledgements

i would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for their support: fiona green, Jean chothia, frances gandy, lee Jenkins, Maud ellmann, bart eeckhout, Simon critchley, the late richard rorty, charles altieri, J hillis Miller, John n Serio, Michael Schmidt, eleanor cook, Wang ao; ray ryan, Maartje Scheltens and the staff of cambridge University Press; Sara Peacock for her excellent copy-editing; Paul giles and the staff of The rothermere american institute; the staff and fellows of Selwyn college, cambridge; Sue hodson and the staff of The huntington library, San Marino (also for permission to quote from The Wallace Stevens archive); Melinda Mcintosh and Mike Milewski

of the University of Massachusetts (also for permission to quote from

Stevens’ copy of henri focillon’s The Life of Forms in Art); The University

of chicago library (for permission to quote from ronald lane latimer’s papers); The british association for american Studies; The british academy; and lu Zhongshe and the staff of the foreign languages department, tsinghua University Special thanks are also due to my par-ents, my parents-in-law, the late tedman littwin, Peter roberts and, last but not least, fongyee Walker

first citations present the full titles of Stevens’ works together, where vant, with date of first publication and/or date of composition Subsequent references are undated The following abbreviations for major editions and other resources are used throughout:

rele-BL Samuel taylor coleridge, Biographia Literaria ed James engell

and W Jackson bate (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press,

1983), 2 vols

CPP Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose ed frank Kermode

and Joan richardson (new York: library of america, 1997)

CW William Shakespeare: The Complete Works ed Stanley Wells and

gary taylor (oxford: clarendon, 1988), compact edition

L Letters of Wallace Stevens ed holly Stevens (new York: Knopf,

1966; University of california Press, 1996)

OP Opus Posthumous ed Milton J bates (london: faber, 1990)

RLP ronald lane latimer Papers, University of chicago (xeroxed

without serial numbers in The Wallace Stevens archive)

WAS The Wallace Stevens archive, The huntington library, San

Marino, california

WSJ The Wallace Stevens Journal ed John n Serio (Potsdam,

nY: Wallace Stevens Society, inc., 1977–2009)

Stevens what la poésie pure was to béranger Personism has nothing

to do with philosophy, it’s all art.2

[r]ecently i have been fitted into too many philosophic frames as

a philosopher one is expected to achieve and express one’s center

for my own part, i think that the philosophic permissible (to use an

insurance term) is a great deal different today than it was a ation or two ago Yet if i felt the obligation to pursue the philosophy

gener-of my poems, i should be writing philosophy, not poetry; and it is poetry that i want to write.3

frank o’hara’s mock-manifesto ‘Personism’ – and the ironic ment of the same name ‘founded’ on 27 august 1959 over lunch in new York – testifies as much to o’hara’s poetic relationship with Wallace Stevens as it reveals how Stevens was viewed only four years after his death ‘Personism’ also recalls o’hara’s brilliance in constructing a poetic

move-1 Wallace Stevens, Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens ed holly Stevens (new

York: Knopf, 1977 ), 90.

2 frank o’hara, ‘Personism: a Manifesto’ in Selected Poems ed donald allen (harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1994 ), xiii–xiv.

3 See L, 753.

‘personality’ equally as daunting and complex on the page as Stevens’,

if more beguiling for its surface, ‘personal’ appeal o’hara’s allegiance,

‘of the american poets’, to Whitman, crane and Williams is clear but, as ‘Personism’ demonstrates, o’hara had absorbed Stevens; just as his range of international influences was as wide as, if not wider than,

Stevens’ ‘Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poésie pure was to

béranger’: o’hara is saying his ‘manifesto’ would, apparently, have proved anathema to Stevens, just as ‘pure poetry’ could hardly have appealed to Pierre Jean de béranger, the french republican whose popular ballads initiated the scorn of baudelaire o’hara intends a double-anachronism where béranger is trumped by the innovations of the later Symbolists and Stevens is trumped by the advent of ‘Personism’ itself

Stevens is probably the twentieth-century poet for whom the ‘nostalgia of

the infinite’ was most motivational o’hara alludes to de chirico’s painting

of the same title (dated 1911, but composed a little later) with its distant yet imposing tower flanked by a dominating, shadowy archway in de chirico’s metaphysical phase, the ‘nostalgia’ experienced is inspiring and perhaps reprehensible, refracted through Modernism’s soul-searching over questions

of reality and faith Similarly, Stevens, despite his many affiliations with french Symbolism, was no Mallarmé as we shall see, a Mallarméan ‘pure poetry’ of the ‘idea’ was ultimately not something the Modernist Stevens could endorse; and his initial 1930s ambivalence concerning abstraction indicates a Modernist poet confronting the unsettling interim of two world wars and the global economic consequences of the depression

as o’hara knew, Stevens had also absorbed Modernist painting in his own idiosyncratic way, undoubtedly affected by the representational issues the new painting and sculpture confronted; even if, by his last dec-ade, Stevens shunned the ‘professional modernism’ then quasi-canonical

by the 1940s and early 1950s.4 o’hara probably read Stevens’ 1951 lecture

‘The relations between Poetry and Painting’ delivered at MoMa only a few months before o’hara would himself begin working there (MoMa producing a pamphlet of Stevens’ paper) but it is, perhaps, Stevens’ the-orizing bent that o’hara’s wit intends to bait Stevens could never have been a ‘Personist poet’, if that ‘poet’ resembles the performance of the intensely personal, yet elusive, ‘frank’ however, Stevens did modify his abstract spirit in his later career, oscillating between what this study calls ‘cool’ and ‘warm’ abstraction.5 indeed, would not Stevens have been

4 See L, 647.

5 The distinction is adapted from late 1940s and 1950s french art criticism ‘cool abstraction’ refers to the geometric ‘art concret’, ‘warm abstraction’ to more expressionist painting or any

Introduction

intrigued by o’hara’s playful claim that ‘Personism’ is ‘so totally opposed

to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry’? to what value can the abstract wheel turn and come full circle? in o’hara’s case, the answer is a pregnant ‘zero’ in other words, this ironically original, ‘true abstraction’

represents the poet pushed to the extreme of the personal in verse, thereby

becoming an abstract version of the poet: genuinely removed from the work rather than artificially divorced from it

o’hara could not have raised this issue in this way without Stevens’ prior posing of the question of abstraction for a poet so affected by the ‘death of the gods’, the lingering desire to capture the idea of ‘the infinite’ or transcendent remained a strong feature throughout Stevens’ work.6 Simultaneously, Stevens’ poetry reveals a poet equally sensitive as o’hara to the implicit stances which the varying abstractness of his writ-ing involves for Stevens, abstraction represented a question of artistic and philosophical proportions; and yet his natural inclinations were those

of o’hara (adamantly in the ‘all art’ camp), resistant to assimilation into

‘too many philosophic frames’ nevertheless, the philosophical leanings

of Stevens’ writing and its engagement with ‘abstraction’ are able What Stevens made of philosophy is most noticeable in his expres-sion of an abstract vocabulary, albeit a rhetoric essentially jettisoned in his late career as the poet absorbed the consequences of abstraction

unmistak-Without doubt, Stevens remains among the more enigmatic, sive, cosmopolitan, oft quoted (but under-read) and seriously playful of the american poets to have emerged during the Modernist era by turns shy, brash, idiosyncratic, straight-talking, disinclined to read publicly (and fiercely private), Stevens stage-managed his late-blossoming poetic career from the confines of his vice-presidential office at The hartford accident and indemnity company Stevens had written poetry from his youth but

reclu-it was only having discovered an inreclu-itial niche in the new art and lreclu-iterature

of international Modernism that he gave voice to the striking performance

pieces of Harmonium (1923), many of which appeared in the ephemeral

pages of the little magazines it would be some twelve years before Stevens

published a second volume: the defensive and defiant Ideas of Order (1935)

by the mid-1930s Stevens sought a poetic idiom adequate to the task of addressing the role of abstract representation in an increasingly violent and

abstraction championing spontaneous creation or the ‘unformed’ (‘art informel’/‘tachisme’)

See anna Moszynka, Abstract Art (london: Thames & hudson, 1990 ), 119–20, 129.

6 See CPP, 329.

pressingly ‘real’ world What the poet had learnt from Modernist and also impressionist painting was, by 1935, in serious need of realignment and refinement if the increasingly abstract tenor of Stevens’ poetry was to have any meaningful relationship with a wider world.

Put differently, Stevens’ initial embrace of Modernist art and the inal ‘pure poetry’ of his first phase led to the desire to justify a mod-ernized ‘pure poetry’ during the turbulent 1930s, not least following

nom-Stanley burnshaw’s criticism of Ideas of Order.7 Stevens became ingly ambivalent about abstract forms of artistic representation at the very point where his own poetry tended toward an abstract aesthetic: one that would eventually leave ‘pure poetry’ behind (even though the charge of

increas-‘irrelevance’ would continue to stick)

This book is principally interested in the turn to abstraction and its influential aftermath that occurred in roughly 1935 in Stevens’ work That the place of abstraction in Stevens remains underappreciated, misun-derstood and the subject of considerable debate, makes careful ground-clearing desirable how did abstraction become a question for Stevens

as a poet? how has the issue of abstraction engaged Stevens’ critics? did Stevens’ attitudes toward abstraction change and do we find different expressions of abstract writing throughout the corpus?

