Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy 9781108491778

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Epigraph
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Committed Solitudes: Imagining Autonomy Otherwise
Stevens, Poetic Resistance, and Autonomy
Autonomy in Modernism and Beyond
Chapter 1 The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise
1.1 Lyric Distance and Intimacy
1.2 The Poet's Seclusion
1.3 The Plural in the Singular
Chapter 2 Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making
2.1 Aesthetic Interiors: ''What Manner of Building Shall We Build?''
2.2 Autonomy's Architectures
Chapter 3 Community and Autonomy: ''The Mode of Common Dreams''
3.1 The Collapse
3.2 Dance and a New Collective Life
3.3 The Poetic Imagination's Global Reach
3.4 Speaking to the Masses
Chapter 4 Autonomy and Philosophy: ''Reason's Constant Ruin''
4.1 Stevens' Wartime Inaesthetics
4.2 Logical Positivism and Resistance to Philosophy
Coda
Autonomy's ''New Beginnings'' and Spatiotemporal Expansions
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

WALLACE STEVENS AND THE POETICS OF MODERNIST AUTONOMY

Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy presents a rethinking of modernist claims to autonomy by focusing on the work of Wallace Stevens, one of the most renowned poets of the twentieth century. By showing how multiple socio-political currents underlie and motivate Stevens’ version of autonomy, the book challenges the commonly received accounts of the term as art and literature’s escape from the world. It provides new and close readings of Stevens’ work including poems from different stages of the poet’s career and reenergizes a tradition of historicist readings of Stevens from the s and s. The study of Stevens’ work in this book is developed in constant dialogue with current studies in modernism and aesthetic theory, particularly those offered by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. The book examines the question of autonomy in Stevens’ exploration of the aesthetic and social domains, and the vexed issue of his poetry’s relation to philosophical thinking. Gu¨ B H is a lecturer in the Department of English at Stockholm University. Her current research lies at the intersection of new modernist studies, world literature, and aesthetic theory. She is the recipient of the John N. Serio Award for her article in The Wallace Stevens Journal (.). Han has published various articles and book chapters on twentieth-century poetry and modernist aesthetics, and she is an active member of the Wallace Stevens Society.

WALLACE STEVENS AND THE POETICS OF MODERNIST AUTONOMY GÜL BILGE HAN Stockholm University

University Printing House, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Anson Road, #–/, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Cambridge University Press  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Han, Gül Bilge, - author. : Wallace Stevens and the poetics of modernist autonomy / Gül Bilge Han. : New York : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. :   |   (hardback) |   (paperback) : : Stevens, Wallace, -–Criticism and interpretation. | Autonomy in literature. | Modernism (Literature) | Aesthetics, Modern–th century. | Poetry. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. :  .   |  /.–dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

And yet relation appears, A small relation expanding like the shade –Wallace Stevens, “A Connoisseur of Chaos” ()

For Jussi

Contents

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations

page viii ix 

Introduction Committed Solitudes: Imagining Autonomy Otherwise Stevens, Poetic Resistance, and Autonomy Autonomy in Modernism and Beyond



 



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise

. . .

Lyric Distance and Intimacy The Poet’s Seclusion The Plural in the Singular

  

   

Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making



Community and Autonomy: “The Mode of Common Dreams”



. .

. . . .

Aesthetic Interiors: “What Manner of Building Shall We Build?” Autonomy’s Architectures The Collapse Dance and a New Collective Life The Poetic Imagination’s Global Reach Speaking to the Masses

Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

. .

Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics Logical Positivism and Resistance to Philosophy

 

   

  

Coda



Bibliography Index

 

Autonomy’s “New Beginnings” and Spatiotemporal Expansions

vii



Acknowledgments

Writing often feels like a solitary process but the end result is definitely collaborative. This book would not have been possible without the guidance and valuable advice of the following individuals to whom I would like to express my warmest and special thanks: Bart Eeckhout, Bo G. Ekelund, Lee Jenkins, Joel Nickels, Stefan Helgesson, Paul Schreiber, Irina Rasmussen, Beyza Björkman, Ingo Berensmeyer, Giles Whiteley, and Frida Beckman. I would like to extend my appreciation to colleagues at Stockholm University in the Department of English, for their thoughtful and consistent feedback over the years. I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments and suggestions improved the book immensely. I owe particular thanks to Ray Ryan for the support he provided me with in this process and for his interest in my project. Many thanks also to Edgar Mendez and the staff of Cambridge University Press for their editorial and production assistance. Acknowledgments are due also to the Anna Ahlström and Ellen Terserus Foundation for their funding of this project in its final stages. My closest friends and family have been a persistent source of strength and inspiration over the course of writing this book. I wish to give my most loving and heartfelt gratitude to my partner, Tobias Resch, for his love, affection, and patience, and for being there in times of trouble and happiness. I was extremely fortunate to have the support of Halil Koyutu¨rk, Erhan Can Akbulut, Lien de Coster, Josef Olgac, Gözde Du¨zer, Selen Hayal, Eda Gecikmez, and Belgin Nazan Diyaroglu who have always expressed their trust in me both in terms of my work and in terms of challenges of life outside of the academy. Last but not least, thank you, Sevil Gu¨l, my dear mother, for showing me the joys of reading and of poetry in particular.

viii

Abbreviations

CP CPP L ND NL SLT SM WSJ

T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, – Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose Holly Stevens, editor, Letters of Wallace Stevens Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature Vol. I Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract Beverly Cole and Alain Filreis, editors, Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens & José Rodríguez The Wallace Stevens Journal

ix

Introduction

Committed Solitudes: Imagining Autonomy Otherwise In the house the house is all house and each of its authors passing from room to room (. . .) Life in this house-island is riddled with light a sense of something last to say first The tone of an oldest voice Still one of great multitude

–Susan Howe, “ Westerly Terrace,” Souls of the Labadie Tract

Prosaically entitled “ Westerly Terrace,” Susan Howe’s homage to Wallace Stevens embarks on an intimate journey into the poet’s life and verse. Howe’s entire serial piece revolves around the image of Stevens’ “house,” with a strong spatial dimension. The “house” serves as an imaginative trope for the encounter between the two poets engaged “in the same field of labor” (). But the poem does more than evoke a sense of lyric lineage between two generations of American poetry by means of an address that is obliquely shared. The poet moves from imagining the “house” as a confined space of solitude and literary activity, where “all doors are closed” (), to seeing it as a structure that opens in unexpected ways onto the world and history: Last night the door stood open—windows were portholes letters either traced or lost—historical fact the fire on hearth (SLT )





Introduction

Howe alternately frames what she calls “the house of [Stevens’] poetry” as an isolated domain unto itself – a hearth with its fire – and as a space peculiarly openable to the outside world, including history (“on Wallace Stevens” :–). This dual emphasis on the embedded historicity and autotelic character of Stevens’ poetic project brings to the fore questions that have long preoccupied Stevens’ critics. Stevens has been, and continues to be, a central figure both for critics like Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom, who have examined his poetry as an enclosed aesthetic entity, and for historically oriented critics like Alan Filreis and James Longenbach, who have rigorously unraveled its extra-textual engagements. Closing doors shut, or leaving them open, criticism has inhabited the “house of [Stevens’] poetry” on its own capacious terms. For several decades, literary criticism operated with an image of Stevens as a historically and socially irrelevant poet. His poetry was to be found exemplary of an elusive aesthetic posture, if not a willed detachment from the social and historical currents of his epoch. Stevens’ profoundly dense and enigmatic style, and his persistent abstention from external references made it convenient for most of his prominent critics to bracket off extraaesthetic concerns and historical sources in favor of the formal, meditative, and self-reflexive dimensions in his work. Vendler’s claim that “solitude” and “not society” is the main subject of Stevens’ poetry was indicative of the critical thrust of her general approach (Extended Wings ). Not only the interpretive strategies employed in these accounts, but also the repeated emphasis on Stevens’ late romantic vision, left little room for situating his poetry within its cultural and historical moment. While providing many valuable insights into his work, critics approaching Stevens on these terms tended to perpetuate the idea of a poet dwelling in the ivory tower of a disinterested aestheticism and autonomy – an accusation that had been made already at the early stages of his poetic career. Even scholars like Mark Halliday who approached Stevens with a contextual sensibility found it difficult to offer a full account of the broader social existence of his poetry. In his study on the ethics of “interpersonal” relations, Halliday observed that despite the plea for socialization, Stevens’ poetry rests chiefly upon a contemplative aesthetic of solipsism and reverie (–). His arguments run parallel to Milton J. Bates’ judgment that Stevens “embraced his loneliness” and “solitude” (). Such observations  

See for instance Vendler, On Extended Wings and Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire, Bloom, The Poems of Our Climate, and Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens. See especially “The Dandyism of Wallace Stevens” by Gorham Munson.

Committed Solitudes



and remarks, in spite of their partaking in an effort to draw up a larger contextual framework for reading Stevens, undermined any challenge Halliday and Bates may have wished to pose to the well-known charges of escapism expressed by critics well into the s. In the past few decades, however, inspired by New Historicist and cultural materialist approaches, a wide range of critical perspectives has forcefully demonstrated the active engagement of Stevens’ poetry with its literary-political and cultural surroundings. A growing number of scholars have posed more effective challenges to long-established views of Stevens as an isolated aesthete. They have documented and explored how, especially Stevens’ poetry of the s and s developed in a dialogic relationship to the cultural and political events of his time. These critical works have set a precedent for tracing Stevens’ growth as a poet not in isolation but against the backdrop of his larger historical milieu. One of the common tenets of historicist readings has been the apparent shift in Stevens’ poetics from his first collection of verse, Harmonium (), to his second, Ideas of Order (). Filreis and Longenbach in particular explore how, in his Depression-era poetry, Stevens infused a more immediate urgency into the question of poetry’s function in the actual world, an urgency that emerged in conjunction with cultural transitions that can be registered in the American literary scene. In the face of social and economic turmoil during the Depression, a great number of writers adopted politically committed forms of artistic production in order to respond to the crisis and to express solidarity with the oppressed classes. The most radical political artists and critics of the period effectively pressed for the direct participation of art in collective struggles, which prompted a new phase in the historical development of modernist and avant-garde practices. Taking this mobilization into account, Filreis has described the “modernist-radical convergence” of the period (), revealing that the dynamic points of contact between Stevens and the period’s leftist literary circles furnished Stevens’ modernist sensibilities with a new political resonance (–). Looking at the whole trajectory of Stevens’ development, Longenbach, by contrast, has taken up his

 

See Marjorie Perloff, “Revolving in Crystal,” Gerald L. Bruns, “Stevens without Epistemology,” and Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts, –. See especially Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left, Longenbach, The Plain Sense of Things, Harvey Terés, Renewing the Left, the “Stevens and Politics” issue of WSJ, Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police, and, more recently, Milton A. Cohen, Beleaguered Poets.



Introduction

construction of a “middle-ground” position “from which extremes,” both “aesthetic and political,” were engaged (viii). Sometimes diverging from, but mainly complementing one another, these critics have provided us with a more detailed and comprehensive picture of Stevens, which, against the charges of escapist dandyism, affirms rather the relevance of his poetry within the wider public sphere. They have also prepared the ground for later scholars who have returned to the topic of “Stevens and the actual world” from expanded angles. More recent criticism in this vein has paid due attention to matters of gender and race (Brogan), the poetics of the everyday (Phillips and Olson), the formations of collective subjectivity (Nickels), and the cultural and political dimensions of his ekphrastic poems (Costello). The many new (and old) contexts in which Stevens appears in the recent volume, Wallace Stevens in Context (), reflect the extent to which culturally and historically situated readings have radically altered his critical reputation as a poet solely of the mind’s fictions. The contribution of the present book to this body of scholarship brings into a new and different focus the issue of autonomy, which has figured only marginally or negatively in those literary debates that set out to explore Stevens’ poetry historically: While previous criticism has highlighted several aspects of Stevens’ development of a socially responsive poetics – especially in the s and s – I will argue that Stevens during this period developed an elaborate conception of aesthetic autonomy as a necessary condition for poetic engagement. Beyond epitomizing a privileged retreat into the protected space of the aesthetic – as it is often understood – autonomy, in Stevens’ poetry, is imagined in distinctly relational terms; and by “relational” I mean specifically the lines of interconnection between his poetry and its wider material conditions. By demonstrating the significance of the concept for Stevens’ multiple responses to the turbulent cultural and political circumstances of his age, this book suggests a rethinking of modernist claims to autonomy as more than an illusory retreat from literature’s worldly entanglements and historical constraints. 



Unlike Filreis, Longenbach pinpoints the continuities between Harmonium and Ideas of Order rather than positing Stevens’ position in the s as a turn away from his earlier aesthetics. However, he discusses at length how, during the Depression, Stevens moved toward a more socially engaged poetry due to the pressures he experienced from the cultural left about the necessary participation of poetry in social and political life. See Longenbach, –. See Jacqueline Brogan, The Violence within/the Violence without, Siobhan Phillips, The Poetics of the Everyday, Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, Joel Nickels, The Poetry of the Possible, and Bonnie Costello, Planets on Tables.

Committed Solitudes



The doctrine of aesthetic autonomy constitutes a significant part of the historical legacy of literary and artistic modernisms. The conception of art as an immanent formation governed by its own internal logic underpins a set of interrelated issues concerning artistic agency, textual meaning, mode of production, reception, and formal innovation that are all central to modernism’s self-definition. Within the field of modernist studies, in particular, the claim to autonomy is often understood in terms of art’s programmatic withdrawal from external imperatives (socioeconomic, political, cultural, etc.). The idea of the art object as an autonomous entity independent of extraneous pressures and concerns, which had dominated the New Critical paradigm of modernism, has long been critiqued as perpetuating an ideological mystification that obfuscates art’s historical origins and determinants. Instead of seeing literary works as selfregulating and freestanding systems, contemporary scholars of modernism focus on the ways in which different historical currents inform the substance of their production, meaning, and reception. In general terms, then, reading Stevens today from a literary-critical perspective cannot be done any longer without taking into account the historical situation of the production and cultural location of his poetry. Yet, pursuing his poetics with regard precisely to its historical conditions affords a strong basis for complicating the existing critical paradigms that view modernist notions of autonomy as merely the theoretical pretext for a retreat into a privileged artistic domain, away from social and political responses and responsibilities. As I will demonstrate throughout this book, the claim to autonomy as it emerges in Stevens’ poetry implies further rather than fewer social and political implications. But the latter emerge only provided that we investigate the claim in its historical specificity, and examine the cultural conditions under which it was formed. Stevens’ poetry, especially from the s through the s, incorporates positions that imply both its inclusion of, and exclusion from, larger historical forces. His poetics articulates in concert the seemingly antagonistic stances of aesthetic separation and social engagement – the solitude of poetry and its commitment to the general order of the social. It presents these stances not as polarized extremes but as mutually implicated elements for constructing a force field that enables new nodes of social, aesthetic, and political transfers. Stevens’ poetics, in other words, operates 

For influential considerations of autonomy as ideology, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity, Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy, and Lentricchia, After the New Criticism and Criticism and Social Change.



Introduction

with an aesthetic strategy that, by separating and distancing itself from its social reality, brings forth different potential forms of relationality between poetry and collective life. In this strategic enactment of separation, the idea of autonomy is discursively developed as a primary force for negotiating the points of interaction that spin out from the domain of his poetry to its wider historical sphere of engagement. This study, then, takes as its starting point the multiple ways in which Wallace Stevens’ poetics brings about a variety of conceptual, linguistic, and spatial configurations of aesthetic autonomy with a range of contextual underpinnings. Written at the height of the Depression and the onset of World War II, when the commitment of literature to sociopolitical issues was hotly debated among critics and artists, Stevens’ poetry offers an understanding of autonomy not as an escape from the immediate world that presses in upon it, but as a necessary condition for imagining new forms of engagement with the historical crisis surrounding it. By positing aesthetic autonomy as a sine qua non for poetry’s intervention in the social domain, Stevens’ poetry destabilizes the commonly asserted notions of modernist routes toward autonomy as figuring the impasse and failure of art’s relation to collective life. Once we acknowledge this destabilization, we may return to Stevens in order to address current theoretical attempts to recalibrate autonomy. I will turn to an overview of various theoretical considerations developed around modernist claims to autonomy, and discuss where this concept now stands in the field of literary criticism later in this introduction. This will include a discussion of the theoretical frameworks offered by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou for rethinking the poetic notion of autonomy in relation to the substantive domains of politics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Before getting into these discussions, however, I would like to offer a brief examination of one of Stevens’ Depression-era poems, “Mozart, ” from Ideas of Order (). The poem provides a compelling case for illuminating the particular understanding of autonomy that will animate this book, an understanding that informed the responses of Stevens’ poetics to the fluctuating sociopolitical and cultural climate under which it was given shape. If Howe, in her homage, pictures Stevens in the “room” in the “house” to convey a sense of his place both in her work and in a larger history, in “Mozart, ,” Stevens imagines his own poet-figure in a room in the house to examine, as he wrote, “the status of the poet in a disturbed society, or, for that matter, in any society” (L ). The poem begins with an imperative voice, addressing the poet:

Committed Solitudes



Poet, be seated at the piano. Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo, Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, Its envious cachinnation.

(CPP )

The confined space in which Stevens imagines his poet-figure making music is situated in proximity to the collective space of a riot taking place outside: “If they throw stones upon the roof / While you practice arpeggios, / It is because they carry down the stairs / A body in rags. / Be seated at the piano” (CPP ). The pelting of stones on the roof, the clamor of the people carrying a dead body, and the musical notes of the piano played by the poet make up the thematic substance of the poem that is alternately sounded and visualized. The historical background echoing throughout Stevens’ lines captures the generally disruptive effects of the Depression (on “any society,” and thus, both locally and globally). A less audible but equally important context, however, which is often brought into the discussions of the poem, is the state of the cultural spectrum in the United States at the time. The temporal frame in which Stevens sets the scene, and in which the poem was published () was stirred by debates crystallizing around the issue of art’s social and political efficacy. Throughout the s – “the red decade,” “the angry decade” – artists and poets were called upon to engage in conversation with the masses facing the economic hardships caused by the capitalist crisis. In “Mozart, ” the secluded space of artistic activity where poetic expression is identified with Mozartian music is unsettled by the outrage of the masses, whose voices are intruding into the poet’s segregated territory. But the unidentified speaker instructs the poet who is practicing “arpeggios” to remain “seated at the piano” despite the upheaval that has taken over the street. At the same time, he urges the poet to “[p]lay the present,” and later, to transform his “voice” into the collective “voice” of the masses by abandoning the private, personal “you” for the intersubjective and relational inflections of “thou”: “Be thou the voice, / Not you. Be thou, be thou / The voice of angry fear, / The voice of this besieging pain” (CPP ). The use of “thou” connotes a new sense of intimacy not only between the speaker and the addressee, but also between the poet and the masses: No longer affirming a simple contrast between angry voices outside and artful arpeggios inside, the pianist is recruited to sound the riotous sentiments – that is, the intrusion is only a first moment, the adoption of the outside voice is next. Previous commentators on the poem have viewed this suspension, or the interruption of the poet’s aesthetic interior, as evidence for Stevens



Introduction

coming to terms with the awareness that, amidst the actual exigencies of the times, he could no longer speak coherently from the position of a pure aestheticism shut off from the world. “Few Stevens poems,” Filreis writes, “convey as much fear of the personal poetic dead end as ‘Mozart, ,’ or present as anxiously the risk of accusations of aestheticism in the face of crisis” (“Three Poems” ). The poem expresses, according to Longenbach, Stevens’ recognition that “the old music played in the old way will no longer suffice, no matter how much we mourn its passing” (). Similarly, Cohen argues that Stevens displays a sense of “regret for the lost Mozartian past, a past when art could be ‘pure’ and the artist untroubled by his times” (). Accordingly, the staging of such anxiety, mourning, and regret, as proposed in these readings, became also the driving force behind Stevens’ renewal of his poetics in order to respond to the cultural demands and pressures of the s. For these critics, the poem contests the aesthetic interiority of a “pure poetry” and acknowledges the need to replace it with a more socially responsive artistic model. In “Mozart, ,” Stevens does indeed respond to the new political demands placed upon poetry under the changed cultural atmosphere of the Depression. Yet, the overall rhetorical direction of the poem goes far beyond lamenting the insufficiency of aesthetic enclosure for a socially engaging poetics. The poem’s tone and imaginary setting provide at once the basis of a separate poetic territory that is epitomized by the poet’s demarcated practicing room, and a claim to relevance to the collective struggle that is taking place outside. Stevens makes the sound, or the musicality of poetry, a central subject of the poem. The relationship between sounds and images points to a latent tension, woven into the poem’s texture, between the people’s “cries” and the poet’s notes, in their competing sounds – a double emergence of the site of autonomy (the carefully delineated space of poetic practice) and that of heteronomy (the street). The aesthetic interior is pointedly conjured up in the poet’s room while the social exterior, the violence of the street, impinges from without. The speaker’s address to the poet suggests a double-edged poetic ambition. On the one hand, it involves the task of adopting a civic voice to become the collective “voice of angry fear,” and of the “besieging pain,” that is to say, to speak for the masses. On the other hand, it sets up the task of maintaining a model of aesthetic territoriality by preserving the boundaries of artistic space and remaining there, making music: The imperative phrase by which the speaker addresses the poet, “be seated,” is repeated three times in this fairly short poem, including in the very final line. The ambivalent juxtaposition of these tasks – of poetry as a self-legislating

Committed Solitudes



procedure of mere musical sound, occupying a space of its own, and of poetry as a politicized expression of social flux and communal needs – is paradigmatic. Composing poetry is not a matter of elevating one task over the other but of staging the interplay between these ostensibly differentiated logics of commitment to collective solidarity and commitment to separation and self-determination as the creative nexus of aesthetic production. Thus, the poem sets out to envision the invention of artistic forms without external function (the poet’s music), while deliberately identifying such forms with a site of collective mobilization and an expression of dissent – giving voice to the crowd’s anger, fear, and pain. The perspective that emerges from this arrangement suggests a compound of social reciprocity and autonomy of poetic practice. It is not the personal autonomy of the individual poet that the poem holds up, but the autonomy of the poetic process and, crucially, of the space in which this process is carried on. The speaker’s invocation of “thou,” by which the poet’s voice is supposed to take on a collective character, seeks to establish a mode of artistic subjectivity that requires abandoning the personal private “you”. The coexistence of these positions (social reciprocity and autonomy) allows for an alternative production of singularity that is predicated on musical/poetic form and activity. The sound of the piano played by the poet does not translate into a song of the street as such, with a merely instrumental political function. But it evolves nevertheless in tandem with the historical matrix of social change that marks the streets of . The potential evolution of the poet’s music is marked at the level of a movement between different musical styles: “arpeggios,” “divertimento,” and “concerto” (CPP ). The trajectory between these forms adds a new dimension to the tension the poem displays between aesthetic autonomy and social engagement. The first musical style with which the speaker identifies the poet’s music is that of the arpeggio, which consists of individual notes played sequentially rather than simultaneously. The restricted scope of this form of musical performance cannot accommodate the multiplicity of cadences and voices of “the present,” which the poet is urged to incorporate into his music. “[P]ractic[ing] arpeggios” is presented as a preparatory phase from which the poet is expected to develop and expand. The speaker introduces two different possibilities for the anticipated transformation of the poet’s music: the divertimento, described as a “lucid souvenir of the past,” and the concerto, seen as an “airy dream of the future” (CPP ). Diverting, or turning away from social crises, was part of the aesthetic function of



Introduction

the eighteenth-century divertimento, a form of composition primarily composed for entertainment in intimate social settings (aristocratic as a matter of course). This stylistic model stands in stark contrast to the violent context of the s, where the poet is exposed to the outside voices of terror and chaos. The second form is the concerto, which is linked to the “future” with a utopian drive for reconciliation (CPP ). Stevens’ reference to Mozart acquires an additional tropological significance here. Just as Mozart’s piano concertos brought together the singular instrument and the collective orchestra, the poem calls into play the poet’s solo piano and the collective voices of the street simultaneously. Inasmuch as the concerto bears the potential for sustaining both the singularity (the poetic/ musical) and the plurality (the collective) in a reciprocal process of competition and harmonization, the poem finds the present an inauspicious time for the kind of harmonious dialogue upon which this form of music was originally founded. The concerto seems like an “airy dream” in dire political trouble. The speaker, nevertheless, presents an instance of this airy fantasy in the fifth stanza. The artistic reconciliation of social conflict within the realm of the aesthetic facilitates a cathartic resolution. Voices of anger and pain are replaced by the abstract, “wintry sound / . . . / By which sorrow is released, / Dismissed, absolved / In a starry placating”. This harmonious resolution of socially inflicted “sorrow” seems excessive and untimely. So it is significant that the speaker ends by pinpointing the persistence of the present turmoil that awaits a response: “The snow is falling / And the streets are full of cries. / Be seated, thou”. The poem does not, however, indicate a wholesale rejection of Mozartian music, but calls for renewing its existing forms for the present: “We may return to Mozart. / He was young, and we, we are old” (CPP ; emphasis added). The call for a shift away from the personal “you” to a more socially oriented voice is emphasized by the integration of the speaker’s voice into a collective “we”. The mode of aesthetic renewal that is explored in the poem is not a completed event but an ongoing process, which would continue to fuel Stevens’ writing as the decade unfolded. In “Mozart, ,” Stevens sets in motion the process of negotiating a politically inclusionary and responsive poetics, which requires reinventing poetic expression under the new social circumstances brought on by the Depression. In the course of exploring its formal and artistic conditions of possibility, the poem foregrounds a perspective that disallows the total immersion of aesthetic “practice” in the systemic crisis of social reality. It

Committed Solitudes



stakes out and negotiates the boundaries of poetic space through an openended strategy of self-differentiation and distantiation. The rhetoric of the poem indicates the necessary link between poetic production and collective experience, while at the same time asserting the separation of poetry as at one with its self-transformative potential, which is imagined as both shared and distinct. The condition of separation constitutes not a secure space for the poet to inhabit but a precarious discursive arena that fosters a selfquestioning relationship to social order. The double bind of autonomy and social relevance that is dramatized by the poem suggests an attitude of resistance to the cultural demands of the s whereby the placing of art at the service of an explicit political message became a burning issue for many modernist and radical poets alike. Poetic expression, as attested by the poem, refuses to comply with a predetermined artistic model of social participation and collective relevance. Instead, the poem maps out an alternative route to actualizing social responsiveness with a capacity for testing the possibilities and limits of poetic discourse for collective enunciation. Separation and autonomy are constitutive of the very process of negotiating the transformation of poetic discourse, rather than indicating an escape from the site of political action and conflict. In the context conjured up by the poem, in other words, aesthetic autonomy becomes manifest through the acknowledged presence of the outside social fabric. The poem does not demarcate a separate territory except by introducing the external social reality it gestures toward and interacts with. This particular configuration of autonomy takes various forms in Stevens’ poetry of the period. As I will demonstrate, it is determined by two main objectives: On the one hand, it resists the complete absorption of poetry into social reality, which, in large measure, characterized the dominant models of politically committed writing in the s; on the other, it forms the staging ground on which a new field of relations to the public domain is opened up. The claim to autonomy, within this frame, heeds the 

Modernist and radical poets who clearly responded to the cultural shift from the s to the s include, among others, Archibald MacLeish, Isidor Schneider, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and the Objectivists. For detailed accounts of American poetry in the s, see Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery, John Lowney, History, Memory, and the Literary Left, and Michael Thurston, Making Something Happen. Far from producing straightforward positions with respect to art’s political role, the transition from the s to the s created a rich discursive arena of diverse views (among the cultural left) of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. I discuss these further in Chapters  and , so as to provide a more contextualized understanding of the period’s critical and artistic approaches to the question of aesthetic autonomy and politics.



Introduction

call for relationality, guided by the quest for an affinitive bond with collective experience, while it nevertheless sweeps aside received notions of social engagement. The conceptual knot of separation (autonomy) and engagement (heteronomy) constitutes not a confused tangle of poetry and its extra-aesthetic allegiances but the tying together of mutually defining, irreducible positions by which the social and political implications of Stevens’ poetics become visible. This relational construction of autonomy and its contextual motivations form the main subject of the present book.

Stevens, Poetic Resistance, and Autonomy The poetic notion of resistance to external pressures and the cultural constraints of the age – a sentiment that pervades “Mozart, ” – makes up one of the main strands of Stevens’ configuration of aesthetic autonomy. It is well known that the question of resistance to the “pressure[s] of the contemporaneous” assumed a central place in Stevens’ essays and lectures of the mid-s and early s, among which his frequently cited  Harvard lecture “The Irrational Element in Poetry” is perhaps the most significant (CPP ). Imagining poetry as a space of resistance becomes central for Stevens in the s because of the urgent need for repositioning poetry vis-à-vis the pressing realities of his historical moment, a process in which the problem of autonomy, as I argue, constitutes a recurrent leitmotif. But how has Stevens criticism come to grips with questions of resistance and aesthetic autonomy? As Bart Eeckhout has outlined in detail, the critical discussion surrounding Stevens’ poetics of “resistance” has engendered a rich tapestry of multifaceted perspectives that can hardly be fit into clear-cut or categorical schemes (Wallace Stevens –). Nevertheless, it is possible to see in the methodological and theoretical concerns of that debate a reflection of the two main threads in Stevens criticism that continue to influence our understanding of his poetry today. The first phase of criticism is spread over a broad canvas of aesthetic and philosophical vantage points, largely characterized by an insistent textual focus that registers Stevens’ resistance to “interpretive closure,” “rational explication,” and “fixity” on both formal and thematic levels. The main aesthetic and philosophical approaches in Stevens criticism, especially up until the s, remained aloof from contextual analysis. They were supported, more often than not, by an underlying assumption about textual self-sufficiency, or the semantic autonomy of language vis-à-vis social and historical determinants. This stance is most visible in the widely

Poetic Resistance, Autonomy



shared insistence on Stevens’ detachment from, or resistance against, external forces, including the reader’s attempts to stabilize poetic meaning. The second, historicist approach, on the other hand, which began taking shape in the s, has been concerned with tracing the sociopolitical motives behind Stevens’ emphasis on poetic “resistance.” As we shall see, however, that exploration paid little or no attention to the implications of “resistance” for the question of aesthetic autonomy. B. J. Leggett’s Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory is a good starting point for a discussion of the first approach. Leggett pays close attention to the discursive orientations of Stevens’ poetry toward indeterminacy, and its resistance to interpretation. Like many other critics, Leggett refers to one of Stevens’ most enigmatic lines: “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,” from the opening of the poem “Man Carrying Thing” (CPP ) (included in a slightly altered fashion in Adagia [CPP ]). “To resist the intelligence,” Leggett suggests, is “to preserve the potency of poetry . . . against the destructive tendency of the intellect to reduce it to statement” (). For Leggett, a “passive” mode of “detachment” governs the initial dynamics of Stevens’ poetics (). This sense of detachment is driven by an anxiety about the possibility that the mind’s aesthetic and contemplative processes will be disrupted, or that poetic meaning will be reduced to paraphrase (). Leggett’s reading of resistance as a process of detachment complements Vendler’s earlier point that “the poetry of disconnection is Stevens’ most adequate form . . . [which] will always challenge the best efforts of critical articulation” (Extended Wings ). But whereas Leggett sees the resistance to intelligence as a steady attempt to arrest the interpretative process before it goes too far, for Vendler, Stevens’ poetry not only demands but also stokes a desire for close inspection even as it seeks to elude the reader’s intelligence (–). Stevens’ refusal to “resolve theoretical difficulties” and internal paradoxes invites further attention to the stylistic subtleties and multiple layers of linguistic experimentation at work in his poetry (). In its broad implications, Vendler’s argument persists in the formalist accounts of later scholars who have all concentrated on Stevens’ creative manipulations of figurative language, syntactic inversion, prosody, and semantic ambiguity. 

See Marie Borroff, Language and the Poet, Beverly Maeder, Wallace Stevens’ Experimental Language, Eleanor Cook’s seminal work, Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War, and more recently, Stefan Holander, Wallace Stevens and the Realities of Poetic Language, and Kristine Santilli, Myth, Wallace Stevens and the Desirous Motions of Poetic Language.



Introduction

The poetic notion of resistance has also found its way into the philosophical strain of what I have identified, for schematic purposes, as the first phase. Stevens’ poetry has been connected to various schools of thought, ranging from phenomenology and deconstruction to pragmatism over the years. J. Hillis Miller’s early phenomenological work shares with a host of other critics, a preoccupation with the idea of perpetual flux (“Poetry of Being” –). In this view, Stevens’ poetry generates fluctuating and fragmentary forms of poetic consciousness that emerge and dissipate from one moment to the next. The effect of such poetry is to resist fixity and closure by constantly shifting in and out of the disconnected experiences of “imagination” and “reality” – the states of imaginative “creation” and “decreation” of the mind’s fictions (Miller, “Poetry of Being” –). The characteristics of openness, fluidity, and incompleteness with which Miller identifies Stevens’ poetic operations of the mind continue to inform his deconstructionist approach of the s, where he traces “moments of suspension” when the poems’ linguistic repertoire self-reflexively calls into question the transparency of language and meaning (The Linguistic Moment xiv). Predictably, Miller and other deconstructionist critics read Stevens’ poetry as a potentially unlimited linguistic play of “doubled and redoubled meanings” (a vexing “mise en abyme”) that refuses being placed in a totalizing paradigm of fixed definitions (“Stevens’ Rock” , ). Despite the evident differences in their respective purposes, deconstructionist and (early) formalist approaches to Stevens share a common orientation toward self-reflexivity, linguistic indeterminacy, and semantic dissonance along with a tendency to circumvent extratextual sources and any of the various historical concerns. Indeed, although they rarely make this explicit, both approaches permit an assertion of textual autonomy, based on an understanding of the signifying mechanisms of Stevens’ poetic language as a self-referential system with no purchase on outside interference (other than the linguistic and the intertextual). As Lee M. Jenkins has also noted, such an exclusive focus on poetic language harks back to New Critical notions of textual self-sufficiency (“America” n), with the important caveat that deconstructionist readings cast aside the possibility of a unified meaning, which had been systematically espoused by the New Critics. Autonomy, in this context, becomes the founding gesture of a  

See also Thomas J. Hines, The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Richard Blessing, Wallace Stevens’ Whole Harmonium, and Alan Perlis, Wallace Stevens. See also Miller, The Linguistic Moment, Joseph Riddel, “Decentering the Image,” Paul Bové, A Destructive Poetics, and Michael Beehler, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and the Discourses of Difference.

Poetic Resistance, Autonomy



critical methodology that seeks to bracket the historicity of poetic discourse, rather than having it figure in the discussion as a concept or trope to be contextually situated and explored (which this book seeks to do). A similar emphasis on philosophical and linguistic over historical concerns can be found among the most influential pragmatist readers of Stevens, who have equally invested in exploring the creative potential of “indeterminacy,” “constant change,” and “process-oriented thinking.” Richard Poirier’s Poetry and Pragmatism examines “vagueness” in Stevens in terms of a liberating “linguistic skepticism,” which he sees as fundamental to American pragmatist (and proto-pragmatist) thought stretching from Ralph Waldo Emerson to William James (). To Poirier, Stevens’ use of poetic language emphasizes transition over “conclusiveness” and “dogma” in its relation to established systems of belief (). Ultimately, both “pragmatism” and “poetry” effectuate processes of “change carried out entirely within language,” which is exempt “from historical crises real or concocted” (; emphasis in the original). Among the variety of critical discourses that note the significance of poetic “resistance” in Stevens’ work, Eeckhout’s Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing sets forth a careful assessment of the concept and its critical reception. Taking the same cue from the poem “Man Carrying Thing,” he offers a critical corrective to readings of resistance as an unremitting rhetorical tour de force against “the intelligence” in terms of both poetic thought and its relation to the reader. For Eeckhout, rather than rejecting intelligibility, Stevens’ poetry rests upon a productive tension “between intelligible thoughts and a counterforce that is constantly in the process of undercutting or resisting” transparency (). The workings of this tension open up questions regarding the limits and the signifying possibilities of reading and writing as they are explored in the poet’s work. While these critical assessments have identified variously the textual, philosophical, and interpretive challenges as indicators of poetic resistance, others have taken a quite different path by inserting into the discussion the problem of subjectivity, and of Stevens’ textual constructions of a self. Halliday examines, from an ethical viewpoint, the notion of resistance in light of Stevens’ “profound aversion to the demands of interpersonal relations” (). He suggests that Stevens’ poetry reflects an “arguably narcissistic” () attitude of “isolation and alienation,” which 

See also Jonathan Levin’s The Poetics of Transition, which follows Poirier’s line of argument by exploring the poetic valuation of transitionality with an extended focus on Stevens’ defense of the imagination against the limiting scope of “rational intelligence” ().



Introduction

acknowledges the problem of dealing with the interpersonal, yet favors the integrity of the poet’s individual self over social responsibility for others (–). With reference to Stevens’ remarks on the notion of “resistance” from “The Irrational Element,” Halliday argues that the threatening “pressure of reality” that Stevens meant to resist in his poems “includes the pressure of conceivable responsibility to ‘the community and other people’” (). Where Halliday sees an objectionable lack of ethical concern, Charles Altieri finds, in Stevens’ valorization of subjective particularity, a potential embodiment of antagonistic agency, achieved through abstraction and metaphor. Altieri provides a compelling treatment of Stevens’ formations of lyric subjectivity around the first person “I.” Distinct in their abstraction from the “authorial subject,” Stevens’ protean forms of selfhood dramatize an ongoing confrontation with the dictates of history, and history’s tendency to subsume all, including the poetic consciousness (Painterly Abstraction , ). This lyric mode of resistance “establishes possible versions of aligning the self to the world” (). It is capable of affecting shared modes of desire and experience without being circumscribed by “beginnings and endings” imposed by “historicism” (). Altieri’s version of Stevensian subjectivity is born out of multifaceted forms of selfexpression seeking to salvage a degree of artistic and individual autonomy at the price of disengaging from any given historical stage. It was precisely this tendency of reading Stevens either against or apart from history that stimulated a wave of contextually situated analyses from the late s to the present with the purpose of illuminating the social and political implications of his poetry and thought. Thus, several critics have explored the points of intersection between poetic and political senses of resistance in Stevens’ writing. The locus classicus for these critics is Stevens’ commentary on the urgency of resisting the “pressure of the contemporaneous” in both aesthetic and political registers in “The Irrational Element” (CPP ). As Longenbach, Filreis, and others suggest, the pressures, at this point in Stevens’ life as a writer, were built up by the economic depression, the battle between fascism and communism, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the impending threat of another world war. Crucially, these pressures were mediated and reinforced by the cultural scene, where the call for an uncompromising engagement with the actual crises of the period was gaining significant impetus. Longenbach interprets Stevens’ insistence on the resistant role of poetry as part of his response both to the historical events and to the cultural and political discourses of his age (–). He sees Stevens deploying in both

Poetic Resistance, Autonomy



his poetry and prose a deeply engaged and at the same time skeptical stance toward ideologically fixed positions, such as the “utopian” optimism and “apocalyptic” despair that permeated the rhetoric of “his generation” faced with extreme tides of unrest (). Like Longenbach, Filreis in Modernism from Right to Left explores Stevens’ poetic development and his conception of resistance in view of his reciprocal interactions with the radical cultural and literary circles through the s up to the outbreak of war (–). Tracing the changing political convictions of the poet, he draws attention to the shift in Stevens’ understanding of “resistance,” from an “engaged stance” (“opposite of escape”) in “The Irrational Element” () to “an escapist process” in his  lecture “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (CPP , ). In Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, which deals with Stevens’ poetics during and after World War II, Filreis augments this discussion by interpreting Stevens’ comments on escapism in light of the nationwide isolationist impulse that had been prevalent during the years prior to the United States’ entry into the war (–). According to Filreis, Stevens left his  position a few years after Pearl Harbor by taking a new political turn due to his correspondence with French writers who “were indeed perilously involved with Résistance in the strict sense” (). Similarly, Brogan teases out the impact of World War II on Stevens’ poetry by pinpointing the centrality of the revolutionary poetic value of resistance against the “increasingly violent reality” of war (). She demonstrates the degree to which the impulse to “resist” played a dynamic role in Stevens’ poetic evolvement: changing “from the felt need for aesthetic disagreement [with objectivism] through political resistance to a more torturous necessity to ‘witness’ to the horrors of his time” (). Brogan finds the subversive political force of Stevens’ wartime poetry in its dismantling of the hegemonic “descriptions of his world that had increasingly come to dominate it in escalating violence” (). In short, 

 



In partial agreement with Longenbach’s point, Malcolm Woodland takes issue with Stevens’ “simultaneous use of, and resistance to an apocalyptic rhetoric” of cultural collapse as a threat against the legitimacy of modernist poetic values (). He ties this position to the idea of autonomy only to reassert the critical consensus about its inadequacy to generate any form of social or “political engagement” (). Among the pressures Filreis lists is the political writers’ and critics’ aspiration toward social realism in the s. See my discussion of this aspect of Filreis’ argument in Chapter . Longenbach also comments on this shift, claiming that even this later impulse to “escape” war was not a retreat from social reality, since, as Stevens himself also realized, such an apparently apolitical position was itself a deeply ingrained “reaction to the political situation of the age” (–). See also Angus Cleghorn, Wallace Stevens’ Poetics and Melita Schaum, “Lyric Resistance.”



Introduction

noticeably diverging from the majority of philosophical and aesthetically oriented readings, “resistance,” in these accounts, serves as a means of encoding the self-revisionary poetic and political sentiments of the poet with respect to his epoch’s social material conditions. The point about these interpretations is not that they have overstated the importance of “resistance” as a specific marker of Stevens’ dynamic interplay with his sociopolitical and cultural surroundings. Rather, contextualizing critics have shied away from dealing with the no less important question of aesthetic autonomy, despite its pertinence to Stevens’ idea of poetically resisting external pressures. This unwillingness to engage with the topic of autonomy, among historicist critics, is in keeping with contemporary critical discourses within modernist studies more generally, where the term is either largely abandoned or deemed as cherishing an ideologically suspect paradigm instituted by the exponents of New Criticism. Such a view, seemingly opposed to established orthodoxies about modernist conceptions, imposes itself by means of a virtual denial that the concept of autonomy had a historical reality beyond serving as the theoretical ploy of conservative critics of “high modernism.” As Lisa Siraganian has duly pointed out, such a position “tend[s] to maintain,” paradoxically, “New Critical definitions as accurately portraying modernists’ own conception of autonomy” (). By refraining from contextually analyzing the concept’s appearance and tensions in modernist texts themselves, criticism – apart from very recent scholarship, and I will come to this very shortly – risks reproducing modernist notions of autonomy defined through the problematic lens of New Critical theory. Andrew Goldstone’s recent book, Fictions of Autonomy, is the only critical work that touches upon the social meanings of autonomy in Stevens’ writing. The chapter on Stevens, “Literature without External Reference,” gives an incisive account of the poet’s rhetorical use of tautology as a way of asserting the non-referential semiotic autonomy of poetic language (–). Drawing on de Man’s theories of non-referentiality, Goldstone shows how Stevens’ tautological constructions, while affirming poetic autonomy, are at the same time invested with constant reminders that they are intrinsically dependent on “socially shared common knowledge” and “dialogue” (–). Although Goldstone promises a contextualized discussion of the concept, his readings of Stevens make little reference to the cultural atmosphere of the s and early s (part of the period covered in his book) when the questions of art’s autonomy, 

See also Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work, .

