Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction

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Wa l l ace St ev enS a nd

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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’.

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Wa ll ace St ev enS a nd

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edWa r d r agg

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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.

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Acknowledgements

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Abbreviations

first citations present the full titles of Stevens’ works together, where rele-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:

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

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1

Introduction: ‘Stevensian’ and the question

of abstraction 1935–2009

The idea of life in the abstract is a curious one and deserves some reflection.1

abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet. for instance, the decision involved in the choice between ‘the nostalgia of the infinite’ and ‘the nostalgia for the infinite’ defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of

the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé). Personism, a movement which i recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being 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. Personism is to Wallace 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 gener-ation or two ago. Yet if i felt the obliggener-ation to pursue the philosophy 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 move-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

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.

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‘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’}

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3 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 unmistak-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.

Without doubt, Stevens remains among the more enigmatic, reclu-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 it was only having discovered an initial niche in the new art and literature 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.

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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 nom-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 Stanley burnshaw’s criticism of Ideas of Order.7_{Stevens became}

increas-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 ‘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}

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Introduction 5

influenced 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’ jet-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 ‘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 con-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 1942.10_{certainly, the poet was able to capitalize on his aesthetic}

discov-eries in other 1942 texts (see chapter 5’s readings of ‘certain Phenomena

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

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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 sim-ply too abstracted to come alive for Stevens, even as he modified the figure in this later poem.

of course, this study does make repeated reference to ‘notes’, and con-textualizes the concept of a ‘supreme fiction’ in chapter 3. however, i have sought elsewhere to distinguish between this poem’s nominative power – in contrast with ‘Montrachet-le-Jardin’ 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 some-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 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 abstrac-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}

11_See_L_{, 863–4.}

12_{See ragg, ‘good-bye Major Man: reading Stevens without “Stevensian”’}_WSJ_{29.1 (Spring 2005),}

98–105; ‘love, Wine, desire: Stevens’ “Montrachet-le-Jardin” and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline’

WSJ 30.2 (fall 2006), 194ff.

13 _CPP_{, 329.} 14 _Ibid_{., 336, 333.} 15 _Ibid_{., 47.}

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

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Introduction 7

least 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}

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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’.23

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

This nominally ‘inhuman’ side assumes a different complexion, how-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-‘second-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 by the calculated poetic interaction of ‘second-order’ and ‘first-order’ concerns.

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

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}

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Introduction 9

coleridge 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 influ-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.

one upshot of sympathetic historicist work, however, has been an over-emphasis on the role Stevens’ poetry plays in responding to political and social issues. although cleghorn declares Stevens ‘ideologically elusive’, he suggests ‘description Without Place’ exacts a ‘deconstruction’ of the ‘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}

re-examination of the interaction between history, politics and poetry, there is

26_{See richard Poirier,}_{The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections}_{(london: faber,}₁₉₈₇_),

178–80.

27 _CPP_{, 903.} 28_See_CPP_{, 665.}

29_{angus J. cleghorn,}_{Wallace Stevens’ Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric}_{(new York: Palgrave,}₂₀₀₀_),

24.

30_{Melita Schaum, ‘lyric resistance: views of the Political in the Poetics of Wallace Stevens and}

h.d.’ WSJ 13.2 (1989), 204, 200.

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

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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.34

historicist 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’.37

Proponents 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

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Introduction 11

comparative 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.

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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.45

but 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 inso-far as they are both part of ‘what-is’ existing in and by virtue of ‘nothing’ […] he senses the falsity of the 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 ‘metaphys-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

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)

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Introduction 13

rorty that tradition specializes in spawning dominant master vocabular-ies with illusory qualitvocabular-ies. 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 sprwrit-ing 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,}

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of apprehending reality that is also a reflection of the inner mechan-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.

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 substan-tially addressed. Such critical attention coincided not only with the collec-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,

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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 confi-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 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’.64

given 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, 1952).

59_{bernard bergonzi, ‘The Sound of a blue guitar’}_{Nine: A Magazine of Literature and the Arts}₁₀

(1953–4), 48–51; randall Jarrell, ‘The collected Poems of Wallace Stevens’ The Yale Review (1955), 340–53; delmore Schwartz, ‘Wallace Stevens: an appreciation’ The New Republic (22 august 1955), 20–2.

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.}

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‘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 mis-conception.’ discussing ‘It Must Be Abstract’, Martz observed:

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 fatu-ous. on occasion, however, the abstractions lack the power to arouse our feel-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.}

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Introduction 17

even 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.70

Morse, 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, sim-ply because it is directed toward things and sensory experience, seems to many of those same readers almost morally reprehensible when directed toward ‘ser-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

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.”’75

The 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.

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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 abstrac-tion, so too is The Rock’s favourable recepabstrac-tion, 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 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.}

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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 thinkincreas-ing 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 gen-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-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, observ-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 ‘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.86

Stevensian 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.}

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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’.88

for 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’).91

however, 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 poet-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’).92

nevertheless, 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

88_{riddel, ‘The contours of Stevens criticism’, 136.} 89 _Ibid_{., 134.}

90_{frank Kermode, ‘Preface to 1989 edition’ in}_{Wallace Stevens}_{, xv.} 91 _L_{, 753.}

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Introduction 21

once 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’.95

This 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 consid-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.

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’.97

cook 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.

Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction

Wa l l ace St ev enS a nd

t he a e St het ic S of

a bSt r ac t ion

Wa ll ace St ev enS a nd

t he a e St het ic S of

a bSt r ac t ion

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: ‘Stevensian’ and the question

of abstraction 1935–2009