The book proceeds in broadly chronological fashion to exemplify how Stevens came to discover and absorb abstraction, providing new read-ings of the poetry and prose which chart the development of Stevensian abstraction in the mainstay of the poet’s career from 1935 to 1955 chapter 1

analyses the abstract impulse in Stevens’ writing and its nominal relations

with ‘pure poetry’ as expressed in Harmonium and Ideas of Order chapter

2 explores Stevens’ turn to abstraction in the mid-1930s – as exemplified in

The Man with the Blue Guitar – focusing on the emergence of a novel

text-ual speaker (addressed in chapters 4 and 5) with Picasso’s influence as a backdrop chapter 3 explains the philosophical relations between abstrac-tion, idealism and phenomenology in Stevens’ work, illustrating how the poet’s embrace of abstraction was conditioned by romantic and phenom-enologist leanings (the british romantics, blanchot, Merleau-Ponty and henri focillon feature prominently) chapter 4 then analyses the place

of abstract figures in Stevens’ mid-career, especially a neglected speaker, Stevens’ idealist ‘i’, suggesting how this figure conditions an aesthetic

7 Stanley burnshaw, ‘turmoil in the Middle ground’ New Masses 17 (1935), 41–2 for ive views, see alan filreis and harvey teres, ‘an interview with Stanley burnshaw’ WSJ 13.2 (1989), 109–21, and burnshaw’s ‘reflections on Wallace Stevens’ WSJ 13.2 (1989 ), 122–6.

retrospect-Introduction 5influenced by cézanne’s notion of abstraction chapter 5 capitalizes on this analysis to address the under-explored relations between Stevens’ meditations on gastronomy and abstract reflection (with Stevens’ idealist

‘i’ forming an important bridge) chapter 6 then focuses on Stevens’ tisoning of an overt abstract vocabulary as his writing moved into a more pragmatic mode of abstract inspiration finally, chapter 7 discusses how Stevens’ mature abstract work relates to his domestic life, combining art-collecting, gastronomy and poetic meditation in other words, the various expressions of abstract writing with which Stevens experimented – his

jet-‘cool’ and ‘warm’ abstract performances – only found full voice in the

‘bourgeois’ ruminations of his late career

What emerges is a Stevens attracted to the mental processes enabling abstract figuration rather than a poet mimicking abstract painting in ver-bal form ‘The Public Square’ (1923) with its ‘slash of angular blacks’ is, perhaps, an early exception; but the mature Stevens was motivated by

ideas concerning abstraction rather than the realization of a pared-down

poetry of abstract implication.8 once he had embraced abstraction as a positive force in his writing – around 1937 – the main aesthetic challenge Stevens faced was exploiting what abstraction offered This would see him dispatch the overt abstract rhetoric and specialist symbolism of ‘notes toward a Supreme fiction’ (1942) and embrace a more boldly abstract verse reflecting on the ‘baldest’ concepts: ‘metaphor’, ‘resemblance’,

‘description’, ‘analogy’, ‘the ultimate poem’ however sparse these cepts appear, Stevens crafted from them a verse of humane abstract medi-tation whose various expressions are intimately pursued throughout.opposite ‘notes toward a Supreme fiction’, some readers may be sur-prised not to discover a detailed reading of this doctrinal poem.9 My interest has rather been in those poems of abstraction that surround and chime with ‘notes’ throughout Stevens’ career; those which are perhaps more a realization of abstract powers than Stevens’ more ‘theoretical’ poem can claim to be Whilst i believe ‘notes’ can be exonerated of the aloofness to ‘reality’ laid at Stevens’ door by Marjorie Perloff, this oft-read text – which has functioned as a vortex in Stevens criticism – only adumbrates what abstraction was coming to mean to Stevens in

con-1942.10 certainly, the poet was able to capitalize on his aesthetic eries in other 1942 texts (see chapter 5’s readings of ‘certain Phenomena

discov-8 CPP, 91 9 Ibid., 329.

10 See Perloff, ‘revolving in crystal: The Supreme fiction and the impasse of Modernist lyric’ in

Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism ed albert gelpi (cambridge: cambridge University

Press, 1985 ), 41–64.

of Sound’ and ‘Montrachet-le-Jardin’) but Stevens also sensed that the trumpeting of abstraction in ‘notes’ erred on too cold an aesthetic front, hence perhaps his later proposition of a final, if unrealized, section for

the poem: ‘It Must Be Human’.11 as chapter 6 makes clear with respect

to ‘Paisant chronicle’ (1945), perhaps the ‘major man’ of ‘notes’ was ply too abstracted to come alive for Stevens, even as he modified the figure in this later poem

sim-of course, this study does make repeated reference to ‘notes’, and textualizes the concept of a ‘supreme fiction’ in chapter 3 however, i have sought elsewhere to distinguish between this poem’s nominative power –

con-in contrast with ‘Montrachet-le-Jardcon-in’ and ‘description Without Place’ (1945) – and the abstract spirit of Stevens’ post-‘notes’ verse.12 Whereas

‘notes’ persistently names and signals its objects of aesthetic interest –

even where it ironizes nomination (‘but Phoebus was / a name for thing that never could be named’) – the mature Stevens realized he could fashion abstract poetry without recourse to an overt idiom, at least not the abstract terminology of his 1942 work.13 for the mature Stevens, a robust abstract poetry would never have to declare ‘The major abstrac-tion is the commonal’; but rather would demonstrate or imply such an

some-imaginative possibility What ‘notes’ calls an ‘abstraction blooded’ other

Stevens poems would have to achieve, as the poet jostled with the innate problems of conveying the ‘[i]nvisible or visible or both: / a seeing and unseeing in the eye’.14 from the poet who declared as early as ‘a high-toned old christian Woman’ (1922) that ‘Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame’ to the architect of ‘The Pure good of Theory’ – discussed at length in chapter 6 – it is the evolution of Stevensian abstraction that concerns the present work.15

but what picture has Stevens criticism painted of the poet’s tions? Scholars whose careers have shaped contemporary criticism – altieri, bloom, donoghue, frye, hillis Miller, Kermode, vendler – have all battled with Stevens before themselves becoming subject to the skirmishes of younger scholars.16 today, being a ‘Stevensian’ is not, at

16 Select works include: charles altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry

(cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1989); harold bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems

of Our Climate (ithaca, nY: cornell University Press, 1977); denis donoghue, Connoisseurs

Introduction 7least in north america, a cranky activity; and, as recent conferences reveal, critical interest in Stevens will excite equally vociferous debate

in the twenty-first century and no doubt beyond.17 More even than Yeats, eliot, auden, Moore, Pound or Williams, Stevens continues

to upset and inspire critics in the extreme arguably, he achieves first place among twentieth-century poets for garnering the largest groups of detractors and zealots, ones for whom abstraction often proves a burn-ing issue

as lee Jenkins has observed, Stevens’ early reputation on both sides

of the atlantic was dogged by charges of dandyism, effeteness, even

irre-sponsibility; charges variously traced to fin de siècle aestheticism and the Symbolist-inspired ‘pure poetry’ of Harmonium.18 gradually, more posi-tive accounts of Stevens’ relations with aestheticism, Symbolism and the romantic poets have emerged.19 nevertheless, doubt persists as to whether Stevens has anything to say, irrespective of his undeniable talent for poetic speech; raising suspicion his own work is hopelessly ‘abstract’

in a pejorative sense.20 from the late 1980s to the present, following the aftermath of deconstructionist criticism, debate surrounding Stevens’ responses to social and political realities – particularly the depression and the Second World War – has been especially acute.21 but whilst historicist accounts have yielded vital information about Stevens’ quotidian exist-ence – as poet, art-collector and surety bond lawyer – there is obvious disagreement as to how Stevens’ times affected his poetry and vice versa;

of Chaos: Ideas of Order in Modern American Poetry (new York: columbia University Press,

1984); northrop frye, ‘The realistic oriole: a Study of Wallace Stevens’ in Wallace Stevens: A

Collection of Critical Essays ed Marie borroff (englewood cliffs, nJ: Prentice hall, 1963 ), 161–76;

J hillis Miller, ‘Theoretical and atheoretical in Stevens’ in Wallace Stevens: A Celebration ed

frank doggett and robert buttel (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 1980 ), 274–85;

frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens (london: faber, [1960 ] 1989); helen vendler, ‘The Qualified

assertions of Wallace Stevens’ in The Act of Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens ed

roy harvey Pearce and J hillis Miller (baltimore, Md: Johns hopkins University Press, 1965 ), 163–78.

17 ‘celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in connecticut’ (2004), University of connecticut; ‘Wallace Stevens’ (2004), University of london; ‘fifty Years on: Wallace Stevens

in europe’ (2005), rothermere american institute, oxford See WSJ 28.2, 29.1, 30.1.

18 lee M Jenkins, Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order (brighton: Sussex University Press, 2000 ), 3–4.