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

political instrumentality, and aestheticism assumed utmost urgency. As will become clear throughout this book, Stevens’ interactions with the literary-political debates and tensions of the period, as detailed in the following chapters, had a profound effect on his dual commitment to autonomy and social engagement. Finally, it is important to note that even though contextualizing Stevens has generally been the favored strategy for providing a more complete picture of his poetry’s place in the expanding maps of historical modernism, that move has met with pointed criticism as well. Edward Ragg, in his remarkably insightful study on Stevensian abstraction, has criticized historicist accounts for overamplifying “the role Stevens’ poetry plays in responding to political and social issues” (). With reference to the interpretive frameworks offered by Filreis, Cleghorn, and Brogan, Ragg has argued that “such responses” risk “sacrificing the particularities of the poetry to the general argument that poetry challenges commonsensical understandings of the world/‘reality’” (). Likewise, Eeckhout has questioned the tendency of giving overriding precedence to “historical contexts” to the point where “the interpretation of Stevens’ poetry proper is of only marginal importance” (Wallace Stevens –). Along the same lines, Vendler, in a recent interview, has complained that critics reading Stevens historically “seemed to love words less than thoughts and facts . . . When a school of criticism estranges itself from the ‘words,’ I feel it is no longer talking about poems” (). In an essay reflecting back on his own earlier work, finally, Filreis himself already anticipated these criticisms by arguing that his and others’ critical endeavors to capture the political elements of Stevens’ work and life led to “a single path formed by straight and narrow rather than crisscrossed aesthetic taxonomies” (“Sound at an Impasse” ). If these objections are taken into account, the crucial question becomes whether the sociopolitical engagements in Stevens’ poetry necessarily entail a “risk” of overlooking the complexity of its aesthetic “particularities” (Ragg ). Are there ways of methodologically reinstating and investing in the practices of close reading – practices central to Ragg’s, Eeckhout’s, and Vendler’s criticisms, each in their own manner – while at the same time attending to the multilayered linkages between the historical, political, and aesthetic dimensions of Stevens’ poetics? Can we exegetically and theoretically reenergize the central concerns of modernist aesthetics, such as the claim to autonomy, as embedded in, and evolving dynamically in relation to wider social and historical contexts that precede it, rather than rejecting 

See Jack Selzer and Ann George, Kenneth Burke in the s, –.



Introduction

that claim as the residual presence of a dated literary-critical position? These are the guiding questions that undergird this book both in its specific aim to highlight Stevens’ particular enactments of aesthetic autonomy and in its broader concern: to stimulate a debate about the relevance and the active role played by the question of autonomy in negotiating the boundary between aesthetic and social domains, the formation of collectivity in poetic expression, and the vexed relationship between poetic and philosophical modes of thinking with distinct contextual motivations. It is to these ends that this book strives against the current of widely accepted accounts of modernist autonomy as literature’s immunity from the world. Perhaps, more than any other modernist poet, Stevens has been associated with this “disengaged” version of autonomy (Lauter –). In the process, I draw on recent reevaluations of the concept, specifically, in Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the politics of aesthetics and in Alain Badiou’s “inaesthetics,” with a view to extending the boundaries of our thinking about autonomy and its implications. In the remainder of this introduction, I will provide a brief account of the major theoretical frameworks developed around autonomy and its current assessments within the field of modernist studies. First, I will trace the notion of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller to its twentiethcentury manifestations in aesthetic theory and artistic practice. Second, I will discuss recent contributions to the field in the past decade, which has prompted a renewed critical attention to the unresolved question of autonomy in modernist and contemporary discourse. This will afford a basis for clarifying how aesthetic autonomy will be understood theoretically throughout the subsequent chapters.

Autonomy in Modernism and Beyond The critical theories of art as an autonomous realm of activity and experience enjoy a long history within the fields of aesthetic theory and philosophy, from the eighteenth-century writings of Kant and Schiller up through the present moment. Thus, my aim is not to give a full-scale genealogy of the emergence and the development of the concept, which would exceed the scope and purpose of this book. It is rather to follow some of the main threads of the discussion in order to provide a discursive historical background for understanding the current perspectives and debates on modernist autonomy and to position my own approach in relation to them. Kant’s Critique of Judgment (), and Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man () mark the beginning of philosophical reflection

Modernism



on aesthetics – closely tied to “beauty” and “form” in this context – as a distinct realm of production and reception. Kant deals primarily with the “autonomy of aesthetic judgment,” which holds that the experience and judgment of beauty (including art) are free from moral, rational, and empirical interests. For Kant, as for Schiller, the work of art is independent of functional considerations, and this noninstrumental characteristic is what distinguishes it from other forms of human production and artifice. With the idea that art presents a “disinterested” and universal realm of experience, with no other purpose than itself, the conceptual basis is laid for various theoretical claims to art’s aesthetic autonomy in subsequent centuries (Kant xvii-xviii, –; Schiller –). Although both of these thinkers emphasize the signal experience of “aesthetic freedom,” for Schiller, unlike Kant, the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic is, in turn, explicitly integrated into a consideration of its political import for the public sphere (Adelman –). Aesthetics is seen as a realm that, precisely in its symbolic embodiment of an ideal emancipation, foreshadows an essentially utopian model of “political freedom,” which politics cannot fully realize on its own (Schiller ). Schiller’s transposition of the discussion of aesthetic autonomy into the sphere of politics shows that broader social implications lie at the heart of the concept’s very emergence. Later in the period, G. W. F. Hegel maps out a substantially different understanding of art and its forms in connection to history. While acknowledging art as a separate institution, Hegel contends that aesthetics is far from being a purified medium of expression ruled by its own immanent laws or by the individual resolutions of artists (–). It is, rather, the sensible form of the “consciousness of the age” (spirit, Geist) shaped by the historical determinants and realities outside itself. In its strong assertion of the historical foundation of art, Hegel’s aesthetic theory, unlike the works of his philosophical predecessors (Kant, Schiller, Baumgarten, and others), rejects the idea of the aesthetic as a self-sufficient and autonomous formation (Hegel –). Hegel’s intervention is fundamental to the history of aesthetics, since the emphasis on art’s heteronomous position proposes an alternative tradition to the Kantian legacy of aesthetic autonomy. Taken together, these two traditions lay the philosophical ground for the major theoretical developments of modern aesthetics.   

For a political reading of Kantian terms, including autonomy, which challenges this perspective, see Michael Wayne’s Red Kant. For further discussion, see Jonathan Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic, . See also Owen Hulatt, Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy, –.



Introduction

The definitions of aesthetic autonomy offered in Kant and Schiller powerfully pass into the nineteenth century, exerting an enduring impact especially on romantic poetry. Romanticism holds equally an idealized vision of artistic freedom from the manipulations of moral, didactic, and utilitarian ends. Still, there are important distinctions between Kantian and romantic aspirations. While Kant’s framework is primarily focused on the autonomy of aesthetic judgment and experience, generally speaking, romanticism places a more distinctive accent on the artist’s creativity (the divine genius of the poet), and on the autotelic nature of the imaginative creation itself (Seyhan ). In the latter part of the nineteenth century, interrelated versions of aesthetic independence culminate in the European fin-de-siècle notion of l’art pour l’art, which manifests itself most visibly in British Aestheticism and French Symbolism (Burwick –). The proponents of these artistic movements, ranging from Walter Pater to Stéphane Mallarmé, profess a secular-spiritual notion of autonomy, under the banner of “pure poetry” or “pure art,” with an intensified attention to the formal qualities of stylistic expression. The turn-of-the century aestheticist movements are often regarded as having prepared both the cultural conditions for the historical avantgarde’s attack on art’s isolation from life (I shall soon return to this) and the breeding ground for modernist legitimations of art’s autonomous status. Stevens’ musings on “pure poetry” is just one instance of his widely studied poetic inheritance from the French Symbolists, which points to the continuity between the late nineteenth-century and modernist assertions of poetic self-containment (CPP ). Critics as diverse as Frank Kermode and Robert Kaufman have shown there are even decisive points of overlap between romantic and modernist versions of aesthetic autonomy (Kermode, Romantic Image ; Kaufman ). However, these family resemblances do not necessarily indicate direct lines of descent. As Goldstone has argued, modernist practices reflect a tangible reorientation “from artist to work, from freedom of judgment to the freedom of making” and “from spiritualized beauties to worldly techniques” (). Such shifts in focus occur in conjunction with the changing cultural material conditions of 





Kant does indeed talk about the notion of artistic genius in Critique of Judgment, but the role of the artist and the art object are secondary in his discussion of autonomy in comparison to aesthetic experience and the judgment of beauty. See Kant, –. For a radically different reading of Mallarmé that explores the political dimension of his aesthetics, see Rancière, “Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community” and Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren. I discuss Rancière’s reading of Mallarmé in relation to Stevens in Chapter . For further discussion, see John Marx, The Modernist Novel, .

Modernism



the twentieth century under which various modernist factions unfold. The period of the s presents one of these transitional phases in which the long-standing questions of the autonomy and social role of artistic production were revived due to the cultural-political tensions induced by the Depression, and in the wake of World War I. The major twentieth-century interventions in the theorization of art hardly provide a non-skeptical or affirmative stance toward the idea of aesthetic autonomy. Perhaps the most renowned critique of modernist aspirations toward self-sufficiency is formulated in Peter Bu¨rger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde. The central point of Bu¨rger’s theory is that the principle of autonomy, most notably articulated by the Symbolist, Aestheticist, and modernist movements, was founded on the institutionalization of art in bourgeois society, which involved the separation of art from life-praxis (–). According to Bu¨rger, the early twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Dada and Surrealism offered a counter tradition to modernism by rejecting autonomy, and by attempting to reintegrate art into life and politics – even though, ultimately, this project failed to deliver on its initial promises (). Bu¨rger’s theory not only (and famously) marks out strict lines of demarcation between modernism and the historical avant-garde, but also magisterially sets up an opposition between aesthetic autonomy on the one hand and political engagement on the other. Bu¨rger’s distinctions are, to a large extent, rooted in the debate between Frankfurt School theorists Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno in the s. Bu¨rger discusses Benjamin’s initial argument about the shifting paradigm of art under conditions of technological modernity and mass distribution (–, ). To Benjamin, in the age of new technologies of mechanical reproducibility and transience, art loses the characteristics of “authenticity” and uniqueness (the sense of its “aura”) that had originally established its domain of tradition in ritual and cult (Illuminations –). The loss of aura leads to the destruction of what Benjamin calls “the semblance of autonomy,” whereby the authentic identity of the artwork was still preserved in the form of its singular existence from the viewpoint of the tradition (). With the liquidation of authenticity and autonomy, caused by mechanical reproduction, “the total function of art is reversed”:  

See Selzer and George, –. Ultimately the avant-garde project and its postwar resurgence, in Bu¨rger’s view, failed to implement significant change in the institutional organization of art. For other influential accounts of autonomy that deal with the institutions of art and the literary field, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art and Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism.



Introduction

Art enters into a new and liberating paradigm that is predicated on “another practice—politics” (). Benjamin sees the historical movement toward the “politicization” of art set in motion in the Parisian avant-garde, and more specifically, in French Surrealism (“Surrealism” ). From this perspective, which is shared by Bu¨rger, the avant-garde sought to radically break with the conservative program of autonomy, in order to incorporate artistic practice into the historical processes of cultural and political transformation. In light of this mapping, attempts to retain autonomy, or to construe art as practiced for its own sake, are seen as a reactionary denial of its political potential and active participation in social change. Indeed, for Benjamin, in the post-auratic age, the “vestiges of autonomous art” become the aesthetic base for the self-glorifying spectacle of fascism, which seeks to generate collective symbolic identification through the resuscitation of “aura” that once characterized artistic phenomena (Koepnick ). As is well known, Benjamin called this process the “aestheticization of politics” (Illuminations ). Thus, the “politicization of art” and the fascist “aestheticization of politics” constitute two opposite ends of the historical spectrum. In the former, the rejection of autonomy foregrounds art’s political agency, and in the latter, the remnant of autonomous art is transformed into a fascist spectacle. Before moving into Adorno’s response to this scenario, which proposes a radically different account of autonomy with respect to modernism, I would like to introduce a particular case from the history of avant-garde discourse on the issue at stake: “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art” from . The piece was cowritten by André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, and Leon Trotsky during the latter’s exile in Mexico. It was signed by Breton and the leading Mexican painter Diego Rivera, and published in the leftist American literary magazine, Partisan Review (Greeley ). I draw special attention to the manifesto since it does not only complicate the antagonism Bu¨rger’s and Benjamin’s theories seem to posit between the political potency and autonomy of artistic practice. It also testifies to the existence of alternative reconfigurations of art’s independence in the s, whose dynamics are often sidestepped in perfunctory mappings and canonical definitions of the concept.   

 See also Peter Koepnick, Walter Benjamin, . For further discussion, see Hess, . See also Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics, . See my discussion of Benjamin’s reflections on fascism and aesthetic autonomy in relation to Stevens in Chapter .

Modernism



The central point of the joint statement was to underscore the necessity of maintaining an autonomous realm for artistic production in order for art to participate in the revolutionary praxis and consciousness at all (–). Written as a response to the propagandist imperatives placed upon art – under the Stalinist regime and under fascism – the manifesto declared art and the imagination to be free from all external determinations imposed from above. “In the realm of artistic creation,” it stated, “the imagination must escape from all constraint and must under no pretext allow itself to be placed under bonds” (). This was definitely not an assertion of artistic indifference or bourgeois escapism, nor was it a Benjaminian re-politicization of art; rather, it was a historically specific politicization of art’s autonomy. Crucially, the manifesto first appeared in the revitalized American leftwing literary magazine, Partisan Review (–; –) whose editors, including William Phillips and Philip Rahv, were engaged in a similar Marxist defense of cultural and artistic autonomy at the time (“Editorial Statement” –). Together with a number of dissident critics such as James T. Farrell, Meyer Schapiro, and Bernard Smith, the writers of Partisan Review blazed an alternative path for viewing the social dynamics of art and literature that sparked heated polemics among the American cultural left (Wald, The New York Intellectuals –). They sought to “integrate aesthetics and politics, specifically modernist experiments à la James Joyce and T. S. Eliot and sophisticated Marxist literary criticism” (Leitch –). The magazine, where Stevens frequently published his poems (during the latter half of the s), aligned itself with what they called “the modernist revolt” to form a bridge between “the radical tradition on the one hand and the tradition of modern literature on the other” (Phillips and Rahv, “In Retrospect” ). Stevens expressed his admiration for the magazine in a 



The further materialization of the statement in the form of IFIRA (International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art) reveals a vibrant network of interactions within radical and modernist literary milieus both in the United States and on a transnational scale. The IFIRA, though short-lived, extended its ties from Mexico, New York, Belgium, and France to Egypt, to carry out the prospect expressed in the manifesto, and to create a transnational site of solidarity among poets and artists. Dwight MacDonald, a Partisan Review critic, whom Stevens admired, was one of the figures involved in launching the New York branch of the IFIRA. See Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals, –. Although the Partisan Review critics, commonly referred to as the New York Intellectuals, abandoned their leftist politics during the Cold War, in the s they aimed to develop a Marxist approach to literature that could tie radicalism to modernism (Terés –). Furthermore, critics and artists of the s such as James T. Farrell, Meyer Schapiro, Bernard Smith, and Sidney Hook launched differing strategies for reassessing the relationship between the social function and the autonomy of aesthetic production (Sorin –; Leitch ).



Introduction

 letter to Van Geyzel: “THE PARTISAN REVIEW is the most intelligent thing that I know of” (L ). Historical affinities and nuances such as these in the trajectory and rearticulation of autonomy complicate the working definitions of the concept as resting on an intrinsically apolitical, if not an implicitly reactionary, aesthetic principle. They also point to the necessity of approaching the issue with an eye to autonomy’s changing contextual implications, bearing on specific social and cultural transitions. The manifesto and the stance of the Partisan Review demonstrate, on two distinct yet interrelated fronts, how certain forms of cultural radicalism sought to remodel the claim to autonomy in socially and politically resonant terms in the s. These reformulations of artistic function, though their angles vary, reveal a dialectical response to the poles of autonomous (self-governing) and heteronomous (socio-politically committed) art, one that exhibits a certain degree of affinity with Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Adorno’s response to Benjamin’s theoretical model takes issue precisely with the underlying dialectic between autonomy and sociopolitical significance in artistic practice. To begin with, for Adorno, aesthetic autonomy is not simply a mode of normative, detached formalism, nor is it predicated on art’s indifference to life praxis and social change. Rather, modern art’s claim to autonomy is itself intrinsically contingent upon, but at the same time not reducible to, the heteronomous elements it must contain. In this view, art is both a social fact that includes in its domain the elements of historical material circumstance, and a distinct phenomenon with its own immanent laws that refuses to submit to society’s functional structures (AT –, –). Art as such is at once a “product of history” and a selfdetermining, critical force against social and historical currents under which it is carried out (). This reflects what Adorno calls the “double character” of modern art “as both autonomous and fait social” (). Within this horizon, art’s sociopolitical character is found neither in its manifest engagement with its historical conditions, nor in the direct impact of those conditions on its formation. It is found at the level of aesthetic autonomy,





For commentary on the manifesto’s dialectical approach to art and politics, see Herbert Marcuse, Art and Liberation, . For an examination of this dialectical approach in relation to Partisan Review, see Wald, The New York Intellectuals, –. Susan Hegeman argues that a comparison between Adorno and Partisan Review is superficial (–) because of the conservative politics the critics of the magazine adopted during the s, but her comments do not take into account the historical differences between the magazine’s cultural politics under the radical climate of the s, and its later transformations.

Modernism



which refers to the unresolved tensions art generates in relation to socioeconomic modes of domination and subsumption (). On this account, art expresses itself through an inseparable constellation of content and form (), which produces negative value by existing in fundamental contradistinction to established norms and categories of social-empirical reality (). Autonomous works of art both derive their “content” from the social world and incessantly reject that world: “As products of social labor,” they “communicate with the empirical experience that they reject and from which they draw their content” (). Instead of reproducing existing norms and relations, art organizes these elements under its principle or “law of form” (). Aesthetic “form” for Adorno is “the sedimentation of content” – a specific organization of social material that is negatively inscribed in the work of art (). “Form,” Adorno writes, “works like a magnet that orders elements of the empirical world in such a fashion that they are estranged from their extra-aesthetic existence” (). The type of aesthetic “estrangement” that is undertaken by artistic form itself offers a radically differentiated, counter vision to the existing world from which art emerges, and from which it emancipates itself. It is this formal capacity of art that separates it from other modes of social existence, and gives art its “specificity” as an aesthetic phenomenon (). For Adorno, then, it is by severing itself from the given order of the social that art generates a potential site of resistance and critique against the homogenizing socioeconomic mechanisms, namely, the culture industry and commodity fetishism: “Art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art” (). Hence, in his discussion of lyric poetry, Adorno describes the poetic demand for autonomy as itself a contextually mediated phenomenon and need (NL ). Accordingly, the more poetry seeks to isolate itself from the world – that is, the more it strives for a position of not being socially wired – the more, paradoxically, it becomes socially grounded; it enacts the potential to foster resistance to society’s instrumental demands, and thereby acquires its contact back to the world (–). Autonomy in this theoretical account thus implies a form of “protest” against society and its structures that are permeated by administrative instrumentalism and market mechanisms of capitalist production. The lyric work’s “opposition to the superior power of material things” is seen as a “reaction to the reification of the world, to the domination of human beings by commodities” (). In Adorno’s theory, aesthetic autonomy is productively defined as a relationally conceived, and historically shaped, category. Furthermore, his conception of resistance as a dialectical manifestation of art’s autonomous/



Introduction

heteronomous dimensions accords with Stevens’ idea of poetically resisting the external pressures of the contemporaneous, as discussed earlier. More significantly, in Adorno’s aesthetic thought, as in the case of Stevens’ poetry, autonomy is not an intrinsic, or a given property of the artwork – an ideal freedom bestowed from above – but a process that is interposed in the perpetually negotiated and changing relations between art and other fields of social reality. Despite these productive affinities, however, key differences exist between my reading of Stevensian autonomy, on the one hand, and Adorno’s theories of autonomous art, on the other. Ultimately, for Adorno, the potential of autonomous art lies in its enactment of social critique, which reveals itself through “the determinate negation of the existing order” (AT , ). The very distance that separates art from life constitutes the ground for a negative relation to social reality that testifies to art’s antagonistic existence: “Artworks are true in the medium of determinate negation only” (qtd. in Bernstein ). Negativity is identified as the main principle on which art’s political import rests, and the politics of autonomous art finds proper expression always in the form of its “immanent movement against society” (AT ). In Stevens’ work, by contrast, autonomy rarely presents itself as an expression of social antagonism achieved through negation. The vision of autonomous art emerging from Stevens’ work provides not an ultimate rejection of the existing social order but a specific vantage point that negotiates the place and function of poetry as it interacts with that very order. His poetry operates with a persistent drive to mark out a separate territory that is invested less in forming a critique of society as such, than in imagining new forms of relations to the shared structures of social existence in a self-questioning mode. While these forms of relationality continuously resist predetermination by external conditions themselves, they are not necessarily built upon a principle of aesthetic negation, which, in Adorno’s view, frees the artwork’s relation to the social of all its “affirmative traits” (ND xix). Adorno’s understanding of the “affirmative character” of art suggests a further discrepancy between his aesthetic theory and Stevens’ poetics with regard to the question of autonomy. The notion of aesthetic affirmation in Adorno corresponds to a positive rendering of existing cultural and societal patterns in a manner that undercuts art’s subversive potential. In order to maintain its resistant and critical status, art needs to break with the complacency of its own “affirmative essence” (AT ). As Adorno explains, this theoretical renunciation of art’s affirmative gesture – both toward life and toward itself – does not reinforce an understanding of the artwork as a

Modernism



non-dialectical play of “abstract” negativity (–). Every individual work of art, even in its most negative form, contains an element of affirmation: “There is no art that is entirely devoid of affirmation” (). But what this “affirmative” element discloses in the final analysis is art’s “ideological dark side”; it reflects the inescapable “stamp” of life on art, and a false unity of aesthetic identity, which must then be decisively opposed in the work’s formal or structural complexion (–). Hence, even in this fleeting recognition of its presence, the gesture of “affirmation” is described as “ineffable” (), which reveals the degree to which Adorno keeps from attributing a positively constructive role to affirmation in his dialectical mapping of art’s autonomy and sociability. In his theory, aesthetic affirmation comes across as a totalizing gesture, and significantly, the transformative and social potential of aesthetic autonomy leans to the side of negation (E. Ziarek ). Contra Adorno’s theory, the act of affirmation performs a constitutive function in Stevens’ poetics of autonomy. The poetic understanding of autonomy in Stevens’ case entails not a determinately negative but also a positive mode of aesthetic production, which plays an active part in his dramatization of the relationship between poetry and collective life. The affirmative aspect of Stevens’ work does not amount to a confirmation of dominant societal patterns, nor does it enforce a totalizing and false unity of aesthetic identity. Rather, it finds expression in the poet’s assertion of the “possible” (CPP ), which attests to imagination’s capacity to produce a space from which new forms of poetic and collective agency and new forms of relationality emerge. Such is the possibility that is affirmed, for example, in “Mozart, ,” where, as discussed earlier, the poetic demarcation of a distinct territory gives rise to a relational framework, and anticipates a new form of socially oriented, poetic subjectivity (“thou”). As we shall see in Chapter , the search for an alternative framework for the possible construction of new forms of collective engagement is discernible in Stevens’ idea of a common “fiction” in “Owl’s Clover,” and in his deployment of various spatial tropes in his poetry of the s and s. Additionally, multiple and interconnected forms of poetic affirmation reverberate through some of Stevens’ most common themes. These range from his notion of “final belief” in a “fiction,” the defense of the imagination as value, the projection of poetic desire as an incessant force, and the multiplicity of the possibilities of aesthetic renewal. Stevens often chooses to locate “the imagination’s new beginning,” not in “Negation,” as he puts it, but “in the yes of the realist”: “The mortal no / Has its emptiness,” he writes, “under every no / Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken” (CPP ).



Introduction

This is not to suggest, however, that Stevens’ poetics is entirely devoid of negativity. As we shall see throughout this book, notions of displacement and (self-) critical responsiveness emerge as essential elements of Stevensian autonomy. Yet his poetry does not operate with forms of negativity that defer or dissolve the affirmative dimension of his aesthetics. Sustaining an interpretive approach to autonomy in Stevens, in this sense, demands moving beyond the primacy of the logic of negation on which Adorno’s vision of autonomy seems to rest. Stevens’ version of autonomy cannot be conceived primarily as a negatively charged form of aesthetic enactment. While both Stevens and Adorno are in some sense modernists espousing the value of autonomy, variously conceived, their positions are distinct from a more general modernist idea of autonomy. The latter has been a key part of scholarly discourse in literary studies at least since the criticism of the mid–twentieth century. When the question of modernist autonomy has been at stake, however, literary critical viewpoints have often tended toward extremes. In general terms, the field has given rise to conflicting perspectives that either impassionedly uphold autonomy as a token of literary value, or more often, discard it as an ideological construct (a “false consciousness”) that erroneously assigns literature a privileged position untainted by extra-aesthetic constraints (Wollaeger and Dettmar xi). Although the adherents of aesthetic autonomy have drawn on a variety of theoretical and philosophical traditions, one of the primary roots of this position in literary studies lies in New Criticism – the dominant school of the Cold War American literary theory. Throughout the s and s, influential figures of New Criticism – including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, among others – efficiently promoted the idea of the individual literary text as a freestanding linguistic object. It has now established itself as a commonplace to link New Critical terms such as “the heresy of paraphrase,” “self-referentiality,” “close reading,” “formal complexity,” and “organic unity” to a general, and oftentimes undifferentiated, notion of aesthetic autonomy understood as an illusory founding of literary freedom from external conditioning. As Patricia 



See Bloom, The Western Canon for a defense of autonomy as an aesthetic value, –. For considerations of autonomy as ideology, see Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Jameson, A Singular Modernity, –, and Reiss, Against Autonomy. Other theoretizations of autonomy in art theory include the formalist paradigm of Clement Greenberg, which concentrates on the notion of medium specificity. Greenberg’s seminal texts include “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” “Modernist Painting,” and “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” See also Michael Fried’s notions of absorption and anti-theatricality in Art and Objecthood.

Modernism



Waugh () and Siraganian () have observed, theoretical conflations of New Criticism’s and modernists’ own notions of autonomy on this particular basis have resulted in restricting the term to a denial of the literary work’s social content and worldly entanglement. In the literary criticism of the past century, there have been various denunciations of aesthetic autonomy, often developed against the backdrop of this restricted definition of the term. One such attack was launched by the New Historicism of the s, which, as Genevieve Guenther has argued, took the idea of “aesthetic autonomy as the main focus of critique, and made the destabilization of the transcendent aesthetic object the correlative goal of most critical endeavor” (–). Critics affiliated with New Historicism invariably challenged the notion of an autotelic or self-enclosed text in favor of a contextually grounded critical methodology and cultural analysis (Veeser xv; Greenblatt and Gallagher –). Correspondingly, much of the recent criticism carried out in the field of new modernist studies shed serious doubt on the primacy of modernist claims to autonomy, by registering the cultural and sociopolitical functions that literary texts perform, in both their immediate local, and wider global, contexts (Jenkins and Davis ). By looking “behind (or below) the modernist work’s assumed pretense to absolute autonomy, scholars of modernism have investigated almost every conceivable sector of modern life to see how the period’s literature responded to its truly seismic upheavals” (Matthews ). With the rise of new modernist studies since the s, critics have expanded the field’s scope of inquiry and highlighted the wider material and historical conjunctures within which modernist works were sited. However, some of the questionable repercussions of such efforts have been to either sideline the topic of autonomy as obsolete, or to portray it as a marginal, if not an overrated aspect, of modernist writing – as if it were simply a theoretical product reinforced by the anti-historical bias of New Criticism. To put it succinctly, then, 



For a general survey of new modernist studies, see “The New Modernist Studies” by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz. For a comprehensive guide to the transnational and global turn in modernist studies, see The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms and A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism. With respect to modernist poetry Peter Howarth observes that, “New Modernist criticism often writes as if the intimate presence of the external simply overrides the poem’s claims to be distinctive. Or it eliminates the tension between work and world . . . by re-enchanting the sense of historical context, so that the whole of modernist culture is seen to work exactly like a poem” (). Howarth’s initial point is that the overriding definition of the literary as purely heteronomous runs the risk of undermining the tension between the work and the varying historical contexts and pressures under which it was given form. See also Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work,  and n.



Introduction

within the general thrust of contemporary critical discourse, the notion of autonomy has frequently been derided for perpetuating an elitist and exclusive view of literature, or regarded as a topic whose time is past (Goldstone ). This perception has only begun to change in recent times, as several commentators have embarked on analyzing the shifting notions of art’s autonomy and their relation to broader historical phenomena. Over the past few years, critics ranging from Siraganian, Goldstone, and Peter Kalliney to Michael Kelly have highlighted previously overlooked interactions between aesthetic autonomy and sociopolitical signification in the arts and literature. They have done so by exploring areas as diverse as postcolonial literature, modernist fiction, and contemporary collaborative and visual arts with respect to economic, institutional, and global structures. Despite the apparent differences, what these critics have in common is the understanding of autonomy as a socially and historically embedded concept with political and aesthetic ramifications. Their reassessments open up a discursive terrain by challenging the established designation of the term as merely the theoretical pretext for art’s (and the artist’s) immunity from pressing cultural currents and worldly concerns. In her Modernism’s Other Work, Siraganian explicates the concept of modernist autonomy as the art object’s freedom from external ascriptions of meaning, rather than its withdrawal from the world. In so doing, she draws out the political implications of what she calls “the meaning’s autonomy” in modernism’s deeper commitment to classical liberal ideals and to questions of artistic agency. Likewise, Kelly, in A Hunger for Aesthetics, sees in modernist and contemporary artistic configurations of autonomy the potential of art’s political recalibration to prepare the ground for enacting public engagement in ways free from subject-oriented notions of intentionality. By showing how the issue of autonomy continues to inform contemporary artistic discourse, Kelly’s work challenges the theoretical assumptions that write it off as an inoperative or outdated aesthetic category. Goldstone’s Fictions of Autonomy explores the contextual motivations behind modernist commitments to autonomy across multiple genres and 



Other critiques of modernist autonomy, which, following Benjamin, link it to “reactionary politics” and to fascism include Andrew Hewitt’s Fascist Modernism and Charles Ferrall’s Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics. For a critical reflection on these works, see Joshua Kavaloski, High Modernism, . See also Gregory Jusdanis, Fiction Agonistes, the edited volume Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy, and Nicholas Brown, “Close Reading and the Market.”

Modernism



modernist writers. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach to the literary field, his study rewrites the critical implications of the term on issues as diverse as domestic labor, expressions of personality, community, and linguistic non-referentiality (). Whereas both Siraganian and Goldstone largely focus on European and Anglo-American contexts of modernism, Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters traces the concept’s strategic deployment among black writers and intellectuals. His book demonstrates how “late colonial and early postcolonial writers” from Africa and the Caribbean voiced “persistent calls for aesthetic autonomy” to resist the categorical and discriminative division of artworks along ethnic and racial boundaries (vii, ). Kalliney’s work is a significant contribution to current debates over autonomy since his arguments contradict the term’s usual affiliation with a mode of cultural and metropolitan elitism often deemed as a characteristic feature of high modernist aesthetics. My exploration of Stevens’ poetry of the s and early s participates in these recent critical efforts to rethink the meaning of aesthetic autonomy and its contextual implications but with a number of distinct contributions to the current discussion. Different from previous accounts, this book tackles the ways in which the question of autonomy is developed and reshaped specifically under socioeconomic and political crisis, by focusing on an intensely charged period in Stevens’ career – s, the height of the Great Depression, through the s and the outbreak of World War II. The book inserts the theoretical discussion of modernist autonomy into a historical frame, by showing how the problem of autonomy – the idea of art as a self-sufficient entity – acquires a new urgency in the poet’s work from this period. The book’s specific focus on the work of Stevens from the s and s provides the advantage of presenting a detailed account of cultural debates and literary-political exigencies that are specific to this unsettling period in American culture and literature. Furthermore, this book demonstrates the relevance of its claims about autonomy and Stevens for contemporary philosophical and literary discussions on art, politics, and aesthetics. For this purpose, it advances its arguments in a critical dialogue with recent debates in contemporary philosophy, particularly those offered by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, while at the same time responding to the renewed polemical  

See the previous section of this introduction for a discussion of Goldstone’s interpretation of Stevens. For a sample of such associations between autonomy, high modernism, and cultural elitism, see for example Steven Best and Dougles Kellner, The Postmodern Turn, –, and Lois Cucullu, “Downsizing the ‘Great Divide,’” , –.



Introduction

interest in the topic of autonomy among scholars in new modernist studies in the last decade. By introducing Rancière and Badiou as its theoretical interlocutors, the book significantly expands the scope of the debate on aesthetic autonomy in modernism and beyond. It should be noted, however, that this study does not offer a comprehensive assessment of the various articulations of aesthetic independence within the American context of modernist writing as a whole. Instead, I aim to draw a detailed picture of how Stevens’ poetry of the period offers a particular poetics of modernist autonomy that responds in multiple ways to questions regarding the aesthetic and social function of poetry, the artistic constitution of collective agency, and the relationship between philosophical and poetic modes of thinking. Such are the questions that, as we shall see, preoccupied the writers, poets, and critics of the time more broadly. In taking into account the cultural dynamics from which Stevens’ poetics of autonomy emerged, I seek to open the way for a broader reconsideration of autonomy’s relevance to the period’s modernist and radical literary production, critical debates, and cultural politics. Indeed, Benjamin Kohlmann has recently undertaken an attempt to read the period’s literature in the British context precisely from this perspective. Kohlmann shows how competing notions of “poetic integrity,” and the unresolved “tension between artistic autonomy and historical self-consciousness” persist, though in different ways, in both politicized and modernist texts of the time (–). This renewed polemical interest in the concept of aesthetic autonomy within the scholarship of the last few years is intimately linked to a wider call for a return to aesthetics. Recent claims for the recovery of aesthetics call into question postmodern theory’s concern with displacing the notion of the aesthetic as merely an ideological category, one that is integrally complicit with forms of socioeconomic and cultural domination (Lisi –). One of the most influential accounts of such challenges against what is commonly 



The cultural history of the s has been explored in detail by critics such as Barbara Foley, Richard H. Pells, Walter Kalaidjian, Cary Nelson, Robert Shulman, and with specific reference to Stevens, by Filreis and Longenbach. Assessing carefully the historical, political, and cultural parameters of the period, these critics provide distinct yet interconnected accounts. However, while the question of aesthetic autonomy is accepted as a key one in the discussions of art and propaganda during this period, critics tend to understate its relevance. Foley, for instance, shows in passing how “inherited notions of aesthetic autonomy was a prevalent stance among most of the progressive artists and writers who were associated with the cultural left in the early s” but she does not fully elaborate on what she calls a “prevalent stance” (). Isobel Armstrong’s The Radical Aesthetic, Jonathan Loesberg’s A Return to Aesthetics, Andrew McNamara’s An Apprehensive Aesthetic, and Douglas Mao’s Fateful Beauty are exemplary of the turn toward questions of aesthetics in literary and art criticism.

Modernism



denominated as the “anti-aesthetic stance” in literary and art criticism is present in Rancière’s reevaluation of the relationship between politics and aesthetics. The notion of aesthetics in Rancière’s philosophical framework takes on a wider meaning than that of beauty or the formal properties of the artwork. In the context of his theory of art and politics, aesthetics refers, instead, to “a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships” (The Politics of Aesthetics ). For Rancière, the aesthetic regime is comprised of artistic “practices and forms of visibility” that “intervene in the distribution of the sensible and its reconfiguration” (Discontents ). The “distribution” and the “reconfiguration” of the sensible refer to the ways in which artworks arrange and codify “spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common, and the singular” (). They participate in, and redirect, the constitution of sensible experience by setting up a domain in which ways of being, seeing, doing, speaking, and thinking are reorganized. With this expanded definition of the term, Rancière proposes that aesthetics and politics are intrinsically linked, since both partake in the task of introducing a new configuration of the given order of the sensible, that is, the determining order of what is visible, audible, sayable, and thinkable, etc. This capacity for the reorganization of the given sensory field, which lies at the core of both politics and aesthetics, carries the potential for not only suspending the established structures of perception, but also for the framing of a shared sense of experience (Discontents –). Politics, in this particular sense, is not the desire for, or the exercise of, power, but “consists in reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible, which defines the common of a community, to introduce into it new subjects and objects, to render visible what had not been” (–). Most relevant to the purposes of this book are Rancière’s reflections on the problem of aesthetic autonomy and the politics of art. According to Rancière, the political dimension of art is predicated not on the messages or sentiments it seeks to convey, but on a paradoxical knot that binds  

For a sample discussion of the notion of the “anti-aesthetic,” see Deborah Knight “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies,” –, Jonathan Loesberg, –, and the edited volume The Anti-Aesthetic. “The aesthetic regime of art” refers to the system of arts in the modern age that have been in place since the Enlightenment. Rancière identifies three historical regimes of art: the ethical regime, the representative regime and the aesthetic regime. Even though Rancière understands the emergence of these regimes historically, he notes that each still exists in some form today. For a sample discussion, see Gabrielle Rockhill and Philip Watts, “Introduction,” –.



Introduction

aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy (Dissensus –). Art’s commitment to autonomy and social engagement does not imply mutually exclusive principles but complementary positions that emerge continually in a reciprocal tension with one another. The political potential of art lies in the possibility of enacting and sustaining a symbiotic relationship between these contrasting paradigms: one that affirms art’s separation from life, which differentiates it from other forms of activity and thereby asserts its singularity, and one that amounts to its “self-suppression,” or merging with other modes of existence, which renders art as a form of common life (–). Going back to Schiller’s writings on aesthetics, Rancière claims that it is by virtue of staging a “free play” between these conflicting scenarios of “art becoming mere art” and “art becoming mere life” that the aesthetic regime of art presents an autonomous realm of experience visà-vis the existing social fabric (“Aesthetic Revolution” ). In this setting, aesthetic separation and distance are presented as enabling conditions for art to demarcate a space of its own, which carries the capacity for the “invention of new forms of life,” and the promise of a collective emancipation (The Politics of Aesthetics ). Rancière’s theory offers a productive perspective from which to explore the political and aesthetic dimensions of Stevens’ commitment to the autonomy of poetry. In Rancière’s thought, as in Stevens’ poetry, aesthetic separation is presented as a condition of possibility for art’s interaction with collective life, rather than a limitation on its societal relevance and potential. Furthermore, Rancière locates the political meaning of aesthetics on a continuum between the poles of autonomy and heteronomy, a strategy that Stevens’ poetry consistently enacts with the ability both to register, and to articulate, multiple responses to the historical and cultural pressures spawned by the Depression and the following outbreak of World War II. My account of Stevens’ poetry, thus, draws on Rancière’s understanding of the autonomy of art, but does so with some critical caution and reserve. This is primarily because Rancière limits the conception of autonomy to 

Rancière’s perspective on politics and aesthetics shares Adorno’s dialectical approach to the problem of aesthetic autonomy. Yet, as Rancière argues, Adorno’s vision of art’s double character (both autonomous and social) operates with a perspective that seeks to maintain indefinitely “the gap between the dissensual form of the work and the forms of ordinary experience” (Dissensus ). In Adorno’s view, the social promise of art is retained only by means of “refusing every form of reconciliation” between the resistant (and autonomous) form of art and forms of ordinary life (Dissensus ). This persistent renunciation of art’s merging with life can be understood in light of Adorno’s skeptical view of the affirmative gesture of aesthetics toward life, as discussed earlier. See also Alan Dunn’s discussion of Adorno and Rancière, –.

Modernism



the notion of aesthetic experience: “The autonomy staged by the aesthetic regime of art is not that of the work of art, but of a mode of experience” (“Aesthetic Revolution” ). The scope of Stevens’ understanding of autonomy is not bound to the category of aesthetic experience but opens up questions concerning the nature of poetic process, the aesthetic space in which this process is created, and the specific responses it forms to the cultural context under which it was given shape. Rancière’s notion of aesthetic experience, which arguably tends to place autonomy at the level of the artwork’s reception, suggests a less multifaceted version than the one Stevens’ poetry supplies. Furthermore, Rancière’s extensive periodization of the aesthetic regime of art, spanning from the nineteenth century to the present, risks overlooking specific historical shifts and transitions like the one that characterized the cultural atmosphere of the s, in which Stevens’ poetics of autonomy was formed. That said, Rancière’s approach offers a helpful alternative to the antagonism between the outright rejection and the uncritical embrace of the notion of aesthetic autonomy. Furthermore, and most significantly, it affords a compelling scheme for reflecting on the sociopolitical ramifications of Stevens’ poetry, without losing sight of its aesthetic dimension, in which, as this book suggests, the poetics of autonomy plays an active and pivotal role. From this point of view, Chapter , “The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise,” begins with a discussion of how Stevens’ poetry tackles the problem of autonomy, by simultaneously registering and alternating between the contradictory impulses of aesthetic separation and social engagement. I argue that a spatial dialectic between distance and intimacy, between solitude and community, forms a constitutive part in Stevens’ negotiation of the boundary between poetic and social realms. To this end, I focus on two of Stevens’ seemingly most personal lyrics, “Secret Man” () and “Re-Statement of Romance” () to show how the problem of autonomy, which seems, at first glance, to be centered on the isolation of the individual poet, signals a socially and historically rooted crisis of verse that is closely tied to the exigencies sparked by the Depression. Whereas in these poems Stevens seems to be dealing with the autonomy of the poet’s private personal self, the poems’ mode of address, changing imagery, intertextual allusions, and rhetoric run beyond the

 

For a careful analysis of the difference between the autonomy of aesthetic experience and of the art object in Rancière’s theory, see Ruben Yepes’ “Aesthetics, Politics, and Art’s Autonomy.” See also my reflections on Rancière and the autonomy of aesthetic experience in Chapter .



Introduction

realm of the personal and the soliloquy to reveal the worldly dynamics of his poetics of autonomy. Expanding on the spatial sensibility that characterizes Stevens’ work, Chapter , “Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making,” traces the ways in which his poems, particularly from Ideas of Order () and The Man with the Blue Guitar (), explore the place and function of poetry by constructing built environments and architectural archetypes. The focus on notions of space and place provides an effective angle for discerning the relational dynamics offered by Stevens’ version of autonomy. His spatial formations of architectural environments operate with an impulse to project an autonomous terrain that communicates with, and resists, influential cultural discourses regarding art’s political efficacy in the s. The chapter argues that far from an instance of aesthetic indifference or escape, the impulse to demarcate a separate space is motivated by a desire to envisage new forms of engagement, or what I call an “independent relation” to the unsettling sociopolitical circumstances of the Depression. I tease out the emergence of these forms of engagement in Stevens’ approach to the literary-political debates over the question of a “usable past,” his exploration of the citizen-state relationship, his treatment of the poet’s flâneuresque connection to the city, and his vision of poetry’s relation to community. Coming to terms with Stevens’ imaginative compositions of collectivity and audience provides another vantage point from which to highlight the contextual dimensions of his poetics of autonomy. As I argue in Chapter , “Community and Autonomy: ‘The Mode of Common Dreams,’” in his longest, and perhaps most intricate poem, “Owl’s Clover,” Stevens links the idea of autonomy to the political and collective import of art. The chapter shows how the poet explores both the potentials and limits of aesthetic separation and autonomy for imagining, and reconfiguring new collective forms of subjectivity and agency, including those of the working classes. I argue that this exploration unfolds in tension with the period’s artistic and political aspirations to the inclusive “rhetoric of the people” and “the masses.” The poet’s search for an inclusive “common” or “civil fiction” to speak to the masses leads to a complex questioning of the poetic imagination’s potential to expand from a local to a global vision of collectivity. The chapter demonstrates how by acknowledging the ideological pressures (fascist war and colonialism) that impede the aesthetic creation of a globalized collective vision, Stevens takes the further step of seeking to resist them, in order to polemically affirm the continual need of poetry for envisaging prospective forms of collective life.

Modernism

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Finally, in Chapter , “Autonomy and Philosophy: ‘Reason’s Constant Ruin,’” I focus on another aspect of Stevens’ conception of autonomy and its contextual meanings with the purpose of reassessing his poetry’s relation to philosophical discourse. Stevens not only thematizes this relation in his poetry, but also identifies certain processes and traits that decouple the reflective operations of poetic thinking from that of philosophy. I explore this aspect of Stevens’ work in dialogue with Badiou’s “inaesthetics,” which allows for a consideration of poetry as a site for thinking without the support or guidance of philosophical discourse. Poetry for Badiou constitutes one of the generic conditions of philosophy rather than being an object that is subordinated and absorbed in it. His insistence on poetic thinking as a process independent from philosophy provides a starting point for examining how Stevens imagines the distinctions, rather than the overlaps, between the two. I explore the claim to autonomy from philosophy as it is formally expressed in Stevens’ poetry of the late s and s, especially from Parts of a World () and Transport to Summer (). The intensification of this claim in Stevens’ writing from this period, I argue, can at least partially be explained by taking into account the rise of logical positivism on the American cultural scene during and soon after World War II. Stevens’ skepticism toward the analytical school of logical positivism must be added to the historical factors behind his increased emphasis on poetic autonomy from philosophy in his writing of this period. Thus, the final chapter contributes to one of the general aims of this book, that is, to transpose Stevens’ poetics of autonomy into a historical perspective.

 

The Politics of Aesthetic Separation No Private Paradise

.

Lyric Distance and Intimacy

No one can have lived apart in a happy oblivion.

– Stevens, “The Irrational Element in Poetry”

“The ivory tower,” wrote Stevens, in , “was offensive if the man who lived in it wrote, there, of himself for himself. It was not offensive if . . . there, he could most effectively struggle to get at his subject, even if his subject happened to be the community and other people, and nothing else. It may be that the poet’s congenital subject is precisely the community and other people” (CPP ).These lines form part of a retrospective moment in Wallace Stevens’ prose piece “Effects of Analogy” (), originally written as a lecture that Stevens gave at Yale, and later published as part of his collected prose in The Necessary Angel (). Reflecting back on an era marked by economic turmoil, political instability, and war, whose destructive effects were still strongly felt, Stevens returned to a number of issues that had preoccupied his poetry at least since the mid-s: artistic detachment, political commitment, and the social function of poetry. As critics commenting on Stevens’ poetics and politics during this period commonly argue, by the time of the composition of “Effects of Analogy,” the “ivory tower” rhetoric that figured an aesthetic stance affirming art’s withdrawal from societal demands and politics, had become a frequently contested critical cliché. In asserting a radical form of artistic self-sufficiency and 

The influential journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair is an early representative of this tendency to reject the ivory tower. See his Money Writes,  and The Brass Check, . A further example can be found in the manifesto Authors Take Sides () about the Spanish Civil War published in Left Review, and signed by a legion of political authors and poets, such as W. H. Auden, George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway. This manifesto reflects one of the later articulations of the widespread challenge to the “ivory tower of art”: “the equivocal attitude, The Ivory Tower, the paradoxical, the ironic detachment will no longer do” (qtd. in MacKay ). A third and final example is to be found in the journalist Vincent Sheean’s address entitled “Ivory Tower for Rent” to the “Second Writers’ Congress” in .



. Lyric Distance



political reticence, the term “ivory tower” not only perpetuated the apolitical notion of “art for art’s sake” – whose roots went back to Symbolists such as Mallarmé – but also designated one of the most prominent concepts of modernism, that is, its claim to aesthetic autonomy. Setting the stage for long-lasting debates among a myriad of modernist writers and critics, the ivory tower turned out to be a rhetorical hallmark of a period of self-questioning about the social impact of literary production, and about the so-called modernist privileging of artistic autonomy in the face of extreme political fluctuation and cultural change. Stevens’ particular use of the image highlights a substantial complexity in his conception of poetic autonomy and function. By defining the poet’s possible “congenital subject” as “the community and other people,” Stevens’ lecture emphasizes the link between poetry and collective life. Yet it simultaneously proposes that the place of poetic activity might be a place of solitude and, thus, might require a positioning apart from society. Stevens’ inhabiting of the “ivory tower,” in this regard, represents the processes of artistic production as being both autonomous from and in relation to social reality. Starting from the mid-s, Stevens’ poetics generates an internal ambiguity in its disclosure of the relationship between poetry and collective life. Stevens in this period wrestles with questions of autonomy and social commitment by staging a series of unresolved tensions between poetry’s separation from and engagement with the public realm. How are we to assess the strain between impulses of separation and engagement as it becomes visible in Stevens’ poetry? What does it reveal about poetry’s social role at the time, and its relation to its own internal aesthetic principles? Is it merely a sign of confusion on Stevens’ part, an impasse in which the poet is torn between the desire to escape the disturbances of the s and the need to incorporate his new sense of reality under increasingly unsettling circumstances? Or are there perhaps other, more deliberate strategies at work that can better explain the occurrence of this contradictory tendency in Stevens’ poetry? In what follows, I will attempt to highlight how the ambivalent impetus behind Stevens’ poetics, that is, his simultaneous affirmations of social engagement and aesthetic separation, reflects not a fundamental confusion regarding art’s agency and social power, but a conscious recalibration of aesthetic autonomy as a necessary means for poetry to engage and interact with the outside world. The simultaneous presence of these conflicting attitudes might in fact be understood to bespeak the potential for a reconfiguration of poetry’s autonomy and its connection to social order. Far from assuming a position of disregard for art’s societal relevance, in



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise

Stevens’ poetry autonomy is framed as a potential means for energizing new modes of interaction with the actual world. As we shall see throughout this chapter, in its equal endorsement of separation and engagement, Stevens’ poetics develops and sustains a spatial dialectic between positions of connection and disconnection, between solitude and community. In doing so, it creates a paradoxical combination of “distance and intimacy” or “being apart together,” which, according to Rancière, lies at the heart of the politics (or metapolitics) of aesthetics (“Aesthetic Separation” ; Discontents ). Elaborating on notions of community, separation, and art, Rancière argues that “constructing a place for solitude, an ‘aesthetic’ place, appears to be a task for committed art,” by referring to the line “Séparés, on est ensemble” (“Apart, we are together”) from one of Mallarmé’s prose poems, “The White Water Lily” (“Aesthetic Separation” –). In Rancière’s reading of this poem, the paradox of intimacy through distance, as well as the way in which separation constitutes a new relation, becomes a metaphor for all poetic activity and art’s relation to social order. The complex linkage of aesthetic detachment and social involvement as two different positions embedded in artworks, as in Mallarmé’s poem, points not to an irreparable gap between artistic passivity, on the one hand, and socially committed activity, on the other. Rather, it points to the concordance of the two states – separation and engagement – that opens up the possibility of configuring a new set of sensations, and anticipates a new sense of space, community, and the individual within the aesthetic domain (Dissensus ). Accordingly, the solitude of the artwork designates the inherent capacity of art to implement new social bonds or envisage new forms of “being together” and “apart.” This capacity is enabled by the aesthetic break, that is, by the very act of separation itself – an aspect Rancière posits as pivotal to the political valence of aesthetics. Rancière’s notion of “being together apart” provides a productive starting point for a detailed exploration of the political and aesthetic implications of Stevens’ commitment to the autonomy of poetry. Stevens shares with Rancière the foregrounding of an aesthetic attitude where the contradictory forces of distance and intimacy emerge as a dynamic condition for art rather than a limitation on its social and political involvement or effectiveness. Seen from this perspective, there are at least two complementary facets to Stevens’ 

“The White Water Lily” tells the story of a man who, in the hope of meeting an “unknown lady,” takes a boat trip on a warm summer night. When he hears the rustling footsteps of the lady, the man chooses to leave the place without ever meeting her, only to “merge into her obscure intimacy” (Mallarmé ).

. Lyric Distance



poetic enactments of aesthetic separation and social engagement: First, through a spatial arrangement of distance and intimacy, Stevens brings the question of poetry’s social function into the domain of his own poetics, as well as of poetry in general. And second, his poetry indicates that the contradiction between these two states should be conceived of as internal to poetics as such. According to Rancière the politics of aesthetics depends precisely on this complicated, paradoxical link between art’s separateness and nonseparateness; between its autonomy and the commitment to collective life that constitutes its heteronomy. “Understanding the ‘politics’ proper to the aesthetic regime of art,” Rancière argues, means understanding this doublededged dynamic, namely, “the way [art’s] autonomy and heteronomy are originally linked” (“Aesthetic Revolution” ). The paradox of intimacy through distance, or of “being together apart” has political underpinnings in that it reveals a seeming contradiction that is inherent to the aesthetic regime of art, but is repressed in discourses that reinforce either art’s total deployment for political and moral ends, or its total detachment from life. It is through the embodiment of this paradoxical link that the aesthetic regime obscures and dynamically displaces “the straightforward scenarios of art becoming life or life becoming art . . . replacing them with scenarios of latency and re-actualization” (). Stevens’ poetry engages actively and consciously in this process of dynamic displacement, which Rancière sees as constitutive of the political meaning of aesthetics. In a move that mutually incorporates both separation and engagement, Stevens’ poetics poses a constructive challenge to the heavily dualistic view that would see the opposition between autonomous (self-sufficient) and heteronomous (socially committed) forms of art as a simple antinomy. And it does so by transforming the space of poetry into an effective site for negotiation between heteronomy (the complete integration of poetry into life) and autonomy (the singularity of poetry), as well as by enacting the ways in which these two states are intricately imbricated rather than opposed. There is an important contextual dimension to this aspect of Stevens’ poetics. The antinomy between conceptions of autonomous and heteronomous art, as Claire Bishop has recently argued, tends to reappear especially “at moments of political transition and upheaval” (), such as the Great Depression of the s, when Stevens embarked on writing poetry again after more than a decade’s interlude. 

For a detailed discussion of the polarization between notions of autonomous and heteronomous artworks during the s, see also Chapter .



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise

Thus, as I have noted in the Introduction, the particular challenge behind Stevens’ envisaging of aesthetic autonomy is historically grounded in the political and cultural transitions of the s. In this period, a direct commitment of literature to an investigation of social and economic crises was a strong demand frequently articulated by leftist critics and artists (Denning xvi). The claim for a socially and politically committed art was shaped under increasingly unsettling circumstances fueled by the stock market crash of , the Spanish Civil War, and the ensuing conflict between fascism and communism between the two World Wars. The cultural-political turn of the s in the United States, as Filreis also argues, cannot be understood in terms of an opposition between high modernist apolitical aestheticism and an upsurge of revolutionary political radicalism. However, the s call for art’s direct commitment to political issues definitely imposed a series of “pressures” (as Stevens himself put it in his wartime essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”) on some of the convictions of modernist aesthetics, including its attestations of art as a self-sufficient and autonomous activity. Thus the point here is not to suggest a lapse back into historicizing this decisively turbulent period of American poetry in terms of a divide between modernist and radical political writing. It is rather to undertake a close analysis of how these sociopolitical and historical pressures stirred Stevens into developing an essentially complex aesthetic in which the question of autonomy provides a crucial focus of inquiry. In their barest outline, the proclamations demanding socially committed art forms spurred heated debates about the political role of literature together with influential critiques of the idea of autonomy as an excuse for the isolated artist to escape the pressing political and socioeconomic ruptures of the s. This gave a new sense of urgency to questions of modernist autonomy, aesthetic and artistic self-sufficiency, and the social function of poetry. As social and cultural conditions of literary production began to change, Stevens – much like other modernists such as Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Yvor Winters, who all remained committed to the ideal of autonomy variously conceived – sought to renegotiate the meaning of such autonomy in dialogue with claims that stressed art’s involvement in sociopolitical issues. 

Tate’s correspondence with Kenneth Burke on issues of aestheticism, artistic autonomy, and the social function of poetry, as well as Stevens’ frequently discussed response to Stanley Burnshaw’s review of Ideas of Order in his long poem “Owl’s Clover” (), exemplify the many ways in which modernist claims for autonomy were renegotiated and reconstructed in this period. In Chapter , we will see how Stevens fleshes out a particular version of aesthetic autonomy in “Owl’s Clover.” See also Selzer and George, , –, and Foley, .

. Lyric Distance



In his “Autonomy in Post-War Art” Alex Potts makes a similar claim about modernist autonomy undergoing renewal and transformation. However, Potts detects the emergence of this transition in the s and s, arguing that, “understandings of artistic autonomy are best seen as constitutionally split and radically unstable throughout the period” (). Inasmuch as the period described by Potts involves a significantly changed understanding of autonomy marked by the neo-avant-garde rejection of the market and “consumerist society,” a closer look at the s debates on the status and function of art reveals that an earlier revival of the meaning of modernist autonomy, one that is not necessarily tied to new types of formalism, had already been taking shape well before the s. Kenneth Burke’s  essay “The Calling of the Tune,” for instance, points to a pertinent aspect of the contemporary debate about aesthetic autonomy and the political import of literary production. Burke underlined “the vacillating relationship between the artist’s freedom and the society’s commands” (). While rejecting the idea of “the complete autonomy of art,” he pointed to the changing status of the artist by means of the allegory of the comedic “piper” who “simultaneously wanted separation and integration” (–). Five years earlier, in his preface to William Carlos Williams’ Collected Poems, Stevens had pondered the same contradictory impetus in the course of explaining his concept of a “new romanticism” and the social function of the poet: What, then, is a romantic poet now-a-days? He happens to be one who still dwells in an ivory tower, but who insists that life there would be intolerable except for the fact that one has, from the top, such an exceptional view of the public dump and the advertising signs of Snider’s Catsup, Ivory Soap and Chevrolet Cars; he is the hermit who dwells alone with the sun and moon, but insists on taking a rotten newspaper. (CPP )

What Stevens identified as a characteristic of Williams’ poetry, “dwell[ing] in an ivory tower” yet “taking a rotten newspaper,” suggested a double bind that was soon to become an essential characteristic of his own aesthetic. The difference between Burke and Stevens was that Burke attempted to resolve this contradiction by focusing on the communicative value of the aesthetic medium, while Stevens aspired to maintain it by exploring the critical potential of poetry as being autonomous and heteronomous at once. Stevens’ textual encoding of this apparent contradiction, or double bind, in this sense, is not an expression of the despair of a poet who, having lost his social stability, wants to remain in a self-created ivory tower while at the same time enjoying the privilege of going “out”



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise

whenever he wishes. Rather, it registers a new configuration of aesthetic autonomy and social heteronomy by positing artistic production both as a solitary affair and as a participatory and engaging practice. Commenting on Stevens and the s, historicizing critics rightly emphasize Stevens’ move toward a more socially attuned poetry between his first collection, Harmonium (), and his second, Ideas of Order (). This trajectory is convincingly argued, for instance, in Filreis’ detailed mapping of Stevens’ poetry onto the interactive continuity between modernism and political radicalism throughout the s. However, what remains partially overlooked is Stevens’ concern with questioning and transforming the conditions of possibility for constructing a poetic response to pressing social conditions, and for artistic commitment to political relevance themselves. In his poetry of the s, Stevens refuses to sidestep the problem of art’s commitment to social responsibility either by embracing one side of the polarization between autonomy and heteronomy, or by endorsing an unproblematized correlation between political and poetic inclusion. Instead, he dislodges both of these discourses on art by developing and sustaining a constitutive tension between two seemingly antagonistic currents: While imagining poetic expression as a distinct category in itself, his poetry postulates at the same time its originary connection to, and imaginative intervention in collective life. In the next two chapters, I will examine more fully the specific cultural and political contexts in which Stevens’ notions of aesthetic autonomy and the combination of distance and intimacy are generated and developed. In the remainder of this chapter, however, I will mainly focus on delineating the aesthetic and political implications behind Stevens’ refashioning of autonomy, most particularly in relation to his use of lyric form. Time and again, this refashioning relies on a paradox that is, as we shall see, recurrently brought up and often left unresolved.

. The Poet’s Seclusion In a rarely discussed but thematically resonant and revealing poem from , “Secret Man,” Stevens illustrates the paradox in question by alluding, once again, to the imagery of the ivory tower: The sounds of rain on the roof Are like the sound of doves. It is long since there have been doves On any house of mine.

. Poet Seclusion



It is better for me In the rushes of autumn wind To embrace autumn, without turning To remember summer. Besides, the world is a tower. Its winds are blue. The rain falls at its base, Summers sink from it. The doves will fly round. When morning comes The high clouds will move, Nobly as autumn moves. The man of autumn, Behind its melancholy mask, Will laugh in the brown grass, Will shout from the tower’s rim.

(CPP –)

“Secret Man” was first published in an anthology of modern poetry entitled Modern Things, but never made it into Ideas of Order. While this may partially explain why it has often been bypassed in critical discussions of Stevens’ poetics and politics in the s – it was written exactly at the time when Stevens was working on the composition of Ideas of Order () – the poem taps into the issue of aesthetic autonomy in a rather striking way, by staging and amplifying an early instance of the tension between artistic solitude and social commitment. It is plausible to see in “Secret Man” one of Stevens’ various poet-figures that feature so frequently in his poetry, and thus to regard it as comparable to the figure in his earlier canonical poem “The Snow Man.” However, if “The Snow Man,” as Vendler has argued, “announces . . . the discovery of the abolition of one old self by a new one, which necessitates at first the contemplation of an absolute void” (Words Chosen ), “Secret Man” offers a rather different figure for the poetic self that calls into question the poet’s social bond and the autonomy of poetic expression and literary activity. Until the final stanza of the poem, the figure of the secret man is tied to a restricted zone, a spatial territory (one of his “houses”) that is 

Edited by Parker Tyler, an author, poet, and film critic, Modern Things () featured already canonical poets such as Pound, Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams, as well as lesser-known poets such as Paul Eaton Reeve, Joseph Rocco, and Raymond Larsson.



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise

circumscribed by what can be called a contemplative distance from the crowd. However, a specific conflict enters into the realm of the poem at the moment when the separation of the secret man, the axis of his distance from collective space, is further enhanced by way of a symbolic shift in the poet’s location from “house” to “tower.” In the last stanza, the speaker details the poet-figure’s seclusion, that is to say, his retreat to the ivory tower; yet at the same time he predicates the possibility of his deviation from detachment through a gesture of engagement: “The man of autumn, / Behind its melancholy mask, / Will laugh in the brown grass, / Will shout from the tower’s rim.” The man’s relation to space is significant here, since it is precisely the spatial configuration of the poet’s dwelling that renders visible the paradoxical coalescence of nearness and remoteness, autonomy and heteronomy. The secret man is secluded in his tower, yet “Will shout from the tower’s rim”; the poet is described as spatially apart from the communal, yet at the same time proximate: The shouting from the rim seems to draw in the implied audience, which extends the boundaries of the “meditative poem” by decentering the primacy of its self-contemplative focus. Furthermore, the poem implodes the distinction between the demarcated space of the poet (“the tower”) and “the world” by declaring, through the voice of the secret man that “Besides, the world is a tower” (CPP ). The poem incorporates this sense of “being together apart” on a formal level as well. The last stanza involves a shift from first to third person (“It is better for me” to “The man of autumn / . . . / Will laugh”) and enacts a form of distancing, in this case, between the voice of the secret man and the voice of the speaker. In her “Stevens and the Lyric Speaker,” Vendler has declared Stevens the first major poet in English to compose a great number of lyrics by referring to himself in the third person. She has explained how rarely Stevens used the first person, and how, “of all the fashions of saying ‘I’ in lyric, Stevens prefer[red] ‘he’”. Accordingly, “in separating the described self from the describing voice,” the poet seeks to blend “expressive accuracy” with “detached observation” (). In “Secret Man,” a poem Vendler does not discuss, Stevens presents a striking instance of this experimental form of address and lyric pronoun by switching from first to third person within a single brief poem. While partially resisting a possible conflation of Stevens, the poet-figure, and the speaker, the pointed discrepancy between the second speaker and the secret man, now called “The man of autumn,” registers a different voice commenting on the poet-figure’s speech. This discrepancy also marks a point of transition inasmuch as the final line of the poem moves the poet to the “rim,” which establishes a space of tension between frames

. Poet Seclusion



of separation and engagement. Instead of presenting the boundary of the poet’s autonomous space as a territorial demarcation between solitude and engagement, the poem turns “the tower’s rim” into a space of possibility for crossing over. The “rim,” as a liminal space significantly introduced at the very end of the text (the poem’s rim), defines not only the dwelling place of the poet but also the space of the poem itself. The “tower” and the poet’s “house,” in this sense, constitute a restricted field of aesthetic production, an autonomous space for poetry, rather than representing no more than the private space of the individual. I will return to a more detailed discussion of Stevens’ exploration of liminal spaces and margins such as the “rim” in a moment. But let us first take a closer look at the affinity between the ideal of personal autonomy and the aesthetic autonomy of the artistic text as they are engendered in “Secret Man.” In the final stanza, the possessive pronoun “its” possibly refers to “the tower” itself. The “melancholy mask,” in this sense, can be thought of as belonging both to the tower and to the poet-figure. Thus, as a concealing garment, the “mask” not only embodies the idea that the place of the poet functions as a place of seclusion and secrecy, but also epitomizes, in a Yeatsian manner, the doctrine of impersonality in disguising the poet’s private self (Mester ). The poem’s emphasis on the privacy of the self may at first generate a focus on the individual autonomy of the poet rather than on the autonomy of artistic production and activity. Such a focus also affirms Nicholas Brown’s argument about the entanglement of modernist claims to aesthetic autonomy with that of the personal. Brown suggests that, within the context of modernism, it was “eas[y] to confuse personal with aesthetic autonomy” (). Indicating the overlap between modernist attestations of personal freedom, aesthetic autonomy, and liberalism’s focus on “the free individual,” Brown contributes to Siraganian’s 



There is an ambiguity in Stevens’ handling of the continuity of speech and the shift to the third person in the poem. In both the lines “Its winds are blue” and “Behind its melancholy mask,” “its” refers to the tower itself. (The symbolic space for poetic activity and the poet-figure become one, as in one of Stevens’ aphorisms: “There is no difference between God and his temple” [CPP ].) While this continuity of speech points to the closeness of the secret man and the second voice, the definite shift to the third person sets up a distance between the two voices. Thus, Stevens demonstrates the tension between distance and intimacy formally, on a micro level, as well, which raises questions concerning the modernist notion of impersonality, especially when examined in relation to the “melancholy mask” in the final stanza. To contextualize this adequately, it is important to note that Brown is talking strictly about autonomy from the market and that his particular focus on aesthetic autonomy is thus very different from mine. However, in the context of the political meaning of modernism’s commitment to autonomy, his argument about “personal autonomy” proves to be relevant while examining Stevens’ poetry as well.



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise

understanding of the political meaning of modernist autonomy as “a deeper commitment to classical political liberalism” (). In the specific context of Stevens’ poetry, a similar link between the emphasis on the poet’s privacy and classical liberalist ideals of free individuality is made, for example, in Joseph Harrington’s Poetry and the Public, in which Stevens’ ideas about imagination and reality in the s are interpreted as manifestations of his “deeper” beliefs in “the liberal habits of thought” and “older rights to privacy and to property” (). The problem of the poet’s autonomy often makes up a crucial component of Stevens’ conception of the aesthetic autonomy of poetry. Yet his staging of the paradox of “distance and intimacy” presents what seems at first like a solely private crisis – the individual autonomy of the poet – as dependent on a socially and historically entrenched crisis of verse. Whether or not Stevens’ own political views in this period can be understood as “deeply” rooted in classical liberalism, his poetic articulation of the poet’s autonomy in “Secret Man” is more an aesthetic strategy to reframe the issue of the function of poetry and the meaning of aesthetic separation than an attempt to endorse the domestic and private realm of the individual. The dynamic combination of distance and intimacy brings out, or makes visible, the imaginative possibilities and impediments of artistic agency: It gives rise to a framework for questioning the production and location of the kind of subjectivity specific to the discourse of poetry. In “Secret Man,” through concurrent enactments of separation and engagement, questions of poetry’s function and agency are carried over into the poem itself and negotiated in a new way. Stevens’ dramatization of the tension between aesthetic separation (autonomy) and social engagement (heteronomy) within the frame of aesthetic production itself is at the same time a strategy that transposes the ontological status of poetry from being the target of critical thinking – an object whose political efficacy is constantly debated in this period – to being the primary agent of critical thinking itself. The changing mode of subjectivity within the logic of the poem constructs a concrete site of disputation and self-revision. This act of 



The “imagination-reality complex” is an issue that Stevens himself theorized about. See for example, Letters of Wallace Stevens, – as well as his prose collection, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (). This mode of subjectivity produced through art is a key element in the discussion of modernist aesthetics and has been theorized by various philosophers, ranging from Hegel, Deleuze, and Guattari, to Badiou. To put it very simply, “subjectivity” as I use it here refers to the constitution of a particular agency through poetry that is different from the kind of subjectivity produced in the domestic and private spheres of experience.

. Poet Seclusion



self-configuration, in the form of a paradox, Rancière asserts, discloses the plurality of the artwork, “the same knot binding together autonomy and heteronomy” (Dissensus ); it reveals the way in which the realm of aesthetics produces “its own politics, proposing to politics rearrangements of its space, reconfiguring art as a political issue, or asserting itself as true politics” (“Aesthetic Revolution” ). In “Secret Man,” the spatial metaphor of “the rim” equally reminds us of Rancière’s perspective on the irreducible “plurality” of art, the weaving together of autonomy and heteronomy that make up the hallmark of the politics of aesthetics. The “rim” designates how the poem is able to overstep and perpetuate the boundary between the autonomous space of poetry and the space of the social, by transposing what seemed at first like the demarcated space of autonomy – “the tower” – to a form that is permeable. On the one hand, the poem suggests the permeability of the boundaries of art by placing the aesthetic sensorium at “the rim” and postulating the ability of the poet to reach outward. On the other hand, the poem refuses to lay out the geography or the architecture of that outwardness. There is a movement from the confines of the private “house” to the panoptical space of the tower’s rim in the winds; yet there is no space of actual interaction, only of expression, and a possibility of communication. In this sense, by retaining the poet-figure at the border and restoring poetic expression in the state of being apart, the poem still resists the complete erasure of the distinction between art and life, maintaining, intrepidly, the tension between impulses of participation and distanciation rather than merging them completely. The construction of “the rim,” as an architectural archetype, provides what can be called a poetics of borders that is inclined to transform the meaning of artistic separation and poetic solitude rather than to abandon the ideal of aesthetic autonomy as such. Seen within this spectrum, Stevens’ expression of the paradox of “distance and intimacy” or “being together apart” can be seen as part of an aesthetic process that converts the concept of autonomy from a selfcontained, and therefore fixed, category into a category of transition. The question of aesthetic autonomy in “Secret Man” is approached as a recurring and historically embedded problem – which is to say, as a problem in transition – concerning the social status and the function of poetry. This is also suggested by the poem’s unraveling of the historicity of the “ivory tower” rhetoric through an implicit allusion to the nineteenth-century French poet Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s poem “À M. Villemain,” from his collection Pensées d’août, Poésies (Thoughts of



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise

August: Poems). Sainte-Beuve’s poem, which contains the original coining of the term “ivory tower,” depicts poetry in a state of fading “fadeur” as opposed to the “grandeur” of the previous generation. In the course of the poem, Sainte-Beuve lists a number of writers and poets from that previous period, starting with “Lamartine who reigned,” adding Victor Hugo, who is likened to Dante and portrayed as a feudal baron fighting in armor under a banner, while the third poet, Alfred de Vigny, is contrasted with Hugo as follows: Vigny, plus secret, Comme en sa tour d’ivoire, avant midi, rentrait. Venu bien tard, déjà quand chacun avait place, Que faire? Où mettre pied? En quel étroit espace? Les vétérans tenaient tout ce champ des esprits. Avant qu’il fût à moi, l’héritage était pris. (Pensées d’aôut )

This is, in translation: Vigny, more secret, Retired to his ivory tower, before noon. I had come late, everybody had already taken their place. What to do? Where to stand? In what narrow space? The veterans held the entire field of spirits. Before it passed on to me, the heritage had been seized.

As Stevens does in “Secret Man,” Sainte-Beuve uses the adjective “secret” (sometimes translated as “discreet”) while describing the poet Alfred de Vigny, who retreats to his ivory tower. Moreover, the speaker tries to position himself, asking how a poet could find a place as a latecomer when these two positions – Hugo’s position, representing total commitment, and Vigny’s complete withdrawal – have already been taken. Stevens’ 



Stevens most probably read Sainte-Beuve’s poetry at some point, since the title of a later poem, “Things of August,” alludes to the title of Sainte-Beuve’s collection Thoughts of August. Moreover, one of Stevens’ close friends and epistolary correspondents, José Rodríguez Feo, praises SainteBeuve’s poetry, although he does so much later than the composition of “Secret Man,” in a letter sent to Stevens in  (SM ). Perhaps the most significant evidence comes from Irvin Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism, in which Babbitt refers extensively to Sainte-Beuve’s poetic enterprise and highlights Sainte-Beuve’s “À M. Villemain” as the poem where the term “ivory tower” was first coined. Stevens refers to Babbitt’s book in his review of Marianne Moore entitled “A Poet That Matters” only a year after the publication of “Secret Man.” This makes it very likely that Stevens was aware not only of Sainte-Beuve’s poem but also of the fact that “À M. Villemain” contained the first coining of the term “ivory tower.” All translations of the poem’s quotes are mine.

. Poet Seclusion



indirect allusion to Sainte-Beuve’s poem underlines the historical reappearance of the polarization between political inclusion and aesthetic indifference, and traces it back to the emergence of the ivory tower rhetoric, which was, as we saw, repopularized in the s and often used to illuminate the programmatic separation of aesthetics from politics. But what does the poem demonstrate by revealing the historicity of the ivory tower rhetoric? And what does this carefully veiled reference to Sainte-Beuve say about the way in which aesthetic separation and autonomy are envisioned in “Secret Man”? We can begin to approach these questions by reflecting on how Stevens treats the issue of the past and poetic heritage in his own poem. In the first stanza, we find the speaker in a state of nostalgia, comparing the “sounds of rain” to the “sound of doves” that used to visit his dwelling place. The “doves” here, as in “Owl’s Clover,” are “aesthetic” figures that stand for the past (L ): “It is long since there have been doves / On any house of mine” (CPP ). However, the seasonal tinge of the poem offers a shift away from the nostalgia of memory to a comprehension of the present: “To embrace autumn, without turning / To remember summer.” In his book on Stevens’ use of seasons, George Lensing has offered several contexts for interpreting the imagery of autumn in Stevens’ poetry. His reading of “Secret Man” suggests that underlying the general sense of melancholy, which defines the poem’s mood, is the construction of an “impersonal” mode of “secrecy” – an ironic distance that “hold[s] out the promise of future relief” and “anticipate[s] a compensatory later season” (, –). But the poem is less about a shift from the present to the future, than about a shift from the past to the present: “To embrace autumn, without turning / To remember summer” (CPP ). Stevens’ use of seasonal metaphors provides a compact way of illustrating the relationship between the poetry of the past and that of the present. The description of the present as autumn in “Secret Man” suggests a metaphor for the new status of poetry at a time of social and economic downturn, whereas the “summer” with “doves” might be seen as recapitulating poetry prior to such crises and invoking a poetics of the past. Here, Stevens might as well be alluding to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in his first inaugural address, which took place less than a year before the publication of Stevens’ poem, famously associated the Great Depression with autumn by comparing “industrial enterprise” to “withered leaves” that “lie on every side” (qtd. in Pederson ). The phrase “To embrace autumn,” read in this context, indicates a gesture of adaptation and engagement with the unsettling circumstances of the s, generating a perspective on



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise

poetry realized under its own current social circumstances. “There are not leaves / Enough to hide away the face of the man / Of this dead mass and that,” Stevens writes in a later poem, “United Dames of America” (CPP ), a proclamation that finds its earlier expression in Stevens’ figuration of the “man of autumn” in “Secret Man” whose solitude cannot be maintained as a form of indifference to the world. Thus, “Secret Man” aspires to the condition of aesthetic autonomy by affirming the state of aesthetic separation: the “ivory tower” of art. However, instead of romanticizing or simply reproducing the word’s original use by Sainte-Beuve, it adapts and renegotiates art’s claim to autonomy within its own present historical context. The relationship between Sainte-Beuve’s and Stevens’ poems and the poetic use of the word “tower” in “Secret Man” can further be seen as an instance of what Michael Riffaterre terms a “hypogram.” The hypogram refers to a textual grid or a “descriptive system” composed in the form of a word, a phrase, or a quotation in a poetic text, which generate conventional associations by way of intertextual references (–). According to Riffaterre, the hypogram constitutes a semiotic kernel, called a “matrix,” around which the text revolves. The matrix is described as a central linguistic entity that does not necessarily consist of the whole phrase or the full expression referred to, but often conveys one or several components of the referent and calls forth the rest (). Commenting on Riffaterre’s discussion of the hypogram, John Frow further explains the term as “a semantic structure—thematic field, cliché, norm, or actual text—which is referred to and transformed by a particular poem,” indicating that the hypogram creates a kind of commentary on the meaning of a socially shared sign, a recognizable linguistic expression – like “the ivory tower” – and renders it open to new forms of development (). Riffaterre’s semiotics of poetry has been exposed to criticism both for its singularly formalist emphasis on the hidden intertext and for its exclusion of social and cultural context (Leitch ). As Frow’s explanation also reveals, extratextual elements such as “cultural modes of authority,” the text’s “present historical space,” and codes of a period’s literary conventions are key to the transformation of a past poetic discourse – the hypogram – when it is actualized through poetic language (–). This is clearly also the case in Stevens’ use of the word “tower” in “Secret Man.” The textual inscription of the “tower” conveys a thematic transformation of a literary convention – the 

While the poet’s shout from the tower’s rim is posed only as a possibility for engagement with the outside world, “To embrace autumn” may be read as a more direct gesture of interaction with the contemporaneous, or the present (s).

. Plural in Singular



hypogram of “the ivory tower” – by way of an intertextual reference to SainteBeuve’s “À M. Villemain.” However, a tenable interpretation of how the hypogram operates in the poem demands a consideration both of the intertextual linkages between Stevens’ and Sainte-Beuve’s poems, and the cultural and political implications of the “ivory tower” rhetoric anchored in discourses of art’s social function in the s. “Secret Man” entails not only a renewal of the past poetic discourse embedded in Sainte-Beuve’s poem but also a transformation of the established trope of the “ivory tower of art” in the s, which was used, rhetorically, to describe aesthetic separation and autonomy as mediated forms of escapism. The poem presents the space of the poet’s seclusion – the tower – as a space of possibility for mobilizing artistic expression beyond its margins – the tower’s rim – and thus both preserves and converts aesthetic autonomy into a spatially conceived relational condition of possibility. The poem offers a new distribution of the symbolic space of the tower – the space of separation and autonomy – and transforms it into a liminal spatial zone, which concurrently maintains and blurs the boundary between the domains of the social and the aesthetic in describing them as both separate and mutually implicating. Hence, the poem takes on a self-transformative role by offering a new image of an independent sphere for poetic creation and activity. In this light, it is important to remind ourselves that the act of selftransformation – poetry transforming its own conditions of possibility – initially confronts a historically specific discourse on poetry’s political meaning and agency from the s, in which autonomy and separation often meant art’s political irrelevance and its lack of engagement with life. Stated simply, in “Secret Man” Stevens challenges an established discourse on the political meaning of art’s separate state, allegorized by the “ivory tower,” and reframes it. The poem operates at the level of confrontation and renewal; it acquires a political dimension in its attempt to reveal the link between autonomy and the societal relevance of artistic practice. Ultimately, in “Secret Man,” Stevens invents a poetics that is decidedly invested in exploring the limits and potentialities of poetry’s separate sphere, rather than renouncing the notion of autonomy for the purpose of developing a more engaged poetry.

. The Plural in the Singular Stevens’ reframing of aesthetic autonomy in the s affects a revisionary attitude toward the political meaning and the social status of poetry. In presenting artistic separation as paradoxically capable of engagement, his



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise

poetics positively undermines the emblematic principle of socially engaged art in the s, founded on an instrumental dissolution of the boundary between poetry and the public in the form of direct commitment, or “art as a weapon.” Accordingly, another salient aspect of Stevensian autonomy hinges on its resistance to a total correlation between the social and the aesthetic, which was then repeatedly posed as an absolute necessity for poetry’s engagement with the social world. The resistance of Stevens’ poetics to what can be understood as a type of “correlationism” – to transpose Quentin Meillassoux’s term into the context of art’s relation to the social order – entails a defense of poetic contingency free from preordained function, and suggests a deeper inquiry into the relational capacities of aesthetic autonomy. It points to the possibility of thinking about poetry and the social separately while considering them at the same time together, rather than demonstrating the two as always already correlated with one another. This particular characteristic of Stevens’ poetics can be discerned most tellingly by looking at his “Re-Statement of Romance” from Ideas of Order (). “Re-Statement of Romance” was originally published in one of the major left-wing magazines of the s, The New Republic, a year after “Secret Man.” Like “Secret Man,” it dramatizes a fecund tension between impulses of separation and engagement, and displays the contradictory impetus of distance and intimacy – the paradox of “being together apart.” However, the effects of the tension are played out here on a seemingly private romance, the speaker’s engagement with and separation from the poem’s addressee, its “you,” who, as I will argue in this section, refers both to an individual and a public body of listeners. The poem proposes a specific “re-statement” of the relation between poetry and public, disguised in the speaker’s lyric form of address to the interlocutor (“you”). The opening lines of the poem depict the “night” as a separate entity without the primacy of an intervening subjectivity. The discrepancy between the “night” and the first-person speaker introduces a nonreciprocal approach to perception and most vitally supplants the “background” by the speaker’s address to “you”: The night knows nothing of the chants of night. It is what it is as I am what I am: And in perceiving this I best perceive myself And you.



(CPP )

In After Finitude, Meillassoux defines “correlationism” as “the idea according to which we only have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” ().

. Plural in Singular



The speaker conceives of the night as a distinct being in itself uninformed by imaginative transformations, “the chants of night” – musical and poetic mediations – as he defines himself as an independent subject regardless of his relation to the night: “It is what it is as I am what I am.” Unlike his later guitarist-figure, who cunningly tells his listeners in the opening canto of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “‘Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar,’” Stevens’ speaker here perceives the night and himself as self-promoting, separate entities unchanged by one another (CPP ). The poem’s emphasis on the maintenance of the subject and the natural world as two divergent entities indicates a break from understanding consciousness (subject) and external reality (object) as essentially correlated with each other. In this sense, the poem offers a paradigm for perceiving the natural world akin to what thinkers of object-oriented ontology would define as a non-correlationist view, since it discloses the possibility of thinking about the object without the intervention of a human mind and vice versa. However, what is most vital in recognizing this aspect of the poem is not so much Stevens’ new way of addressing nature, as Gyorgyi Voros and Stephen Sicari claim, nor is it the emphasis on the “cosmic solitude” and the “solitary experience of the separate individual” as Halliday suggests (). The way in which the “night” and “I” are perceived as distinct categories generates a new framework for understanding another relationship that occupies the foreground of the poem. The distance between the speaker and nature, imagined as ontologically autonomous entities, sets the stage for the rest of the poem, which explores the relationship between “you” and “I.” The non-correlational juxtaposition between the “night” and “I” in the first stanza is something that provides an awareness in the speaker’s perception of himself “And you.” It is “in perceiving” the discrepancy between the “night” and “I” that the speaker reaches a new insight into the relationship between “you and I”: And in perceiving this I best perceive myself And you. Only we two may interchange Each in the other what each has to give. Only we two are one, not you and night, 

For Sicari the discrepancy between the “night” and “I” indicates that the speaker is trying to find the “right way of” addressing nature (), whereas for Voros it significantly illustrates a break from romantic transcendence, which is part of Stevens’ formation of a new kind of romantic expression (–). Curiously, “Re-Statement of Romance,” as Halliday argues, “has been neglected by critics —it is not mentioned at all in the important studies by Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, Milton J. Bates, Frank Doggett, and Lucy Beckett, and barely mentioned by Joseph Riddel” ().