19 See Milton J bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (berkeley: University of california Press,

1985); Michel benamou, Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination (Princeton, nJ: Princeton

University Press, 1972); george bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and

Stevens (chicago, il: University of chicago Press, 1976 ).

20 See Marjorie Perloff, ‘Pound/Stevens: whose era?’ in The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the

Poetry of the Pound Tradition (evanston, il: northwestern University Press, 1996 ), 2.

21 See Melita Schaum, Wallace Stevens and the Critical Schools (tuscaloosa, al: University of

alabama Press, 1988 ), 100–28, 129–82.

and it has been especially hard for historicist criticism to align contextual politics with poetic practice.

Painted most negatively, Stevens is usually accused of being doomed

to a kind of aloof abstraction that disabled him from writing verse adequate to his epoch; despite his avowal that the poet of ‘any time’ must discover ‘what seems to him to be poetry at that time’.22 he is fre-quently charged with writing without feeling; and even ‘Stevensians’,

as bates observes, can find the poet ‘emotionally unsympathetic’.23typically, the ‘abstract side’ of Stevens’ writing disappoints readers who want literature to have an overt relationship with everyday life halliday, despite his admiration, mounts ‘a moral critique of Stevens’

as a writer whose work apparently embodies ‘an objectionable drawal […] from caring about […] individual other persons’.24 Such didacticism overlooks not only the range of Stevens’ work, but the reach of poetry itself Sadly, the tendency to equate ‘the abstract’ with

with-‘the inhuman’ has triggered the majority of misplaced charges of ousness on Stevens’ part

oblivi-This nominally ‘inhuman’ side assumes a different complexion, ever, once a more imaginative ear is given to abstraction vendler suggests Stevens’ poetry specializes in ‘second-order reflection’ – rather than ‘first-order personal narrative’ but, as vendler suggests, this dichotomy masks something subtler: ‘the distinction is so crude as to be false, because all good poetry pretending to be first-order poetry […] is in fact implicitly second-order poetry by virtue of its having arranged its first-order narra-tive in a certain shape’.25 Thus Stevens cannot be superficially a ‘second-order’ poet who transmutes ‘first-order’ concerns for precisely the reason vendler gives for the distinction’s failure to hold nevertheless, the idea that an abstract poetic has an abundantly human task is given weight

how-by the calculated poetic interaction of ‘second-order’ and ‘first-order’ concerns

Sympathetic critics, therefore, counter the inhumanity charge by gesting Stevens, like Yeats, is a high-priest of the imagination, an american

sug-22 CPP, 639.

23 See Jenkins, Wallace Stevens, 3; george lensing, ‘Wallace Stevens in england’ in Wallace

Stevens: A Celebration ed frank doggett and robert buttel (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University

Press, 1980), 130–48; carolyn Masel, ‘Stevens and england: a difficult crossing’ WSJ 25.2 (2001), 122–37; Milton J bates, ‘Pain is human: Wallace Stevens at ground Zero’ The Southern

Review 39.1 (2003 ), 169.

24 Mark halliday, Stevens and the Interpersonal (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 1991 ), 94.

25 helen vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (cambridge, Ma: harvard

University Press, 1988 ), 75.

Introduction 9coleridge without coleridge’s metaphysics, an emersonian who knew

a thing or two about pain; even, paradoxically, because of a superficial indifference to suffering.26 as Stevens himself remarked: ‘Sentimentality

is a failure of feeling.’27 certainly, Stevens stands to one side of the crowd, scrutinizing how poetry becomes a viable part of life; a writer unlikely

to be swept up by political or literary movements even as he was enced by them.28 The place of abstraction in that project is undeniable; but the impetus for this study emanates from the misconceptions that very abstract aesthetic has aroused

influ-one upshot of sympathetic historicist work, however, has been an emphasis on the role Stevens’ poetry plays in responding to political and social issues although cleghorn declares Stevens ‘ideologically elusive’,

over-he suggests ‘description Without Place’ exacts a ‘deconstruction’ of tover-he

‘expansionist rhetoric’ of american foreign policy in 1945.29 Schaum views Stevens as ‘centrally political’, arguing the poet ‘provides startling insights into the fictions of history, the rhetorical “illusions” by which we as social beings live and act’.30 Similarly, brogan finds Stevens to be a ‘very polit-ically involved poet’ who ‘dismantle[s] false public rhetorics’.31 filreis also claims Stevens’ misgivings about the new critics – especially allen tate’s ferocious response to the ‘brooks–Macleish’ call for a nationalistic war literature – led the poet to adopt a ‘nationalist’ stance during the 1940s.32

Yielding to the pressure to answer Perloff’s damning appraisal of Notes

Toward a Supreme Fiction, such responses over-state Stevens’ readability as a

politically concerned poet, sacrificing the particularities of the poetry to the general argument that poetry challenges commonsensical understandings

of the world/‘reality’.33 Whilst Stevens criticism has been enriched by examination of the interaction between history, politics and poetry, there is

re-26 See richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (london: faber, 1987 ), 178–80.

31 Jacqueline brogan, ‘Wrestling with those “rotted names”: Wallace Stevens’ and adrienne

rich’s “revolutionary Poetics”’ WSJ 25.1 (2001 ), 19, 23.

32 alan filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press,

1991 ), 80.

33 See Perloff, ‘revolving in crystal’, 41–64 Perloff refers explicitly to the cummington Press

edi-tion elsewhere i refer to ‘notes’ as a single poem, as it appears, tardily, in Transport to Summer

(1947).

obviously a danger in implying Stevens was this politicized, however

‘pol-itical’ his apolitical gestures appear and however much political readings might engage the prosodic and other poetic features of Stevens’ work.34historicist accounts have also shied from abstraction, unless the concept is linked with the poet’s early isolationism or the later polit-ical dimension of abstract expressionism but the tendency to defend Stevens excessively derives from the sheer abstract ambiguity of his often enigmatic verse With critical hindsight, it also appears that Stevens’ own abstract terms seemingly resist novel interpretation ‘Major man’, a

‘new romantic’, a ‘supreme fiction’, ‘the first idea’, ‘the death of the gods’,

‘the imagination–reality complex’, ‘the fluent mundo’, ‘the abstract’ itself: the choice terms of Stevens’ mid-career furnish the reader with a ready-made vocabulary for reading back into the poetry it is an idiom which provides the illusion that Stevens’ work constitutes a ‘harmo-nious whole’, a tendency critics assume the poet encouraged in want-

ing to title his 1954 Collected Poems ‘The Whole of harmonium’ (even

although Stevens actually spent a lifetime resisting a collected edition of his work).35

Several critics complain of the effects abstract, and often binary, terms serve critically leggett laments the ‘imagination-reality termin-ology that has plagued Stevens criticism for decades’.36 cleghorn observes

‘[b]inary oppositions function significantly in the Stevens critical legacy’.37Proponents of a ‘theory’ through which readers can navigate Stevens’ work often strive in vain to discover the ‘metaphysic’, as frye assumes, that informs his ‘poetic vision’ or the ‘theory of knowledge’ that informs Stevens’ ‘metaphysic’.38 typically, in the absence of a discernible ‘theory’, critics harness another vocabulary for support, either beyond or deriv-ing from Stevens donoghue’s 1980 epiphany where he reports want-ing ‘to give up [Stevens’] privileged terms, or to go beyond or beneath them’ is telling, as is vendler’s contemporaneous move to a vocabulary of

‘desire’.39

34 filreis admits: ‘Those of us who have tried to make manifest the political life of an apparently unpolitical poet found the requirements of the project were so daunting […] that we had to make short work of sound in readings of poems where the music of words is obviously central’,

‘Sound at an impasse’ WSJ 31.1 (2009 ), 21.

35 See L, 834, 829.

36 b J leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory: Conceiving the Supreme Fiction (chapel hill,

nc: University of north carolina Press, 1987 ), 80.

37 cleghorn, Wallace Stevens’ Poetics, 3.

38 frye, ‘The realistic oriole’, 161.

39 denis donoghue, ‘two notes on Stevens’ WSJ 4.3/4 (1980), 44; helen vendler, Wallace

Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (Knoxville, tn: University of tennessee Press, 1984 ).