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise Nor night and I, but you and I, alone, So much alone, so deeply by ourselves, So far beyond the casual solitudes, That night is only the background of our selves, Supremely true each to its separate self, In the pale light that each upon the other throws. (CPP )

In contrast to the night, which is decisively detached from any dependence upon interaction, there seems to be a complete convergence between “you” and “I,” which is emphasized especially in the second stanza, in the clause “Only we two are one.” The two are “alone,” so intimate and “So far beyond the casual solitudes,” that, as the poem evolves, they are made to merge in a single process and are no longer referred to as separate beings but as “ourselves.” While this indicates a complete fusion between the two figures, toward the end of the poem what had previously seemed like an unproblematic correlation between “you” and “I” turns into a paradoxical one. In the final stanza, the two figures are imagined together while they are at the same time apart, remaining “Supremely true each to its separate self, / In the pale light that each upon the other throws.” Thus, instead of “ourselves” as one word, the way we encounter it in the third stanza, we have “our selves” written as two separate words. The word “ourselves” is presented both together and apart, which further underlines that the two “selves” remain two distinct entities that resist the total correlation of being fused into a single whole. Perhaps Stevens is giving us a hint of the separateness of “you and I” already in the first two stanzas by inserting not just a line break but also a stanza break between “myself // And you” instead of keeping them together in a single line. Nevertheless, the element of separation becomes fully realized only toward the end of the poem. By then, what we encounter is an intimate relationship marked by a series of complex distantiations: Just like the “night” and “I,” “you” and “I” remain distant and thus resist absolute correlation. Yet unlike the “night” and “I,” the distance between “you” and “I” is an intimate distance beyond “casual solitudes” that displays the idea of “being together apart.” Thus, what remains vivid in the speaker’s awareness of nature and subject as divergent categories is the way in which this awareness, at the end of the poem, opens up the possibility to “best perceive” the relationship between the two figures not as an absolute convergence but as a specific type of intimacy marked by distance and autonomy. The poem deemphasizes correlation by underlining each term’s autonomy: “true each to its separate self.”

. Plural in Singular



How now does this seemingly “romantic” exchange between “you and I” relate to issues of aesthetic autonomy, the social intervention of poetry, and non-correlationist thinking – not only between nature and mind, or “you and I,” but also between social and artistic objectives? How is the speaker’s address to “you” directed to a public body? Who is it that is speaking? And what is it, finally, that the poem is restating? In what seems at first glance to be almost a traditional “romance” or love poem, Stevens registers multiple and interrelated restatements at once, ranging from his “new romantic” vision to the innovative rhetoric he brings to the immaculate surface of lyric form. To start with the latter point first, in “ReStatement of Romance” the lyric form of address does not simply function as a vehicle for the privatized self-expression of the poet but as a form of expression that, upon closer inspection, turns the speaker into an impersonal, exterior, third voice. In the final stanza, in which the setting of “the night” serves as a “background” for his interchange with “you,” the speaker not only disentangles the synthesis between “you and I” but also disassociates his own voice from that of the “I.” In the second line of the final stanza, the speaker refers both to “you” and “I” as “its,” and in the third line, as “other,” so that a separate voice emerges, commenting on “you and I.” Here, Stevens conspicuously breaks the line of identification between the speaker and “I” in a fashion similar to the act of distantiation we have seen in “Secret Man”: the shift from the firstperson voice saying, “It is better for me,” to the third-person characterization of “The man of autumn.” The detachment of the lyric voice from the speaker objectifies the “I” within the scope of the poem. This implies that the “I” does not merely speak as a subject. Rather, the “self” becomes almost an object inscribed in the poetic material, as it does in “Prelude to Objects”: “It comes to this: / That the guerilla I should be booked / And bound” (CPP ). In other words, what makes the “I” personal is taken away through a break in identification. The process of objectification epitomizes the way in which the “I” becomes an alienated figure and an abstract voice. In the end, then, it is not a self-expressive “I” we find in Stevens’ modernist adaptation of lyric form, but a voice that gradually dissolves into the poetic medium and becomes immersed in the poem. The existence of multiple poet-figures in Stevens’ poems points to a variety of mutations undergone by subjectivity when encapsulated within the space of poetry. In the particular case of “Re-Statement,” the voice of the “I” is reified, and evolves into the voice of a separate self whose origin is beyond access outside of the poem. The self-effacing voice of the final lines presents the “I” not as a ventriloquist for the poet but, suggestively, as



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise

an impersonal figure for poetry itself, a figure that Stevens projects as a separate or autonomous entity capable of a non-correlationist relation with “you.” The reciprocal casting of a tentatively “pale light” between “you” and “I” at the end of the poem is the result of the two figures being conceived independently. Given the shift toward verbal abstraction, and the gradual transformation of the “I” into a dispossessed voice, how do we interpret the “you” of the poem? Does it refer to a single individual listener functioning as a byproduct of a private romance, or to an internalized community of listeners perhaps, including the reader? The addressee of the poem can be read as singular and plural at once, not only because of the linguistically inherent ambiguity of the pronoun “you,” but also, more importantly, because of Stevens’ unconventional use of “romance,” which adds another dimension to his “re-statement” in the poem. Just as he does with the “serenade” in “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” where the private song of courtship and love assumes the form of a dialogue between the poet and a crowd of listeners, here Stevens uses “romance” to illustrate and reassess simultaneously the relationship between poetry and audience. One of the dialogical complexities of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” lies in its shifting sketches of its addressee from an individual to a multitudinous identity (Costello, “Audience” ). The movement between “man” (CPP ) and “A million people on one string” (CPP ) throughout the poem finally bestows the addressee with a fluctuating identity situated “Between you and the shapes you take,” and immersed in constant discovery: “You as you are? You are yourself. / The blue guitar surprises you” (CPP ). In spite of their immediate differences, in both poems Stevens strategically widens the scope of traditionally private forms of address, namely, the “romance” and the “serenade,” transforming tacitly the internalized addressees into both singular and collective audiences. Even though in “Re-Statement of Romance” this may not be as explicit as it is in “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” reading Stevens’ “Re-Statement” in the light of his growing interest in exploring the complexities of the figuration of audience and collectivity in the s opens up the possibility of interpreting the lyric sense of address (“you”) as carrying private and public dimensions alike. But how do we affirm that possibility in the face of Steven M. Critelli’s argument about the poem, which runs contrary to my reading of “you” as possibly referring to a community of listeners? Drawing on Stevens’ newly sparked interest in developing a “new romantic” in the mid-s, Critelli begins by reflecting on the poem’s approach to romantic transcendence

. Plural in Singular



and the mind’s relation to nature. In his reading, rather than being a source of “divine order,” as it was for the romantics, nature in the poem is ultimately unyielding to the mind’s abstractions, which makes the speaker take an essentially inward turn to search for introspection and selfknowledge. In effect, the poem reaches a radical form of withdrawal from the world: “an increasingly inward movement that ultimately excludes the world or removes the self from it” (). Unlike in romantic poetry, Stevens’ “new romantic” restatement lies in an introspective revelation enabled not by nature but by an “interior paramour” (“you”), which concurrently provokes “a counterpoint to the sentimentality of the popular notion of ‘romance’ in the s” (). By interpreting the interchange between “you” and “I” as a form of monologic utterance or soliloquy, Critelli not only turns the speaker into a fundamentally solipsistic self, but also the poem into a type of modernist retreat into subjectivity. Not only is this argument at odds with Critelli’s own assertions of the social relevance of Stevens’ “new romantic” phase as an attempt to rearticulate poetry’s relationship to the turbulent s, but it is also inconsistent with the historical parallel he draws between the title of the poem and a series of official announcements made by the American Law Institute under the heading Restatement of the Law. These had been published over a ten-year period before the poem’s publication, and the first complete editions of two of the series took place in  and . In probing the likelihood of Stevens’ awareness of these texts as a lawyer, Critelli indicates that just as these documents announced changes in the pursuit of the law, “Re-Statement of Romance” states Stevens’ newly formulated attitude “with regard to the figuration of nature, transcendence, and the apotheosis of self-knowledge” (). While Critelli makes an interesting discovery by arguing plausibly for the title’s allusion to legal sources, his readings fail to substantiate its pertinence to Stevens’ modification of a “new romantic” doctrine. Contrary to Critelli’s reading of the poem as an “intensely personal” expression of a solipsistic romance, what I find most revealing in Stevens’ intertextual reference to Restatement of the Law has to do with the manner in which these documents were designed to adapt law to new social needs and to address a community. Alluding to the address articulated in these restatements of the law, the interaction between “you” and “I” in “Re-Statement of Romance” maps the relationship of poetry and the poet onto a societal, or at least public, domain broader than the private. After all, this is the kind of problem that characterized the core of Stevens’ renovation of his poetry in the s, which his “Re-Statement of Romance” also embodies. The same problem is also



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise

closely articulated, as Stevens himself explained, in poems that chronologically succeeded “Re-Statement of Romance,” such as “Mozart, ,” which investigates “the status of the poet in a disturbed society” (L ), and “Owl’s Clover,” which stages a “confrontation of reality (the depression) and the imagination (art)” (L ). Indeed, Stevens’ concern with finding ways to address and include the Depression-shaken “masses” in his poetry of the s (not unlike Williams’ “proletarian portraits”) is a recurring figure of thought running through Ideas of Order. The poet’s turn to a community of collective voices – his “return to people, to find among them / Whatever it was that he found in their absence,” as he puts it in “Like Decorations” (CPP ) – is phrased in various registers. The move from private to collective is tangible in “Lions in Sweden,” where the speaker departs from the “sovereigns of the soul” and the “majestic images” of the imagination to the vantage point of “every man” (CPP ), or in “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,” where the poet, “Who found all form and order in solitude, / For whom the shapes were never the figures of men,” eventually seeks to “unite these figures of men and their shapes” (CPP –). Reading “Re-Statement of Romance” along with these poems from Ideas of Order, all of which share a renewed interest in the collective, suggests that what is restated in the poem has more to do with poetry’s relation to a public than a single individual “you.” Moreover, as Michael Szalay argues, in Stevens’ case the imaginative projection of a collective subjectivity into abstract and singular forms of address is a persistent theme developed in conjunction with a tendency toward lyric appropriation, which he shared with a legion of modernist poets in the mid-s (–). According to Szalay, Stevens, like many of his contemporaries during this period, became fascinated with the kind of rhetoric that bestowed personal attributes on the public, as this rhetoric developed into a major aspect of the New Deal politics and imagination. In exploring various dimensions of the interaction between literary production and the state, Szalay claims that during the Depression the New Deal version of “social legitimation” consisted in personifying both



During this same period, for instance, addressing the public and the state by using the singular pronouns “you” and “I” was a hallmark of Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” and other speeches he made to the public. It is possible to ascertain to what extent this rhetorical formulation had an influence on the public imagination by taking a quick look at poems sent to Roosevelt himself at the time, which are full of “You” and “I.” See the list of poems in Poetry of the People by Donald W. Whisenhunt.

. Plural in Singular



collective bodies and the state, which “led to new accounts of how modernist concerns with form and audience might engage political and economic experience” (). Stevens’ poetry, so Szalay argues, not only accommodates the New Deal “rhetoric of inclusion” by embodying human collectivities in the form of individual figures such as “major man,” but also points to “the potentially problematic nature” of this representational process itself (both in political and poetical discourses) by presenting it as “an abstraction blooded,” as he does in his later poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (). While, as Szalay points out, Stevens’ poetry displays an awareness of the problem of employing singular figures as abstract placeholders for collective masses, it nevertheless brings out the potential of this form of address to expand the private realm of the lyric into a site for exploring and soliciting possible articulations of collectivity. In other words, one of the more positive inclinations Stevens might have found in the New Deal rhetoric of inclusion is the possibility it affords for incorporating the public into the genre of the personal lyric. Arguably, “Re-Statement of Romance” illustrates an early instance of this tendency and discloses “you and I” not merely as private individuals but also as abstract figures that illuminate the relationship between poetry and public at the time. Thus, situating “Re-Statement of Romance” within its larger cultural context provides a basis for arguing that the problem Stevens is “indirectly getting at” is not to restate the relation of poetry to nature, and that the poem is not addressed solely to a single individual but to a collective “you.” At the same time, however, the poet’s turn to a collective “you” does not indicate an absolute correlation between poetry and public. Instead, the relationship between the two is marked by a tension between intimacy and distance that adamantly resists a fixed correlation between the aesthetic and social terrains. The poem restates the relationship between poetry and public in a specific manner that tacitly holds “you and I” as paradoxically separate and engaged – a relationship in which aesthetic autonomy is maintained through the very tension between intimacy and distance. In “Re-Statement of Romance,” as in “Secret Man,” underlying the tension between separation and engagement, between solitude and collectivity, is an implicit exploration of the link and the boundary between the poetic and the public realms. Stevens presents an alternate means to portray the social dynamics of poetic discourse by furnishing his seemingly private and meditative lyrics with intertextual allusions, experimental mode of address, and changing imagery in rhetorically resonant ways that posit an expanded notion of poetic autonomy beyond the



The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise

enclosure of the personal lyric mode. Taking into account these elements of Stevens’ poetics not only allows us to glimpse these poems in both their formal and contextual complexity, but also to recognize that the problem of aesthetic autonomy constitutes not an obstacle but a constitutive part of Stevens’ quest in the s to transform the aesthetic process into a more responsive, and engaging mechanism.

 

Spaces of Autonomy Relational Place-Making

There is a building stands in a ruinous storm, A dream interrupted out of the past, From beside us, from where we have yet to live.

– Stevens, “Sketch of the Ultimate Politician”

. Aesthetic Interiors: “What Manner of Building Shall We Build?” In a  letter to his Depression-era correspondent and publisher, Ronald Lane Latimer, Stevens explained that “from the point of view of social revolution, Ideas of Order is a book of the most otiose prettiness . . . I am not a propagandist” (L ; emphasis added). The statement was a response to the British critic Geoffrey Grigson’s prickling review published in the left-wing journal New Verse the same year. While following Marianne Moore’s immediate advice not to answer assaults like Grigson’s openly, Stevens could not help but write a confidential remark about it to his publisher. Stevens’ reaction may at first seem puzzling, for there was no mention of “social revolution” in the review, nor an attack citing a lack of commitment to propaganda in his verse. What provoked Stevens was probably what he saw in complaints such as “too much Wallace Stevens, too little everything else,” “the single artificer of his own world,” “still the finicking privateer,” “describing thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, forgetting the bird” (): They described his verse as solipsistic expressions of a self-enclosed aestheticism, thereby indicating that Stevens failed to address his actual social surroundings. Tying Grigson’s critique to his political background – “Grigson is a propagandist. His group is interested in the social revolution, if a social 

Marianne Moore wrote a letter to Stevens on March , a week before Stevens wrote to Latimer, and urged him not to respond to the assaults of Grigson and others (Schulze –).





Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making

revolution may be said to be going on” (L ) – Stevens found the underlying tone of the review similar to the one adopted by many leftists at home. With the advent of the Great Depression and the emergence of a long lasting struggle between fascism and communism, the s cultural climate in the United States was heated by debates about the role of literature in the midst of social and economic crises. Impeaching individual expression for offering an escape to the “ivory tower,” Marxist critics such as V. F. Calverton, and later on Granville Hicks, Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold, and others, emphasized the necessary commitment of literature to politics and social needs. Among the strategies inspired especially by the influential cultural front – the cultural bureau of the socialist Popular Front – was the formation of a new “Proletarian literary renaissance.” Such a formation would include works with a precise focus on class struggle through realistic depictions of the life and the mobilization of workers. Notwithstanding the gloomy years of serious economic crises, by  – the year also of the publication of An Anthology of the Proletarian Literature in the United States – a growing number of proletarian novels, essays, poems, and works in other genres had already generated a relatively expansive literary production. The s witnessed an increasing number of literary publications termed “proletarian literature,” which, as Denning writes, “had a profound and lasting mark on American literature” (–). Walter Bates Rideout, a literary historian of the period, for instance, counts fifty proletarian novels published in just five years between  and  (). As the title of Calverton’s book The Liberation of American Literature () connotes, the initial project of the s Marxist criticism was to liberate literature from bourgeois capitalism by shifting its gears toward a socialist revolution. Thus, on a more general scale, the idea was to embark on a wider transformation of literary and cultural production  

See Foley, Radical Representations, Wald, Exiles from a Future Time, Michael Denning, The Cultural Front, Kalaidjian, American Culture between the Wars, and Leitch, American Literary Criticism since the s. The Popular Front, as Denning has explained, “was the insurgent social movement forged from the labor militancy of the fledging CIO, the anti-fascist solidarity with Spain, Ethiopia, China, and the refugees from Hitler, and the political struggles on the left wing of the New Deal. Born out of the social upheavals of  and coinciding with the Communist Party’s period of greatest influence in US society, the Popular Front became a radical historical bloc uniting industrial unionists, Communists, independent socialists, community activists, and émigré anti-fascists around laborist social democracy, anti-fascism, and anti-lynching” (). For a discussion of proletarian literature and the Popular Front, see Denning, –. For a discussion of the cultural importance of the Popular Front, see Filreis, Modernism –, – and Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams, –.

. Aesthetic Interiors



(Leitch –). While the Marxist belief in literature’s transformative role in social and political domains was at the same time an affirmation of its value, practical principles following this premise, especially the avowal of propaganda, added a new complexity to questions of modernist autonomy, aesthetic self-sufficiency, and the social function of poetry. It was this latter aspect, the persistent call for the deployment of literature for social and political purposes, that Stevens was opposing in his reply to Grigson. Moreover, by calling his verse “otiose,” and ironically “pretty,” Stevens was, in a way, reiterating the position he took two years earlier, when, in response to an inquiry initiated by the same journal, New Verse, he claimed that he does not “like” the word “useful” in relation to poetry (CCP ). On the one hand, Stevens’ insistence on the uselessness of poetry asserts the dominant notion of modernist autonomy as the art object’s withdrawal from socially determined, external functions. Yet, on the other hand, his answer to the very next question in the same inquiry tells a different story: “There can now be a use for poetry of any sort. It depends on the poet” (CPP ). Stevens’ conflicting responses about the use of poetry point to a markedly ambivalent attitude in his understanding of poetry’s autonomy and social function, one that, as I have touched upon in my previous chapter, is deeply grounded in the larger cultural shifts from the s to the s. It is worth unpacking this aspect of Stevens’ poetics more fully here, in order to give a more contextualized account of his idea of aesthetic autonomy. The transition from the modernist aesthetics of the s to the politically radical s had long-lasting effects on the poetics and politics of modernism in the United States (Lowney –). As Filreis argues, the turn toward politicization in the s was not a transition from modernist apolitical aestheticism to political radicalism, but a phase that should be seen as part of the historical development of modernism (Modernism –). While poets such as Isidor Schneider embraced politicized forms of expression by moving away from writing imagist poems in the s to writing narrative poems that could directly speak to the masses in the s, others such as the imagist William Carlos Williams and the objectivist Louis Zukofsky incorporated politics into their verse without abandoning modernist experimentation (Beck ; Lowney ). Stevens’ 



Counting among its ambitions accomplishing commercial success while at the same time opposing capitalism, the proletarian renaissance as it evolved had an ambiguous relationship to the literary market. For a more detailed discussion of this aspect of proletarian literature, see for instance, Utz Riese’s “Neither High nor Low,” –. See also Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work, –.



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making

incorporation of social and political issues into his verse, as Grigson’s review also demonstrates, was already at the time perceived as much more ambiguous compared to that of Williams or Zukofsky. One of the reasons for Stevens’ rather “indirect commitment” to the social crises at this time stems from his resistance to the idea of employing poetry to serve as a vehicle for a predetermined program. While acknowledging the need for a more socially engaged poetics, he postulates autonomy as a prerequisite for poetry’s interaction with social and political realities. Stevens’ defense of poetry’s autonomy in this sense is deeply rooted in his insistence on the “resistance” of poetry to what he called “the pressure of the contemporaneous” in his often quoted  lecture “The Irrational Element in Poetry” (CPP –). By the mid-s, not only the critical events themselves (the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the approaching World War, and the controversy over fascism and communism) but also the political obligation urged by the left had become, for Stevens, a weighty component of the pressure of reality. In Stevens’ case, claims to resistance and autonomy both emanated from the need to form new ways to respond to the pressures of external demands for art’s effective participation in politics. Thus, his notion of poetic resistance against complying with political and social obligations was an assertion of aesthetic autonomy – not, however, from the world but from pressing models of aesthetic relationality: the s demand for the direct utilization of poetry to actualize artistic commitment to social, economic, and political crises. Nevertheless, Stevens’ relation to the cultural left cannot be understood in terms of a series of antagonisms. As several commentators have already argued in detail, Stevens was building an intricate and poetically productive relation to the period’s leftist literary circles. Indeed, his conception of aesthetic autonomy partially emerged out of heated debates among leftwing critics themselves, who expressed conflicting views regarding the 



While acknowledging this aspect of the situation, Filreis goes a step further and claims that what was so nettlesome for Stevens at this time was more “realism” than “reality” as such (Modernism ). As mentioned, proletarian critics endorsed realism because they saw it as the most appropriate form for reflecting critically on social and economic turbulence. But we may legitimately wonder whether Stevens, had the dictated form been something other than realism, would not still have wanted to resist it, simply because it was a dictate. Moreover, as Longenbach (–) and Ragg (, ) have argued convincingly, far from renouncing realism, Stevens in the s was developing an advanced conception of abstraction that sidestepped the controversy between realism and abstract expression. It was not realism as such, then, but the cultural demands imposed on both realism and literature that made poetic resistance and opposition compelling. See Filreis, Modernism, –, Terés, –, and Longenbach, –.

. Aesthetic Interiors



social role of literature during the Depression era. When Stevens wrote to Latimer in , “I hope I am headed left but there are lefts and lefts,” he was hoping to be allied with a left that would be capable of articulating a critical attitude similar to his (L ). Thus, during the second half of the s, Stevens’ ideas about the autonomy and the political role of poetry converged with those of leftist critics, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, who were critical of the notion of propaganda and defended the idea of autonomy in the resuscitated Partisan Review (), where Stevens published several of his poems. By paying close attention to linguistic and conceptual innovations offered by modernist aesthetics, Partisan Review critics espoused an eclectic and complex understanding of art and politics. Despite the fact that these critics (often referred to as “The New York Intellectuals”) paved the way for the institutionalization of high modernism and later – in the late s, faced with McCarthyism – relinquished their earlier leftist radicalism, in the s they were trying to establish a link between political radicalism and modernist literature (Phillips and Rahv, “In Retrospect” ). One of the conclusions that can be drawn from looking at Stevens’ relation to the cultural politics of the s is that questions pertaining to the function of poetry, the role of the poet in society, and artistic autonomy were aesthetic and political questions central to literary and cultural debates. Terés and Filreis also acknowledge this aspect of the s cultural climate while investigating the impact of Stevens’ interplay with leftist circles on his poetry. My reading of Stevens’ interactions with the left suggests an additional complexity, however, absent from previous criticism’s treatment of his politics and aesthetics in the s. The aforementioned critics seem to claim that the primary question at stake for Stevens at this period concerned how to develop an accurate response to social realities. Looking closely into poems from Ideas of Order and The Man with the Blue Guitar, I claim that the issue for Stevens was to transform the conditions of possibility for poetry to make a response, in order to contest extant models of responding. Moreover, I propose that the political resonance of Stevens’ avowal of autonomy is to be heard in this process of transforming the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a new poetic response. 



Stevens published several poems in the Partisan Review, including “The Dwarf,” “Loneliness in Jersey City,” “Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is,” “The Woman Who Had More Babies than That,” and “Life on a Battleship.” For a discussion of this aspect of “The New York Intellectuals,” see also Terés, .



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making

One of the striking ways in which Stevens’ vision of aesthetic autonomy manifests itself in his poems, and one that I want to explore here, is through the use of spatial images and architectural spaces. Stevens’ poetry of the s wrestles with questions of poetry’s autonomy, its cultural status and social function by means of architectural imagery that often incorporates the demolition and restoration of built environments. Many of Stevens’ poems are stocked with habitable structures, spatial metaphors that body forth the desire to stake out an independent aesthetic territory that seeks to condition how poetry passes into contact with social reality. To put it differently, Stevens examines the question of the place of poetry in society by making up places for poetry. Architectural archetypes become figures for aesthetic independence and sovereignty, posing a question for criticism: What does it mean to treat the issue of poetry’s autonomy and social function in terms of making up places and architectural images? Stevens’ persistent use of architectural imagery in his poetry characterizes a sense of aesthetic autonomy that is understood in relational terms. The ideal of autonomy implied in his use of spatial tropes turns on the effort to form an independent relation to social crises and political urgency, rather than signifying the art object’s immunity from the world. In “The Invisible Skyscraper,” Bart Eeckhout pinpoints the relevance of Stevens’ “archetypal typologies” to his poetic development (). Eeckhout reads Stevens’ built environments in various contexts: biographical (Stevens’ own relation to New York), literary (possible allusions to the romantics), and architectural (historical archetypes that have European sources). Adding the cultural context of the s, we can extend the allegorical meaning of Stevens’ archetypes already suggested in Eeckhout’s reading of “the balcony” as the “threshold between the public and the private” (). Carrying this argument forward, I propose that the construction and occupation of aesthetic interiors do not so much fulfill a bourgeois desire to create spaces for comfort and solitude as they restructure a critical engagement with unsettling historical circumstances. In Architecture and Modern Literature, David Spurr also focuses on the production of architectural spaces in Stevens’ poems, in this case by examining them alongside Martin Heidegger’s conceptualization of “building,” and he claims that “Stevens’ most direct statement of the analogy between poetry and architecture is precisely that which seeks to define the human in relation to the heavenly” (). However, reading Stevens’ poetic acts of place-making historically reveals his buildings to have greater relevance for the question of poetry’s relation to the social than to the supernatural. Moreover, Stevens’ poetic use of buildings is not

. Aesthetic Interiors



as analogous to the Heideggerian understanding of “building” as a “safeguarded” location for thinking (Heidegger –) as Spurr claims: While Heidegger’s “building” promises the ontological security for the “fourfold” (earth-sky-mortals-divinities) that “give form to dwelling in its essence and house this essential unfolding” (), Stevens’ interiors, built upon a tension between poetry and the social, are precarious spaces that create resistance and critique instead of security. Stevens’ conceptual figuration of aesthetic autonomy through architectural and spatial imagery has political implications, provided we are ready to widen the scope of what politics means in relation to his aesthetics. Terés points to the theoretical necessity of rethinking politics while reading Stevens’ poetry from a historical perspective, claiming that the critical tendency of neglecting “Stevens’ strengths as a political poet” derives from critics’ “unacknowledged or unconscious assumption that politics must be something largely instrumental” and their casting of “poetic acts and political acts” as “mutually exclusive” (). A possible response to the theoretical challenge to reevaluate poetics and politics in Stevens’ case, can be distilled from Rancière’s discussion of politics and aesthetics. Rancière’s theory provides an alternative rendering of aesthetics whose specificity consists not in disseminating messages but “in bringing about a reframing of material and symbolic space. And it is in this way that art bears upon politics” (Discontents ). The aesthetic reframing Rancière describes here is a political gesture because it is inclined to distribute sensory experience in a new way that is at odds with hierarchical categorizations in what he calls “the representative regime” (). Stevens’ commitment to aesthetic autonomy can be read as part of the act of “reframing” described by Rancière because his production of spaces provides an alternative vantage point for reconfiguring the relationship between aesthetic and social domains in ways that are independent from, and, as we shall see, at times, explicitly counterpoised to, dominant discourses on the politics of aesthetics in the s. Rancière’s understanding of the politics of aesthetics in this sense suggests a potential avenue for elaborating on the political meaning of Stevens’ aesthetic interiors. However, rather than pointing out a parallel between Stevens’ poetics and Rancière’s 

In “Building Dwelling Thinking” Heidegger points to a fundamental link between building and thinking. He explains building as a “safeguarded” location for thinking and being-in-the-world, a place “preserved from harm and danger” (). Anticipating Spurr’s argument, in a  essay entitled “Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut,” Kermode also noted the affinities between, on the one hand, Stevens’ meditations on poetry and place, and, on the other, Heidegger’s philosophy of dwelling and thinking (–).



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making

theory, it is also one of my concerns in this chapter to open up a debate concerning Rancière’s critique of modernism and more particularly his critique of modernist autonomy as the autonomy of the artwork. A distinctive feature of Rancière’s perspective on modernism and aesthetic autonomy is that, instead of defining the work of art as autonomous, it focuses on the autonomy of “aesthetic experience” (“Aesthetic Revolution” ). While disclosing the interpretive possibilities Rancière’s theory opens up for approaching Stevens’ poetry, I will address this distinction (between the autonomy of the work of art and the autonomy of the aesthetic experience) toward the end of this chapter. In the next section, however, I want to elucidate the political and aesthetic predicament behind Stevens’ urge to build and inhabit places. The allegorical use of architectural typologies reveals how Stevens tackles the problem of autonomy and relationality in terms of producing, confronting, and redefining spaces. His spatial composition of architecture in poems such as “A Postcard from the Volcano,” “Academic Discourse at Havana,” and “A Thought Revolved” brings about a specific conceptual figuration of poetic autonomy with political and aesthetic import.

. Autonomy’s Architectures From his first collection, Harmonium (), to his last, The Rock (), Stevens consistently returns to architectural metaphors that point to the significance of his poetic dwelling places. Throughout his oeuvre, Stevens’ formations of various architectural spaces, specified through the mention of rooms, corridors, pillars, walls, balconies, houses, and cathedrals, can be read as attempts to mark out a separate aesthetic territory. From Crispin’s “single room” in “The Comedian as the Letter C” to the “distant room” in “The Sick Man,” or from the majestic “chiefest dome” of “Architecture” to the “speech-full domes” of “The Sail of Ulysses,” we find a complex trajectory of imagined spaces underlining ideas of poetic sovereignty and independence (CPP , , , ). In “Things of August,” from The Auroras of Autumn (), the simultaneity of “interior intonations,” and the command “Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through” suggests that while there is continuity in Stevens’ understanding of aesthetic autonomy as capable of sustaining both engagement and distance, there is also change with regard to how Stevens conceptualizes the ways in which such a capacity is realized (CPP ). Because of the present focus on Stevens’ poetry of the s, I will limit my analysis of this trajectory from Harmonium to The Man with the Blue

. Autonomy’s Architectures



Guitar. In Stevens’ first volume, aesthetic interiors are places of serenity, inwardness, and solitude, such as “the room” in “Of the Surface of Things,” Crispin’s “cabin” in “The Comedian as the Letter C,” or the “place” in “The Place of the Solitaires” (CPP , , ). Stevens already starts transforming the meaning of his spatial archetypes in “Academic Discourse at Havana” (), the last poem he wrote before his neardecade of silence. In many ways linked to “The Comedian,” “Academic Discourse” marks a shift from delineating places of detachment and solitude to shaping the perspective of a relational space. A substitution made in the second edition of Harmonium () helps us see this shift more clearly. Instead of “Architecture,” which stages the construction of a monumental poetic space, “Our chiefest dome a demoiselle of gold” (CPP ), in the second edition, Stevens chooses to include “The Public Square,” which dramatizes the collapse of a monument (L –). This decision reflects Stevens’ understanding of his earlier constructions as monuments to be gradually destroyed and reconstructed. Situated in the turbulent context of the s, Stevens’ aesthetic interiors in Ideas of Order evolve into precarious and remote spaces from which poetry engages with the world in accordance not with the pressure of the outside but with principles initiated by poetry itself. His work of the s sets up the concept of aesthetic autonomy as a task for poetry to take on, and it does so by means of a spatial imagery of architectural structures. From the beginning, this task involves reconfiguring poetry’s original encounter with the world, rather than finalizing its detachment from it. The production of a sovereign space in “Ghosts and Cocoons,” for example, highlights this aspect of Stevens’ poetics: The grass is in seed. The young birds are flying. Yet the house is not built, not even begun. (. . .) Where, butcher, seducer, bloodman, reveller, Where is sun and music and highest heaven’s lust, 

In a special issue of WSJ that focuses on “The Poetics of Place,” John N. Serio draws attention to Stevens’ shifting notions of place. Serio argues that, whereas in Harmonium the physical environment determines and limits Stevens’ perspective on spatiality, extending from the mids his poetry moves toward a more abstract understanding by rendering “the relationship between people and place as a distinctively poetic process” (). In later poems, Stevens identifies physical locations less with material reality than with internal aesthetic processes so as to underline “the central importance of imagination’s nongeography to the world’s geography” (). While Serio maps a convincing trajectory, he does not really pay attention to historical and cultural factors involved in Stevens’ renewed poetics of place.



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making For which more than any words cries deeplier? This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon To blot this with its dove-winged blendings. (. . .) “The fly on the rose prevents us, O season Excelling summer, ghost of fragrance falling On dung.” Come now, pearled and pasted, bloomy-leafed, While the domes resound with chant involving chant.

(CPP –)

The unconstructed “house” at the start of the poem turns into several “domes” by the end. Substantiating a distinct territory, further implied also by the “Cocoons” in the title and “the grass in seed,” these spaces are more than an allegory for the birth of a new aesthetic. Far from expressing aloofness, the construction of an independent aesthetic territory is what enables the confrontation with the “butcher, seducer, bloodman, reveller” who, as Stevens explains in a letter to Hi Simons, represent the “inept politician” during the Depression (L ). Even if it is no longer possible for poetry to “blot” the dirty world with “dove-winged blendings,” the act of marking a distant, autonomous place creates the potential for implementing a critical position and thus for engagement with the turbulent historical circumstances of the Depression. In “Botanist on Alp (No. ),” Stevens carries on this theme by staging the struggle to reconstruct his earlier archetypes that are about to collapse. As opposed to the “obedient pillars” and “plinths” of “Architecture” (CPP ), here “The pillars are prostrate, the arches are haggard,” and the poet’s vision is one of “despair,” away from “the central composition, / The essential theme” that was once available to the painter Claude (CPP –). However, the poet, who is glancing at a hotel from above, is soon to embark on a new composition: “The hotel is boarded and bare. / Yet the panorama of despair / Cannot be the specialty / Of this ecstatic air” (CPP ). Thus, in “Botanist on Alp (No. ),” the speaker’s gaze turns away from the hotel and the scene of collapsing pillars to “crosses on the convent roofs” (CPP ). Here, the attempt to map out a new aesthetic terrain may at first seem to succumb to a sentimental longing for the supernatural. Yet, what creates the transition from “the panorama of despair” in the first poem to a new panorama that belongs to “An earthier [poem]” in “Botanist on Alp (No. )” is not the crosses themselves, but “merely . . . their glittering,” their aesthetic appeal (CPP ).

. Autonomy’s Architectures



A similar perspective is also at the heart of “Gray Stones and Gray Pigeons” and “Winter Bells,” where buildings of worship are symbolically abandoned. In these poems church and synagogue are left empty: “The archbishop is away”; “The Jew did not go to his synagogue” (CPP –). Perhaps, placing these religious figures outside of their buildings reflects Stevens’ “obsession with the ways in which poetry may come to replace religion as the highest spiritual value” (Eeckhout, “Skyscraper” ). This is also reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s claim about poetry replacing religious spirituality as he argues in “The Use of Poetry” and later develops in “After Strange Gods” (). To go back to Spurr’s argument for a moment, the treatment of the supernatural here stems not so much from the need to form a relation to the heavenly as from the urge to replace it. Just as in “Botanist on Alp (No. ),” in “Evening without Angels,” as its very title indicates, the poet descends from the metaphysical, “angelic syllables” to “Bare earth” (CPP –). Significantly, Stevens also brings back the image of the house: . . . Evening, when the measure skips a beat And then another, one by one, and all To a seething minor swiftly modulate. Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare, Except for our own houses, huddled low Beneath the arches and their spangled air, Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire, Where the voice that is in us makes a true response, Where the voice that is great within us rises up, As we stand gazing at the rounded moon. (CPP )

The ellipsis with which Stevens begins this final stanza marks a point of digression in the “speech” of “men of sun / And men of day” who “repeat antiquest sounds of air” introduced earlier in the poem (CPP ). The repetitive voice of antiquity is interrupted “when the measure skips a beat / And then another, one by one,” recalling in a way the doubt Stevens cast on the “antiquity of self” in “A Fading of the Sun” (CPP ). Stevens’ attitude toward “antiquity” in these poems has him occupy a different position from Ezra Pound or H. D., who both sought to carry the “feel” of antiquity into the modernist idiom. A significant aspect of antiquity as it is depicted here is its link to religion. While asking, “Was the sun concoct for angels or for men?” Stevens problematizes the perspective of “men” 

See especially Pound’s The Cantos and H. D.’s “The Tribute.”



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making

who “made angels of the sun, and of / The moon they made their own attendant ghosts, / Which led them back to angels, after death.” The poem invites a new and secular voice by opposing the circularity of mythical or religious antiquity. The celebration of the materiality of sight and body, “the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking,” as the epigraph goes, heeds the call for a secularly realized collectivity by the end of the poem (CPP ). The rejection of antiquity in the final stanza turns the speaker toward an acceptation of barrenness (or perhaps even nothingness) as something good. Yet Stevens adds an important exception: “Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare, / Except for our own houses.” Unlike the convent roofs in “Botanist on Alp (No. ),” these houses are “huddled low / Beneath the arches and their spangled air” (CPP ). The careful inclusion of the houses as improving a situation in which both night and earth were bare is important, since it is through the implementation of these houses that a new voice and “a true response” emerge out of nothingness. Here, a question remains concerning the nature of this response: Are aesthetic interiors place-markers of poetic sovereignty and thus of a sense of aesthetic autonomy? During the transition from the s to the s, Stevens’ impulse to include built environments in his verse becomes more and more motivated by an attempt to mark out poetry’s autonomy from cultural, political, and historical pressures. The important caveat is that autonomy, just like the houses in “Evening without Angels,” is formed so as to negotiate the conditions of a new response to those pressures, and thus cannot be understood as isolated from them. The responses Stevens articulates throughout the s demonstrate the intrinsic capacity of poetry to stage and ponder the limits and possibilities of its enabling conditions – to construct and interrogate the spaces in which an independent relation can actually be established. In “A Postcard from the Volcano” (), the spatial remoteness and sovereignty that Stevens’ built environments keep suggesting provide the means for a critique of a given politics of art and a commentary on the situation of poetry in the s. Even critics such as Longenbach and Vendler, who approach the poet from very different angles, commonly 

It should be noted that Stevens’ celebration, which seems very much like a variant of humanism here, is something he finds less satisfactory later in his career, as in his claim that “The chief defect of humanism is that it concerns human beings. Between humanism and something else, it might be possible to create an acceptable fiction” (L ).

. Autonomy’s Architectures



assert that the speaker of the poem is Stevens imagining himself dead and speaking to the future. But the temporal complexity of the poem suggests more than one interpretation of the historical vantage point of the speaker. If we note the persistence of the non-American image of “the volcano” in romantic poetry, and Stevens’ widely discussed quest for a “new romantic” that he was advocating at this time, then a possible source of inspiration might be seen as a dead romantic poet, perhaps Shelley, who actually wrote letters to his friend Thomas Love Peacock, recounting his excursion to Mount Vesuvius (Bieri ). Read this way, what the poem proposes is a subtle claim about the poetic inheritance of the past and a questioning of a given model of relationality. In the opening stanzas of the poem, the speaker’s perspective is merged into that of an external referent, who might be seen as a dead poet speaking to Stevens’ immediate present: Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill; And that in autumn, when the grapes Made sharp air sharper by their smell These had a being, breathing frost; And least will guess that with our bones We left much more, left what still is The look of things, left what we felt

(CPP )

What the children perceive as lifeless bones embodies more than the physical remains of the dead: “with our bones / We left much more, left what still is / The look of things, left what we felt.” The bones, which epitomize the heritage of the past, carry feelings and images that were recorded by an older generation. The speaker conceives that the children will examine the cultural inheritance of the past, but few will regard its relevance to the present – “least will guess” that what the dead poets left behind is “still” part of their immediate reality. The new generation’s disregard of poetic legacy is rendered more tangible when, later in the text, the speaker postulates that “Children, / Still weaving budded aureoles, / Will speak our speech and never know” (CPP ). Stevens’ treatment of poetic inheritance, and the children’s reception of the past raise questions central to s debates on the left about the 

This interpretation appears both in Longenbach, – and Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire, –.



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making

“usable past” of literature, in which notions of romanticism and the romantic came under effective criticism. Indeed, the children in the poem, as representatives of a newer generation, resemble the proletarian critics of the period who projected a “pejorative” fiction on to the term “romantic.” Stevens complained about this tendency in a letter to Latimer in : When people speak of the romantic, they do so in what the French commonly call a pejorative sense. But poetry is essentially romantic, only the romantic of poetry must be something constantly new and, therefore, just the opposite of what is spoken of as the romantic. (L ; emphasis in the original)

Stevens exemplified one such pejorative use by referring to Irving Babbitt’s conservative attack in Rousseau and Romanticism (), while another influential but very different attack was being articulated by proletarian critics. Stevens was most probably aware of the latter attack since, as Filreis claims, “radical disapprovals” of romanticism were largely popularized and accessible “in the intellectual weeklies” of the period (Modernism ). Moreover, when Stevens called Williams a romantic poet, he was well aware of the negative connotations such a description would hold for a poet who had at that point formed stronger ties to the left compared to himself: “The first [thing to say about him] is that [Williams] is a romantic poet. This will horrify him. Yet the proof is everywhere” (CPP ). In this context, in order to understand how Stevens’ “new romantic” bones speak very directly to the children picking among them, it is instructive to consider briefly the reception of the literary past and conceptions of the romantic among literary critics of the s. It should be noted from the start that the critical outlook on romanticism was in fact a complex one. Some critics, most notably Kenneth Burke, identified the politics of romanticism with an impotent “attitude of rejection” (qtd. in Filreis, Modernism ), whereas others, such as Granville Hicks, acknowledged the possibility of transforming such rejection into a fruitfully political stance. Stevens himself retrospectively commented on this when he wrote that “Communism is just a new romanticism” (L ). In their response to Genevieve Taggard’s  essay “Romanticism and Communism,” (where she challenged the romantic tendencies of the “Auden School Poets”), the editors of New Masses (Stanley Burnshaw, Hicks, Michael Gold, and Joshua Kunitz) sought to defend the idea of a 

See Stevens’  review of Moore’s poems, “A Poet That Matters,” CPP, .

. Autonomy’s Architectures



“‘revolutionary romanticism’—a poem, story or play projecting a socialist society” (qtd. in Wald, Exiles ). Yet the editors were on the same page as Taggard in her critique of modernist art as illustrating the last phase of a “bourgeois romanticism.” As the exchange between Taggard and the New Masses editors demonstrates, modernist art and romanticism were criticized on a similar basis: “Dadaism, Stream of Consciousness, the Revolution of the Word, Objectivism, and Futurism” were all seen as expressive forms of romantic eschewal (Wald, Exiles ). It is thus not coincidental that Stevens in the mid-s was calling modernist poets such as Moore, Williams, and Eliot romantics (CPP , –). The link between modernism and romanticism had already been made, though only in a negative sense. Stevens wanted to challenge this radically by treating the affinity between the romantic and modernist spirit in positively useful terms. Even if revolutionary critics often stressed the importance of the past for the formation of a new American literature, certain traditions were valued over others. The literary value of a past work was measured against the degree of its direct involvement with social and economic circumstances. Consequently, there was also confusion as to how the proletarian critic was to evaluate past literatures that clearly had literary value but at the same time seemed like products of a bourgeois culture. In , Margaret Marshall and Mary McCarthy mocked this confusion: Michael Gold’s aesthetic sensibilities force him to admit of Thomas Hardy . . . even though his lack of information leads him to go on to sneer at the ‘eighty comfortable years’ of Hardy’s life . . . Hicks is numbed by Proust’s artistry, but his political conscience stings him into a measure of disapproval. ()

The revolutionary critics’ method of selection while reevaluating literary traditions soon triggered opposition from within Marxist circles. In a  article, “Problems and Perspectives in Revolutionary Literature,” Phillips and Rahv criticized the tendency of “combating all endeavors to use the

 

Van Wyck Brooks’ “On Creating a Usable Past” (), for instance, remained an important resource for the Marxist critics of the s. In The Great Tradition () Hicks openly negated both the aesthetic isolationism of the romantics and the pessimism of the s (European influence) in American literature. Margaret Marshall and Mary McCarthy had claimed early on that the proletarian critic’s attitude toward the literature of the past came to convey a “curious internal warfare between Marx and aestheticism,” which “gives to left-wing reviews of bad proletarian and good bourgeois books . . . a hybrid, muddy quality” ().



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making

heritage of the past” (). The following year Phillips and Rahv reiterated their critique by attacking Hicks’ exclusionary approach to modernism, especially to Eliot. Hicks responded to Phillips and Rahv in the same pages of Partisan Review. While agreeing with them on issues such as the inseparableness of “form and content,” Hicks claimed that “there is much less agreement on the problem of tradition” (“Discussion” ). What Hicks rightly diagnosed in his riposte to Phillips and Rahv were the many “confusions and misunderstandings” surrounding the problem of “tradition” on the left. The critics’ recapitulation of the past was very much colored by the principles they stipulated with regard to how poetry was to form a relation to social and economic conditions. All in all, the term “romantic” held negative connotations and was associated with the desire to escape. Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle (), Malcolm Cowley’s account of the romantic in “John Dos Passos: The Poet and the World” (), or Hicks’ derogatory use of the term in The Great Tradition () were exemplary of this attitude. The critique of the romantic, in this context, was based on a predetermined model of the relationship between poetry and society. Analyzing literary history through principles of effective commitment led to a denial of relationality while assessing romanticism as “escapism” and the s high modernism as the “lost tradition.” Whether or not Stevens was reading Partisan Review before he started interacting with its editors, or New Masses in the early s, his widely acknowledged search for a “new romantic” in the middle of the decade, as Filreis claims (Modernism ), was a project that partially emerged out of such cultural controversies over the understanding of romanticism. Interpreting “A Postcard from the Volcano” from this historical perspective reveals how Stevens participates in this heated literary debate. While addressing  



Rahv explicitly uses the phrase “usable past” in his attack on those who would reject everything “save that which is near-Marxian” (qtd. in Murphy ). Following Phillips and Rahv, Farrell, in his  A Note on Literary Criticism, problematized Hicks’ conclusion in The Great Tradition that “the great tradition is made up mainly of failures and partial failures who did not manage to come to grips sufficiently with the problems of their day and age” (). After the publication of A Note on Literary Criticism Hicks wrote a sympathetic response in the July  issue of New Masses entitled “In Defense of James Farrell.” Farrell’s book was then being attacked on grounds of being reactionary and anti-Marxist. Here, Hicks came with a corrective, implying that even though he was not in full agreement with Farrell’s views, he was convinced that the book argued along the lines of Marxist thinking and was not opposed to it. In the second half of the decade, further tensions between on the one hand Phillips, Rahv, and Farrell and, on the other Hicks, Cowley, Burke, and Gold stemmed from deeper divergences in their understanding of the function of literature. This became more apparent after , when the former group openly broke with the Communist Party and began criticizing the literary politics of the latter in the resuscitated Partisan Review.

. Autonomy’s Architectures



the issue of literary heritage, the poem demonstrates some of the limitations of the denial of relationality in revolutionary critics’ description of romanticism. In response to the allegorical use of buildings such as the ivory tower and the castle, prevalent in discourses that question the escapist aesthetic tendencies of the romantic, Stevens formulates a defense of aesthetic territory by introducing an alternative allegorical space: “the mansion” and the area surrounding it. A central image to the poem’s second half, the mansion is an inherited territory. Stevens’ description of this architectural space resists the idea that marking a separate aesthetic territory simply confirms poetry’s lack of relation to the world. Though the mansion is seemingly shut off from the outside, it is at the same time a historically contingent space that is open to change: The spring clouds blow Above the shuttered mansion-house, Beyond our gate and the windy sky Cries out a literate despair. We knew for long the mansion’s look And what we said of it became A part of what it is . . . Children, Still weaving budded aureoles, Will speak our speech and never know, Will say of the mansion that it seems As if he that lived there left behind A spirit storming in blank walls, A dirty house in a gutted world, A tatter of shadows peaked to white, Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

(CPP –)

The “literate despair” Stevens writes about here is not the mourning over a bygone age, but the despair of the past as it is rendered in the present. The cry is caused by the pejorative fiction modulated by the “As if” – a reading of the mansion foreshadowed by the children. According to this vision, the mansion becomes a physically confined, homogeneous space with windowless walls where the dead poet is wrapped up in solitude: “A spirit storming in blank walls.” The children’s vision of the poet isolated in the mansion is antithetical to the speaker’s self-description at the beginning, 

“Blank walls” might be a pun on “blank verse” implying that iambic pentameter was the medium for storming passions, whereas this poem is in consistent tetrameter, mixing iambs and dactyls.



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making

that “our bones” – also metaphors for the poet’s words – were once “quick as foxes on the hill.” The dead poet anticipates what the children “Will say of the mansion”: From the s standpoint of realism, the mansion is “a dirty house” that is “peaked to white” and “Smeared with gold” – in other words, aestheticized by the poet to escape “a gutted world.” Yet, without realizing it, by speaking about the mansion as they do, the children speak the language of the dead poets: “Children, / Still weaving budded aureoles, / Will speak our speech and never know.” Stevens’ radical claim is that the language with which the s critics describe the dead poets displays the same “attitude of rejection” that they critically aligned with the romantics. What is placed under suspicion, meanwhile, is the description of the mansion and the dead poet as incapable of forming any relation to the outside. Here, Stevens’ vision of autonomy enabling relationality can be construed from his resistance to the children’s discourse. In contrast to the description of the mansion with “blank walls” that belong to the children’s fiction, in this period Stevens operates with a conception of poetic space that is not immune to the world, but functions like a window opening onto it, or a gate that can be opened – a point where the forces of poetry and the outside impinge upon each other. This figuration points to the possibility of self-reflexively reconfiguring the relationship between aesthetic and social domains in ways that are autonomous from and resistant to dominant discourses on the politics of aesthetics in the s. The implicit rejection of the children’s as-if fantasy of the mansion is at once an attempt to restore the meaning of a distant poetic territory and a gesture of engagement. In other words, Stevens is able to conduct a critical distantiation through his defense of the mansion, a separate aesthetic space whose meaning is subject to constant change in history. By questioning the derogatory rendition of the mansion as a protective monument of escapism, he negotiates the meaning of aesthetic autonomy. To contest a categorization of poetry by means of a symbolic production of spatiality is at once a political and an aesthetic gesture, because it confronts, and questions, a dominant and pressing discourse concerning poetic relationality and autonomy. A central tenet of Stevens’ thinking about the response to social crises is to evaluate the changing conditions of poetic creation, which for him is distinct from other modes of producing relationality. In “Academic Discourse at Havana,” he stages competing accounts of spatiality that allow for a more nuanced conception of aesthetic autonomy. This poem was first published under the title “Discourse in a Cantina at Havana” in  in

. Autonomy’s Architectures



Broom and reprinted in  in Hound and Horn. As Longenbach () and Ragg () claim, the poem accords extremely well with the context of the s even though it was written in . This is probably why Stevens chose to include it among the pages of Ideas of Order. The fact that “Academic Discourse” is well attuned to the tone of his  collection also demonstrates, as Longenbach writes, that “a deep concern with the place of poetry was from the start an essential part of Stevens’ introspective voyage” (; emphasis added). Recalling in several respects “The Comedian as the Letter C” (), the poem provides a perfect case for underlining the continuity between Harmonium and Ideas of Order. As such, it sheds light on the aesthetic problem that has already been hinted at in “The Comedian”: the tension between, on the one hand, “Crispin, magister of a single room” dwelling in “solitude,” and, on the other, the idea of “The return to social nature” (CPP –). In “The Comedian,” the aesthetic configuration of a sovereign poetic space implied by Crispin’s “cabin,” “room,” “home,” and “dome” is in the end not yet capable of stimulating relationality. The poem ends with the premise: “what can all this matter since / The relation comes, benignly, to its end?” Inasmuch as the ending renounces “relation,” on another level, by declaring, “So may the relation of each man be clipped,” Stevens also clips his own attachments to the figure of Crispin (CPP ). This act of selfdistancing confirms Longenbach’s argument that “the poem is not a simple imitation but a self-conscious parody of Shelley’s and Yeats’s voyaging” (). In “Academic Discourse,” the parody directly speaks to the question of defining an autonomous aesthetic territory. The poem starts out with a perspective that mocks an earlier mapping of poetic space adumbrated in Stevens’ allusion to Coleridge’s canonical poem “Kubla Khan.” Emphasizing, as Longenbach does, “the self-conscious parody,” Ragg pays close attention to the Coleridge allusion and to the issue of the function of poetry that Stevens explicitly raises when he asks, “Is the function of the poet here mere sound . . . ?” (CPP ). While acknowledging the symbolic function of place and space in Stevens’ consideration of the role of poetry, both Longenbach and Ragg interpret the poem’s deteriorated buildings as part of his questioning of the poetic imagination’s validity (Longenbach ;



Longenbach speculates that the poem was originally written as a part of “The Comedian as the Letter C” (). Ragg’s reading also emphasizes the continuity of imagery and tone between the two poems ().



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making

Ragg ). In their readings, the declining “old casino” is seen as an isolated space that is incapable of transformation and relation. However, I would argue that in “Academic Discourse” both the allegorical use of imagined architecture – the “old casino” and the “balcony” (CPP , ) – and the parody of “Kubla Khan” suggest a negotiation and remodeling of an autonomous aesthetic territory as a relational poetic space. In the first section of “Academic Discourse,” the territorial claim of Kubla Khan, now seen as “the mythy goober khan” turns into a “peanut parody” (CPP ). Coleridge’s “pleasure dome” shrinks to “an old casino” in the modern metropolis. And unlike that pleasure dome, which stands intact by a sacred river, the old casino is unable to sustain itself: Life is an old casino in a park. The bills of the swans are flat upon the ground. (. . .) The swans . . . Before the bills of the swans fell flat Upon the ground, and before the chronicle Of affected homage foxed so many books, They warded the blank waters of the lakes And island canopies which were entailed To that casino. Long before the rain Swept through its boarded windows and the leaves Filled its encrusted fountains, they arrayed The twilights of the mythy goober khan. The centuries of excellence to be Rose out of promise and became the sooth Of trombones floating in the trees. The toil Of thought evoked a peace eccentric to The eye and tinkling to the ear. Gruff drums Could beat, yet not alarm the populace. The indolent progressions of the swans Made earth come right; a peanut parody For peanut people.

(CPP )



Pursuing the question of the function of poetry along with the allusion to “Kubla Khan,” Ragg finds an implicit skepticism in Stevens’ resistance to all-encompassing perspectives (universalisms) pertinent not only in the “imaginative indulgence” of Kubla Khan but also in “the politic man [’s]” explicit denial of imagination (–). Even though Longenbach approaches the poem from a rather different angle, his conclusion is similar to Ragg’s. Focusing also on the question of the function of poetry, Longenbach explores “the breaking points” of “universals” and “grander visions” that are represented by both “the mythic resonance of the swans” – fallen figures attached to an older aesthetic principle – and the exaggeratedly apocalyptic worldview of “the politic man” (–).

. Autonomy’s Architectures



Stevens’ parody of “Kubla Khan” is part of the introspective voyage in search of a poetic territory that has already been vouched for in “The Comedian.” However, Stevens here carries the self-conscious parody onto another level. If Ragg is right in claiming that “Academic Discourse” is ostensibly linked to the “end” of “The Comedian” (), we can plausibly claim that Stevens’ challenge to Coleridge is also meant to review the denial of relationality in the final episode of Crispin’s failed attempt to “return to social nature” (CPP ). The reason the modern pleasure dome or old casino is unable to sustain itself is that, just like Crispin’s house in the final part of “The Comedian,” it falls short of affect or relation: “The toil / Of thought evoked a peace eccentric to / The eye and tinkling to the ear. Gruff drums / Could beat, yet not alarm the populace.” There is no essential difference between Crispin’s peaceful settlement in “A Nice Shady Home” (part five of “The Comedian”) and the warlike drums of the Goober Khan’s narrative. In the end, neither of these is capable of engendering contact. Stevens’ contestation of what David P. Haney calls Coleridge’s “autonomous pleasure dome” (), in turn creates a tension with the defense of the mansion as an inherited romantic space in “A Postcard from the Volcano.” Yet the deterioration of the pleasure dome in “Academic Discourse” is not the result of a constrained discursive representation as it is in “A Postcard.” In , it was perhaps less problematic for Stevens to question the romantic claim for aesthetic sovereignty since there was not yet a dominant discourse associating the romantic with the pejorative. Moreover, while Stevens confronts the aesthetic construction of an enclosed autonomous sphere, he does not therefore reject the idea of autonomy as such. He is more interested in resuscitating it. This comes to the fore more tangibly when Stevens confronts the other extreme, that is, the complete subsumption of art into public life: Politic man ordained Imagination as the fateful sin. Grandmother and her basketful of pears Must be the crux of our compendia. That’s world enough, and more, if one includes Her daughters to the peached and ivory wench For whom the towers are built. The burgher’s breast, And not a delicate ether star-impaled, Must be the place for prodigy, unless Prodigious things are tricks. The world is not The bauble of the sleepless nor a word



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making That should import a universal pith To Cuba. Jot these milky matters down. They nourish Jupiters. Their casual pap Will drop like sweetness in the empty nights When too great rhapsody is left annulled And liquorish prayer provokes new sweats: so, so: Life is an old casino in a wood.

(CPP )

At the other end of the spectrum lies the public stance of the “Politic man,” who disputes the “Imagination” and promotes the complete merging of poetry with the public realm. The world of the “Grandmother” and the “burgher” are “world enough”; the problem of the solid citizen constitutes the primary question of aesthetic creation, “our compendia.” Unlike in the beginning of the poem, where the aesthetic commitment to life is defined as a sole commitment to its limited spatial surroundings (“Life is an old casino in a park”), here poetry is committed to the public. However, if the pleasure dome or old casino, deprived of relation and affect, turn into a “circus,” total convergence with the social does no better than to fabricate fairy-tale-like images of civic figures such as the “Grandmother and her basketful of pears” and the “burgher’s breast” and the “daughters” (CPP ). The confrontation of the burgher and politic man gives a condensed synopsis of an earlier poem, “The Weeping Burgher” (), where Stevens resists the idea of poetry in the service of the public good: “It is with a strange malice / That I distort the world,” the speaker announces there; “Permit that if as ghost I come / Among the people burning in me still, / I come as belle design / Of foppish line.” Yet, “Among the people” the poet is also a burgher; in the end, he is “tortured for old speech” (CPP ) and becomes like one of the figures of Rodin’s famous monument The Burghers of Calais. Rodin’s sculptural ensemble bears the same designation as Stevens’ “Weeping Burgher” and collectively depicts how six citizens of Calais sacrificed themselves to the English king Edward III to spare the lives of people in their besieged city. Part of what is at stake here is that the citizen-state relationship cannot be the model for the relationship of poetry to the public. As Ronald R. Krebs argues, the dominant model of citizenship before and after the Great War in the United States was essentially republican, strongly 

The “daughters” recall Crispin’s four daughters, those “Four questioners and four sure answerers,” of his isolated aesthetic settlement, his “house” (CPP ). Here, they also become public figures.

. Autonomy’s Architectures



emphasizing the participatory role of the citizen to the point of selfsacrifice for the nation (–). Stevens is keen on confronting this ideal of heroic self-sacrifice, which also functions as an allegory for the total dedication of poetry to public life. The critical reflection on the figure of the citizen in “Academic Discourse” also bears traces of Stevens’ description of the burgher in the earlier version of “The Comedian,” “From the Journal of Crispin.” In a passage he later decided to leave out, the citizen is presented as a fully regulated subject living under the illusion of freedom: “let the burgher say / If he is burgher by his will. Burgher, / He is, by will, but not his own / . . . / a candid bellows-boy, / According to canon” (CPP ). In Stevens’ resistance to this particular mode of relationality on the basis of social obligation and ascribed identity lies also a defense of autonomy. The poem not only opposes the ideological formation of the individual by the state, but also resists the complete absorption of poetry into the public. In “Academic Discourse,” neither total detachment nor total commitment suffices. Both options, the “bauble of the sleepless” – recalling the image of Coleridge who, waking up from a dream, recollects his vision of Kubla Khan – and the “universal pith” – the politic man’s vision – seem to dissolve: “Their casual pap / Will drop like sweetness in the empty nights” (CPP ). Stevens stages the tension between these two options, which carries further implications for the kind of aesthetic territory that is negotiated in the entire poem. The location of the building, the old casino, is expanded from the more confined surroundings of “a park” in part II to the wider surroundings of a wood at the end of part III. While the shift of the aesthetic territory from park to wood indicates a new opening for poetry to its surroundings, this is at the same time a movement from safety to insecurity, from the more civilized surroundings of a park to the more insecure landscape of a wood. As implied in section IV, the wood epitomizes not only wilderness but also a sense of social nature: “As part of nature” the poet is also “part of us” (CPP ). Even as the poet enables the possibility of a relation by becoming part of a community, he also abandons the exotic and ornamental images of his aesthetics, “the cantina” and “the chandelier”: “Close the cantina. Hood the chandelier” (CPP ). Unlike at the outset, this time the casino is saved from drowning because it is no longer a space that represents a detached form of autonomy. Thus, by the end of the poem Stevens restores relationality not by abandoning the idea of an autonomous domain – inherited from the past and rendered into the present as the casino – but by rehabilitating it:



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making But let the poet on his balcony Speak and the sleepers in their sleep shall move, Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors. This may be benediction, sepulcher, And epitaph. It may, however, be An incantation that the moon defines By mere example opulently clear. And the old casino likewise may define An infinite incantation of our selves In the grand decadence of the perished swans.

(CPP )

This complex spatial encoding implies that if the primacy of total commitment (the politic man’s universal pith) and the primacy of total detachment (Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome) are both dislodged, the space of autonomy is removed into a relational place of in-between. Even though the casino is in the end saved from drowning, it is presented as a precarious space flickering at the threshold between finitude (death) and infinitude (“infinite incantation”): It is now located somewhere between becoming “benediction, sepulcher, / And epitaph,” which gives the sense of an ending, and becoming “An infinite incantation.” Stevens does not reject the idea of “pure poetry” when he asks, “Is the function of the poet here mere sound, / Subtler than the ornatest prophecy, / To stuff the ear?” (CPP ). Rather, by removing its merely ornamental function, he opens up the possibility of “mere sound” transforming itself into effective “incantation.” Just like the poet who speaks at the threshold between private and public spheres, “on his balcony,” the casino is located at a threshold and sustained as a passage for negotiating the social efficacy of poetry. It is through the affirmation of its precarious state of autonomy that poetry resists, as John Roberts claimed in another context, “the opposing routes of ‘social effectivity’ and aesthetic sublimity” (). Stevens’ conceptual figuration of aesthetic autonomy, embodied in the spatialterritorial dimension of his architectural images, such as the casino, opens up the possibility of reorganizing poetry’s relation to a community rather than securing its detachment from the public. At the end of “Academic Discourse,” “the poet” “Speak[s]” and the “sleepers” “move” and “Waken,” while the speaker asserts, “the old casino likewise may define / An infinite incantation of our selves.” The poet and the old casino express the tenor of an imaginative community, enabling a new link between poetry and collective life. In this sense, Stevens provides us with an

. Autonomy’s Architectures



understanding of poetry akin to Rancière’s claim that the political meaning of aesthetics does not reside in disseminating messages – as it is in the case of the politic man’s “universal pith” – but in the act of partitioning spaces to form and address an imagined future community, such that it can forge links to the present (“Contemporary” –). The political efficacy of art, in this context, lies in the simultaneous enactment of its autonomy and its relatedness, that is, its distance and intimacy. In Stevens’ case, these two are intricately intertwined because the issue is to reconfigure the autonomy of relation between poetry and collective life. Stevens would find the idea of an autonomous relation, such as the one he builds in “Academic Discourse,” increasingly relevant in the s as claims for the attachment of poetry to public life and the urgency of a sufficient response to social crises of the times became increasingly pressing. In part XXIX of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” for example, he situates the poet in the isolated space of a “cathedral.” While at a distance from the world (“Alone” in his “fertile glass”), the poet figure reads a “lean Review” (probably of his own work), and relates to “What is beyond the cathedral, outside,” by “balanc[ing] things” with his “nuptial song” (CPP ). The poem records a simultaneous sense of closeness and distance by detailing the poet-figure’s seclusion, that is, his retreat to the confined space of the cathedral, while also affirming a gesture of engagement. In “A Thought Revolved” () from The Man with the Blue Guitar, Stevens continues to use architectural metaphors in order to negotiate the possibility of an alternative, autonomous aesthetic relationality. In the second part of the poem, “Mystic Garden & Middling Beast,” he presents a particular sense of space that functions as a passage between the commercial signposts of the modern city and a secular paradigm of spirituality construed by poetry: 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. The era of the idea of man, the cloak And speech of Virgil dropped, that’s where he walks, That’s where his hymns come crowding, hero-hymns,



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making Chorals for mountain voices and the moral chant, Happy rather than holy but happy-high, Day hymns instead of constellated rhymes, Hymns of the struggle of the idea of god And the idea of man, the mystic garden and The middling beast, the garden of paradise And he that created the garden and peopled it.

(CPP –)

The poet moves in an abstract space while at the same time strolling around in the street, invoking an essential trope in modernist writing: the poet as city-dwelling flâneur. The figure of the flâneur, first popularized by Charles Baudelaire and later theorized by Walter Benjamin, has been central to theoretical explorations of the modern artist’s relation to urban spaces of modernity. Whereas Baudelaire himself defines the flâneur as a man of the crowd, for Benjamin the figure in Baudelaire’s poetry illuminates a much more ambiguous and dialectical experience of urban environments, characterized by his simultaneous distance and attraction to the city and the crowd that inhabits it. Stevens’ use of this literary trope in “A Thought Revolved” calls upon the idea of aesthetic autonomy as a key component of the poet’s relation to the outside world. The poet’s interaction with the city involves the production of architectural archetypes that frame a separate terrain: “These are his infernal walls, / A space of stone, of inexplicable base / And peaks outsoaring possible adjectives.” While the space encapsulated by these archetypes emerges in conjunction with the poet’s walk, it succeeds in grounding an abstract mental space that is explicitly linked to the processes of poetic creation: The “true abstract” in which the poet “promenades” is presented as a space where, in a sublime manner, the capacity of poetic language reaches its height – “peaks outsoaring possible adjectives.” Stevens introduces an interior site, “the inexplicable base,” created in relation to the outside and yet not easily deciphered from without, resistant to interpretation by means of its opacity. Thus, the space that corresponds to a separate aesthetic territory (the inexplicable base), takes on the attribute of aesthetic autonomy through its irreducibility to external appropriation. Separate from, yet somehow connected to, the public realm, Stevens’ construction of an autonomous aesthetic sphere in the form of concretized architectural spaces simultaneously engenders distance and intimacy. The “mansion,” “infernal walls,” “space of stone,” “old casino,” and “balcony” are precarious spaces designed to produce new modes of relationality, and enact new forms of collective engagement distinct from prescribed models.

. Autonomy’s Architectures



Even though these spaces generate distance, they are all affected from without: The mansion is a historically contingent space while the old casino, balcony, and inexplicable base are limit cases, passages between autonomy and heteronomy. Thus, distance in Stevens’ poetics is not a folding back on itself; rather, it is built on a particular tension with the social and actualizes engagement. Distance is preserved so as to retain the autonomy of relationality between the poetic and social spheres. It is in this manner that autonomy calls for its constitutive other, heteronomy. Rancière defines this aspect of aesthetics – the constitutive interdependency between autonomous and heteronomous elements of a work of art – as key to its politics. Rancière’s remapping of aesthetics and politics accommodates a creative interpretive possibility for reassessing Stevens’ poetry that nevertheless sits uneasily with his own critical approach to modernist autonomy. As Toni Ross claims, “Rancière shares with postmodern theory a concern to displace aesthetic autonomy as the defining concept of modern art” (; emphasis in the original). Unlike postmodern theory, however, Rancière does not reject the concept of autonomy entirely. Tracing the notion back to its origins in the eighteenth century (especially to Schiller), he redirects it and stresses its relevance to the politics of aesthetics: “the radicality of ‘artistic autonomy’” he writes, “is part of a wider plot linking aesthetic autonomy with some sort of political—or rather metapolitical—implementation of community” (“Contemporary” ). Still, for Rancière, the autonomy is “the autonomy of the experience, not of the work of art” (“Aesthetic Revolution” ). The artwork offers to the spectator an autonomous aesthetic experience enabled by a new distribution of the sensible that is different from existing hierarchical distributions. This redistribution points in turn to the self-sufficiency of a future community, not of the artwork itself. Art becomes political by enabling a non-hierarchical sensory experience. The artwork becomes part of an autonomous sensorium inasmuch as it participates in life (becomes life and non-art). Therefore, the autonomous sphere is defined as the sphere of experience in which hierarchies are suspended, and not of art as such. For Rancière, modernist narratives of aesthetic autonomy (Greenberg is the usual suspect here) are inclined to turn art into “mere art.” Yet the 

Rancière’s consideration of modernism involves a critique of periodizations that define the movement as a break from earlier forms of art (Davis ) and in terms of autonomous form or medium specificity: “the idea of modernism as ‘autonomy’ or ‘truth to medium’ is a very late one. And it was a certain reversal of historical modernism, which was clearly about the crossing of borders between the different arts and between art and life” (Rancière, “Interview” ).



Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making

opposite perspective that refuses to acknowledge any distinction between art practices and life presents a similar extreme by which art is turned into “mere life” (Dissensus –). Neither of these perspectives leaves room for understanding the politics of aesthetics that lies in the paradoxical coalescence of art and non-art. Stevens’ aesthetics is responsive to this paradox that becomes tangible in the simultaneous enactments of autonomy and social engagement – the distance/intimacy complex I have been tracing – in his poetry. However, as mentioned earlier, there is a substantial difference between Rancière’s notion of the autonomy of experience and the autonomy of relation in Stevens’ poetry. When Rancière tackles the problem of the polarization between art and politics, he abandons the idea of an autonomous work of art. But the problem here is that the autonomy of relation can exist only to the extent that poetry maintains a territory. There is no autonomous relation unless there is a poetic terrain enabling resistance and reorganization of a new address. We find a perfect image in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s allegory of the home to explain how Stevens’ aesthetic interiors establish an autonomous horizon for poetry itself. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe “home” as a “territorial assemblage,” a circled milieu in which creative forces are organized so as to facilitate a new relation to the chaos outside pressing in on it. The circle opens, the “crack” is made, but “in another region, one created by the circle itself” and not by the pressure from “the old forces of chaos” (). The home as an allegory represents territorial folding and unfolding: First the circle is drawn so as to stake out a territory, but what this territory creates is a new unfolding, a crack or opening in the circle. Stevens’ aesthetic interiors have a function similar to the interior (home) described here, because they first mark out an aesthetic territory that seeks to resist what looked at the time very much like chaos for Stevens, “the pressure of the contemporaneous” (CPP ). Yet they are also autonomous from models of relationality determined by that pressure – that is, the s demand for a socially and politically effective poetry. Just as the crack is made “in another region, one created by the circle itself,” the possibility of a new field of relation for poetry is enabled in another region created by poetry itself. Stevens’ use of architectural imagery in the s provides a basis for viewing his built archetypes as dynamic aesthetic formations that underline, defend, and question processes of and conditions for constructing a new response growing from within the domain of poetry itself. And it is precisely through multiple representations of its processes of construction that poetry depicts its autonomy. By vigorously reevaluating the principle

. Autonomy’s Architectures



of aesthetic autonomy, Stevens’ poetry presents a quest for alternative forms of social engagement that lie outside established regimes or conceptions of art’s political intervention in the s – a quest that closely parallels one of his aphorisms: “To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it” (CPP ).

 

Community and Autonomy “The Mode of Common Dreams”

“The Mass Appoints These Marbles Of Itself To Be Itself.” No more than that, no subterfuge

– Stevens, “Owl’s Clover”

Stevens’ frequent evocations of communal presence in Ideas of Order – as we have seen in the preceding chapter – anticipate his more expansive explorations of collective agency in the second half of the s. In poems such as “Owl’s Clover” () and “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (), the implicit turn “to face the social scene . . . in a world of struggle, of action,” as Eda Lou Walton put in a  review (–), enables the poet to further explore ways of aggregating “figures of men and their shapes,” as envisaged earlier in “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz” () (CPP ). But what role does Stevens assign to the poetic imagination in identifying and forming potential modes of collectivization? What kind of social agency does his poetry enact, and where does his defense of aesthetic autonomy stand in relation to an understanding of poetry as an imaginative ground for collectively pursued interventions? This chapter seeks to consider what bearing questions of autonomy and relationality might have on Stevens’ preoccupation with the collective experience of the masses and with audience reception in the s. Stevens’ imaginative formations of collectivity have been explored from a number of competing and complementary vantage points. Critics such as Justin Quinn, Angus Cleghorn, Michael Szalay, and more recently Joel Nickels have analyzed Stevens’ collective imaginary and have posed a substantial challenge to the view, articulated perhaps most strongly by Hugh Kenner, that “the Stevens world is empty of people” (). In his Gathered beneath the Storm, Quinn has explored the ways in which Stevens juxtaposes 

See also Miller, The Conflagration of Community, –.



Community and Autonomy



the imagery of nature with “public contexts and social forms” (). In Quinn’s view, underlying Stevens’ seemingly romantic, individual encounters with the natural world is a scenery of “the masses of men” that connects landscapes, climate, and pastoral space, with human history, community and its changing sociopolitical vistas (–). Commenting on “Owl’s Clover,” Cleghorn, on the other hand, has argued that Stevens’ poetic language and rhetoric depict “the pressure[s] of the collective” (including a “collective unconscious”) on the artistic consciousness of the poet in ways that contend with the legacy of “modernist individualism” (). In his New Deal Modernism, Szalay has taken a different tack by examining Stevens’ collective figurations in light of the cultural and political climate of the New Deal. More particularly, he has shown how Stevens brings the personal lyric into public discourse and representation by inventing abstract composite figures (such as the “major man”) that mirror forms of political inclusion central to the New Deal rhetoric of social security and insurance. Finally, in his The Poetry of the Possible, Nickels has suggested an alternative reading of Stevens’ “collective imagination” by drawing on Hardt and Negri’s notion of the “multitude.” For Nickels, in “Owl’s Clover” Stevens creates competing forms of collective agency that render the multitude as a spontaneous and self-organizing force. Demonstrating how Stevens brings to the fore intersubjective forms of spontaneous collective organization, Nickels challenges the restricted notion of poetic spontaneity as solely a function of the artist’s individual mind. This chapter introduces a different view on Stevens’ dealings with community, by highlighting the ways in which ideas of aesthetic separation and autonomy constitute a dynamic component in the poet’s imaginative constructions of collective agency. Taking into account the historical moment in which homogenizing models of collectivity were being shaped within different arenas of cultural-political discourse – among which leftist conceptualizations of working classes in terms of “the masses” and “the people” were prominent (Denning –) – the chapter focuses on one of Stevens’ most politically oriented poems, “Owl’s Clover.” In the first two sections of the chapter, I draw out the poem’s staging of aesthetic renewal, or “adaptation to change” as a means of revitalizing art’s societal relevance and transformative possibilities. A specific negotiation between social expectation and aesthetic selfdetermination not only underpins Stevens’ conception of artistic adaptation to social and cultural changes caused by the Depression, but also plays a central part in his imaginative embodiment of the masses as a form of community. The remainder of the chapter directs attention to the poem’s



Community and Autonomy

challenge to the universalizing aspects of an all-inclusive notion of collectivity, produced by an expansionist view of the imagination. I explore the poem’s resistance to an all-encompassing collective imagination in relation to the period’s radical writers and poets who sought to invent an inclusive rhetoric of the people and the masses. Throughout “Owl’s Clover,” I argue, Stevens both questions the rhetorical production of collectivity (on both political and poetic levels) and interrogates the potentialities and obstacles entailed in the ideal of aesthetic separation for imagining an aesthetically and politically engaged mode of collective subjectivity.

. The Collapse In “Owl’s Clover” Stevens negotiates a notion of community whose expression is illuminated in a distinctly aesthetic process that combines dance, movement, song, and color. The first section of the five-part poem presents a confrontation between “art” and “the depression,” by staging the fall of a monument that is envisioned as a symbol of art (L ). “The Old Woman and the Statue” features the first of Stevens’ experimental sculptures in the poem, which delves into the question of art’s “adaptation to [social] change” (L ). With an explicit reference to the broken monument of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” whose ruin is not only a result of historical, but also of social change, and its effects on art, the collapse of Stevens’ statue stems from a disjunction displayed between the work of art and the new material conditions of its emplacement. The sculptor’s lack of an organic engagement with the poverty-stricken “old woman” is what causes the temporal demise of the statue: “But her he had not foreseen: the bitter mind / In a flapping cloak” (CPP ). Placed in the urban setting of a public park, the sculpture fails to “move” and awaken the woman from her “somnolent dream,” and seems incapable of affecting “what she was / And was to be”: “The golden clouds that turned to bronze, the sounds / Descending, did not touch her eye and left / Her ear unmoved” (CPP ). But what kind of imaginary or internalized audience does the poem invoke through the figure of the old woman, and what is the connection of this individual figure with the collective, if there is any? In his lecture, “The Irrational Element in Poetry” (), Stevens referred to the figure of the old woman as “a symbol of those who suffered during the depression” (CPP ). In doing so, he maintained the strategy of locating a sense of the communal within the individual, which, as I have touched upon in Chapter , is an integral aspect of his poetic project as it took shape during the s. In “The Old Woman and the Statue” the

. Collapse



link between the individual and the communal is underlined especially in part V, by way of a shift from the singular pronoun “her” to the plural “their” (CPP ). While speculating what the statue would be like at a time “untroubled by suffering,” and without the woman’s presence, the speaker situates the singular “self” within a shared social terrain (CPP ). The “desolate syllables” of the “harridan self and ever-maladive fate” are construed together, with the “tortured wind,” as a collective voice, “seeming one”: V Without her, evening like a budding yew Would soon be brilliant, as it was, before The harridan self and ever-maladive fate Went crying their desolate syllables, before Their voice and the voice of the tortured wind were one, Each voice within the other, seeming one, Crying against a need that pressed like cold, Deadly and deep.

(CPP )

The relationship, or rather, the lack thereof, between the woman and the statue foreshadows questions pertaining to audience reception and participation that became increasingly incorporated into debates about the political and social role of art during the ferment of the s. With the onslaught of the Depression, the responsibility to address the masses prompted a generation of artists and critics to broaden their scope of content and address in order to reach a wider audience including the working classes. This predominantly Marxist conviction (urged especially by the parties, movements, and individuals aligned with the Popular Front) stimulated a cluster of modernist poets (ranging from William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore to Archibald MacLeish and Isidor Schneider), which led to the emergence of a new phase in modernist conceptions of collectivity and audience (Nelson –). When examined in light of this context, the internalized encounter between the work of art (statue) and the perceiver (the woman), together with the ensuing collapse of the statue, can be seen as providing an image of artistic decline



This tendency is visible, for example, in Williams’ “proletarian portraits” of the mid-s, in Schneider’s workers in poems such as “To the Museums” and in From the Kingdom of Necessity, as well as in MacLeish’s Public Speech. See also “Marianne Moore’s Depression Collectives” by Odile Harter.



Community and Autonomy

and renewal, in which the relationship between poetry, collectivity, and audience is reconsidered. In “Owl’s Clover,” Stevens’ emerging concern with collectivity and audience reception cannot be examined without acknowledging the pioneering role the cultural left played during the Depression in its insistence that art speak to the masses and become a site for shaping new models of social organization. Urging the necessity of an explicit transition from individualism to collectivism, from “I” to “We,” the cultural-political radicalism of the s had a productive – if relatively overlooked – impact on modernist articulations of collectivity and audience. However, in Stevens’ case, poems such as “Owl’s Clover” that bring forth the issue of communality do not simply provide a staging ground for a utopian strand solidifying the “masses” of the Depression into a homogenous whole. The inclusion of collective voices and figures opens the possibility of a collective subjectivity arising from the aesthetic process. At the same time, it confronts problems of distribution, address, spectatorship and aesthetic autonomy, rather than pointing to a pre-given or a finalized model of community. The perspective initiated in “Owl’s Clover” leads to a formation of community that responds in complex ways to the cultural left’s wish to speak to the masses. Stevens’ internalization of audience reception poses a question informed by the politically oriented poets’ and artists’ attempts to accommodate the masses in and through art, a question which the rest of the poem consistently and laboriously deals with: how or whether poetry can give visibility and expression to a form of communal presence that corresponds to and at the same time transcends its present social reality. What difficulties and tensions does poetry face in undertaking such a task? As we shall see, Stevens’ integration of a collective presence into the texture of “Owl’s Clover” is revealingly (at times affirmative, at times challenging) in dialogue with the period’s conceptualizations of audience and collectivity in terms of the masses. But let us first look at the ways in which the problem of reception is reflected upon in the opening scene of the poem. In “The Old Woman and the Statue,” the statue’s failure to affect its audience creates a “conflict” between the “moving colors” of its atmosphere, and the “blackness,” or the despondency of the woman’s “thought,” which is closely affiliated with the social condition of the community she is attached to. The total absence of relationality between the work of art and its social context generates, gradually, the collapse of the statue to a “marble hulk” (CPP ). However, in his thematic assessment of art’s social status, Stevens positions the statue in a vertically organized space that entails not a simple fall but a double movement that extends both

. Collapse



downward and upward. In part IV of “The Old Woman and the Statue” the image of the crumbled pediment is accounted for by what can be called an upward fall; the statue falls but is concurrently placed “in stars”: The mass of stone collapsed to marble hulk, Stood stiffly, as if the black of what she thought Conflicting with the moving colors there Changed them, at last, to its triumphant hue, Triumphant as that always upward wind Blowing among the trees its meaningless sound. (. . .) The statue stood in stars like water-spheres, Washed over by their green, their flowing blue. A mood that had become so fixed it was A manner of the mind, a mind in a night That was whatever the mind might make of it, A night that was that mind so magnified It lost the common shape of night and came To be the sovereign shape in a world of shapes. A woman walking in the autumn leaves, Thinking of heaven and earth and of herself And looking at the place in which she walked, As a place in which each thing was motionless Except the thing she felt but did not know.