Introduction 11comparative work on Stevens has, therefore, proven critically popular Stevens’ abstract vocabulary appears less intimidating when contextualized through nietzsche, William James, emerson, the british romantics, other american Modernists, or various continental thinkers and writers not only does comparison provide Stevens’ readers with various intellectual and poetic contexts, it deflects the totalizing power Stevens’ mid-career vocabu-lary wields for Stevens criticism has not only suffered from binary oppos-itions or enigmatic terms its main abstract figures, championed in ‘notes’, feature frequently in self-confirming readings of the poet’s work a critical idiom, ‘Stevensian’, establishes a hermeneutic circle in which the corpus itself

‘revolv[es] in crystal’, where every phase of Stevens’ writing is reducible to the terminology that actually only dominates the period in which Stevens first embraced abstraction: 1935–45.40 among this book’s claims is that the ‘fluent mundo’ is not co-extensive with the Stevens corpus; that Stevens’ need to create a vocabulary advertising abstraction was born of the early 1930s and did not survive the mid-1940s; that it was not until his final decade that he fully absorbed abstraction; and that, if Stevens is to be read afresh, a revision-ist account of how and why he was drawn to ‘the abstract’ must be found

My concern, therefore, is more with re-examining what abstraction represented to Stevens – through a combination of close-readings and review of the documentary evidence, published and unpublished – and less with arguing with Stevens critics on their own terms as pragmatism cautions, the latter would only give credibility to the very vocabulary one wants to re-interpret or transcend.41 one example of ‘Stevensian’ at work, however, should suffice in demonstrating how approaching so ‘abstract’ a subject as ‘Stevensian abstraction’ requires careful choices of vocabulary.harold bloom reads ‘notes’ through Stevens’ ‘first idea’, the abstract notion that poem itself scrutinizes, observing:

for Stevens, an image is an obsession […] and so he tries to demystify it by a reduction to its first idea, a fate or reality supposedly beyond further reduction but […] he undergoes a recognition of the first idea (itself an ‘imagined thing’

or image) and then finds he is in danger of being dehumanized by this freedom

of substitution, since substitution is its own meaning, as though

to-put-into-question was what would suffice Thus Stevens moves on to a fresh recognition

or retroactive meaningfulness of the first idea as a potentia (both Power and passion) or pathos, or as he says […] the fiction that results from feeling.42

40 CPP, 351.

41 See richard rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (cambridge: cambridge University Press,

1989), 8–9; Philosophy and Social Hope (harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999 ), xviii.

42 bloom, Wallace Stevens, 170.

bloom struggles here to illuminate Stevens’ ‘first idea’, despite harnessing his own emersonian ‘triad’ of fate, freedom and Power bloom’s enig-matic ‘american orphism’ cannot ultimately compete with Stevens’ ter-minology, as his resorting to both the ‘first idea’ and troping the poet’s own phrases demonstrates (‘what [would] suffice’, ‘the fiction that results from feeling’).43 This is not to imply Stevens’ work does not reflect on itself

or that it is illegitimate to refer to Stevensian terms per se it is to stress the

tendency of an abstract vocabulary to dominate interpretation; although

i distinguish between Stevens’ terminology in situ and ‘Stevensian’, the

critical language requiring translation into less abstract idioms

Stevens created, therefore, a seductive idiom which can encourage uncritical familiarity (leggett wittily observes that bloom himself suffers

an ‘anxiety of influence’ over Stevens’ poetics).44 richardson even insists on the necessity of learning Stevens’ ‘language’ before approaching his verse.45but this strategy risks foregrounding only one element of Stevens’ achieve-ment at the expense of reading the poetry intimately Similarly, if criticism can only make limited use of ‘Stevensian’, comparative studies can suffer from reifying a substitute language in place of reading Stevens at all for example, bové’s analysis of ‘The Snow Man’ (1921) shows more familiarity with heidegger than it does with Stevens and risks rendering heidegger

and Stevens unintelligible referring to Stevens’ ‘listener’, bové writes:

he is ‘nothing himself,’ that is, he is ontologically identical with the other far as they are both part of ‘what-is’ existing in and by virtue of ‘nothing’ […]

inso-he senses tinso-he falsity of tinso-he dualistic separation of res cogitans and res extensa and

sees the primordiality of being-in-the-World, alongside the World, as a structure

of his own being.46

Pragmatist discourse also urges not investing foundational or ical’ priority in any one vocabulary rorty wryly comments of heidegger’s language: ‘heideggerese is only heidegger’s gift to us, not being’s gift to heidegger’ (he also brings heidegger and derrida to task for re-capitulat-ing what heidegger himself calls ‘the tradition of onto-theology’).47 for

‘metaphys-43 Ibid., 5; see CPP, 218–19, 351.

44 leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 70.

45 Joan richardson, ‘learning Stevens’s language: The Will & the Weather’ in Teaching Wallace

Stevens: Practical Essays ed John n Serio and b J leggett (Knoxville, tn: University of

tennessee Press, 1994 ), 140–55.

46 Paul a bové, Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry (new York: columbia

University Press, 1980 ), 190–1.

47 richard rorty, ‘Wittgenstein, heidegger and the reification of language’ in Essays on

Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers vol ii (cambridge: cambridge University Press,

1991), 65; ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’ in Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980)

(Minneapolis, Mn: University of Minnesota Press, 1982 ), 100.

Introduction 13rorty that tradition specializes in spawning dominant master vocabular-ies with illusory qualities referring to derrida, he warns: ‘We may find

ourselves thinking that what heidegger thought could not be effed [sic]

really can be, if only grammatologically’.48 to trope rorty, ‘Stevensian’ is only Stevens’ gift to us, not the abstract’s gift to Stevens

Unsurprisingly, the word ‘abstract’ has occasioned conflicting debate leggett notes the confusing tendency of associating abstraction with a) isolating ‘reality’ without the interference of the imagination and b) cre-ating poetry opposed to the concrete and physical.49 it will become clear that i consider Stevensian abstraction an idealist process that coincides with neither of these positions leggett himself traces Stevens’ ‘abstract’

to the poet’s reading of i a richards’ Coleridge on Imagination (1934) although leggett is right to link Stevensian abstraction with coleridgean idealism, i suggest a need to go beyond richards’ coleridge to the

Biographia Literaria and other idealist phenomena for support clearly,

no single textual source of influence exists for an imaginative process that evolved gradually in Stevens it is, therefore, through a range of vocabu-laries that Stevens’ ‘abstract’ may be read afresh The point of focusing on the term is not merely that ‘major man’, a ‘supreme fiction’ and Stevens’

other figures are abstract one simply cannot understand the poet Stevens

becomes, both during 1935–45 and throughout his career, without some account of what abstraction meant to him personally and in practice

as Patke observes, Stevens’ 1900 journal entry, noting that ‘the idea

of life in the abstract’ was a subject worthy of ‘some reflection’, proved prophetic for the poet’s career.50 but what specific critical arguments con-cerning abstraction should be grasped? Stevens’ occasional companion richard eberhart appreciated how the abstract quality of Stevens’ writ-ing represented ‘a spring to […] contemplation’.51 anthony hecht, though ambivalent, observed Stevens’ interest in ‘the very beauty of the abstract formulation of things’.52 doggett, meanwhile, suggested Stevensian abstraction ‘contains something of the drama of being and of a specific existence’.53 ellmann, keen to dispense with treating Stevens the man and poet as categorically distinct, remarks: ‘Stevens presented a mode

48 rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’, 101.

49 leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 34.

50 rajeev S Patke, The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens: An Interpretative Study (cambridge:

cambridge University Press, 1985 ), 130.

51 richard eberhart, ‘notes to a class in adult education’ Accent 7.4 (1947), 251–3.

52 anthony hecht, ‘a Sort of heroism’ Hudson Review 10 (1957 –8), 607.

53 frank doggett, Stevens’ Poetry of Thought (baltimore, Md: Johns hopkins University Press,

1966 ), 216.

of apprehending reality that is also a reflection of the inner ism of that reality’, adding that, in composition, Stevens ‘was both actor and spectator’ indirectly, ‘his poems are fragments of the grand con-fession of his life’.54 it is partly this study’s intention to demonstrate the role abstraction plays in that dramatization, particularly with regard to Stevens’ quotidian experience, his gastronomic and aesthetically catholic imagination.

mechan-This dramatic component, however, is rarely conceived as such randall Jarrell was quick to question Stevens’ abstract side: ‘little of Stevens’ work has the dramatic immediacy, the mesmeric, involving human-ity, of so much of Yeats’ and frost’s poetry […] [t]hese cool, clear, airy poems, which tower above us […] ought to be sailing over other heads many centuries from now’.55 Jarrell’s nuanced prose indicates reservation and grudging admiration, implying the ‘flight’ of Stevens’ poetry is culp-able in aiming for heights even a ‘poetry audience’ would find perplex-ing ‘ought’ is similarly loaded: implying an unpalatable future where Stevens’ poetry will continue to tower over its audience as it revels in its own aerial detachment

although Schwartz discussed Stevensian abstraction as early as 1938 (as

chapter 2 reveals), it was not until the 1940s that the subject was tially addressed Such critical attention coincided not only with the collec-

substan-tions following Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction but with Stevens’ post-war

anthology appearances (of which he kept personal copies).56 Stevens’ library testifies, in fact, to his minute tracking of the criticism appearing after 1945 (to which holly Stevens added), the poet binding in red leather

the 1945 Voices issue devoted entirely to his work.57 The year 1948 saw the publication of blackmur’s ‘Poetry and Sensibility’; 1949, cunningham’s

‘The Poetry of Wallace Stevens’ and frankenburg’s ‘variations on Wallace Stevens’; 1950, louis Martz’s ‘The World of Wallace Stevens’ and

o’connor’s monograph The Shaping Spirit by 1952, Morse’s ‘Motive for Metaphor’ composed the entire issue of Origin V, whilst deutsch’s Poetry

in Our Time mounted an ambivalent critique of Stevens’ career.58 in the

54 richard ellmann, ‘how Wallace Stevens Saw himself’ in Wallace Stevens: A Celebration ed

frank doggett and robert buttel (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 170.

55 randall Jarrell, ‘very graceful are the Uses of culture’ Harper’s 209 (1954 ), 100.