(CPP –)

The outcome of this upward movement is one of radical separation from social reality. The statue, presented now as a “fixed mood,” loses its “common shape” and becomes a “sovereign shape” among other “shapes” through its spatial placement in the sky (emphasis added). The linguistic ambiguity involved in the transition from “common” to “sovereign” has led critics to approach this passage from diverging angles: Longenbach, for example, suggests that the “sovereign shape” is ascribed to the woman’s “mind” () whereas one of the early readers of the poem, James Baird, connects it back to the statue (). While the poem allows for both of these interpretations because of its mixture of pronouns and the referential vagueness of “it,” what this specific indeterminacy entails is an emphasis upon the state of separation in reference both to the woman and the statue: Just as the woman – although she is initially part of a larger social network – becomes isolated in an act of retreat into the “mind” (and perceives everything as “motionless / Except the thing she felt but did not know”), the statue loses its anchoring to the ground on which the



Community and Autonomy

legitimacy of its social relevance would rest. Thus, the relationship between the work of art (“statue”) and the perceiver (“the woman”) is conditioned by their shared distance or isolation, and not by their mutual interaction or reciprocal exchange. While endowing the “atmosphere” of the statue with various aesthetic features (color, movement, light), Stevens designates the attachment of this concomitantly disintegrating and levitating symbol of art to poetry, by describing its mode of expression as “meaningless sound” (CPP ). The phrase “meaningless sound” evokes the notion of “pure poetry” as mere sound, whose social dimension, in this instance, remains out of sight. Despite its sudden collapse, then, by way of a transfiguration into purely formal, unsignifying sound, and self-contained form (“sovereign shape”), the statue is simultaneously conceived as a socially detached and autonomous entity. And as such, it seems to have no bearing on producing a commonly shared vision, or what Stevens, later in the poem, calls a “civil fiction” (CPP ). Instead, in the end of section IV, the “cry” of material necessity founded on collective experience, “a need that pressed like cold,” and the “meaningless” sounds originating from the statue reside in excessive distance from one another (CPP ). The statue’s flight, thus, emphasizes the severance between the aesthetic and the social as spatially organized realms that operate under different principles and standards. The collapse of the statue, on the other hand, points to the necessity of art’s intervention into collective life to retain its aptness and sturdiness over historical dispersion and social flux. The move toward social engagement from the first to the second part of “Owl’s Clover” is a perspective that has been underlined by several critics commenting on the poem. There is a visible trajectory, as Longenbach also discerns, from an absence of relationality in “The Old Woman and the Statue” to a newly constructed aesthetic in “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,” which explores the possibilities and limits of poetic undertakings to express a collective’s desires and aspirations (). As is well known, Stevens registers this trajectory in the form of a response to the Marxist poet-critic Stanley Burnshaw. Burnshaw’s review of Ideas of Order, “Turmoil in the Middle Ground” () published in the New Masses, was what partially stimulated Stevens’ interest in negotiating leftist demands for commitment to collectivity on the one hand, and the sources of his own avowal of aesthetic autonomy, on the other. Well into the late s, readers of the interaction between Burnshaw and Stevens interpreted Burnshaw’s review as “hostile” and, in turn, Stevens’ reply as a straightforward satire of the kind of political

. Collapse



determinism at work in the radical left’s approach to poetry. But, as Filreis has shown, the Burnshaw episode of “Owl’s Clover” constitutes a striking instance of the interplay between modernism and the cultural politics of the Popular Front (Modernism –, –). Burnshaw’s review allowed Stevens to see his own aesthetic premise in a “new setting,” as he put it (L ), rather than simply prompting him to write a one-sided mockery of leftist affirmations of participatory art. Indeed, if, as the radical poet and critic Ruth Lechlitner claimed in a  review of “Owl’s Clover,” Burnshaw “took Stevens to task for his anti-collective view-point” (), Stevens’ intensely dialectical rejoinder sought to reframe the boundaries of poetic space to include a communal sense of expression, even while questioning the problems and potentials of such a perspective. A poignant instance of this questioning is found in Stevens’ site-specific installation of the statue right from the start. While considering the ways in which art can be reintegrated into social space, Stevens also extends the possibilities of the statue’s spatial and temporal locations, by attributing what may be called a double site specificity: the statue that becomes the mass of stone on the ground and the statue in the sky. Such a double sitespecific recombination places the work of art at a threshold, between the desire for poetic transcendence – allegorized by the statue’s sudden ascent – and recognition of historical necessity – the rehabilitation of a new aesthetic form that is tailored toward social engagement. Toward the end of “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,” Stevens weaves these two threads together, which creates a polemical interpolation of autonomy and heteronomy. Ideas of separation and autonomy become integrated into the social and political dimensions of the poem’s search for adaptation to social change. Hence, as we shall see, inasmuch as the poem stages a shift toward a participatory poetics, there is also a tangible overlap between, on the one hand, aesthetic autonomy – typified by the statue’s radical split from social space – and, on the other hand, the orchestration of a collective agency developed especially in the final part of “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue.” The only critical assessment of “Owl’s Clover” that turns upon the question of autonomy is Stefan Holander’s claim that “the poem negotiates an ethical dilemma of artistic autonomy” (). Holander’s reading  

See for instance Riddel’s “Poet’s Politics” and Beckett’s Wallace Stevens, –. For an explanation of “the Popular Front,” see Chapter . For a detailed discussion of the cultural importance of the Popular Front and Burnshaw’s role in it, see Filreis, Modernism, –, and Pells, –.



Community and Autonomy

provides insight into the highly abstract imagery conjured up in “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” by, for example, tracing the metaphorical aptness of solid material objects such as the “porcelain” and “glass” to the ideal of autonomy and abstraction (). However, Holander does not set out to explore the implications of Stevens’ figurations of aesthetic autonomy to his collectivizing sentiments. Instead, he concludes that, in the final section of “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,” the combination of what he sees as incompatible – the “solid, material, exterior” (“glass” and “porcelain”) and the “interior, personal, and human” (the “song of the Muses”) – suggests a “dead end” both for the aesthetic renewal the poem sets out to achieve, and for the kind of socially informed (and realistic) poetry “conceived by intellectuals like Burnshaw” (). Such a reading is limited first by its assumption that the poem is locked into an opposition between a subjective “interiority” and an exteriorized “material” abstraction. Second, it does not account for the interplay between Stevens’ figurations of aesthetic autonomy, on the one hand, and collectivity on the other. Stevens illustrates this interplay in terms of a reappropriation of muselike figures addressed as “celestial paramours” and later as “Mesdames” in parts II, VI, and VII of “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue.” Here, Stevens expands the scope of the statue as metonymy, from signifying art in a strict sense to expressing instead society at large, as he explains in a series of letters to Hi Simons with extensive commentary on “Owl’s Clover” (L ). By registering a process of implicitly construed and at times elliptical transitions from one stage to another, Stevens gradually turns the muses into active agents in the constitution of a future community.

. Dance and a New Collective Life As Longenbach and Filreis have suggested, “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” alternates between the voices of Burnshaw and an unidentified poet/artist speaker (Longenbach ; Filreis, Modernism ). It begins with a description of the present – from Burnshaw’s perspective – as a ruin, just like the statue, and thus, inadequate for a renewed poetic expression: “Like a word in the mind that sticks at artichoke / And remains inarticulate” (CPP ). Yet, the outright declaration, “The thing is dead . . . Everything is dead / Except the future,” suggests the need for a new paradigm that will turn “everything that is” (the dead present) into what “ought to be” (the future). The prospect of futurity accommodates a desire to revivify the statue in a manner different from before: “In the rudest red / Of

. Dance



autumn, these horses should go clattering / Along the thin horizons, nobly more / Than this jotting-down of the sculptor’s foppishness” (CPP –). Thus, in part II, the poet-speaker calls for “celestial paramours” to set in motion the process of renovation and change: Come, all celestial paramours, Whether in-dwelling haughty clouds, frigid And crisply musical, or holy caverns temple-toned, Entwine your arms and moving to and fro, Now like a ballet infantine in awkward steps, Chant sibilant requiems for this effigy. Bring down from nowhere nothing’s wax-like blooms, Calling them what you will but loosely-named In a mortal lullaby, like porcelain. Then, while the music makes you, make, yourselves, Long autumn sheens and pittering sounds like sounds On pattering leaves and suddenly with lights, Astral and Shelleyan, diffuse new day; And on this ring of marble horses shed The rainbow in its glistening serpentines Made by the sun ascending seventy seas. Agree: the apple in the orchard, round And red, will not be redder, rounder then Than now. No: nor the ploughman in his bed Be free to sleep there sounder, for the plough And the dew and the ploughman still will best be one. But this gawky plaster will not be here.

(CPP )

In an attempt to endow the broken statue with a newly found integrity, the paramours emerge from on high as dancing figures instructed by the speaker. The invocation of “Astral and Shelleyan” and “haughty clouds” in relation to the dancers can be seen as indicating a link between the muses’ dance and the solitary form (“sovereign shape”) of the statue that has ascended into the sky at the start of the poem. At the same time, the passage presents an exploration of the medium of dance as a potential force for artistic transformation and adaptation to change. 

Here, Stevens’ use of dance recalls the surrealistic imagery of “The Dance of the Macabre Mice” () where a group of “hungry” mice dance around a statue with horses in a mock-heroic celebration of the “State” embodied in the boastful posture of its “Founder,” the “Monsieur” (CPP ). Written in the midst of the Depression, the grandeur of the statue in that poem stands in absurd contrast to the economic breakdown, which makes the starving mice-like masses ridicule it. Stevens makes the mice read the “inscription” written “at the base of the statue,” in a



Community and Autonomy

In spite of the instructive voice of the speaker who guides their steps in the style of a choreographer, the muses are commanded to acquire selfdirection and movement: “while the music makes you, make, yourselves.” Nevertheless, the steps of Stevens’ corps de ballet come across as “awkward.” The soothing refrains – the “mortal lullaby” and the “requiem” by which they address the broken statue – produce a cumbersome and incompetent procedure for change. Consequently, the statue remains in an insufficient state: a “gawky plaster.” The initial dancing to the mortal music and the requiem, that is the dirge for the broken form of the statue, reconciles the muses with the dead artistic forms and their traditional shapes. The muses’ dance is an infantine ballet, the first awkward steps that are taken to the “death” music (as in “The thing is dead”), but they are at the same time the first steps in a movement toward a state of things when “this gawky plaster will not be here.” As Burnshaw’s address in part IV suggests, the failure of the “celestial paramours” (or the muses) staged in part II originates in their reliance on a subjective and idealistic rather than an intersubjective or collective understanding of change. The dancers’ choreography stimulates a vista of inward transcendence: “the radiant disclosures that you make / Are of an eternal vista, manqué and gold / And brown, an Italy of the mind” (CPP ). Furthermore, the paramours harbor a nostalgic yearning for the past, epitomized by “ploughman,” “doves,” and “peacocks”: “And if you weep for peacocks that are gone / Or dance the death of doves / . . . / The ploughman may not live alone / With his plough, the peacock may abandon pride, / The dove’s adagio may lose its depth / And change” (CPP ). These lofty figures of poetic inspiration conceived as catalysts for artistic revitalization display a tenacious attachment to the past, and they belong to a subjective artistic will that fails to produce a socially resonant aesthetic. In a cogent reading of “Owl’s Clover,” Nickels pays attention to this aspect of the poem, and notes approvingly that the paramours are of “a subjective adaptation to changing social realities” (; emphasis in the original). For Nickels, the fall of the statue is a call for change to unearth



move, once more, reminiscent of “Ozymandias”: “The Founder of the State. Whoever founded / A state that was free, in the dead of winter, from mice?” (CPP ). In “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,” Stevens reverses the irony of “The Dance of the Macabre Mice” by turning the dancing figures into poetic agents who seek to pursue a recovery, rather than a mockery of the statue’s aesthetic and social decline. As Stevens explains in a letter to Hi Simons, these figures (“ploughmen,” “peacocks,” and “doves”) belong to the past (L ).

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poetry’s possibilities to stimulate collective agency and communal organization. Yet he argues that this search, in the first two poems of “Owl’s Clover” (“The Old Woman and the Statue” and “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue”) is doomed to failure from the outset. This is because the paramours as agents of change are a product of a fundamentally personal fantasy imposed from above by the poet rather than of a collective will (–). Thus, in Nickel’s reading, Stevens’ collectivizing tendencies are more efficiently displayed (if always self-scrutinizing) only in the later stages of the poem. Although Nickels convincingly brings to light the underlying problem of artistic authority involved in the paramours’ dependence on an individualistic approach to adaptation, he does not acknowledge that the problem is proactively dealt with already in “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue.” In part III, through Burnshaw’s voice, the poem establishes an alternative point of view that attempts to turn the motive for change from a subjective into a collective incentive. This time, instead of the speaker, the masses are envisioned to lead the course of the statue’s replacement: “The stones / That will replace it shall be carved, ‘The Mass / Appoints These Marbles Of Itself To Be / Itself’ . . . no subterfuge, / No memorable muffing, bare and blunt” (CPP ; emphasis in the original). The tendency toward collective agency becomes more pointed when Burnshaw’s address urges the muses (paramours) to “disclose the rude and ruddy at their jobs” (the proletarian workers), instead of the introspective panorama (“eternal vista”) of the mind (CPP ). In adopting Burnshaw’s vantage point, the poem proposes a shift from the “Astral and Shelleyan” which, as mentioned, recalls the isolated image of the statue in stars, to an “earthy” aesthetic evolved as a counterpoise to art’s loss of social ground (CPP ). As Quinn has suggested, “the poem of the earth” for Stevens especially in the s comes to signify not only “the expansive natural scenery” but also the social scenery of the “great masses of men . . . changing from one political figuration to the other” (). Much like in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” where the guitaristpoet depicts “earth” as a place “alive with creeping men,” “earthy,” in Burnshaw’s speech, extends to the realm of collective life, illustrating the demand to accommodate the masses (CPP ). 

Furthermore, it can be argued that the muses have a cultural permanence over centuries that make them anything but individualistic or personal, and the problem for any poet who wrestles with tradition is that one can never start from scratch, so the mobilization of these awkward figures (the muses) for the new dance is perhaps idealistic or fantastic but no more so than attempts to start from zero, and it is certainly not personal.



Community and Autonomy

Seen from this angle, the call for transition – from astral (lofty and detached) to earthy (socially grounded) – might at first suggest a candid rejection of aesthetic autonomy in order for the new artistic modeling to fully acquire its social bent. But the poem complicates this reading in the ambiguity of the word “Itself” in the inscriptive lines “‘The Mass / Appoints These Marbles Of Itself To Be / Itself ’”: Is the new construction, here, expected to assume the shape of the masses, or is it appointed to be itself? The referential indeterminacy of the pronoun “itself” opens up the possibility of rendering the substitute for the collapsed statue at once a thing-initself and an expression of the masses’ collective will. Subsequently, the phrase “To Be Itself ” is, through the lack of caesura, more distinctly tied to self-sufficiency and self-transformation: “Speak, and in these repeat: To Be Itself, / Until the sharply-colored glass transforms / Itself into the speech of the spirit” (CPP ). Put in simpler terms, the poem dynamically combines, in the same stroke, the mark of autonomy (to be itself ) with a solidaristic commitment to collectivity (to represent the masses). The combination of these seemingly contradictory positions brings a specific notion of autonomy into the perspective of Burnshaw. This is perhaps, in part, how Stevens imagined applying a poetic approach to the practical communist viewpoint as he explained it to his Depression-era publisher, Ronald Latimer: “You will remember that Mr. Burnshaw applied the point of view of the practical Communist to Ideas of Order; in ‘Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue’ I tried to reverse the process: that is to say, apply the point of view of a poet to Communism” (L ). The rhetoric of “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” bespeaks the various stages by which the muses eventually perform a socially relevant choreography, and carves the massive chunk of broken marble into the collective mold of the masses. It is also in this direction that the poem “moves / . . . / out of the hopeless waste of the past / Into a hopeful waste to come” (CPP ). But while seeking to unravel the possibility of a new prospect to rise out of the “immense detritus,” the speaker emphasizes the persistence of “waste” in visions both of the past and the future (CPP ). The vision of a hopeful futurity flows ineluctably into the dead past. The image of the future retains the sense of ruination and decay that is in part V introduced by a voice different from Burnshaw’s. The speaker presents a sweeping wasteland where the rich and poor alike are physically consumed: “There buzzards pile their sticks among the bones / Of buzzards and eat the bellies of the rich / . . . / and the crows / Sip the wild honey of the poor man’s life” (CPP ). But what does this “waste” carried over into the future consist of? The mise-en-scène of bodily exploitation and material decline reflect a site of

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crisis informed by the economic downturn of the Depression. On the one hand, the waste refers to the social landscape in which the members of divergent classes, the rich and the poor, are severely affected. On the other hand, the waste also pertains to objects – including the art object – that run the risk of turning into “a trash can” in a crisis economy marked by accumulation of waste and overproduction (CPP ). As in “The Man on the Dump” () where materials of mass culture, “papers from a press,” “papers” around a “bouquet” of flowers, “the wrapper on the can of pears,” “the paper-bag,” etc. are implicitly associated with poetry as corporeal object (the poem on a page); here, the art object is not easily located outside of the waste cycle (CPP –). Thus, the poem recapitulates what was declared from the start: “The Thing is dead . . . everything is dead” (CPP ). Placed in this landscape of ruination and decay, the artwork is faced with a double pressure: The pressure of the historical necessity of its commitment to society, and the pressure that directly derives from its precarious status as an object, which, as any other cultural object, faces the danger of turning into waste during the crisis. The particular depiction of waste and of the economic crisis allows for a more deliberate consideration of how aesthetic innovation or adaptation to change is engendered in the poem. Stevens ties the material decline caused by the economic crisis to a process of biological consumption and decay: The “buzzards” and the “crows” (“self-seekers” [L –]) are presented as the exploiters of the human body (“bellies of the rich,” “poor man’s life”) by which the crisis is linked to a mechanism of nature. Yet, the persistence of waste does not translate into a type of teleology, one that would posit the crisis as an end in itself. Rather, the moment of crisis is precisely what drives the necessity and desire toward change. In both “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” and “The Man on the Dump” the crisis defines at once a period of decline, and a period of latency. In “The Man on the Dump” the continuity of waste creates its own rejection: “One rejects / The trash / . . . / One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. / One beats and beats for that which one believes” (CPP ). In “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” Stevens paratactically juxtaposes waste, “a trash can” with a Keatsian image of a “solitary urn” – another “sovereign shape” which, as in “The Old Woman and the Statue,” signifies singularity and autonomy (CPP ). The paratactical juxtaposition of these images – “solitary urn” and “trash can” – anticipates the emergence of a renewed possibility out of ruin. The final section of part V introduces a spectrum of collective upsurge that emerges out of waste, that is, out of the crisis zone in which it is situated:



Community and Autonomy Parts of the immense detritus of a world That is completely waste, that moves from waste To waste, out of the hopeless waste of the past Into a hopeful waste to come. There even The colorless light in which this wreckage lies Has faint, portentous lusters, shades and shapes Of rose, or what will once more rise to rose, When younger bodies, because they are younger, rise And chant the rose-points of their birth, and when For a little time, again, rose-breasted birds Sing rose-beliefs.

(CPP )

While the “hopeful waste to come” carries the promise of a not yet fully realized collective uprising (the “rise” of “younger bodies”), in part VI, a possible fulfillment of this movement is suspended once again. This time, the source of interruption lies in the muses’ ongoing reverence for the past: Even though the muses “in their very movements . . . are of the future” (L ), they “retain ploughmen, peacocks, doves, / However tarnished, companions out of the past” (CPP ). In other words, they continue reproducing traditional poetic forms whose insufficiency to respond to the changed social conditions renders them obsolete: Just like the broken statue, the tarnished images of the past become the waste materials of poetry. The muses’ attachment to outworn images and signs diagnose a crisis of poetic form and language that requires their revision. The implied rendering of the past poetic images as waste adds another dimension to the way in which poetic production and change are viewed in the poem: Poetry is conceived not only as a product but also as a mode of production that undergoes its own material crisis, and generates waste, which it can no longer accommodate. This way, the poem suggests a particular analogy between economic and poetic modes of production that share a common trait in producing waste and unsustainability. However, while the capitalist crisis centers on the overproduction of the new, which, due to underconsumption, turns into waste, the crisis of poetic form (the muses’ clinging to past forms of poetic expression) centers on the reproduction of the old, which results in indifference to social change. Hence the poetic voice attributed, once again, to Burnshaw contends: “It is not enough that you are indifferent, / Because time moves on / . . . / It is only enough / To live incessantly in change” (CPP ). In explaining the constancy and spontaneity of change in terms of a metaphorical sequencing of seasons (from summer to autumn), Burnshaw’s voice seeks to alter the perspective of the muses by asserting that

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chaos or disorder is prerequisite for an (albeit temporary) renewed kind of serenity: “The time you call serene descends / Through a moving chaos that never ends / . . . / But change composes, too, and chaos comes / To momentary calm” (CPP –). Burnshaw’s address provides a counter perspective to the pessimistic understanding of change that is characterized by the muses: “Mesdames, / Leaves are not always falling and the birds / Of chaos are not always sad nor lost” (CPP ). The constant selfcancellations of the poem generate an understanding of change as a process more strenuous than the one maintained by Burnshaw, who insists on its spontaneity. As the poem unfolds, it becomes clear that the muses’ adamant longing for the past is conditioned not only by pessimism but also by their fear of a future collective upheaval. The closing lines of part VI present a questioning of the muses’ fear of a prospective communal action: Shall you, Then, fear a drastic community evolved From the whirling, slowly and by trial; or fear Men gathering for a mighty flight of men, An abysmal migration into a possible blue?

(CPP )

Burnshaw’s confrontational address to the muses opens up a new paradigm that converts dance into a vital medium for the construction of a collective subjectivity. The final part of “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” designates a new type of collective presence shaped through poetic and terpsichorean activity. The performance of the muses evolves in a way that reconfigures the statue as an expression of the masses: “Conceive / . . . / that the pediment / Bears words that are the speech of marble men” (CPP ). Dance as it is generated at the end of “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” provides a speculative basis by means of which a new collectivization can be imagined in aesthetic terms. Instead of producing “meaningless sounds” as it did in its failed encounter with the old woman earlier in the poem, the statue conveys the “speech,” and takes the shape of “marble men.” The dancers not only actualize the masses’ will by restoring the broken marble as an embodiment of the masses in the form of “marble men”; they also indicate a wish to mobilize the static form of marble, as if giving flesh to stone, to “make real the attitudes / Appointed for them” (CPP ). Note that this appointment was made, earlier in the poem, by the masses themselves: “‘The Mass / Appoints These Marbles Of Itself To Be / Itself ’” (CPP ).



Community and Autonomy

In projecting the masses onto the statue in a mode of being together that is constituted by mutual speech and belonging, the dancers promote both an aesthetic and a social form, that of a community. Thus, the quest for aesthetic renewal toward social engagement negotiated throughout the poem points in the direction of fulfillment. But as we shall see, rather than reaching a point of completion, the remaining parts of “Owl’s Clover” (“The Greenest Continent,” “A Duck for Dinner,” and “Sombre Figuration”) provide an interrogative basis for testing the limits of the collectivization attained within the imaginative frame of poetry. As though resisting the expansion of its own universalizing implications, the rest of the poem reveals and incorporates the ruptures and contingencies in the course of transposing the idea of collectivization into different contexts ranging from Africa to Europe. Before delving into a discussion of these ruptures, I would like to elaborate a more nuanced account of how collective embodiment is premised on a renewal of a distinctly aesthetic activity (the muses’ dance). In order to elucidate how, in “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,” a new mode of community is generated by means of aesthetic renewal and change, it is crucial to reflect on Stevens’ particular use of dance. Throughout “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” the movements of muse-like dancers acquire forms of articulation and meaning that contribute to the rhetorical substance of the poem, which is framed by Burnshaw and the speaker, alternating. Depicted often also as singers, the dancers create a bodily discourse that is closely tied to speech and writing. Stevens’ treatment of dance, in this sense, is akin to poetic creation. It offers an exploration of choreography and movement that is attuned to conceptualizations of dance as “écriture corporelle” (corporeal writing), as it is also expressed in the works of Symbolists such as Paul Valéry and Stéphane Mallarmé. But in its focus on a possible mobilization and organization of the masses, Stevens’ allusion to dance is also in dialogue with the avant-garde theories of what was generally called “the revolutionary dance” in the s (Franko –). Seen from this perspective, his choice of dance as the appropriate medium to scrutinize the question of art’s relation to social change and the masses is no coincidence. The cultural development of dance during the Depression years, as Mark Franko claims, was centered on the politicization of its elements to become “a discourse of desire bringing social action into being” (). 

In a  letter to Latimer, Stevens mentions the impact of Valéry’s writings on his work while commenting on various parts of “Owl’s Clover” (L ).

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Although this was an impulse that, from the radical point of view, all forms of art were expected to develop, dance occupied a key position in debates among critics who emphasized the political potential of art in regard to social realities (). In fact, Burnshaw himself published a series of dance reviews entitled “The Dance” that appeared in the New Masses between  and . Since, as mentioned earlier, Stevens construed “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” as a poetic rejoinder to Burnshaw, it is not unlikely that he would be aware of these reviews, which examined the aesthetic and political implications of a variety of contemporary dance performances. In spite of its multiplicity of sources and claims, one of the common and often pronounced points of leftist dance critique was the conceptualization of motion and the flow of the body to articulate “a socially collective entity” in action whose political import rested in demonstrating the social synergy of the masses (Franko ). Stevens’ dramatization of dance in its revived state as a basis for mobilizing and giving speech to the mass of men corresponds to this theory of dance. For, in endowing the statue with the collective form of the masses, the dancers are guided by a socially informed impulse that was generally associated with modern dance during the s. Yet what is distinct about Stevens’ use of dance lies in his figuration of bodily motion and flow not only as a performative tour de force to give expression to the masses, but also as a thematic configuration of aesthetic autonomy, which plays a deliberate part in his imaginative articulation of communal agency. In other words, Stevens integrates into his poetics an attempt to maintain both relationality and autonomy at once. This combination comes to the fore, as in the case of the statue, via movements that blend downward connectedness with an upward leaping out of the ground. In part VII, the dancers deploy a choreography that presents a fluctuating flow of connection and disconnection by blending “earthy” and gravitational dynamic with skyward motions “captured” from high above the ground (CPP , ). In contrast to their first appearance (in part II), here, the movements of the dancers emphasize their connection to the ground: “Dance, now, and with sharp voices cry, but cry / Like damsels daubed and let your feet be bare / To touch the grass and, as you circle, turn / Your backs upon the vivid statue” (CPP ). The “vivid statue,” that is referred to here, is not the statue that had collapsed in the beginning of the poem, but the statue 

See the series of reviews “The Dance” and “Five Dancers in Fourteen New Works” in New Masses (–).



Community and Autonomy

that went into the sky in unbroken form. Thus, the way in which dance is directed, “turn / Your backs upon the vivid statue,” indicates at the same time a move away from the ideal of detachment characterized by the statue that “stood in stars” (CPP ). The first part of the renewed performance of the dancers evolves in accordance with horizontal and groundward movements connected to earth, venturing toward an engaging aesthetic (“earthy”) that was ushered in by Burnshaw’s speech (CPP ). However, the second sequence of dance illustrates an axis of ascent, stimulating movements that vertically extend upward. The muses’ dance in this case is marked by separation and “distance”: Then, Weaving ring in radiant ring and quickly, fling Yourselves away and at a distance join Your hands held high and cry again, but cry, This time, like damsels captured by the sky, Seized by that possible blue. Be maidens formed Of the most evasive hue of a lesser blue, Of the least appreciable shade of green And despicable shades of red, just seen, And vaguely to be seen, a matinal red, A dewy flashing blanks away from fire, As if your gowns were woven of the light Yet were not bright, came shining as things come That enter day from night, came mirror-dark, With each fold sweeping in a sweeping play. Let your golden hands wave fastly and be gay And your braids bear brightening crimson bands.

(CPP )

The dancers’ upward motions of release imply a shift away from their territorial boundedness. As in the case of the statue, the dancers are “captured by the sky, / Seized by that possible blue” (CPP ). Significantly, in addition to the vertical, skyward movement, the poem brings back the colors (“blue” and “green”), which were formerly attributed to the statue that was lifted off the ground: “The statue stood in stars like water-spheres, / Washed over by their green, their flowing blue (CPP ). The speaker demands that the dancers recompose themselves out of 

As if enacting the “flight” of the “drastic community . . . into a possible blue” the possibility of which they had earlier “fear[ed]” here, the dancers are also “seized by that possible blue” (CPP ). This mirroring between the dancers and the community, as we shall see, becomes more tangible in the end of “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue.”

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these colors: “Be maidens formed / Of . . .” (CPP ). Yet, “this time” the colors are lessened; instead of the “flowing blue” and “green” that had previously filled the “atmosphere” of the autonomous statue, we have a “most evasive hue of a lesser blue” and “the least appreciable shade of green” (CPP , ). The recurrence of imagery and movement in such alternating patterns demands a retrospective reading in order to highlight the various changes the poem itself marks. Indeed, such a reading enables us to recognize that the reason for this fading of colors is the conflict that had taken place earlier between the old woman and the statue: “as if the black of what she thought / Conflicting with the moving colors there / Changed them, at last, to its triumphant hue” (CPP ). Thus, the colors here are shaded by “black” and are reintroduced in their altered states. The vertical space of dance, in this respect, signifies not a position of self-enclosed transcendence, nor is it a manifestation of sublime or religious elevation. Rather, it indicates a particular space of separation that includes the impact of a socially determined crisis within its compass: The blackening effect of the woman’s “thought,” who, as already mentioned, functions as a figure to embody the somber reality of the Depression-stricken crowds (CPP ). In a way that also points to the social relevance of the space of separation, Stevens adds “red” to the color scheme, which connotes social protest and dissent, increasingly affiliated with the working classes in the s. While red takes on a variety of meanings in Stevens’ oeuvre, given the poem’s concern with the masses, and with “the rise of a lower class” as Stevens put it, it is plausible to interpret red within the context of his exploration of “Leftism” (L , ). Furthermore, the way in which “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” ends with an instance of collective uprising – “swelling bodies, upward, drift” – enhances the reading of red in terms of social upheaval (CPP ). Though described at first in a negative light (“despicable shades of red, just seen”), the emergence of “matinal” red – an adjective the OED associates with early choir and birdsong – paves the way for a retrieval of what was in part V only temporarily invoked and then canceled: “shades and shapes / Of rose, or what will once more rise to rose, / When younger bodies, because they are younger, rise / . . . / For a little time, again, rosebreasted birds / Sing rose beliefs” (CPP –). Imbued with the 

The s is often called the “Red Decade.” For a similar reading of “red” in another poem from this period, “Idiom of the Hero” (), see Cook’s A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens, where she links “red” with the working classes and the political left ().

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Community and Autonomy

“brightening of crimson bands,” the dancers are urged to conceive once more the fall, and the reconstruction of the statue: “Conceive that while you dance the statue falls, / The heads are severed, topple, tumble tip / In the soil and rest. Conceive / . . . / that the pediment / Bears words that are the speech of marble men” (CPP –). While “the vivid statue” that was incapable of social contact falls, the restructured statue bears the imprint of sociality on its form; the “marble hulk” is solidified into a coexistence of bodies, assuming the form of marble men and their common speech. This new mode of togetherness embodied in aesthetic form is predicated on the specific transformation achieved through dance, the process of which, as I have been arguing, constitutes a central thread in “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue.” In the closing section of the poem, the dancers maintain both a closeness to and distance from the horizontal plane of the earth. As both an organizing and organized energy, the dancers present a newly arranged space of dancing. And, dance as a trope for poetic creation offers at the same time a new arrangement of poetic space. What this spatial configuration displays is a double affirmation of the participatory and detached character of aesthetic activity, namely, its integration into, and withdrawal from the world. It is precisely out of this play of connection and disconnection that, in the end, the statue is rematerialized as an articulation of a new sense of community. The gyrating movement of the dancers – between vertical separation and horizontal engagement – contributes to the larger tension between autonomy and heteronomy that the poem builds upon. In order to examine more concretely how this tension underscores Stevens’ conception of aesthetic renewal and constitutes its political meaning, it is helpful, once again, to bring Rancière into the picture. The double-edged dynamic of aesthetic renewal ascribed to the muses’ dance offers a framework onto which two types of the politics of aesthetics can be mapped: “the politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form” (Discontents –). The becoming-one of art with life, in Rancière’s account, demonstrates the commitment of the artwork “to construct new forms of life in common, and hence to eliminate itself as a separate reality” in a manner that is readily recognizable (). “The politics of the resistant form,” on the other hand, rests in art’s potential 

The gyrating movement echoes in miniature in the very final lines as well: Portrayed first as “no longer of air but of the breathing earth,” the dancers are then caught up by an “upward drift / In a storm blown into glittering shapes” (CPP ). Stevens’ description of the dancers in this section is also reminiscent of Matisse’s The Dance with “kinetic rhythms of brick-red naked figures gyrating against a blue sky and green ground” (Stewart ).

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

to resist being subsumed under the larger, heteronomous framework of collective life; it “encloses the political promise of aesthetic experience in art’s very separation,” viz. its autonomy (). The becoming-life of art in the poem is discernible as a figure of thought, in the dancers’ remodeling of the statue as “marble men,” and in the fleshing out of marble men as “selves.” The reconstructed statue demonstrates a politics of inclusion by becoming the founding blueprint of a being-in-common. In “[c]onceiv[ing],” to use Stevens’ own poetic terminology, artistic form as a form of collective presence, the dancers seek to give visibility and speech to the masses. This becoming-one of the artwork with the community, which is at the same time a transgression of the boundary between art and life, is also encoded at the level of a coalescence culminating in the speaker’s address. As Cleghorn also observes, the poem’s form of address eventually dissolves the distinction between the dancers and the collectivity they envisage (). At the end of “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,” it is no longer entirely clear whether the “bodies” described as “Speaking and strutting broadly, fair and bloomed, / No longer of air but of the breathing earth” are the dancers or the “marble men” perceived as “selves” (CPP ). Stated plainly, the development of a new aesthetic direction (the dancers in their newly adopted stance), and the evolvement of a new type of coexistence (community) go hand in hand and finally merge into one another. Yet, despite this convergence between the aesthetic and the social realms, the act of distantiation (engendered by the ascent of the dancers) is posited as an enabling move for the statue to become the site of a new collective presence. The soaring motions of the dancers become the stepping-stone leading to the figuration of the masses as a form of community. More pertinently, the principle of aesthetic autonomy proves thematically resonant in the reiteration of the notion of “To Be Itself ”: the pediment Bears words that are the speech of marble men. In the glassy sounds of your voices, the porcelain cries, The alto clank of the long recitation, in these Speak, and in these repeat: To Be Itself, 

By staging the transformation of the artwork into a form of social life, the poem anticipates Stevens’ claim in “Imagination as Value” where he describes “imagination” or “imaginative life” as “social form” (CPP ). Acknowledging the erasure of the boundary between life and art that is operative in the restoration of the statue makes it more understandable why Stevens repeatedly underscored that the statue in “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” is not a symbol of art but is “a manifestation of the civilization of which it is a part” (L ).



Community and Autonomy Until the sharply-colored glass transforms Itself into the speech of the spirit, until The porcelain bell-borrowings become Implicit clarities in the way you cry

(CPP )

The “sharply-colored glass,” placed in associative relation to the voices of the dancers (“glassy sound of your voices”), designates a selftransformative, and autotelic mode of expression that prevents the total conversion of speech into collective expression. Whilst the “marble hulk” turns into the “speech of marble men,” the dancers’ “glassy” voices become, in a self-determining fashion, the singular “speech of the spirit” (CPP ). The juxtaposition of the self-transformative image of “sharplycolored glass” with the “appointed” image of “marble men,” and the autotelic “speech of the spirit” with the collective speech of men indicates a double operation of autonomous and heteronomous components and points to a tension between them. The strategic integration of singular and self-contained objects such as the “sharply-colored glass,” “porcelain,” “solitary urn,” and “sovereign shape,” within the texture of the poem, allows for resistance to the understanding of art’s adaptation to change as entirely a process of transforming artistic form into tangible forms of social existence: Unlike the broken statue, these figures resist being transformed into a form of collective life. The emphases on the singularity (“sovereign” and “solitary”) and the self-constitutive (“glass transforms / Itself”) aspect of solid forms and shapes, which Stevens occasionally links to expression (“glassy voices,” “porcelain cries”), convey a sense of aesthetic autonomy. The sense of self-determination and autonomy codified into these figures or conceptual images sets a limit to the total synthesis between artistic form and collective life that is apparent in the restoration of the statue as social presence and collective speech. Indeed, Stevens’ use of solid objects as expressive of autonomy and resistance to external determination is not limited to “Owl’s Clover.” In “A Thought Revolved,” as discussed in Chapter , the poet-speaker defines the space of poetry in terms of concretion (“a space of stone”) and illegibility (“inexplicable base”) while simultaneously exploring and thus 

In “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” Stevens talks about “solid, static objects extended in space” as a means of illustrating his particular conception of “escapism,” which, as he explains, does not mean a mode of escape from reality as such but a mode engagement that is achieved by “resisting or evading the pressure of reality” (CPP ).

. Dance



engaging with the urban space of the city, “striding among the cigar stores, / Ryan’s lunch, hatters, insurance and medicines” (CPP ). If we go back to “The Man on the Dump,” we find that the hardness of stone endows poetic expression (“stanza my stone”) with the possibility to resist being entirely recapitulated by what “one finds on the dump”: “tin can / . . . / Bottles, pots, shoes and grass” (CPP ; emphasis in the original). In these poems, Stevens attributes the density and hardness of stone to poetic expression. Solidity is posited as an intrinsic property of poetry. In all of these instances poetic activity stands in a particular relationship to the social scene (the city, the dump). But at the same time, poetic expression is granted a firm, stone-like character, and a level of impenetrability that prevents it from dissolving entirely into heteronomous and legible forms of social life. Ideas of abstraction and aesthetic autonomy, as Holander has pointed out (), underline Stevens’ use of solid objects as early as in his  play “Three Travellers Watch a Sunrise” where “porcelain” is identified with “seclusion” and “abstraction”: “there is a seclusion of porcelain . . . abstract like porcelain” (CPP –). But inasmuch as this early register also demonstrates the affinity of Stevens’ exploration of the object world with his articulation of autonomy, it provides a less promising and more negative account of aesthetic self-containment than in his poetry of the s. This is because, in the s, as it is visible in “The Man on the Dump,” “A Thought Revolved,” and “Owl’s Clover,” the assertion of aesthetic autonomy projected onto concrete objects is strategically juxtaposed with modes of expression that point to heteronomous influences, such as the appearance of the masses on the statue, the trash can, the city scene, and the dump. In these moments, the desire to maintain autonomy furnishes Stevens’ poetry with a kind of complexity that stimulates social engagement but precludes the complete merging of its forms with the elements and demands of the social domain. Correspondingly, in “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” Stevens’ inscription of solid and hard-edged ornaments can be read with reference to Burnshaw’s presumption (in the aforementioned review) that Stevens “can no longer write” the kind of verse he did in Harmonium filled with imagery and “sensuousness . . . cool[ed] off and “harden[ed]” in the poet’s mind” like “a strange amazing crystal” (“Turmoil” –). For Burnshaw, Stevens’ early poetry, in spite of its impersonal and even “scientific” precision, displayed a level of abstraction that “people concerned with the murderous world collapse [could] hardly swallow . . . except in tiny doses” (). When set in dialogue with Burnshaw’s statement, Stevens’ frequent evocations of



Community and Autonomy

crystalline forms – such as the “porcelain” and “glass” – indicate a positioning of his poetry that refuses to fully comply with the aesthetic requirements of his age, which, to a large extent, located the social and political potential of art in the logic of “art becoming life” (Rancière, Discontents ). A passage Stevens inserted into his commonplace book from Jacques Maritain’s Degrees of Knowledge also points to this aspect of his poetics: “By depending on the intellect of his time and pressing it to the limit, in the concentration of all his languor and all his fire . . . the artist has a chance of reshaping the whole mass” (–). While positing the organization and reshaping of the mass as an essential part of the artistic/poetic enterprise, as the previous lines indicate, Stevens seeks to position his poetry both actively in dialogue with and in resistance to the artistic and social demands of his era. In his figuration of the masses in the shape of the statue, Stevens points to the possibility of poetry to become an organizing energy, and endorses art’s socially participatory role. He also shows that art cannot take its cue directly from the public mood, not solely from the “Commissar for culture.” In inscribing strategically and continuously forms and expressions that resist being filled with social import, Stevens indicates that the organizing and socially pertinent energy of art is dependent on maintaining its autonomy. In “Owl’s Clover,” by setting side-by-side forms of expression that connote aesthetic separation and autonomy with those that gradually evolve into the shape and speech of a community, Stevens presents a poetics that “can simultaneously found the autonomy of a specific domain of art and construction of forms for a new collective life” (Rancière, Discontents ). In the first two sections of “Owl’s Clover” the process of aesthetic renewal demonstrates a compelling negotiation between “the logic of art becoming life at the price of its self-elimination and the logic of art’s getting involved in politics on the express condition of not having anything to do with it” (Rancière, Discontents ). Rather than interpreting the strain between these logics as evidence that politics and aesthetics are antithetical, it is possible to identify in it, and more productively, the way the socially transformative potential and the autonomy of art exist in a complementary relationship. In the next section, we will see how the negotiation between the self-sufficient separateness and the political relevance of aesthetics furnishes Stevens’ poetics with a (self-) critical energy. The remaining parts of the poem call into question the universalizing impulse behind the conception of art as a constitutive ground for

. Poetic Reach



collectivization. This questioning in turn places Stevens’ poetic discourse in a dialogic relation to the political avant-garde’s insistence that art depict and organize the masses or the people as an all-encompassing category.

. The Poetic Imagination’s Global Reach To impose is not / To discover

–Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”

In the third section of “Owl’s Clover” (“The Greenest Continent”), Stevens removes the statue from its urban American context (the park) and places it in Africa. “The Greenest Continent” moves away from the vertical and horizontal spatial axes along which the statue is mapped in the preceding sections of the poem. The geographic translocation from the United States to Africa allows for an exploration of the social possibilities the statue might offer, in a different cultural conjuncture than that of the United States, where aesthetic autonomy could be invested with social and collective significance. The main question “The Greenest Continent” deals with is posed along the lines of part VI: “could the statue stand in Africa?” (CPP ). Or, to unpack this question further, can the statue, which, in the preceding sections of the poem, is conceived as an aesthetic basis for the masses or the people to appear as a community, function in an entirely different context? What does it mean to think about the collectivizing potential of the poetic imagination globally? As is well known, Stevens was not a great traveler, unlike his modernist rivals such as Pound and Eliot. Nonetheless, he was deeply interested in expanding the boundaries of the poetic imagination to reach beyond its domestic and local settings. The desire to develop a cross-cultural poetics that initiates patterns of relationality between near and far places is persistently there across Stevens’ oeuvre. In the following, I will first draw a brief sketch of Stevens’ exploration of far geographies in “The Comedian as the Letter C” from Harmonium, and in a number of poems from Parts of a World, which reveal the possibilities and limits of the poetic imagination for a globally oriented poetics. I will then turn to “The Greenest Continent” to examine the statue’s placement in Africa within a historically situated discussion of the capacities and pitfalls of the expansionist imagination for envisioning a transcontinental and global community. “The Comedian as the Letter C” () depicts the journey of Crispin, “the affectionate emigrant,” roaming from east to west and from south to north: “Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next, / And then to Carolina” (CPP



Community and Autonomy

, ). In the second section of the poem (“Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan”), Crispin is described as a recorder of voices, sounds, and other cultural phenomena that emanate from the southern cities and landscapes he travels across: Now as this odd Discoverer walked through the harbor streets Inspecting the cabildo, the façade Of the cathedral, making notes, he heard A rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed, Approaching like a gasconade of drums. (CPP )

Crispin as a poet figure is driven by the desire to compile the musical affluence and poetic heritage of the Latin Americas and the Caribbean – “the Maya sonneteers of the Caribbean amphitheater,” the native “music” of “rainy men,” the “pampean dits” of “dark Brazilians in their cafés,” and the “incantation” of “black branches” – into his unwritten “anthology,” that is, Crispin’s work-in-progress “book” of verse (CPP , –, ). Fredric Jameson identifies the deeper logic behind Stevens’ treatment of non-Western contexts in “The Comedian” as a kind of exoticism of the south that reduces “the material of the Third-World” to “an occasion for infinite imagining reverie” (Modernist ). But in “The Comedian” the distinction between Crispin’s and the speaker’s voices (and the speaker’s ironic treatment of Crispin) creates, to borrow Louis Althusser’s term, a level of “internal distantiation” that reveals the ideological limitations of Crispin’s extensive circuits (). The poem makes visible the colonial impulse behind Crispin’s exoticisms and his aesthetic urge for possession. Crispin is described as at once the “poetic hero,” and a “valet” who mystifies and seeks to seize the foreign (both natural and cultural) forms of poetic inspiration he encounters during his trans-hemispheric travels (CPP , ). He “seeks to own” the revelatory “proclamations” of the Yucatan thunderstorms and “the span / Of force, the quintessential fact, the note / Of Vulcan” in Mexico. Throughout his journey from the Yucatan peninsula to his home in Carolina, Crispin’s urge to possess and collect (“commingled souvenirs and prophecies”), as the speaker puts it, 



In “A Letter on Art” Althusser explains the notion of “internal distantiation” as follows: “What art makes us see . . . is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes”; art provides “a view which presupposes a retreat, an internal distantiation from the very ideology from which [it] emerge[s]” (; emphasis in the original). For a discussion of “The Comedian” in the context of US imperialism, see John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, –.

. Poetic Reach



“makes him envious in phrase” (CPP , ). The striving for “a singular collation,” formed out of the specificities of the cross-cultural domain into which Crispin ventures, renders him a biased colonist: Upon these premises propounding, he Projected a colony that should extend To the dusk of a whistling south below the south, A comprehensive island hemisphere.

(CPP )

The possibility of an enlarged and inclusionary poetics that seeks to combine imagery, sound, and symbolism of different localities in Central and South America is shadowed by Crispin’s colonial logic, which risks producing a mode of undifferentiated and homogenizing globalized vision. As “the progenitor of such extensive scope,” Crispin, though “not indifferent to smart detail,” is defined at the close of the poem as “the effective colonizer” (CPP , ). “The Comedian” stages, as several critics have argued, an epic journey that explores issues pertaining to the imagination and reality (Beckett ; Blessing , –), solipsistic retreat and “epic ambition” (Longenbach –), realism and romanticism (Bevis –) and (although rarely discussed) prose-verse relationships. But Crispin’s imaginative expeditions also tap into problems of cultural appropriation and hegemony arising from the process of the Western poet-voyager’s artistic wish to convert the aesthetic and social localities of non-Western cultures into a singular modernism that is epitomized by Crispin’s “unwritten book” of verse (CPP ): “Was he to company vastest things defunct / With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky?” (CPP ). Crispin’s enlarged poetic vision falls short. While grafting a far-reaching poetic map of cultural material onto his book, his voyage reveals the overarching difficulties involved in constructing a transnational poetics that requires crossing uneven terrains of power and meaning. In “The Comedian,” the ideological limitations of the expansionist imagination (Crispin’s colonial impulse) eliminate the possibility of forming a collectivizing fiction. At the end of the poem, the poet-figure is settled in 

One of the most recent readers of the poem, Edward Marx, claims that “Crispin’s colony [is] all about expression and the celebration of diversity . . . But one of the problems that bothers Crispin is the impossibility of separating the celebration of diversity from the stereotype” (). His reading of the voyage as a failed “celebration of diversity” dismisses not only the ironical tone of voice with which the speaker reflects on the voyager, but also the various ways in which Crispin’s goal to collect foreign cultural and natural sources of poetic inspiration into a whole (a “single collation”; the “book”) is problematized in the poem.



Community and Autonomy

his domestic surroundings (his home in Carolina) while the speaker asks: “what can all this matter since / The relation comes, benignly, to its end?” and concludes: “So may the relation of each man be clipped” (CPP ). Stevens records the extensive imagination’s limits in delivering the “relentless contact” that Crispin seeks throughout his journey (CPP ). The poem reveals, through the figure of Crispin, the complexities involved in constructing an all-encompassing poetics that privileges nodes of interconnectedness over disproportions and dissonances. Stevens’ later poetry continues to interrogate this problem, especially in Parts of a World (). In exploring new ways to accommodate a “common fiction” where local and foreign elements may coexist, his poems acknowledge the danger of producing assimilative abstractions, and an all-inclusive global imaginary that overlooks contingencies and ruptures in favor of artistic fulfillment and connectivity. In “Arrival at the Waldorf,” the prospect of containing “the world in a verse” is checked by the recognition of the economic discrepancy and the aesthetic remoteness between the artificial extravagance of the Waldorf (the luxurious hotel in New York) and “that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala” (CPP ). In “A Weak Mind in the Mountains,” the meeting of the northern “wind of Iceland” with the southern “wind of Ceylon” “grip[s]” and “grapple[s]” the poet’s mind (CPP ). Bringing them together is seen as a difficult and improbable task that turns into what Stevens later in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” would call “an abstraction blooded” (CPP ): “The black wind of the sea / And the green wind / Whirled upon me. / The blood of the mind fell / To the floor” (CPP ). The meeting of Iceland and Ceylon proves impossible except by a world-shaping mind, and on a higher, idealistic plane. The speaker reflects on an inner self (“a man within me”) who “Could have touched these winds.” But in the end, even that self cannot but do violence to both (the winds) in the course of his endeavor to arrange and design: He “Could have / . . . / Bent and broken them down, / Could have stood up sharply in the sky” (CPP ). These instances engage with the problem of imaginative manipulation, that is, the imposition of an artistic order involved in the production of a trans-regional and globally inclusive poetics. Still, Parts of a World also includes poems such as “Connoisseur of Chaos” that affirm a “small relation” between foreign and local places and things. In this poem, the propositions “A” and “B” about “order” and “disorder” are followed by the speaker who ponders on the import of “the flowers of South Africa . . . bright / On the tables of Connecticut” (CPP –). The voice postulates “Englishmen” in Ceylon (still a British colony at the time) without “tea,”

. Poetic Reach



which reflects a sense of British national identity tied with imperial and colonial history. Building on these images, the speaker asserts: “a law of inherent opposites, / Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port, / As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough, / An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand” – a place-name found both in South Africa and in the United States (CPP ). Yet, the contours of this transnational meeting zone cannot be drawn, so the speaker concedes, by way of a world-absorbing, large-scale theory that seeks to resolve the world: “opposite things partake of one, / At least that was the theory, when bishops’ books / Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that. / The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind” (CPP ). This self-critical position, however, does not leave the poem at an impasse but points to the necessity of imagining relationality and connectivity in ways different from those that are determined by preordained conceptions of the world. Thus, in lieu of a “law” of “essential unity” imposed from top to bottom by a monolithic – explicitly Western and Christian – view of the world as in the “bishops’ books,” the measure of connectivity is alternatively described as: “A small relation expanding like the shade / Of a cloud on sand” (CPP ). Rather than staging a mutual interplay between local and global frameworks, in these poems, Stevens interrogates the cross-cultural reach of poetry by emphasizing distances, ruptures and slippages that self-reflexively demonstrate the hierarchical intricacies of the poetic imagination’s global circuits. Similarly, in “The Greenest Continent,” the statue’s transport to Africa thematizes issues of cross-cultural contact and circulation, but with an emphasis on the inclusionary and collectivizing role of the poetic imagination. In this section of “Owl’s Clover,” community and its relation to the poetic imagination are approached from a globalized perspective. The statue (moved from the United States to Africa) can be seen as an epitome of the socially oriented, nonautonomous artwork’s crossing of cultural, national, and geographical borders. Yet, this crossing reveals problems involved in thinking about the imagination as a universal source that can infinitely expand. Can the Western statue, perceived (at the end of “Mr. Burnshaw”) as an integrating ground for community and collective expression, maintain its social and aesthetic function when transferred to another cultural context, especially if this context is a non-Western one? 

Filreis discussed these lines in relation to a painting by the French cubist painter, Jean Marchand, which Stevens bought through the dealer Anatole Vidal. His reading of the poem reveals that the geographical stretching of aesthetic spaces here also includes France (Actual –).



Community and Autonomy

Stevens’ answer to this question is at first sight a straightforward one. The statue belongs to the Western imagination, it is “part of a northern sky” (CPP ): “The marble was imagined in the cold / . . . / among / The common-places of which it formed a part / . . . / it would be of the mode of common dreams / . . . / But in Africa / . . . / The message is half-borne” (CPP ). While pursuing the loss of the old ideals, norms, and belief systems of the west (“The heaven of Europe is empty, like a Schloss”), at the start of the poem, the speaker identifies an historical, religious, and aesthetic disjunction between Africa and the West: “the imagination of the West differs from that of the South” (L ). The lost “heaven” of Europe is seen as incommensurable with the “black sublime” and serpent gods of Africa (CPP –). The mystifying imagery and the level of exoticism entailed in the description of Africa in part IV cleaves close to Crispin’s colonial logic in “The Comedian as the Letter C.” The African continent is seen as irrational, dark, and chaotic, as opposed to the lost orderly heaven of Europe, which, as the speaker underlines in part IV, “was never the heaven of Africa.” Moreover, the African peoples are reductively portrayed as “jaguar-men,” “lion-men,” and “forest-men.” In contrast to the characterization of the West in part II, the illustration of Africa in part IV lacks specificity; there is no reference to any particular place, and the whole continent is referred to as a composite of “flowery nations” (CPP ). The depiction of Africa, in the opening sections of the poem, is a figment of the colonial imagination. While emphasizing the statue’s local attachment to the West, the unidentified speaker illuminates the contrariety between the West (the original locale of the statue) and the South (where the statue is transferred to). Yet, the point of the poem is not to celebrate the perspective offered by the colonial imagination, nor is it to overemphasize the impossibility of poetry’s transnational allegiances and common appeal. It is rather to inquire, as Stevens said, whether “imagination, extended beyond local consciousness, may be an idea to be held in common by South, West, North and East” (L ). In “The Greenest Continent” the search for this comprehensive notion of commonality, expanding from the local to the global, meets with ideological obstacles pertaining to the historical pressures of fascism and colonialism. Stevens strategically places the central question of the poem 

The Christian “heaven” of Europe is contrasted with African religions via serpent symbolism; “snake worship” constitutes an important trope in African mythology and religious belief (Lynch and Roberts ).

. Poetic Reach



“But could the statue stand in Africa?” in between sections V and VII, that deal with colonial and fascist expansionism whose common denominator is identified in terms of financial expansion and economic prosperity (CPP ). The question of the Western statue’s validity in Africa is both formally and thematically set against the historical backdrop of Mussolini’s fascist invasion of Ethiopia (), and of the colonial encroachment of Africa by Western forces. Alluding to Italy’s imperial war, part V portrays Western “Angels” “sighting machine guns” and “returning” from Africa “after war with belts / And beads and bangles of gold.” This section of the poem depicts an instance of the militarization of the imagination: “This must / Be . . . a rare / Tractatus, of military things / . . . / Of an imagination flashed with irony / And by a hand of certitude to cut.” It also portrays the aestheticizing of war: “The oracular trumpets round and roundly hooped, / In Leonardo’s way” (CPP ). Both the militarization of the imagination, and the aestheticizing of war are seen, with a sense of bleak irony, as a pointless adornment of “Concentric bosh.” By shifting the perspective to that of the self-indulgent “diplomats of the cafés,” part VII delineates the steady enterprise of “colonists” in the South: “There will always be / . . . / the obese proprietor, who has a son / In Capricorn / . . . / Victoria Platz, / To make its factories content, must have / A cavernous and a cruel past” (CPP –). Surrounded by the twin pincers of colonial and fascist regimes, the statue in Africa as a trope for the expansionist imagination risks being hijacked by the oppressive legacies of the West. It is situated within the history of Western colonial conquest: “The statue belongs to the cavernous past,” which, as the “diplomats . . . expound,” has to be a “cruel past” to keep the colonists’ “factories content” (CPP ). The spatial and 



In this section of “The Greenest Continent” Stevens makes up imaginary colonial regions such as “tropic Benitia” and “lapis Ville des Pins” that are a product of the diplomats’ prospective vision of colonialism in Africa; factories of “Victoria Platz” are also part of this future colonial vision. For a reading of “The Greenest Continent” that focuses on the anti-imperialist aspects of Stevens’ rhetoric, see Cleghorn, –. Glossing Cleghorn’s readings and partially opposing them, Siraganian claims that, “Stevens critiques imperialism . . . not because he is particularly concerned for colonized people and their culture, but because he is anxious about the insecure standing of Westerners and their culture” (“Dilemmas” ). But rather than seeing the western presence as insecure, the poem points to the firm existence of the colonial landowner (“obese proprietor”), and the “factories” both in the future and in the present: “There will always be cafés and cards / And the obese proprietor, who has a son in Capricorn” (CPP ). The question has more to do with whether the statue can stand in Africa without mirroring the settlement of the colonizer. The poem’s concern with the statue becoming a hosting ground for a globalized commonality is not addressed in Siraganian’s reading; she examines “The Greenest Continent” in isolation, cutting its relation to the other sections of the poem.

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Community and Autonomy

temporal expansions of the statue are further seen, through the lens of a hypothetical future, as mirroring the economic progress of the colonial landowner: Just as “there will always be / . . . / the obese proprietor / . . . / The statue has a form / That will always be and will be everywhere. / Why should it fail to stand?” (CPP ). Distinct both from the cynical ventriloquism of part VII (the diplomats’ vantage point), and from the satirical tone of part V, the more solemn voice in between these two sections questions the durability of the statue in Africa, which is faced with the violent impact of fascist war and imperial rule: Could marble still Be marble after the drenching reds, the dark And drenching crimsons, or endure?

(CPP )

Even if the statue escapes being utilized by the exploitative logics of colonialism and fascism, its aesthetic meaning and social function in Africa cannot remain uncolored by them. The possibility of the statue’s founding of a common imaginative basis (“mode of common dreams”) is deeply complicated by the presence of dominant historical precursors. Thus, whereas the statue, in its local setting (a park in an East Coast city in the United States), is seen as “a visible wreath / To men, to houses, streets, and the squalid whole,” in Africa, its social “message” cannot be fully delivered: “The message is half-borne” (CPP ). In his oft-quoted poem, “Anecdote of the Jar,” Stevens’ placement of the jar in Tennessee leads to the supremacy of foreign form over local context: “It [the jar] took dominion everywhere” (CPP ). In “The Greenest Continent,” the reversal of this movement, on a larger scale, that is, the placement of local object (statue) in foreign context (Africa), risks being complicit with a much more problematic mode of “dominion” allied with colonial desire and fascist war that define the limits of the imagination’s global expansions. Thus, instead of examining the cross-cultural imaginings of poetry by producing unhindered contact zones and affirmative circularity, “The Greenest Continent” stages the difficulty of the poetic imagination’s global circuits. The poem interrogates the global reach of poetry by emphasizing disjunctions, ruptures, and slippages that

 

Note how the symbolism of “red” changes here compared to the way in which it was imagined in “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” that was discussed earlier in this chapter. Longenbach reads this section of “Owl’s Clover” as a rewriting of “Anecdote of the Jar,” and claims that the “statue” unlike the jar in that poem “cannot take dominion over bird or bush” ().

. Poetic Reach



demonstrate the hierarchical intricacies of artistic and geographical circulation of the statue as a cultural and aesthetic object. While in the end of “The Greenest Continent” the quest for an alternative route to forming a common fiction culminates in a global vision of a community, this shared existence is based not on a universalizing utopian vision of “common dreams” but on misery and poverty (CPP ). The last section of the poem depicts a transcontinental community composed of the poor and the oppressed. The “disinherited” crowds of the world are brought together under the ultimate rule of Ananke, the god of necessity: Fatal Ananke is the common god. (. . .) The voice In the jungle is a voice in Fontainebleau. The long recessional at parish eves wails round The cuckoo trees and the widow of Madrid Weeps in Segovia. The beggar in Rome Is the beggar in Bogotá. (. . .) Life’s foreigners, pale aliens of the mud, Those whose Jerusalem is Glasgow-frost Or Paris-rain.

(CPP –)

As in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Stevens’ Ananke stands for “harsh necessity” that performs the task of “uniting separate individuals into a community” (). Yet far from being an ideal construction, the figure of Ananke, defined as the “unmerciful pontifex,” forms a world community of necessity without consolation. Indifferent to the crowd’s “necessitous cries” – “he does not care / . . . / Knowing and meaning that he cannot care” – the rule of Ananke illuminates its own credence and 

While Cleghorn (–) and Brogan () pay attention to the level of irony in Stevens’ treatment of Ananke, Leonora Woodman interprets this figure as a fundamental element of Stevens’ poetic vision (). Siraganian, on the other hand, claims that Stevens places Ananke “as an alternative, universal, and secularized god” but at the same time “doubts” whether this distinctly Western abstraction “will succeed” as an alternative (“Dilemmas” ). None of these readings places the rule of Ananke, the god of necessity, in relation to the economic austerity of the Depression. Indeed, Ananke can be read as part of the trope of “the kingdom of necessity” (a phrase borrowed from Friedrich Engels), which became popular among the political writers and poets of the s such as Isidor Schneider and Carl Sandburg. See Schneider’s From the Kingdom of Necessity () and Sandburg’s The People Yes ().



Community and Autonomy

“obdurate” power over an impoverished community of individuals across the world (CPP ). Seen as the common god of “Life’s foreigners” (the beggars of “Bogotá” and “Rome,” the weeping widows of “Segovia” and “Madrid,” and “pale aliens” in Glasgow or in Paris), Ananke reflects an image of socioeconomic turmoil and austerity on a worldwide scale. Furthermore, the collectivizing role and the cultural legitimation of the statue are expropriated by the perpetual image of Ananke: “He, only, caused the statue to be made / And he shall fix the place where it will stand.” Ananke’s “ubiquitous will,” and his all-pervading power over the statue add to the chronicle of the global imagination’s subjugation to the social and historical exigencies of reality (CPP ). Thus, in “The Greenest Continent,” without the negotiation of a principle of autonomy, the statue’s social and aesthetic functions are compromised by the external pressures of fascism, colonialism, and finally, by the rule of necessity (“Ananke”). By demonstrating the presence of these constraints, the poem complicates the universalizing tendencies behind the conception of art as an all-encompassing phenomenon that can circulate and expand without confronting the established ideological and historical conditions preceding its own development. The poem’s challenge to the universalizing rhetoric of collectivity emerges from its translocation of the statue into the spatiotemporal setting of colonial Africa. It presents the ideological forces of Western colonialism and fascism as obstacles to the transformation of the statue into an unlimited and globalized source for collectivization. “A Duck for Dinner” further carries out this theme in a dialogic fashion. Stevens’ poetic discourse evolves in a polemical relation to the Depression-era conceptualizations of poetry as a unifying and inclusive cultural force – a vehicle to speak to the masses.

. Speaking to the Masses Scaffolds and derricks rise from the reeds to the clouds Meditating the will of men in formless crowds

–Stevens, “New England Verses”

In “A Duck for Dinner” Stevens continues to explore the collective affiliations of poetry in terms of artistic inclusion and expansion. By transposing the question of poetic collectivization and community into the context of working-class struggle, “A Duck for Dinner” reflects but also resists the populist direction of the leftist writers and poets of the

. Speaking to Masses



s toward a globally and regionally engaged poetic and political inclusion of the masses. As we shall see, the poem’s implicit approach to the Depression-era poetic alliance with the rhetoric of the people involves a wider self-questioning about poetry’s communal undertakings and collectivizing role. Often grounded on a pluralistic notion of collectivity comprised of racial and ethnic differences, in the s, a great number of poets such as Carl Sandburg, Edwin Rolfe, and Archibald MacLeish employed forms of rhetorical inclusion to stand with the workers and the oppressed masses of the United States and the world against their imperial and capitalist exploiters. The combination of an ethnically and racially pluralistic conception of Americanism with an outward-looking internationalist approach to the people’s struggles constituted a crucial aspect of the cultural left’s representations of collectivity during the Depression (Denning –). Whether influenced by the socialist pluralism of the cultural front and its anti-fascist international solidarity (Rolfe, MacLeish), or by the official populism of the New Deal (Sandburg), an affirmative stance toward poetry’s capacity to represent the people gained momentum thanks to a wide range of poets. Edwin Rolfe’s revolutionary “fellow men” in “These Men Are Revolution” () are formed to inaugurate the political agency of multitudes of workers spread “eastward” and “southward” both across the “globe” and in “America” (–). Archibald MacLeish’s “we” or “us” in poems such as “Speech to Those Who Say Comrade” () and “America was Promises” () extends from solidarity with the community of the American lower classes and the common man, to a global identification of brotherhood in favor of revolutionary struggle (Collected –, –). Both Rolfe and MacLeish emphasize ethnic and racial plurality in their depiction of the American working classes. Equally invested in accentuating the heterogeneity of American society, Sandburg’s book-length poem The People Yes 



As Denning has argued: “both the Americanism and the nationalism of the Popular Front were inflected with a popular internationalism” (; emphasis in the original). The movement illustrated a synthesis of nationalism and internationalism. In this period, “Americanism and internationalism,” in Joseph Keith’s words, “were not necessarily polar opposites but were potentially constitutive of one another” (). The Popular Front’s anti-fascist call for solidarity with the people against the crises overseas – Spanish Civil War, invasion of Ethiopia, Japan’s occupation of China, and Hitler’s Third Reich – was highly influential during the s (). Denning distinguishes the populism of the Popular Front from the mainstream populism of the New Deal (–, –). Even though, for Denning, Sandburg would belong to the less radical populism of the New Deal (), as Brian Reed argues, Sandburg was definitely influenced also by the Popular Front (–).



Community and Autonomy

() promotes an enlarged poetic vision that attempts to merge “The people of the earth,” “from six continents” and “seven seas” into a continuous stream of lexical synthesis (–). The poem celebrates, as Reed has claimed, “unity and solidarity of all oppressed against their victimizers” (; emphasis in the original). In spite of its solidaristic ambitions and political objectives, the commitment to “the rhetoric of the ‘people’ by artists and intellectuals [of the s],” as Denning has argued, provided “less an imaginary solution than a formal and aesthetic problem” (). Robert Frost’s rather hostile response to Sandburg’s poem highlights nevertheless some of the formal and conceptual difficulties that accompanied the rhetoric of the people, which the radical poets themselves dealt with: “The people Yes and The people No . . . It’s like playing tennis cross-country, without boundary lines or a net” (qtd. in Stanlis ). All-embracing discourses of collectivity could run the risk of flattening out boundaries while enlarging the scope of poetic address to incorporate the masses into poetic space. MacLeish’s “Invocation to the Social Muse” () registers the poet’s self-reflexive concern with the difficulty of creating an all-inclusive image of collectivity to represent the people in its entirety: “How to take to one’s chamber a million souls? / How to conceive in the name of a column of marchers? / . . . / I remind you, Barinya, the life of the poet is hard” (Reflections –). In “A Duck for Dinner,” Stevens both engages in and exposes the limits of poetic inclusion through the figure of the social “orator” (CPP ). In part IV, the poem moves from envisaging a future society under the “perennial doctrine” of a domineering demagogue (“super-animal,” “the man the state”) to a consideration of the artist as the shaper of a prospective form of community: “It may be the future depends on an orator, / Some pebble-chewer practiced in Tyrian speech” (CPP ). Whereas the orator as a poet-figure is endowed with the power of aesthetic and social impact – “twanging instruments / Within us hitherto unknown” – his artistic wish to expand infinitely to contain everything generates a monolithic lump in which discrepancies and boundaries dissolve: “he that / Confounds all opposites and spins a sphere / Created, like a bubble, of 



Sandburg also evokes Ananke without naming it: “What does justice say? or if justice is become an abstraction or a harlot / What does her harder sister, necessity, say? Their ears are so far from us” (). Unlike Stevens, Sandburg calls for the destruction of the rule of necessity by the people: “we must trim these kings of our time” (). MacLeish’s lines echo those of Stevens in “The Man with the Blue Guitar”: “A million people on one string?” (CPP ). In “The Man with the Blue Guitar” Stevens negotiates this mode of artistic inclusion, by giving direct voice to the masses that confront the poet.

. Speaking to Masses



bright sheens, / With a tendency to bulge as it floats away” (CPP ). If the demagogue’s “doctrine” depends upon a reductive principle of uniformity that equates New York with Cocos and Chicago with a Kaffir kraal, the orator’s task of ultimate inclusion is similarly perplexed by the problem of resolving differences into a synoptic whole. Hence, the poet’s bubble-like “sphere” turns “Caramel and would not, could not float” (CPP ). Here, Stevens’ satirical take on the social orator is similar to Frost’s attack on Sandburg’s enlarged panoramic rhetoric of the people in The People Yes. However, unlike Frost who declared that he had “none of the tenderer-than-thou / Collectivistic regimenting love” (–), Stevens was willing to explore the aesthetic and political sense of commitment to collective life that was ushered in with the cultural atmosphere of the s. Not least is this reflected in the lines that directly follow his critical depiction of the social poet-orator. Admitting the artistic “deformation” wrought in the orator’s expansive scope, the speaker, nonetheless, regards poetry (“The volcano Apostrophe, the sea Behold”) as the “base of every future” (CPP ). Even if the poetic image of a collective future, “instead of failing,” may never be actualized at all, “to think of the future is a genius,” and so needs to be performed by the poet (CPP –). In his depiction of a future form of community, as Douglas Mao has also observed, Stevens connects the demagogue and the poet “as producers of public objectifications of a community’s desires” (). Yet, the poem points to the failure of the poet who adopts the perspective of the demagogue, rather than affirming the figure of a centralized political power around whom the masses are united and unified. Indeed, the dialogue between the socialist Bulgar and the poet-speaker in the preceding sections of “A Duck for Dinner” lays down a polemical basis upon which the problem of imposing unified form on speculative frames of collective organization unfolds. The poem underscores how models of collective subjectivity – even inclusive and pluralistic ones – that rely on a cohesive body politic might amount to a totalizing gesture of imposing homogeneity. The interlocution between the socialist and the poet-speaker initiates a confrontational relationship between two forms of collectivity: the image of the workers with self-organizing capacities and an externally enforced identification of collective cohesion by poetic and political intellect. The Bulgar starts off by offering an ethically and racially composite but unified picture of the workers situated, once more, in the metropolitan park. They 

The “Kaffir Kraal” refers to an African homestead or village (Perpener ).



Community and Autonomy

are guided by a mutual desire for expression and visibility: “these hands from Sweden . . . These English noses and edged, Italian eyes, / Massed for a head they mean to make for themselves, / From which their grizzled voice will speak and be heard” (CPP ). Like Sandburg’s “people of the earth” who “wanted to put up something proud to look at” in The People Yes (), here, the workers seek identification with a symbolic phenomenon; a “head” that is supposed to reflect and assemble their varying features into a closely knit body – the “Swedish hands,” “English noses,” “edged Italian eyes,” etc. (CPP ). Whereas the Bulgar’s portrayal of the workers, in part I, seeks to emphasize their mosaic plurality and self-organizing agency, the second voice in part II challenges this perspective. The image of a mass-membered “head” is seen as a metonymic construction in which the thoughts and desires of the workers are appropriated into an invariable totality and uniformity: O buckskin, O crosser of snowy divides, For whom men were to be ends in themselves, (. . .) their thoughts, squeezed into shapes, the sun Streamed white and stoked and engined wrick-a-wrack. In your cadaverous Eden, they desire The same down-dropping fruit in yellow leaves, The same return at heavy evening (CPP ; emphasis added)

From this point of view, the mode of togetherness offered by the Bulgar is a product of a “scholar’s outline / . . . / magnified / By poets.” It is a “telltale” derived from the individual “agony of a single dreamer,” and not from the collective “agony of dreams.” As such, mechanically construed modes of collectivization, “magnified” by the poets’ “print or paper,” have no relevancy to the lives of those “preserved / For poverty” (CPP –). Indeed, the next section of the poem (part III) illustrates precisely this 



Even if historical determinism postulates the political mobilization of the workers: “Time’s fortune near, the sleepless sleepers moved / By the torture of things that will be realized, / Will, will,” the irrelevancy of prescriptive models of collectivization fostered “By print or paper” perpetuate the question of how such a prospect is supposed to be realized: “but how and all of them asking how / And sighing.” The confronting voice elicits further that the individual poet or the scholar who projects this vision does not belong to the lower classes s/he depicts: “these lives are not your lives, O free” (CPP ). In the edited, second edition of “Owl’s Clover” this section includes the phrase “the print / Of poets” (CPP ).

. Speaking to Masses



magnified poetic image of collective embodiment and inclusion, but from the socialist Bulgar’s perspective. It constitutes an all-embracing militarized artistic fantasy under the banner of a totalizing harmony: “This man / Is all the birds he ever heard and that, / The admiral of his race and everyman, / Infected by unreality, rapt round / By dense unreason / . . . / flittered, howled / By harmonies beyond known harmony” (CPP ). Even though the Bulgar introduces a highly skeptical view of this artistic formula of a centralized collective “man,” it reflects an exaggerated version of his own body politic, which, as we have seen, similarly promotes the fusion of the masses into a conceptual and corporeal “head” (CPP ). Nevertheless, it is by entirely rejecting this aesthetically produced order of a unified social body that the Bulgar further details his own account of community. In underscoring the worker’s not only physical but also ideological unity, the Bulgar suggests the possibility of “all men thinking together as one / . . . / Disclosed in everything, transcended, poised / For the syllable, poised for the touch” (CPP ). The socialist’s model of collective organization, in which the workers are seen as attaining ultimate consensus (“all men / . . . / thinking a single thought”) and laws (“spelling out pandects and haggard institutes”), rests upon an apocalyptic vision of the future (CPP ). Yet, the utopian strand of a socialist or proletarian apocalypse, which requires rapid social change, is after all, the Bulgar concedes, incommensurate with the social dynamics of the urban park: “But that / Apocalypse was not contrived for parks”; that is, the location in which his collective picture of the workers was situated (CPP ). Ultimately, the Bulgar’s account of collectivity, despite his earlier attestation of plurality, proves to be nearly as prescriptive as the record of the collective “man” who is driven by the illusion of “harmonies beyond known harmony” (CPP ). Indeed, both versions of sociality (both the Bulgar’s version and the artistic formulae of the collective “man”) are identified with a homogenizing impulse. By projecting absolute cohesion and uniformity onto the collective consciousness of the masses, they point 



 

For an alternative interpretation of this passage, see Nickels, whose reading emphasizes the plurality of this image of collective embodiment; accordingly, it is the “particularity,” and not the unification of the workers into a singular body, that is challenged in these lines (–). Stevens’ depiction of a corporeal and conceptual “head” that epitomizes the workers resembles the collective or “mass man” trope of the Soviet Union that is described in René Fu¨löp-Miller’s The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (), a popular writer at the time. See Jason Puskar’s “Wallace Stevens’ ‘Drastic Community’” for a reading that also acknowledges the Bulgar’s emphasis on the workers’ “more than bodily unity” (–). For similar interpretations of the Bulgar’s description of the apocalypse as a socialist vision of the future, see Longenbach,  and Woodland, –.



Community and Autonomy

in the direction of a monolithic approach to community. But far from indicating an underlying fear of a socialist future, the shifting rhetoric of the poem reveals that both the political and artistic discourses on collectivity, which rely on premeditated notions of uniformity, generate totalizing models of social organization. In “A Duck for Dinner,” neither the aesthetic nor the political conceptions of collectivization are readily accepted but rather consistently questioned and contested. As in the case of the social orator who mirrors the demagogue, the colloquy between the socialist and the poet-speaker involves a questioning of aesthetic and political visions of collectivity that seek social cohesion. The treatment of the poetic image of the collective “man,” the Bulgar’s apocalyptic vision of the workers, and the critical assessment of the “poets” who “magnify” scholarly prints display a level of skepticism toward social organization that rely on pre-given (political and aesthetic) models of collective unification. However, as remarked earlier, in “A Duck for Dinner,” this particular skepticism is leavened by the poetic necessity to “think of the future,” which, in part V, paves the way for an alternative spatialization of community. In part V of “A Duck for Dinner,” Stevens registers an alternative framing of social space, by bringing back the image of the lofty statue: “The statue is white and high / . . . / high beyond any height / That rises in the air / . . . / In this he [the sculptor] carved himself, he carved his age, / He carved the feathery walkers standing by, / Twitching a little with crude souvenirs / Of young identities” (CPP ). Whereas the statue represents a detached and ideal aesthetic formation, it paradoxically implicates a boundless containment of all other dimensions – the artist, the crowds and the “age” (CPP ). As such, its autonomy takes the form of a radical heteronomy that delineates a space of indivisibility between collective life and the artwork.





Riddel claims that, “in a time when fascism was commanding headlines and the uneasy attention of independent states, Stevens would choose the Marxist promise as the greatest potential threat to his humanistic order” (). In a  letter to Latimer, Stevens defines the “fear” of “Socialism” and “Communism” as “all nonsense” while accepting that both necessarily create disorder as any social transition would necessarily entail (L ). In the poem, the problematic supposition of ultimate consensus that is prevalent in the socialist’s model of collectivization and the phrase “The newest Soviet réclame” (CPP ) invoke Stalin’s “Great Purge” that took place between  and . The movement from democratic centralization to the monolithic rule of Stalin resulted in conflicting views about the Soviet Union among the American cultural left (Laskin –). This paradoxically inclusive yet detached image of the statue illustrates Stevens’ contention that “aesthetic order includes all other orders but is not limited to them” (CPP ).

. Speaking to Masses



The statue’s boundless containment of all might be seen as replicating the potential artistic error or the “deformation” that was previously brought forth by the social orator’s all-inclusive vision (CPP ). Besides, this alternative spatialization of collective life is grounded on an absolute self-rule that highlights a centralized artistic authority: “The statue is the sculptor not the stone.” As opposed to the “starless crown” of Ananke, the sculptor-poet is endowed with the “diamond crown of crowns” (CPP , ). The poem valorizes the superiority and shaping role of the artist. But instead of imposing a premeditated form of social organization onto the masses, here, the sculptor “conforms” his artistic material to the crowd. The statue demarcates a space of community, not through a presumed model of rational political consensus, but through a mutually shared experience of sense guided by creative forces, in which the masses actively participate and recognize themselves: The sprawlers on the grass See more than marble in their eyes, see more Than the horses quivering to be gone, flashed through With senses chiseled on bright stone. They see The metropolitan of mind, they feel The central of the composition, in which They live. They see and feel themselves, seeing And feeling the world in which they live.

(CPP ; emphasis added)

Unlike in the beginning, where the statue fails to generate any impact on the figure of the old woman, here, the sculptor’s work is given the capacity to impact the masses. The masses see and feel “The central of the composition, in which / They live” (CPP ). The emphasis on the affective dimension of aesthetic experience over rational consensus foreshadows Stevens’ endorsement of the “man” of “imagination” or the “subman” who thinks by “imagining,” over the “sterile rationalist” in “Sombre Figuration” – the final section of “Owl’s Clover” (CPP –). Even though the statue is deployed as an artistic composition of collective desires, it does not provide an enclosed safe haven that culminates in a 

Stevens’ valorization of artistic authority is compensated for by the transition of the mode of address from a distanced “they” to a self-inclusive “ourselves” by which the speaker’s perspective is merged with that of the masses. Thus, while the poet-sculptor’s comprehensive stance incorporates the masses through the image of the statue, the poetic voice becomes equally incorporated within the collective consciousness of the masses. In an extremely complex set of formal and thematic maneuvers, Stevens’ poet-sculptor, in a Whitmanesque gesture, both absorbs and is absorbed by the crowd.



Community and Autonomy

finalized fiction of community that is devoid of conflict. Nor does it point to a historically detached idea of a utopian future. In fact, the possibility of a politically and poetically committed utopian unification of the masses turning into a totalitarian and nightmarish order casts over Stevens’ dramatization of a collective future a shade of horror: If these were theoretical people, like Small bees of spring, sniffing the coldest buds Of a time to come—A shade of horror turns The bees to scorpions blackly-barbed, a shade Of fear changes the scorpions to skins Concealed in glittering grass, dank reptile skins.

(CPP )

The aesthetic construction of a community, gathered around shared sense and experience, is replaced by the prospective vision of a “theoretical people,” mobilized by an exploitative logic of fear and horror. This pessimistic view of community is expressed more rapidly in the final section of the poem, “Sombre Figuration,” through the image of a “sprawling portent” (CPP ). The “portent,” – which Stevens described in sociopsychological terms of a collective “subconscious” (L ) – is the future in which the masses, devoid of political self-consciousness, are overtaken by an externally imposed, and destructive logic that suggests a warlike and fascistic mechanism: It [the portent] is the form Of a generation that does not know itself, (. . .) And the people suddenly evil, waked, accused, Destroyed by a vengeful movement of the arms, A mass overtaken by the blackest sky, Each one as part of the total wrath, obscure In slaughter

(CPP )

The possibility of a disastrous and fascistic future, which was more than a mere theory in , suspends the poem’s speculative dispositions of community between the “total wrath” and the “happy form / That revolution takes” (CPP –). In other words, the idea of an aesthetically articulated “civil fiction” is caught, once more, as in “The Greenest Continent,” in the flux of the historical contingencies of fascism and war (CPP ). It thus seems as if the poem, within its fictional frame, comes to the conclusion reached by Benjamin that same year () about

. Speaking to Masses



aesthetics and political life: “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war,” to which he famously added fascism (Illuminations ). Yet, the poem evolves in a way that suggests the opposite. For, whereas Benjamin brings “autonomous art into a constellation with fascism” regarding the utilization of its aesthetic power over the masses, Stevens develops an alternative vision by conceiving the statue as a form of resistance to the “portent” of fascism (Buck-Morss ). In the end of the poem, the statue and the “portent” are juxtaposed: IV High up in heaven the sprawling portent moves. (. . .) The statue stands in true perspective. Crows Give only their color to the leaves. The trees Are full of fanfares of farewell, as night And the portent end in night, composed, before Its wheel begins to turn.

(CPP –)

The statue as a source of aesthetic and social order is imagined not only to remain resistant to the “portent” but also to annul its progress. The portent is “composed” in the double sense of the word: both set in order, and pacified “before / Its wheel begins to turn.” In the process of configuring the statue as a means to encapsulate an alternative model of community, the poem displays an awareness of the political and historical conditions surrounding it. Unlike in “The Greenest Continent,” where the statue is infiltrated by the ideological disputes of fascism and colonialism, here, Stevens introduces the statue as a form that can resist the portent of fascism. The end of the poem depicts a double movement that combines connection and disconnection by registering the statue’s simultaneous immersion in, and withdrawal from, the social world as a continuous process. In the first half of part IV, the speaker refuses the “crow’s perspective,” which seeks to realistically conform the statue to actual space and time. This perspective seeks to measure the “size” of the statue according to the space it occupies (“The statue scaled to space”) (CPP ). The second half, by contrast, locates the statue in an ordinary and common “hum-drum space.” No longer a “thing imagined,” the statue is 

Here, “its” most probably refers to the “night”; in the next lines, we have the progression from “day” to “night,” just as a wheel turning (CPP ).



Community and Autonomy

situated within a “present time” (CPP ). The last section shifts from the “flight of emblemata” to “descent,” illustrating, once more, the vertical and horizontal movements by which the heteronomous and autonomous dynamics of the statue have been mapped throughout the poem. Nevertheless, the poem ends not with the final settlement of the statue in a present time and space, but with the necessity of the constant reactualization of the imaginative process: “the night to be re-designed, / Its landbreath to be stifled, its color changed, / Night and the imagination being one” (CPP ). In “Owl’s Clover,” a relational configuration of aesthetic autonomy underpins Stevens’ interrogation of the complex relationship between art (poetry), community, and politics. The poem moves from the aesthetic collapse of the statue (“The Old Woman and the Statue”) to an intricate process of aesthetic renewal for reactivating art’s societal relevance. “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” initiates a conception of the statue as a work of art giving expression to the masses, while positing autonomy as a necessary condition for this process to be actualized. In “The Greenest Continent” and “A Duck for Dinner” Stevens’ poetic discourse indicates a questioning of the reach of this collective vision (“mode of common dreams”), which tests the limits and expansion of art’s communal and inclusionary role. The impulse of collectivization around art is replete with problems caused by ideological, cultural, and geographical confines, which the poem laboriously explores and amplifies. In the process, the dialectical interplay between aesthetic separation and social engagement is posited as a dynamic mechanism underlying Stevens’ staging of the collective allegiances of poetry. This particular interplay, which constitutes a salient part of Stevens’ conception of aesthetic renewal, demands rethinking the collective dynamics of his poetics from a perspective that acknowledges his strategy of combining autonomy and the political ethos of art, a strategy that presents itself most intricately in “Owl’s Clover.”