56 See Milton J bates, ‘Stevens’ books at the huntington: an annotated checklist (concluded)’

WSJ 3.1/2 (1979), 25–6.

57 Voices ‘Wallace Stevens issue’ 121 (1945).

58 r P blackmur, ‘Poetry and Sensibility: Some rules of Thumb’ Poetry 71.5 (1948 ), 271–6; J v

cunningham, ‘The Poetry of Wallace Stevens’ Poetry 75.3 (1949 ), 149–65; lloyd frankenberg,

Pleasure Dome: On Reading Modern Poetry (boston, Ma: houghton Mifflin, 1949 ), 197–267;

Introduction 15

poet’s final years, the Selected Poems was reviewed by bernard bergonzi and the Collected Poems by Jarrell, whilst Schwartz was among the first to

write a retrospective following Stevens’ death.59

by 1956, however, William carlos Williams observed: ‘i have no dence that anyone will read the poems of Wallace Stevens tomorrow The more reason those of us who will read them should make the most of it.’60 if Stevens had not then attained a sizeable audience, the explosion in criticism

confi-of the next half-century was something Williams was neither willing nor able to anticipate (Williams was not alone in pondering Stevens’ reputation, however).61 only eight years later riddel would write what remains one of the best assessments of Stevens’ career (‘The contours of criticism’) in an

ELH Stevens issue with early essays by Pearce, hillis Miller and benamou.62

in the Voices issue brinnin suggested that Stevens’ idealist abstractions

are essentially sensory:

Stevens possesses a belief in the reality of the sensory object […] consequently

he is to be observed on sensuous excursions into the impure image itself, the manifest object, and not to the image as a copy emanating from the idea if it is

possible to understand how it feels to be a pear, a green light on the sea, a bowl

of flowers, Stevens manages […] to say that he does.63

This recalls ‘a rabbit as King of the ghosts’ (1937) which imagines what

it feels like to be a rabbit or shade of a rabbit: where ‘nothing is left except

light on your fur’ and where one ‘feel[s] that the light is a rabbit-light’.64given that he only had access to Stevens’ work up to 1945, brinnin’s insight into the idealist quality of Stevensian abstraction was unusually appreciative

however, reviewing Transport to Summer, blackmur declared Stevens

had grown ‘prolific, and sometimes prolix’ although he admired Stevens’

louis l Martz, ‘The World of Wallace Stevens’ in Modern American Poetry ed b rajan

(london: denis dobson, 1950), 94–109; William van o’connor, The Shaping Spirit: A Study

of Wallace Stevens (chicago, il: regnery, 1950 ); Samuel french Morse, ‘Motive for Metaphor’

Origin V 2.1 (1952), entire issue; babette deutsch, Poetry in Our Time (new York: henry holt,

60 W c Williams, ‘comment: Wallace Stevens’ Poetry 87.4 (1956 ), 237.

61 See alan filreis, ‘Stevens/Pound in the cold War’ WSJ 26.2 (2002 ), 181–93 filreis jokes about

‘the great Stevensian consolidation’, 186.

62 Joseph n riddel, ‘The contours of Stevens criticism’ ELH 31.1 (1964), 106–38.

63 John Malcolm brinnin, ‘Plato, Phoebus and the Man from hartford’ Voices 121 (1945 ), 30, 33.

64 CPP, 190.

‘absolute content of sensibility’, blackmur was alienated by the ‘unusually high number’ of words that are ‘recognizably a part of a special vocabu-lary’, which ‘not charged and fixed by forces outside the vocabulary, will obliterate the perceptions it specializes’ evidently blackmur felt short-changed by Stevens’ abstract master-vocabulary (whose ‘meanings’ might

‘disappear with use’).65 blackmur’s ‘an abstraction blooded’ had argued that abstraction ‘requires constant iteration and constant experience’; but his previous fervour for ‘notes toward a Supreme fiction’ proved unsus-tainable.66 frankenburg, by contrast, recognized the painterly qualities of Stevens’ ‘abstract’, associating ‘a Study of two Pears’ (1938) with cézanne and noting affinities between Stevens, Klee, de chirico and Miró like brinnin, frankenburg appreciated how an abstract poetic could paradox-ically be intimate, suggesting: ‘Klee’s description […] of “a line taking a walk” is congenial to the course of a Stevens poem’.67

but it was not until the 1950s that Stevens was even considered a writer

of ‘ideas’ in 1950 Martz paid tribute to Stevens’ ‘explorations into the realm of the pure idea’, adding: ‘Stevens is often called a hater of ideas

and of reason […] Notes toward a Supreme Fiction should dispel any conception.’ discussing ‘It Must Be Abstract’, Martz observed:

mis-note here the interaction of precise generality and precise concreteness, each supporting and enriching the other, as if the abstract definition were a flower

or a grove and indeed it is: the flower, the grove, perceived in candour, define momentarily the observer’s place in the world.68

Martz understood how an ‘abstract definition’ might be the portal to novel aesthetic experience

however, even as supportive a reader as o’connor struggled with Stevens’ more abstract poems:

[Stevens’] abstraction[s] or generalization[s] […] will rarely if ever sound ous on occasion, however, the abstractions lack the power to arouse our feel-

fatu-ings one finds such lines more often in the later poems, as in Esthétique du

Mal or A Primitive like an Orb in ‘chocorua to its neighbor’ […] one may

read with the sense that a subject is being made ready to declare itself […] but finally come to recognize that the poem says […] in the first few stanzas all that

is to be said ‘repetitions of a Young captain’ exhibits […] some of the same weaknesses.69

65 blackmur, ‘Poetry and Sensibility’, 271–3.

66 blackmur, ‘an abstraction blooded’ Partisan Review 10.3 (1943), 298.

67 frankenburg, Pleasure Dome, 221–2 chapter 7 discusses Stevens and Klee.

68 Martz, ‘The World of Wallace Stevens’, 98, 100.

69 o’connor, The Shaping Spirit, 131.

Introduction 17even critics who applauded Stevens’ ‘philosophical’ side were, therefore, ambivalent about its ‘abstractions’ failure to ‘arouse’ feeling was not the only problem The association of abstraction with generalization led critics

to see Stevens’ most abstract poems as un-poetic, ‘vague and unrealized’; lacking the ‘subtly elaborated subject-matter’ o’connor found in other, perhaps equally abstract, but nominally more ‘approachable’ works.70Morse, however, queried the assumptions at the root of typical portray-als of Stevens’ work:

[t]he gusto that many readers would not question in […] the early poems, ply because it is directed toward things and sensory experience, seems to many

sim-of those same readers almost morally reprehensible when directed toward ious’ ideas Stevens himself tends to accentuate this split between poetry and philosophy in his description of philosophy as an ‘official view’ of being and poetry as an ‘unofficial view’; but when he is […] writing poetry, he refuses to acknowledge the split.71

‘ser-certainly, Stevens romanticized or vilified philosophy according to his poetic needs, as eeckhout notes eeckhout also describes ‘Stevens’ end-less playing off of sense impressions against abstractions’.72 however,

as chapter 4 suggests, this notion requires challenging because ‘sense impressions’ and ‘abstractions’ are not necessarily conflictive Stevens

delights in abstractions of sense impressions, or abstract notions that re-invite imaginative scrutiny of our own senses Speaking of Parts of a

World, Morse did complain that some poems ‘remain abstractions […]

[t]hey do not take on the “radiance” that Stevens cherishes’.73 but he was alive to Stevens’ changing use of ‘abstraction’.74 Morse also defended

Stevens from ‘deliberately set[ting] out to epater les bourgeois’: ‘his

con-stant concern is rather to find some way to demonstrate that “The poet

is the intermediary between people and the world in which they live.”’75The paradox Stevens’ readers confront is how abstract reflections conjure commonality, ordinariness and ‘the normal’ without promulgating hol-low generalizations This is especially clear in the later poetry and is one regard in which Stevens refined his developing sense of abstraction

if Morse did not conceive the ‘bourgeois’ aesthetic chapter 7

addresses below, deutsch saw Stevens in domestic terms whilst sharing

70 Ibid., 131.

71 Morse, ‘Motive for Metaphor’, 57–8.

72 eeckhout, ‘Stevens and Philosophy’ in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens ed John n

Serio (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2007 ), 107.

73 Morse, ‘Motive for Metaphor’, 23.

74 See ibid., 45–6. 75 Ibid., 20–1.

o’connor’s reservations about abstraction noting Stevens’ ingenuity in

‘domesticat[ing] the savage Southern night’ deutsch resisted the poet’s

‘abstract sound’, complaining that ‘the manipulation of sound values’ leads ‘far from the accepted language of poetry’.76 admittedly, deutsch was seeking an idiom to tie down an elusive subject, reasonably suggest-ing how Stevens’ ‘imagery tends to be visual rather than auditory […] yet the tone-color of certain titles […] indicates his feeling for abstract sound’ but what deutsch meant by ‘abstract sound’ remains unclear: ‘[Stevens’] work is divided between poems that are rich, clear transcripts of reality and poems that talk rather abstractly about the gulf between the ultimate reality and its various appearances’ deutsch only helped foster the con-ception of Stevens as an ‘aloof […] music maker’ who ‘lets a problem of metaphysics or aesthetics usurp the poetry.’77

Such reductive criticism is compounded by over-attention to

Harmonium, as evidenced by bergonzi’s review of the Selected Poems.78 in

1952, of course, commentators could not read the more ‘personal’ poems

of The Rock or ‘late Stevens’ Thus, Stevens’ work post-Harmonium tended

to be viewed as abstract evasion if bergonzi claimed it ‘foolish’ to accuse the poet of ‘being cut off from reality’, he concluded Stevens’ ‘phenom-enal world’ was ‘lonely and depopulated’.79 although Stevens’ work up to

1952 is hardly ‘a barren achievement’, bergonzi argued the poet had paid

‘the penalty of viewing the world purely as an aesthetic phenomenon’.80

as with r S Thomas’ ‘Wallace Stevens’, the notion that Stevens’ world constitutes a solitary, dry abstraction has stuck, in large part because read-ers are uncomfortable not merely with abstractions as generalizations but with abstract ‘versions’ of feeling.81

Just as over-attention to Harmonium is traceable to a dislike of tion, so too is The Rock’s favourable reception, even though The Rock has its own abstract poetics Jarrell had, of course, read The Rock when he reviewed Stevens’ Collected Poems but it was Jarrell’s earlier reservations concerning The Auroras of Autumn that galvanized his embrace of The

abstrac-Rock, where he latterly discovered poems in which ‘it seems to us that

we are feeling […] what it is to be human’.82 This essay forms a pivotal

76 deutsch, Poetry in Our Time, 243–4. 77 Ibid., 250, 377, 252.

78 Marius bewley complained of this tendency as early as 1949 in ‘The Poetry of Wallace Stevens’

(Wallace Stevens: A Critical Anthology ed irvin ehrenpreis [harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 ], 162–82) bergonzi suggests Stevens’ ‘first volume remains unsurpassed’, 49.

79 bergonzi, ‘The Sound of a blue guitar’, 51.

80 Ibid., 51.

81 r S Thomas, ‘Wallace Stevens’ in Collected Poems 1945–1990 (london: orion, 2000 ), 135.

82 Jarrell, ‘The collected Poems’, 342–3.

Introduction 19

moment in Stevens criticism, polarizing appreciation of The Rock at the expense of the equally fine The Auroras of Autumn: ‘equally fine’ because imagine The Auroras of Autumn without poems such as ‘large red Man

reading’ or ‘This Solitude of cataracts’, easily companion pieces to the

‘personal’ lyrics Jarrell favours in The Rock.

in 1951 Jarrell observed:

When the first thing that Stevens can find to say of the Supreme fiction is that ‘it must be abstract,’ the reader protests, ‘Why, even hegel called it a concrete uni-versal’ […] Stevens has the weakness – a terrible one for a poet, a steadily increas-ing one in Stevens – of thinking of particulars as primarily illustrations of general truths, or else as aesthetic, abstracted objects, simply there to be contemplated.83

as leggett observes, this simplistically equates the abstract with eralization as a force opposed to the concrete/particular What Jarrell dismisses as inconsistency – that Stevens ‘is never more philosophical, abstract, rational’ than when he tells the reader to have faith in ‘nothing but immediate sensations, perceptions, aesthetic particulars’ – is, viewed differently, a crucial aspect of Stevensian abstraction.84 Jarrell’s champion-

gen-ing of The Rock, however, unfortunately led to a lack of appreciation for

Stevens’ more abstract late work

Schwartz was more generous in his 1955 retrospective, ing: ‘Stevens, studying Picasso and Matisse, made the art of poetry vis-ual in a way it has never been before’; as the poet variously combined

observ-‘Shakespeare, cubism, the Symbolist movement and modern philosophy since Kant’.85 Just as Schwartz astutely recognized the abstract possibil-ities of ‘The Man with the blue guitar’ (see chapter 2), he appreciated early how Stevens synthesized abstract notions in contemporary art with philosophical reflection, idealism especially contra Kenneth burke – who thought Stevens 150 years late in exploring idealism – Schwartz understood it was not so much Stevens’ subject-matter that mattered, but

how one saw that poetry and how such verse actuates readerly vision.86Stevensian abstraction re-examines how poetry might be ‘visual’, pre-cisely through conjuring the ‘in-visible’ (a term chapter 3 borrows from Merleau-Ponty) abstraction enables a poetry that, as ‘The creations of Sound’ (1944) remarks, makes the visible ‘a little hard / to see’ (note not

impossible to see).87

83 Jarrell, ‘reflections on Wallace Stevens’ Partisan Review 18 (1951), 339.

84 Ibid., 341.

85 Schwartz, ‘Wallace Stevens’, 21.

86 See eeckhout, ‘Stevens and Philosophy’, 110; also filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, 97.

87 CPP, 275.

in ‘The contours of Stevens criticism’ riddel subsequently argued

that Stevens’ ‘final composure’ lies in ‘the power of the self to be […] and to find its being in the act of mind that can create abstractions’.88for riddel, Stevens criticism had overlooked the poet’s career-long battle

to effect this achievement: ‘critics who maintain that Stevens’ stylistic changes are simply new jars for old moonshine sacrifice much of this sub-stance in order to attain their own coherent view of the late poems’.89 The present study explains how an abstract aesthetic had to grow on Stevens

in order for him to grow into it like riddel, i refrain from totalizing the corpus (‘The Whole of harmonium’), however much Stevens’ self-referential gestures are inter-textually engaging The cracks in that world beautifully emerge, in fact, in Stevens’ questioning of abstraction it is not that Stevens’ later work moves from the more baffling abstractions

of his middle phase (including The Auroras of Autumn) to the plainer,

more ‘domestic’ speculations of the late poetry Such a claim misleads not merely because ‘last Stevens’ involves such extremely abstract poems as

‘of Mere being’ or ‘as at a Theatre’, but because the final poetry actively blends ‘personal’ and nominally ‘impersonal’ expression Moreover, ever since ‘The Man with the blue guitar’, if not before, Stevens purposively incorporated ‘cool’ and ‘warm’ abstract gestures into his writing

but we should also recall Kermode’s cautionary words: ‘Many books and articles on Stevens fall into the trap of treating him as a philosopher […] [o]ne would hardly suspect that they were talking about a poet at all’.90 certainly, Stevens’ priority was to produce poetry, even although

he was aware of the intellectual changes then conjoining ‘disciplines’

(hence his comment concerning the changed ‘philosophic permissible’).91however, the very fact Stevens tended to embrace philosophy when it catalysed his poetry or reified ‘Philosophy’ as pejoratively ‘abstract’ when

it proved less than inspiring accentuates how abstraction engages ical/philosophical exchange irving howe had suggested Stevens ‘himself was partly to blame’ for the problem Kermode highlights (‘at his prolific second-best he had a way of sounding like a versifying philosopher’).92nevertheless, it is critical to refine the relations between philosophy and poetry in Stevens’ work, especially as abstraction often proves the sorry bridge for more critical earnestness than the poetry deserves: a verse at

poet-88 riddel, ‘The contours of Stevens criticism’, 136.

Introduction 21once philosophically playful and poetically preoccupied with experien-cing ideas.

Kermode also warns: ‘There is a poetry of the abstract; if you do not like

it, even when it is firmly rooted in the particulars of the world, you will not like Stevens’, adding: ‘Stevens approved the saying of valéry’s Socrates, that “Man fabricates by abstraction”.’93 fredric Jameson would seemingly exemplify Kermode’s point about abstract poetry dividing opinion for Jameson, Stevens’ ‘astonishing linguistic richness’ and his ‘impoverish-ment or hollowness of content’ are ‘seeming[ly] irreconcilable’.94 Stevens’ language ‘at once empties itself by calling attention to its own hollowness

as that which is merely the image of the thing, and not the thing itself’.95This reductive position implies Stevens’ idealism is essentially frustrated however, if Stevens tries to ‘touch’ reality – whilst necessarily being at

an aesthetic remove from ‘the real’ – such idealism affords him erable negative capability readers may complain the poetry lacks sus-taining content, but their complaints constitute preferences for different varieties of verse rather than compelling evidence for supposing ‘poetry’ and ‘abstraction’ are definitively opposed

consid-one further paradox has alienated critics: namely, that abstraction shares in common things, even embodies ‘commonality’ cook, however,

is refreshingly alive to this dimension:

My sense of Stevens’ word ‘abstract’ is consistent with i a richards’s use in his

Coleridge on Imagination […] richards conceives of an ‘ “all-inclusive myth” that

would provide the kind of nature “that the religions in the past have attempted

to provide for man.”’ Stevens starts ‘it Must be abstract’ with a play on ‘be,’ and

a doctrine of being is at the centre of christian ‘supreme fictions.’96

cook is quoting leggett quoting richards on her reading, the ‘doctrine

of being’ allies fiction and abstract conception; just as Stevens would note

in quasi-theological terms: ‘the fictive abstract is as immanent in the mind

of the poet, as the idea of god is immanent in the mind of the theologian’.97cook thereby focuses the common sharing of beliefs abstraction breeds

in fact, she goes further in her reading of ‘notes’: ‘The revelation of major man in his particulars should remain private, though in his abstraction,

93 Kermode, Wallace Stevens, 46, 102 See CPP, 883.

94 fredric Jameson, ‘Wallace Stevens’ in Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens ed Steven gould axelrod

and helen deese (boston, Ma: g K hall, 1988 ), 178.

95 Jameson, ‘Wallace Stevens’, 190.

96 eleanor cook, Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens (Princeton, nJ: Princeton

University Press, 1988 ), 229.

97 L, 434.

major man is part of – rather, is – the commonal’.98 This constitutes a cal definition of Stevens’ hero figure but in 1942 Stevens was not poetic-ally equipped to convey how abstraction might comprise the ‘commonal’ That was a project for his final decade nevertheless, cook rightly hones the multiple senses of Stevens’ ‘abstract’, even in the same sections of

radi-‘notes’: ‘“abstract” as compendium merges with “abstract” as able” or “invisible” or “visible” or both.’ 99 These notions, particularly the

“inconceiv-‘visible’ and ‘invisible’, are refined and synthesized throughout this book.beyond filreis’ pioneering historicism, longenbach’s account help-fully contextualizes Stevens’ embrace of abstraction for longenbach, the abstract spirit of Stevens’ early 1940s writing marks ‘not a retreat from the political content of the social realism of the 1930s’ but ‘a rebellion against the coercive demand of ideological explicitness’ and ‘an assertion of inter-nationalist values’ longenbach cites the 1943 abstract expressionist manifesto ‘globalism’, spearheaded by rothko and gottlieb, which challenged the ‘narrow political isolationism’ still persisting after Pearl harbor These painters sought ‘a language transcending the barriers of nationality and class – the language of abstraction’.100 There was noth-ing ahistorical or solipsistic to this approach The abstract expressionists were, longenbach explains, resisting propagandist art precisely because that art represented a caricature of the world

Thus, ‘to say “it must be abstract” is to assert that “it cannot possibly

be otherwise than abstract” and that “it cannot possibly leave the ical world behind”’.101 certainly, Stevens’ abstract side is misinterpreted if construed as a desire to quit history or contemporary society in harness-ing blanchot and focillon especially, this book shows how Stevens cannot sensibly be accused of such escapism as longenbach suggests: ‘the impos-sibility of sustaining the imperative “it must be abstract” is not a failure to

histor-be overcome but a dialectic to histor-be embraced’, adding, ‘if the purely abstract’ necessarily evades us, ‘the continual effort to remake the supreme fiction is the only way we can approach the condition of abstraction, retaining the fiction’s availability to all people in all places and times’.102

98 cook, Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War, 231 This goes further than robert Pack, who

argues: ‘The hero is an abstraction, but as he appears in each poem he becomes the

concretiza-tion of the ideal’ (Wallace Stevens: An Approach to his Poetry and Thought [new York: gordian,

1968 ], 157).

99 cook, Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War, 231.

100 James longenbach, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (new York: oxford University

Press, 1991 ), 253.

101 longenbach, Wallace Stevens, 254.

102 Ibid., 255–6.

Introduction 23but it is leggett and altieri who have most persistently scrutinized

the workings of abstraction in Stevens leggett’s Wallace Stevens and

Poetic Theory disputes doggett’s, donoghue’s and Jarrell’s tendency to

equate abstraction with ‘an aphoristic and generalizing style’.103 however, although leggett rightly challenges this idea, doggett’s conception of Stevens’ ‘poetry of thought’ is more nuanced than this grouping sug-gests.104 leggett also disputes Martz’s attention to the ‘root meaning –

abstrahere, to draw away’ and questions how, ‘in a strange turnabout,

the abstract is associated with the concrete, the fully realized’.105 but ‘the

abstract’ should not be conceived as ‘the opposite of real’, a notion leggett

derives from only part of Stevens’ reactions to philosophy, namely a blunt-headed distinction between ‘the real’ and ‘unreal’, the ‘official’ and

‘unofficial’.106 even if, as philosophically ‘harassing master[s]’, we tain abstract poetic ideas are less ‘real’ than ‘the pans above the stove, the pots on the table’, our distinction risks demoting ‘the abstract’ to a flight

main-of fancy where the ‘more abstract’ Stevens becomes, the more able, less relevant his poetry appears.107 leggett inadvertently supports the criticism that Stevensian abstraction equals negative removal from ‘real-ity’ his uneasiness with Stevens’ most abstract poems – as he struggles to defend their abstract qualities – suggests as much

unread-i dunread-ispute, therefore, a number of leggett’s early arguments as well as

some aired more recently in Late Stevens: The Final Fiction.108 leggett is much closer to the spirit of Stevens’ poetry when he argues it captures ‘an epistemology by which even the most sensuous detail remains radically

a product of abstraction’.109 against this background, it is curious he did not yield to Martz, who highlights abstraction’s realization of particu-lars and ‘the observer’s place in the world’.110 What prevents leggett from embracing Martz, however, is the thought that Stevens might, after all,

be using ‘abstract’ in an unconventional sense in other words, leggett

appears stuck between claiming Stevens is conventional in his use of

103 leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 18.

104 doggett’s ‘abstraction’ is actually linked with idealism and the ‘fictive’ (see doggett, Poetry of

Thought, 107 and 207ff.).

105 leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 20.

106 See b J leggett, ‘Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore: two essays and a Private review’

WSJ 10.2 (1986), 81 and ‘Stevens’ late Poetry’ in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens

ed John n Serio (cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2007), 65.

107 See CPP, 415, 365.

108 b J leggett, Late Stevens: The Final Fiction (baton rouge, la: louisiana State University

Press, 2005 ).

109 leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 40.

110 Martz, ‘The World of Wallace Stevens’, 100.

‘abstract’ (as opposing the ‘real’) whilst suggesting an unconventional role for abstraction: namely, that it allies intimately with sensuous particulars,

something his Late Stevens seems bound to deny in its ambivalence

con-cerning Stevens’ most abstract poems (i also question leggett’s lumping together of hillis Miller, Pearce and riddel as adherents of an abstraction aimed at reaching through to ultimate reality).111

leggett does sensibly question the use of Stevens’ 1950s interest in

‘decreation’ to account for the poet’s 1942 understanding of abstraction

he addresses, therefore, ‘the conception of abstraction that Stevens

him-self held when he wrote Notes’ but it is unlikely, as leggett believes,

that Stevens took his 1942 reading of henri focillon literally in ing an absolute world of forms directs the artist.112 Late Stevens even

believ-argues: ‘Stevens’ late poetry, unlike “notes,” does in fact embody a version

of the supreme fiction, not merely as description or illustration but as a belief given concrete form, realized.’113 referring to a retrospective state-ment Stevens made in 1954 – which identified his ‘supreme fiction’ as the

‘central theme’ to which his other poems concerning ‘reality’ and ation’ were ‘marginal’ – leggett claims Stevens finally gave ‘form to what was formless in “notes”’.114 certainly, the 1954 statement was revisionist for example, the more ‘accessible’ poetry of The Rock differs in expression

‘imagin-from the bejewelled rhetoric of ‘notes’ but there is much more to Stevens’

final work than The Rock; and, as suggested, even The Rock offers a

com-pelling admixture of ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ abstract manoeuvres for instance,

‘The river of rivers in connecticut’, a poem where personal reflection is

almost absent, provides a subtle contrast to The Rock’s ‘warmer’ texts.115

but how can The Rock or other late work realize Stevens’ ‘supreme

fic-tion’, however modestly? leggett’s inter-textual reading of Stevens – where

111 See leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 21–2 Miller insists it is ‘impossible’ to ‘walk

barefoot into reality’ and claims ‘to place reality in the imagination by abstracting it does not mean, however, twisting it into some unreal mental fiction it means the power to carry

the image of the very thing alive and undistorted into the mind’, J hillis Miller, Poets of

Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (cambridge, Ma: harvard University Press, 1965 ),

246–7 Pace leggett and Miller, this last sentence does not sound like ‘reach[ing] the uncreated

rock of reality behind’ it is the ‘image’ of the very thing that is arrested rather than the thing itself likewise, riddel is more dialectical and idealist than leggett suggests: ‘The poet […] not only lives by abstraction but knows he lives by abstraction […] [h]e knows that although he

lives at the edge of things, he lives in the center of himself where abstractions are created’, The

Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens (baton rouge, la: louisiana State

University Press, 1965 ), 166.

112 leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 26.

113 See ibid., 15–16; leggett, Late Stevens, 3.

114 L, 820 leggett, Late Stevens, 3.

115 CPP, 451.

Introduction 25Stevens is ‘read’ through other Stevens texts – encourages this notion although Stevens’ work is unquestionably self-referential and self-reflexive, leggett thereby risks reading ‘late Stevens’ in almost purely Stevensian terms certain readings also merely construe abstraction as negative for example, leggett casts late and last Stevens as follows:

although difficult from the beginning, Stevens’ poetry had become increasingly

theoretical and abstract, and thus increasingly obscure, since Parts of a World

in 1942 […] The Auroras of Autumn represents the culmination of this tendency […] [t]he poems of The Rock are unexpectedly plain, stripped of the imagina-

tive flourishes and epistemological quandaries of the preceding volumes Stevens’ late poems are thus not of a piece formally or stylistically, even if they address many of the same themes.116

Whether or not Stevens became ‘increasingly obscure’ as his poetry

became ‘increasingly […] abstract’, those approaching The Rock for the

first time would be surprised to hear this is a poetry ‘stripped of the imaginative flourishes’ and ‘epistemological quandaries’ of Stevens’ earlier

work certainly, The Rock addresses the quotidian in an idiom desiring

plainness or ordinariness but this change of tone reveals a poet more accommodated to abstraction rather than one correcting too abstract an idiom it is as though leggett denies Stevens his more abstract poems because they do not, apparently, sit comfortably with the ‘personal’

engagements of The Rock: Jarrell once again.

admittedly, leggett knows his position is complicated by the overtly abstract ‘last Stevens’, the poetry written after such ‘final’ pieces as ‘not ideas about the Thing but the Thing itself’ and ‘The Planet on the

table’ referring to the uncollected poems in Opus Posthumous from

1954–55, leggett claims: ‘as a group, these poems […] are less accessible

than the poems of The Rock, more abstract, less personal “as You leave

the room,” “of Mere being” and “reality is an activity of the Most

august imagination” would have been at home in The Rock “The Sail

of Ulysses” would not.’117 but if The Rock is ‘more personal’, how can ‘of Mere being’ be ‘at home in The Rock’? leggett himself describes ‘of Mere

being’ as one of ‘the coldest and most impersonal of the last poems’.118

leggett’s negative rendering overlooks Stevens’ ‘warm’ and ‘cool’

expres-sions of abstraction; which obliterate the nominal ‘tension’ in the late

poetry between abstract expression v ‘reality’, between a ‘poetry of ideas’

v one of domestic reflections on old-age or the quotidian.

116 leggett, ‘Stevens’ late Poetry’, 62 117 Ibid., 74. 118 Ibid., 74.

by contrast, altieri argues of Stevens’ work:

These exercises in abstraction have the important consequence of enabling us

to display to ourselves human powers […] one cannot defend Stevens’ ideas as ideas without denying the paradox on which they are founded – that their value

as ideas is not in their truth claims per se but in the life they create within the scene that displays them.119

This performative quality is crucial altieri maintains, however, that Stevens was not aping Modernist art: ‘Stevens derived his principles from painterly examples […] but familiarity need not entail influence […] Stevens wants to pose poetic language as a form of abstraction more res-onant and representative than anything produced for the eye.’120 altieri thus implicitly takes his lead from the Stevens who claims poetry should

be ‘a little hard / to see’.121 Stevens, for his part, was perhaps realizing the claims of his early mentor Santayana: ‘The visible landscape is not a proper object for poetry […] [t]here is a sort of landscape larger than the visible, which escapes the synthesis of the eye; it is present to that topo-graphical sense by which we always live in the consciousness that there is

a sea […] even when we do not see it’.122

charles tomlinson’s frustrations with Stevens are telling in precisely this respect.123 in a 1964 interview, tomlinson explained:

it was a case of being haunted [by Stevens] rather than of cold imitation i was also a painter and this meant that i had far more interest in the particulars of

a landscape or an object than Stevens Stevens rarely makes one see anything in

detail for all his talk about a physical universe.124

tomlinson added elsewhere:

[W]as there ever a poetry which stood so explicitly by a physical universe and against transcendence, but which gives so little account of that universe, its spaces, patterns, textures, ‘a world of canon and fugue’, such as hopkins spoke

of seeing before him.125

119 charles altieri, ‘Why Stevens Must be abstract, or What a Poet can learn from Painting’ in

Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism ed albert gelpi (cambridge: cambridge University

122 george Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (new York: Scribner’s, 1900 ), 274.

123 See gareth reeves, ‘a ghost never exorcized: Stevens in the Poetry of charles tomlinson’

in Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic ed bart eeckhout and edward ragg (london: Palgrave,

2008), 186–203.

124 ian hamilton, ‘four conversations’ London Magazine 4 (1964), 83.

125 charles tomlinson, Preface to The Necklace (Swinford: fantasy Press, 1955 ), 5.

Introduction 27This overlooks the creative power of Stevensian abstraction for there is

a different vision involved in not making readers see things as directly

as tomlinson craves but i will return to the visible, the invisible and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘in-visible’ in relation to Stevens’ abstract gaze below.altieri’s sense of abstraction, then, relates to unconventional modes of

‘seeing’; and what he calls the domination of ‘third person’ over ‘first

per-son’ concerns borrowing from Wittgenstein’s Notebooks to describe the

abstract ‘self’ or selves Stevensian poems generate, altieri quotes:

Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? […] i think that nothing

in the visual field would enable one to infer that it is seen from an eye The ing subject is surely mere illusion but the willing subject exists if the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call ‘i’ […] What

think-is good and evil think-is essentially the i, not the world […] The ‘i’ think-is not an object.126altieri adds: ‘This non-objective “i” […] could serve as the typical speaker

of a late Stevens poem.’127 by contrast, as chapter 4 argues, Stevens’

ideal-ist ‘i’ is a kind of object, maybe even a cipher for an impossible objectivity

at the very least, that speaker is an abstract token, paradoxically intimate with the personal by possessing hardly any, if any, individuating charac-teristics at all

but i want, finally, to return to the alleged problematic of ‘Stevens and philosophy’, an issue informed by the very question of abstraction Some readers still view Stevens’ ‘poetry of ideas’ as a sorry departure from the

exotic verses of Harmonium Simon critchley’s Things Merely Are is an

apparent corrective but the responses to the book have been even more captivating critchley gingerly defends his approach:

Stevens’s verse shows us a way of overcoming epistemology […] i am not

min-ing Stevens’s verse for philosophical puzzles and aperçus in pleasmin-ing poetic garb

nothing would be more fatuous on the contrary, i am trying to show […] that Stevens’s poetry […] contains […] instructive philosophical insight, and […] that this insight is best expressed poetically […] i am painfully aware of the fact that this entire enterprise is a performative self-contradiction[.]128

eeckhout contends: ‘critchley is clearly writing about “Philosophy and Stevens” here to him […] the notion of providing a “pleasing” aesthetic

“garb” to philosophical ideas is anathema and any attempt at treating osophy as subservient to the aesthetics of art-making is quickly dismissed

phil-126 ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–16 trans g e M anscombe (new York: harper, 1969 ), 80.

127 altieri, ‘Why Stevens Must be abstract’, 110.

128 Simon critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

(london: routledge, 2005 ), 4.

as fatuous.’ in other words, if critchley wants to avoid the charge of

‘min-ing Stevens’s verse for philosophical puzzles’, eeckhout sees this as faux

subservience to poetry.129

eeckhout’s own position proves compelling:

a residual antagonism between poetry and philosophy, then, is noticeable in even the most elegant and admiring attempts at bringing the two together […] Stevens himself was given to expressing this antagonism on occasion in spite of his own attraction to philosophy, and his well-attested appeal to philosophically oriented readers, we should not be made to forget too soon that he remained a poet first and foremost[.]130

but is it not possible to counter this ‘residual antagonism’ by dispatching such reified categories as ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’? derrida’s and rorty’s works, as eeckhout knows, suggest as much We might then at least avoid the philosophical ‘running in circles’ critchley represents (however much

an understandable ‘performative self-contradiction’)

critchley defends his critical impetus as deriving from Stevens’ ent inability to transliterate ‘the philosophical content of his poetry into philosophical prose’ but if critchley is right in saying this con-tent is ‘best expressed poetically’, how is Stevens’ ‘case’ an ‘oddity’?131critchley asks: ‘What is it about the particular meditative poetic form that he developed that is able to carry genuine philosophical weight and yet which is impossible to translate into prose?’ Yet the claim that such

appar-‘philosophical weight’ is ‘impossible to translate into prose’ is different, surely, from the suggestion Stevens failed to broach ‘philosophy’ convin-cingly in his prose Moreover, if a poetry–philosophy distinction is relin-quished and Stevens’ texts are seen as different expressions of an evolving abstract idiom, critchley’s conundrum disappears.132

Paul valéry, whose writing Stevens prefaced for a translation sioned in 1954, illustrates the positive combination of poetry and philoso-phy.133 bloom attributes Stevens’ sense of abstraction to valéry.134 valéry’s

commis-129 eeckhout, ‘Stevens and Philosophy’, 115.

130 Ibid., 116.

131 critchley, Things Merely Are, 31.

132 for other responses to critchley, see charles altieri, ‘Stevens and the crisis of european

Philosophy’ in Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic, ed bart eeckhout and edward ragg

(london: Palgrave, 2008), 70–1, and Krzysztof Ziarek, ‘“Without human meaning”: Stevens,

heidegger and the foreignness of Poetry’ in Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic ed bart eeckhout

and edward ragg (london: Palgrave, 2008 ), 86–8.

133 Wallace Stevens, ‘two Prefaces’ in Paul valéry, Dialogues trans William Mccausland Stewart

(london: routledge, 1957), vii–xxviii; reprinted CPP, 879–94.

134 bloom, Wallace Stevens, 173.