 

Autonomy and Philosophy “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

. Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics As the reason destroys, the poet must create

– Stevens, Adagia

The historical exigencies of the s and s shaped Stevens’ vision of aesthetic autonomy not only with respect to poetry’s relation to political life, cultural demands, and socioeconomic pressures, as I have been tracing so far throughout the preceding chapters. Such exigencies, especially during the time of war, had also a crucial impact on his understanding of the relationship between poetry and philosophy, and formed, to a notable extent, his idea of the autonomy of poetic thinking from philosophical systems of thought. The relation between poetry and philosophy has long been a mainstay of Stevens criticism. Stevens’ poetry has been discussed and framed, over the years, with reference to a variety of philosophical perspectives, which, in one way or another, have been discerned in the contemplative and abstract dimensions of his work. The discourse of philosophy continues to serve as an important source for scholars who seek to explore the processes of poetic thought that characterize Stevens’ poetry. But perhaps we need to come at the relation between poetry and philosophy from a different perspective, a perspective that, by focusing on their distinctions, rather than potential affinities, may get closer to Stevens’ own framing of it. One of the several instances that highlights Stevens’ views on the relation between poetry and philosophy is found in a letter from , in which he responded to the literary critic Robert Pack’s complaint that his long sequence poem, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “does not really lead anywhere” (L ). “In projecting a supreme fiction,” Stevens wrote, “I cannot imagine anything more fatal than to state it definitely and incautiously . . . we are dealing with poetry, not with philosophy. The last thing in the world that I should want to do would be to formulate a system” 



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

(L –). Stevens’ reply to Pack, who was a young scholar and editor at the time, marks poetry’s difference from philosophy by identifying the latter with a goal-oriented and systematized mode of thinking: Unlike poetry, philosophy not only seeks to “lead somewhere,” but also, importantly, it states its objectives “definitely” by way of formulating and building systems (L ). Stevens’ take on the vexed relationship between poetry and philosophy, in his late career, resonates with his earlier reflections on the topic in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” (), a lecture he gave at Pontigny-en-Amérique at the invitation of the philosopher-poet Jean Wahl. Defining philosophy as the “official” and poetry as the “unofficial view of being,” Stevens went on to argue: “if the philosopher comes to nothing because he fails, the poet may come to nothing because he succeeds. The philosopher fails to discover” (CPP , ). What sense do we make of the critical attitude these remarks display toward philosophy, especially given that Stevens more often than not defined poetry in terms of thinking, not to mention the various philosophical traditions within which his poetry has been placed? His skeptical stance toward philosophy has captured the attention of a number of readers but stimulated little discussion of what it might mean with regard to poetic autonomy on the side of thinking itself. Goldstone has recently claimed that Stevens defended poetry’s institutional autonomy from philosophy in its academic form (), and Eeckhout has interpreted Stevens’ “supreme fiction” as an attempt to “autonomize . . . thought” (Wallace Stevens ). These claims are not only exceptions to the run of arguments that seek to synthesize the line of thinking that underlies Stevens’ poetry with philosophical discourses. As such exceptions, they also call for exploring the various ways in which the idea of poetry as an autonomous form of thinking is brought into play and developed at different stages of Stevens’ poetics. In a  letter to the literary critic Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, Stevens complained that “recently” he had been “fitted into too many philosophic frames” and added: “if I felt the obligation to pursue the philosophy of my poems, I should be writing philosophy, not poetry; and it is poetry that I want to write” (L ). Over the next five decades of literary criticism, Stevens’ characterization of poetry as the “act of the mind” (CPP ), expressed in multiple ways in his oeuvre, would continue to intrigue readers of his poems and lead them through an increasingly large body of philosophical doctrines. In critical approaches that struggled to grasp the 

For a discussion of Jean Wahl’s response to Stevens’ lecture on philosophy and poetry, see Anne Luyat-Moore’s “Wallace Stevens and Jean Wahl,” –.

. Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics



pertinence of philosophical issues in Stevens’ poetry, phenomenology, deconstruction, and pragmatism have been the dominant sources. While acknowledging the relevance of reading Stevens from a philosophical vantage point, recent criticism has underlined the problematic character of interpreting his poetry through the lens of a specific philosophical branch or a philosopher, and the risk of pigeonholing his work into a preestablished paradigm of abstract thinking. In his Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing, for example, Eeckhout claims that “such analogies between a particular brand of philosophy and a highly unique body of poetry . . . provide a set of angles, perspectives, and directions, but are not in themselves sufficient to generate valid readings” (). Similarly, in his recent book, Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, Altieri repudiates readings in which “Stevens’s career is telescoped into the ideas of a particular philosopher” (). Commenting on earlier accounts of Stevens and philosophy, Altieri asserts that even the title of Stevens’  lecture “A Collect of Philosophy” shows how, “at least” at this point in his career, “Stevens was simply not interested in writing poetry under the auspices of any commitments to particular bodies of philosophical work or school of thought” (). For anyone interested in rethinking Stevens philosophically, Altieri provides an alternative outlook by shifting from epistemological questions (such as “what does it take to know the world?”), which have been central to the philosophical reception of Stevens, to “what difference does it make for our sense of the world to be concerned with knowing it in particular ways?” (). With this shift, Altieri undertakes a nuanced consideration of Stevens’ poetry that points to the potential it generates for creating value out of “aspectual thinking” in response to the world of fact as experienced under “conditions of modernity” (–). But despite the renewed approach Altieri offers to the relation of Stevens’ poetry to philosophy, he still shares the common concern with previous scholarship to portray Stevens as a “philosophical poet,” and thereby to elicit the distinct 

The phenomenologist accounts include Miller’s Poets of Reality, Hines’ The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens, and Kermode’s “Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut.” Among the deconstructionist approaches voiced, especially in the s, were Riddel’s “Metaphoric Staging” and Miller’s “Rock and Criticism as Cure” and The Linguistic Moment. Stevens’ relation to American pragmatism can be traced in works such as Patricia Rae’s The Practical Muse, Poirier’s Poetry and Pragmatism, and Levin’s The Poetics of Transition. The latest work that interrogates Stevens’ philosophical leanings is Daniel Tompsett’s Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic Philosophy. See also Simon Critchley’s Things Merely Are, which focuses on Stevens’ “poetic epistemology.” For Critchley, Stevens’ poetry provides us with “instructive philosophical insight” that overcomes the epistemological problem of the relationship between mind and world (, ).



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

“commitment” of his poetry to “philosophy,” and more specifically to the phenomenological conception of value (–). Rather than adding to a long wave of critical attention by again conflating Stevens’ poetry with philosophy, I intend to focus in this chapter on their separateness. Beginning in the late s, I will suggest, his poetry demarcates philosophical and poetic domains of thinking more distinctly than has generally been acknowledged. In a number of poems from Parts of a World () and Transport to Summer (), Stevens posits poetry as an alternative site for thinking that is free from the systematic and preconceived imperatives of logic and reason, which he increasingly associates with philosophy. During the period that coincides with World War II and soon after, Stevens’ poems set out the possibility for delineating a space for thought that is equal to, and not dependent upon, philosophy for the activity of creating, altering, and grounding its own fictional or poetic ideas (CPP ). In the second half of this chapter, we will see how the transformation of philosophy as a discipline in the United States under the cultural influence of war (especially the rise of logical positivism) shaped the dynamics of Stevens’ thinking about poetry and philosophy in this particular sense. As Bonnie Costello has suggested, out of his engagement with the cultural atmosphere during World War II emerged Stevens’ concern “with another war, the war that never ends between poetry and philosophy on the ground between art and politics” (Planets xi). In this respect, the critical task of reconsidering Stevens’ dealings with philosophy can be enhanced by pursuing the various strains his poetry evokes between philosophical and poetic realms, instead of recuperating his philosophical affiliations that have so far been closely explored. The stakes of Stevens’ conception of poetry as a realm for thinking that is autonomous from philosophy can be viewed most productively by taking into account the notion of “inaesthetics” introduced by Alain Badiou. “Inaesthetics,” in Badiou’s words, refers to “a relation of philosophy to art which, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn it into an object for philosophy” (Handbook xii). As Alberto Toscano and Nina Power have argued, inaesthetics suggests reinvigorating the “relation 

As has often been the case with earlier approaches to the topic under discussion, Altieri’s work also does not accommodate the social and historical impulses at work in Stevens’ stance toward philosophy, except the very general backdrop of “modernity” that constitutes the context for his reevaluation of Stevens’ poetry and philosophy. Ultimately, Altieri sees phenomenology as the most fitting philosophical school by which Stevens’ poetry can be viewed from a perspective that is concerned with the question of values (Modernity ).

. Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics



between philosophy and literature as separate, if interacting, disciplines of thought” (xxvi). Rather than absorbing poetry into the discourse of philosophy, or seeing the two as interlocking discourses, inaesthetics offers a “productive schema, where the exploitative drive of philosophy or the contamination of philosophy by art are both avoided,” and “in this schema only,” for Badiou, “does the literary experience become an experience of thought” (Lecercle –). An important characteristic of Badiou’s approach to poetry lies in his emphasis on the poetic transposition of the sensible or the perceptible into the non-sensible operations of thoughtprocedures and ideas (Handbook –). This characteristic, in turn, places his inaesthetics in a critical relation to the aesthetic regime of art, for which the distribution of sensible material in a given work of art, viz. aesthesis, is central (Rancière, Discontents ). I will return to this point a little later in this chapter, but first, in what follows, I would like to draw attention to a number of instances where the distinction between philosophical and poetic modes of thinking undergirds Stevens’ poetry. Badiou’s insistence on the idea-producing yet nonphilosophical dimension of poetry offers a basis for elucidating this distinction as it applies to Stevens’ conception of poetic thinking. In his long World War II–era poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (), Stevens explores this distinction through the figure of a “major man” – an abstract heroic poet-persona – who is portrayed as the “thinker of the first idea” (CPP ). “Notes” is one of the most canonical poems in Stevens’ oeuvre, and it has been approached from a variety of interpretive angles. The imaginative formation of a secular belief in fiction as a response to the modernist “crisis of belief” (Jarraway –), the exploration of the idea of abstraction, either as an escape from political and social realities (Perloff –) or as a means to “re-connect” with “reality” (Ragg ), the elusive engagement with war (Longenbach –; Filreis, Actual ), and the convergence of the philosophical “strains of idealism and pragmatism” (Bates ) are among the main threads running through previous critical discussions of the poem. The philosophical stimulus, explicit in the poem’s persistent preoccupation with the notion of the “first idea” and the “major man” as a poet-thinker, has been well documented in earlier readings. Yet “Notes” also hints at an implicit resistance to the discourse of philosophy by combining a set of thematic and formal registers. Just as he does in his near-contemporaneous lecture “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” (), Stevens incorporates in the poem a position with respect to philosophy by reflecting on the function of reason



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

(CPP ). In It Must Be Abstract, the first section of “Notes,” the speaker distinguishes the form of expression (the “idiom”) and “clairvoyance” of the “major man” from the mechanical applications of logical thinking: “They differ from reason’s click-clack, its applied / Enflashings” (CPP ). Stevens’ use of the term “reason,” in earlier poems like “Dezembrum” and “Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial” signals the superiority of aesthetic sense and imaginative fulfillment over the rational: “Dezembrum” ends by asserting that “The reason can give nothing at all / Like the response to desire” (CPP ). Similarly, “Meditation” concludes with a question that implies the irrelevance of reason and will compared with the sensual sources of poetic inspiration: “But what are radiant reason and radiant will / To warblings early in the hilarious trees / Of summer, the drunken mother?” (CPP ). Unlike these poems, which seem to discredit reason in favor of aesthetic sense, “Notes” develops a particular process of poetic “reason” – a “later reason” – that brings into focus what eludes the rules of “logos and logic” (CPP ). The multiple notions of unintelligibility, inexpressibility, and irrationality, as they are envisaged in Stevens’ poetry, have often been understood in terms of a “post-romantic distrust of rationalism” (Eeckhout, Wallace Stevens ). The elusive aspects of Stevens’ language and rhetoric have been read, in this context, as an intricately construed resistance to the demands of interpretation that is achieved by his staging of the limits of language and expression. However, in “Notes,” Stevens’ evocations of the unintelligible and the inexpressible, and his treatment of reason equally form modes of thinking that mark a distinction between the contemplative conditions of poetry and philosophy. The poem transposes, as we shall see, the unintelligible and the inexpressible (or the unnameable) into its conception of reason. This transposition, in turn, furnishes Stevens’ “supreme fiction” with effective tools for mapping out a distinctive territory to demarcate the conditions of poetic thinking. 



In “The Figure of the Youth,” Stevens approaches the topic of philosophy and poetry through a discussion of the concepts of “reason,” the “rational,” and the “imagination” (CPP –, –). Instead of opposing these concepts, he argues that poetry should satisfy both the reason and the imagination: “The poet, in order to fulfill himself, must accomplish a poetry that satisfies both the reason and the imagination” (CPP ). The examination of philosophy through the concept of reason is carried on in his later essay “Imagination as Value” () (CPP –). For a discussion of these approaches, see especially Eeckhout, Wallace Stevens, . As Eeckhout explains, the evasive qualities of Stevens’ poetry have also led critics to embark on articulating connections with various philosophical frameworks, among which the kind of pragmatism that “attaches most value to concepts like contingency and transitionality” as well as deconstructive and phenomenological readings are most prominent (–).

. Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics



In canto IX of It Must Be Abstract the speaker underscores that the figure of the “major man” originates from reason and not from “apotheosis”; yet the form of this specific reason is defined as the “hum of thoughts evaded in the mind”: He comes, Compact in invincible foils, from reason, Lighted at midnight by the studious eye, Swaddled in revery, the object of The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind,

(CPP )

The evasive sounds of thought, which the speaker invokes here, resonate with the form of thinking that is specified earlier in the poem in relation to the “first idea” (CPP –). Emblematically encapsulated by the image of the “sun,” in the opening of the poem, the first idea is approached through a mode of thinking that, rather than striving for ultimate clarity and categorization, allows its object to be perceived “in the difficulty of what it is to be”: “The inconceivable idea of the sun / . . . / Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be / In the difficulty of what it is to be” (CPP –). In “Notes,” both the major man and the first idea, as the central markers of the poem’s thought process, create a resistant surface – a “difficult visage” – that sets a limit to rational operations of the mind (CPP ). This resistant surface – much like the “brune figure” of a later poem, “Man Carrying Thing” (), that “resists / Identity” – is characterized in “Notes” as a fundamental aspect of poetic thought that evades categorical and instrumental reason (CPP ). “The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind” provides a rhythmical counterpoint to the steady and automatic beat of “reason’s click-clack” (CPP ). The rhythmical differentiation between the automatic cadence of reason and the free-floating metrical style of the poem itself (the spontaneous rising and fading pattern of blank verse) records also a formal and musical dissonance between the poetic and discursive modes of thought. The poetic object of thinking, then, is what resists being classified or “named,” and operates at the threshold of the intelligible and the nameable (CPP ). Unnameability and unintelligibility are not obstacles to the 

In the beginning of the poem, the speaker asserts: “Phoebus was / A name for something that never could be named / . . . / The sun / Must bear no name” (CPP –). Both the “sun” and “Phoebus” are mythologized figures and names for the first idea, which, the speaker insists, cannot be properly named, that is, it cannot be given proper linguistic expression.



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

process of thought within the realm of the poem, precisely because the poem posits the state of indeterminacy as one of its enabling conditions for thinking. This does not imply, however, that Stevens’ poetic operations of thinking remain ultimately confined to a state of imprecision and indeterminacy. In “Man Carrying Thing,” for instance, regarding the “uncertain particles” of the “certain solid” and the unexplored, “secondary” parts of the “obvious whole” culminates not in an incessant flux of ambiguities, but in a new form of clairvoyance emerging out of a temporally extended state of contingency (CPP ). This state is metaphorized by a long-lasting “storm”: “Out of a storm we must endure all night, // Out of a storm of secondary things), / A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real. // We must endure our thoughts all night, until / The bright obvious stands motionless in cold” (CPP ). Likewise, in “Notes” the evasive “hum of thoughts” with which the speaker meditates on the “first idea” is, as the poem unfolds, imbued with a “candor” that “for a moment” taps into a commonly shared glimpse of immaculacy: “The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning / . . . / The poem, through candor, brings back a power again / That gives a candid kind to everything” (CPP –). In both of these instances spontaneity and contingency are vital to the poems’ movement of thought that facilitates passages from indiscernibility to a state of momentary precision. In “Man Carrying Thing” the emphasis on the “sudden” occurrence of “thoughts,” and in “Notes” the recurring expressions of instantaneity and unpredictability, such as “for a moment,” “quick of this invention,” “balances that happen,” “moments of awakening,” “suddenly,” “momentary,” etc. point to a spontaneous impulse arising from the processes of thinking enacted in each poem (CPP , –, ). It is possible to read these spontaneous moments of insight in terms of epiphany, as Harold Bloom has done, by describing the main drive behind Stevens’ approach to the first idea as a form of “secularized epiphany” (Poems ). However, unlike the strictly individual and subjective experience of epiphany found in the works of other modernists such as Joyce and Woolf (Kim ), the impulse of spontaneity and the focus on contingency in these poems create temporal zones of insight that do not emanate from an individual mind. As the persistent use of plural pronouns, i.e., “we,” “our,” “ourselves,” and “us,” indicates, these temporal zones of sudden understanding emanate from a collectively shared, intersubjective dimension that is embedded in the poems’ reflective processes of thinking. Indeed, the speaker in the very beginning of “Notes” points exactly to this by warning, “Never suppose an inventing mind as source / Of this idea nor for that mind

. Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics



compose / A voluminous master folded in his fire”; the “major man” and the “major abstraction” are “commonal” (CPP , ). As Eleanor Cook has judiciously observed, Stevens’ use of the word “common” in “Notes” signifies not only a sense of the ordinary and the quotidian but also “a sense of the communal,” which results from a consideration of “what things may truly be held by a people” (Word-Play , ). Spontaneity and erratic moments of shared insight open up new procedures of thinking as well as a distinctive pedagogical paradigm that treats the irrational as rational: “We shall return at twilight from the lecture / Pleased that the irrational is rational” (CPP ). An alternative pedagogical process, evoked by such figures as “ephebe,” “Clouds” that become “pedagogues,” “structures” of academies” blurred in “a mist,” and the poet’s “petty syllabi,” makes up a running theme throughout “Notes” (CPP –, , , –). The poem’s pedagogical take on the first idea is stimulated by a specific form of thinking that is geared toward expanding the boundaries of instituted and accepted modifications of reason, and toward teasing out the limits of the rational. In “Man Carrying Thing,” this thinking is figuratively brought into play through the impressionistic and opaque images of the “man” (“brune figure”) and the “thing he carries,” and in “Notes,” it revolves around the first idea as a fictional and mythical invention (CPP ). A specific cognitive mode, which departs from straightforward reason without abandoning the rational, forms the basis of the poem’s alternative pedagogy. While in canto II of It Must Be Abstract the implication is that the “philosopher” and the “priest” are, or have been, equally driven by an (intransitive) “desire” toward the first idea, for the poet the first idea resides in a fiction like a “hermit in a poet’s metaphors” (CPP ). Thus, importantly, the poet’s difficulty in “Notes” lies neither in grasping the origin of the first idea (it is fictional; “an imagined thing”) nor in dissecting or deconstructing it as an essentialist category of thought (CPP ). As the speaker in the first section of It Must Give Pleasure articulates, the poet’s difficulty lies in capturing from the “irrational moment” of 



The fiction of the first idea is not controlled or designed by an individual or subjective mind. The major man as the poet-thinker is not a “man” but a “commonal” abstraction: “Beau linguist. But the MacCullough is MacCullough. / It does not follow that major man is man” (CPP ). Here I call this “desire” “intransitive” since both the priest’s and the philosopher’s desires are marked by a lack of fulfillment: “the priest desires. The philosopher desires. // And not to have is the beginning of desire. / To have what is not is its ancient cycle” (CPP ). “To have what is not” is to have a “fiction” and while this leads the philosopher and the priest to a cyclical state of “ennui,” for the poet “fiction” is what constitutes the basis for an exploration of the first idea.



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

perception “its unreasoning” (CPP –). This sentiment toward unreasoning is in keeping with the poem’s underlying motive for establishing fiction as a field of possibility for thinking that is set apart from regulative and imposing configurations of thought. Toward the end of “Notes,” this resistance to established models of reasoning is expressed through the figure of the “sophisticated” “Canon Aspirin,” “the man who has explored all the projections of the mind” (L ). Commenting on the first of the “Canon Aspirin” cantos, Cook claims that it may serve as a potential “trap for the unwary, inviting allegoresis but so far resisting our intelligence quite successfully” (Word-Play ). The narrative of “Canon Aspirin,” as Cook notes, does not lend itself to a straightforward reading, yet the references to “thinking,” “knowing,” “reason,” and “order” do suggest the importance of this figure for an understanding of the poem’s thought procedure. As another figure for the poet as thinker, Canon Aspirin “imposes orders as he thinks of them,” and “establishes statues of reasonable men” (CPP –). In rejecting this figure’s institutionalizing frame of thought, which is tangible in the symbolic act of installing “statues” to canonize certain applications of reason, the speaker claims: He imposes orders as he thinks of them, (. . .) Next, he builds capitols and in their corridors, Whiter than wax, sonorous, fame as it is, He establishes statues of reasonable men, Who surpassed the most literate owl, the most erudite Of elephants. But to impose is not To discover. To discover an order as of A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find, Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather, It is possible, possible, possible. It must Be possible.

(CPP –)



In his phenomenological reading of the figure of Canon Aspirin, Hines takes the “fable of this attractive character to be an illustration of one of the limits of the creative imagination” (). Riddel takes a similar direction, interpreting Canon Aspirin as a figure that “awakens to the world” but then makes “his canonical choice—he submits his experience to the formal ordering of dogma” ().

. Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics



If the possibility of knowing without “having reasoned at all” in its normative senses resides in a new “fiction,” this fiction itself requires disrupting, and moving away from established constructions of thought, or as Stevens puts it, from “all existing fictions” (L ). Canon Aspirin does the opposite by idolizing and instituting “statues of reasonable men” along the “corridors” of his legislative “capitols” (CPP ). Ultimately, Canon Aspirin shares the same limitation as the philosopher whom, as we have seen earlier, in “The Figure of the Youth,” Stevens associates with a failure to “discover” (CPP , ). This failure is also at the core of a later poem, “The Role of the Idea in Poetry” (), where, placed in a genealogy of thought directed toward an end (“determined thereto”), the philosophers are defined as “patriarchs / Of truth” (CPP ). In contradistinction to the philosophers’ drive toward the determinate, which allows “nothing” to evolve from the end of the “day” (“the evening’s edge”), the poetic voice records the evening’s “form” expanding into a “new-found night” (CPP ). The role of the idea in poetry, unlike in philosophy, is identified as one of discovery. The earlier Stevens of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” engages in the idea of poetry enabling an alternative mode of thinking by identifying the musical inflections of the poet-guitarist with a contingent and unruly form of reason: “I know my lazy, leaden twang / Is like the reason in a storm; // And yet it brings the storm to bear. / I twang it out and leave it there” (CPP ). The transforming shapes of the “wind,” the “sea,” and the “falling snow,” which the poet describes in drifting metaphors, have a quality to mock (“satirize”) the “geographers and philosophers” who, unaware of the constancy of change, seek, ironically, to “shift the shifting scene” in their chartings of the world (CPP ). Similarly, in “Life on a Battleship” the speaker rejects the prospect of the philosopher-“captain” of “The Masculine” (the ship), who, defined as a descendant of Descartes, charts and imposes “rules of the world” (CPP ). Toward the end of the poem, the speaker confronts the figure of the philosopher-captain and his “Regulae mundi.” The philosopher subordinates parts – the particular sound of each instrument: the “thump” of the “basses,” the “smack” of “fiddles,” the “yahoo” of “horns,” and the “strike” of “flutes” – to an 



Whereas the structural and legislative characteristics of the architectural metaphors (“corridors” and “capitols”) that define Canon Aspirin’s approach to reason determine a center, the mode of poetic thinking endorsed and imagined in Stevens’ poetry defines a peripheral zone that is concerned with what is “unofficial,” secondary, and unexplored (CPP ). “The reason in a storm” is reminiscent of the “thoughts” that emerge “out of a storm” in “Man Carrying Thing” (CPP ).



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

undifferentiated “whole.” The speaker in turn, asserts, “Your guns are not rhapsodic strophes, red / And true” (CPP –). In “The Woman That Had More Babies Than That” – the poem that immediately follows “Life on a Battleship” – “The old men, the philosophers, are haunted” by the “maternal voice” of a female figure whose “sense of speech” is posed as an antidote to the masculine lineage, which, in “Life on a Battleship,” Stevens links to philosophers (CPP ). Quite differently from these poems, in “Asides on the Oboe,” Stevens plays upon a nuanced sense of analogy between the philosopher and the poet as thinkers, but marks an essential difference on the basis of a “final belief” in a “fiction” that (as we have seen) is further developed in “Notes”. The poem begins with the assertion that the “philosophers’ man” who “alone still walks in dew / . . . / Concerning an immaculate imagery” is not enough to replace the discarded “gods” and “heroes” (CPP ). As an alternative, the “final belief” in a “fiction” that is postulated in the prologue of the poem enables the invention of an “impossible possible philosophers’ man” (CPP ). This alternative fictive figure is, then, seen at once as a communal source of elegiac consolation for the war and as paradoxically apart from extraneous influence: “It was / . . . / as we heard / Him chanting for those buried in their blood, / In the jasmine haunted forests, that we knew / The glass man, without external reference” (CPP ). Taken together, these instances indicate not merely a posture of anxiety about the value or supremacy of poetry over philosophy, but a concern with specifying the conditions for poetic thinking within the fictional register of each poem by distinguishing its processes and function. It is in this constitutive gesture of investigating and determining the conditions for poetic thought that a claim to autonomy and a view of poetry as a particularized form of thinking emerge as principal features of Stevens’ poetics. The issue at stake, therefore, is not to decipher an underlying antagonism between poetry and philosophy as a thematic constituent of Stevens’ poetry. What is at stake, rather, is to trace the ways in which Stevens’ poetry both presents itself as a thought process and reflects on the conditions of that process without the supervision of philosophy as the authoritative source for the production of thought. Badiou’s inaesthetics, in this sense, offers an adequate way to consider Stevens’ poetics of thinking, insofar as it provides an approach that will not 

For a reading of the poem as elegy, see Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, . The poem is arguably more a reflection on the ways in which it may come to function as an elegy during war than being an elegy in its entirety.

. Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics



be tempted to construe the manifestations of poetic thought as imitations of philosophical reflection. The purpose of employing the notion of inaesthetics is not, therefore, to hold up particular aspects of Badiou’s claims about poetic thinking as direct analogies to Stevens’ poetry. It is rather to take up its deliberate dismantling of the codependency between poetry and philosophy, and thus foregrounding the autonomy of poetic thought, as a generative starting point for revisiting Stevens’ poetic enactments of thinking. Nevertheless, a founding aspect of inaesthetics, implied by Badiou’s characterization of poetry strictly in terms of the “Idea,” marks an important divergence from the way thinking is organized and produced in Stevens’ poetry, and thus needs to be addressed at this stage. While in Badiou’s framework, poetry is seen as producing an autonomous procedure for thinking, the poetic and linguistic figurations of sensorial material within the sphere of a poem are always, and rather axiomatically, identified with the ideational elements of thought: “What the poem declares is that things are identical to their idea” (Handbook ; emphasis in the original). For Badiou, rather than representing or imitating what is empirically perceived or experienced, poetry engages in a thought process of its own by subtracting thought from the “immediate and sensible presence of objects” (During ). In this schema, all sensible matter that is poetically formalized constantly disappears into the procedures of thought that the poem stages (Handbook ). Thus, Mallarmé Mallarmé’s “Tomb,” “Swan,” and “Rose,” and Rimbaud’s “Christ,” “Worker,” and “Infernal Groom” are all seen as emblems or figurations of ideas that “engineer the sensory presentation of thought” (Handbook , ). It is by means of transfiguring (not transcending or elevating) the perceptible or sensible material into a happening or the “event of the Idea” that the poem provides a point of excess that the sensible alone is incapable of achieving (Polemics ): “Through the visibility of artifice, which is also the thinking of poetic thought, the poem surpasses in power what the sensible is capable of itself. The modern poem is the opposite of a mimesis” (Handbook ). The transposition of the poem’s references to sensible objects into thought mechanisms and ideas indicates not only a rejection of mimetic representation, but also, as Rancière has pointed out, an anti-aesthetic 

Far from seeing the “modern poem” as the “sensible form of the Idea,” Badiou postulates the “sensible that presents itself within the poem as the subsisting and powerless nostalgia of the poetic idea” (Handbook ; emphasis added). It is not the sensible presentation of the idea but the disappearance of the sensible into the idea that is actualized in the form of the modern poem.



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

stance grounded in Badiou’s skepticism toward placing poetic material on the side of sensation (Discontents ). Even though Stevens is one of the poets whose work has inspired Badiou’s approach to poetry, the constant dissolution of the sensible into the ideational is not entirely compatible with Stevens’ poetics of thinking. This is because Stevens’ poetry does not always allow its images of sensible objects to vanish into its thought procedures and operations of ideas. In poems like “Man Carrying Thing” and “The Role of the Idea” Stevens lets the sensible material – in the former, the “certain solid,” which consists of the “brune figure,” the “thing” he carries, and the “storm,” in the latter, the “evening” and the “night” – serve as figures for the presentation of a thought process. In other poems, however, objects resist being deployed as operative vehicles for the orientation of thought. “Study of Two Pears” () is a good case in point. It introduces an object-oriented focus on the sensible form and the physical location of two pears that are depicted with a painterly eye. As with the “figure” that is “not / An evading metaphor” in “Add This to Rhetoric” (CPP ), the “two pears” in this poem “resemble nothing” other than themselves: “The pears are not viols, / Nudes or bottles. / They resemble nothing else” (CPP ). The speaker details the shape (“curves,” “round”) and the color (“touched red,” “various yellows / Citrons, oranges and greens”) of the pears suspended in space: “Bulging toward the base / . . . / Tapering toward the top” (CPP –). Even though the poem has often been analyzed in terms of its painterly qualities, and especially with reference to still life, as Eeckhout has also observed, in the third stanza, a possible analogy with painting is implicitly canceled out (Wallace Stevens –). The figuration of the pears is not a two-dimensional visual projection of the object on paper or canvas: “They are not flat surfaces / Having curved outlines” (CPP ). The poem’s rejection of ekphrastic representation entails also an implicit negation of mimesis – the reproduction of the sensible qualities (roundness) of the object (pears) on a flat surface (paper). This negation of mimetic inscription, however, does not suggest – as Badiou would have it – a “disappearance of the sensible” into the idea of the poem (Lecercle ). The title’s “study” of two pears, and the opening phrase of the poem, “Opusculum paedagogum,” imply at first glance that the pears are deployed 



“Wallace Stevens is, in my opinion, the greatest American poet of the twentieth century” (Badiou, Militants ). Badiou’s works that discuss Stevens include “Drawing” and Philosophy for Militants. See also Tom Eyers, “Alain Badiou, Wallace Stevens,” –. See also Costello’s discussion of the poem and still life in Planets on Tables, , –.

. Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics



as pedagogical or instructive tools for the proposition of a thought process or an idea. However, by the end of the poem, this possibility is countered; the pears are explicitly removed from an intending human subject: “The pears are not seen / As the observer wills” (CPP ). Thus, in spite of the earlier reflection on the “way they are modelled,” by the end of the poem, the pears are severed from a thinking agency and from any intentionality. The removal of the object from a reflecting and willing subjectivity is not because the “observer” has failed to grasp the object. Nor is it because the poem has reached a point of dualistic opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. It is, rather, because the poem entails an attempt to present the object independently of a confronting and thinking subject, which is achieved by way of registering a speculative description of the object’s sensible qualities. In other words, instead of staging the vanishing point of the sensible, the poem directs attention to the separate ontological existence of the object apart from thought. It starts out with the task of construing an alternative pedagogy (“Opusculum paedagogum”) in a similar way to “Notes.” But in the end, the syntactic modeling of the sensible object is kept from being transposed into the hypothesized and ideational paradigm of this task. If “Study of Two Pears” marks a degree of resistance to the disappearance of the sensible object into an element of thought, in other cases, things, by maintaining their sensuality and corporeality, bear witness to socially and historically specific conflicts and intricacies. In “A Dish of Peaches in Russia” (), the immediacy of sensual experience that is engendered by seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling a dish of peaches is, in the opening stanzas of the poem, associated with bodily/erotic pleasure and love: “With my whole body I taste these peaches, / I touch them and smell them / . . . / I see them as a lover sees” (CPP ). In a detailed reading of the poem, Costello notes that the search for the subject of this experience, namely, the consistently posed question of “Who speaks?” locates the object in a historically specific setting (Planets ). In the third stanza, the speaker is identified as a dislocated “I” – an “exile” from Russia under Stalin’s rule. As a number of critics have observed, the sensual experience of the peaches provokes a scene of memory by which the dispersion of the exiled self and history fuse into the poem: “They are full of the colors of my village / And of fair weather, summer, dew, peace / . . . / I did not know / That such ferocities could tear / One self from another, as these peaches do” (CPP ). The sensual experience of the object (“peaches”) provides access to a past, demonstrating the effects of historical change and political conflict absorbed by the self. Thus, rather than



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

withdrawing or “subtracting” – to use Badiou’s terminology – from the experience of the sensible object to achieve an experience of thought, by retaining the sensible, the poem enters into a historically particular site of conflict. As such, it displays the influence of historical forces on the exiled subject’s socially bound self-understanding, and thus on his identity. The conceptual frame of inaesthetics, as these readings attempt to show, might strain and crack when set in close dialogue with Stevens’ poetry. But despite this, Badiou’s focus on poetry’s capacity for producing thought that is unconditioned by philosophy, while at the same time not entirely subsumed under the sensible, provides a useful perspective on Stevens’ poetic process. Those of Stevens’ poems, such as “Notes,” that primarily deal with the imaginative production of ideas both present themselves as a form of thought and investigate the conditions for that thought without inviting the support of philosophical discourse. When, in “Notes,” Stevens tells us that “The first idea was not our own. Adam / In Eden was the father of Descartes,” he implicitly positions the thinking of the first idea vis-à-vis the fields of philosophy and religion (CPP ). The notion of a first idea bears upon both philosophical and religious thinking in their respective views of origins and beginnings. The primacy of a projecting mind is what binds, in this context, the Cartesian account of the “cogito” and the Judeo-Christian narrative of dominion that is intrinsic to the story of Adam’s linguistic and symbolic act of naming animals and other natural beings. Thus, the poem, in its approach to the first idea, acknowledges a shared dimension between poetic, philosophical, and theological modes of thought. However, instead of denoting a dependency of poetry on philosophy or religion, or of identifying either field as the legitimate source of the first idea, the speaker goes on to designate a separate site from which the poem and its thinking of this idea are extended. In opposition to the notion of a projecting mind, common to both Cartesian and Adamic narratives, and expressed, above all, in the line, “Eve made air the mirror of herself,” the speaker claims: But the first idea was not to shape the clouds In imitation. The clouds preceded us. There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete. From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

(CPP –)

. Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics



The “muddy centre before we breathed” connotes a place immersed in deep time and prior to human history. Despite its preceding human existence and thought, however, this site (the “articulate” and “physical myth” that “preceded us”) is paradoxically tied to the poetic imagination. The possibility of thinking, envisaging, and elaborating on this “huge abstraction,” as Stevens called it (L ), demands expanding the imaginative and speculative scope of our thinking, which is immanent to the process of poetic creation. Thus, unlike the biblical and Cartesian discourses of beginnings that center upon the mastery of human reason over nature, the poetic notion of the first idea identifies a place of origins that requires an imaginative or fictional intervention in our thinking without granting superiority to the human mind and, especially, as in the case of “Canon Aspirin,” without imposing forms of reason. What is implied, among other things, in the poem’s evocation of the Adamic source of origins and of Descartes – who, as Stevens noted with reference to this specific section of “Notes,” stands as a symbol for “reason” (L ) – is the distinction between, on the one hand, poetic, and, on the other, philosophical and theological configurations of thinking (of the “first idea”). While it may seem excessive to draw a generic distinction between poetic and philosophical modes of thinking by means of a single poem’s reference to a single philosopher, Stevens’ commentary on “Notes” testifies to the urgency of distinguishing poetry from the stage of philosophical thinking, an urgency we can read in the texture of his effort to articulate a supreme fiction. The particular drive toward this distinction in Stevens’ development of “Notes” is expressed in a letter to Henry Church from , which raises the issue of poetic autonomy from philosophy in relation to his supreme fiction: It is only when you try to systematize the poems in the NOTES that you conclude that it is not the statement of a philosophic theory. A philosopher is never at rest unless he is systematizing: constructing a theory. But these are Notes; the nucleus of the matter is contained in the title. It is implicit in the title that there can be such a thing as a supreme fiction. (L ) 

The poem’s confrontational approach to the radically anthropocentric focus of thought upon the world, which, in a letter to Henry Church, and with specific reference to this section of “Notes,” Stevens defined as a form of “pathetic fallacy,” is implicit in the statement: “we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves” (CPP ). The resistance to anthropocentrism takes on a more critical dimension when, in the following section of the poem, the speaker, by introducing the image of the “ephebe” thinking in his room in solitude, illustrates the instrumentalizing and “violent” effects of anthropocentric thought on the body of animals: “These are the heroic children whom time breeds / Against the first idea—to lash the lion, / Caparison elephants, teach bears to juggle” (CPP ).



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

Stevens’ remark on the way the poem operates with a non-philosophical arrangement recalls his response to Robert Pack, which, as we have seen in the beginning of this chapter, draws a contrast between his poetry and forms of systematized thinking expressed by philosophy. Here, Stevens transposes the issue of poetic independence from philosophy into a context that is more specifically concerned with the structure and form of poetic articulation. Reflecting on the question of poetic distinction in the same letter, he sets out to argue that, “the articulations between the poems are not the articulations one would expect to find between paragraphs and chapters of a work of philosophy” (L ). At stake in these emphases upon the specificity of poetic articulation and form of “Notes,” as several commentators have argued, is the fragmentary and at the same time musical connotations attached to the notion of “notes” pressing against the limited horizon of system-building. As Osborne Hardison and Leon Golden put it: “Notes are notes, the reverse of system” (). Yet, if we take a closer look at the formal arrangement of “Notes,” we find a careful and highly elaborated structure comprised of three parts, with syntactically aligned titles made up of aphoristic imperatives: It Must Be Abstract, It Must Change, and It Must Give Pleasure. Each of these parts consists of ten individual poems; each poem contains seven stanzas; and each stanza features three lines. As Harvey Gross has remarked: “The line and stanza patterning of [the poem] would delight a medieval poet’s sense of the power and significance of number” (). Or as Bloom has argued: “Despite Stevens’ assertion that ‘Notes’ is not a system, the form of the poem itself is systematic” (“Critical” ). What does this carefully formed structure tell us, then, about Stevens’ relation to systematization in light of his claims about philosophical and poetic modes of thinking? One way of approaching this question is to recognize that the poem displays not a rejection of organized structure as such, which would determine the relation of Stevens’ supreme fiction to systems only negatively, but a structural arrangement that allows its formal and thematic elements to move into new states. The heterogeneity of the poem’s seemingly confined form, which Marjorie Perloff has pejoratively called a “perfect geometric whole” (), operates on several different levels. The consistent numbering of each canto is tempered by an unnumbered final section preceded by a dash between the stanzas, which Stevens originally intended to set apart from 

See for instance Miller’s “Wallace Stevens’ Poetry of Being,” , Krzysztof Ziarek’s Inflected Language, , William W. Bevis’ Mind of Winter, , and Blessing’s Wallace Stevens, .

. Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics



the rest of the sequence of thirty numbered poems. The rhythmical pattern of blank verse, as mentioned earlier, is loosened by transitory shifts into other cadences. Stevens’ deployment of figures such as “major man” and “Canon Aspirin,” the narrative of the “mystic marriage in Catawba” and the narrative of “Nanzia Nunzio” gesture toward the epic (CPP , ). The form of address and contemplative elements of the poem by contrast correspond rather to its lyrical mode and design. Throughout the poem, elements of epic and lyric form alternate, and shade into one another. The flexibility at work in the poem’s formal instabilities and prosodic extensions, while highly concealed to the novice reader, allows for the channeling of new forms, extending “Notes” well beyond a meta-communicative affirmation of one of its imperatives, that is: “It Must Change.” As such, they complicate the tendency “toward” the totality and finality of a closed system at the level of self-organization and form, which, in his letter to Church, Stevens links to the compositional logic of philosophical thinking. Importantly, and in contrast to this claim, the unnumbered, final section of the poem might be seen as serving as an epilogue or coda to mark a more settled closure rather than eschewing a systematic finality. But the poem’s final section takes on board more new questions and antinomies than it resolves. Moving unexpectedly into the context of war (largely unacknowledged elsewhere in the poem), the coda addresses a soldier, juxtaposing the poet’s contemplative war “between thought and day and night” with the actual war: “Soldier, there is a war between the mind / And sky, between thought and day and night / . . . / It is a war that never ends. // Yet it depends on yours” (CPP –). Stevens is careful, here, in not pressing this “parallel” too closely; the respective “wars” are seen as “Two parallels that meet if only in // The meeting of their shadows” (CPP ). The poet’s never-ending war within, an outcome of which is the poem itself, is designed to display a solacing or elegiac role in relation to the soldier’s war without: “The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines / . . . / the bread of faithful speech” (CPP ). In short, while identifying war as the historical precedent and actual condition of its construction, the coda postulates the interminability of the poem’s contemplative process (“that never ends”) instead of reinforcing a conclusive ending to it.   

For detailed readings of the metrical irregularities of the poem, see Gross (–). The poem exhibits a shifting form of address; its addressees include Henry Church (prologue), the “ephebe,” the “prodigious scholar,” the “soldier,” and a “Monsieur and comrade” in the last section. As in “Asides on the Oboe” and (as we shall see) “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas,” Stevens here grants a consoling and elegiac role to poetry in a time of war.



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

Stevens’ use of a coda, in this regard, is reminiscent of Eliot’s in “Four Quartets” whose concluding quartet, “Little Gidding,” was published in the same year as “Notes” (). Filtered through the form of musical arrangement, Eliot’s poem, in its own ending, looks forward to a new beginning rather than to a settled closure: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (CP ). It is perhaps not surprising to find in both poets’ sense of endings a desire for inventing new beginnings as a form of political longing, considering the war-torn world surrounding them. But in the case of “Notes,” the coda of the finely formed triad extending from internal to external “war” also has implications that shed further light on the relation between poetic thinking and system-building, which Stevens identifies as a distinctive form of philosophical discourse. Acknowledging and incorporating what was largely excluded from the body of the poem (the context of war), the coda expresses an afterthought that interrogates the actual conditions of the poem’s production and social function. It is, in this sense, not simply a follow-up to the preceding sections of the poem, but a departure or extension, both thematically and formally, from the seemingly closed frame, or what Bloom has called the “system” of “Notes” (“Critical” ). With its argument for the counter-finality of the poem’s making and thinking, the coda as an afterthought suspends the closure of the poem as a unitary system. This state of what we may call afterness or lateness (of thought) is indeed thematized as an integral aspect of poetic thinking in the middle of the poem. In the first and fourth cantos of It Must Give Pleasure, the line of thinking after or later is invoked in terms of a “later reason” and characterized as the nexus of the poem’s reflective scope: “We reason of these things with a later reason” (CPP –). “To speak of a later reason,” as Maria Santos has recently pointed out, is to “postulate a broken, or interrupted, reason: a later presupposes an earlier reason” (). The notion of a later reason, which speaks to the temporal structure of thinking, denotes both a 

Indeed, the idea of “beginning” anew and “not resuming” is linked directly, in the second canto of It Must Change, to the backdrop of war via imagery in which “the banners of the nation flutter, burst / On the flag-poles in a red-blue dazzle, whack / At the halyards” (CPP ). Ideas of openendedness, as these instances indicate, do not constitute merely the formal traits of the poem. The function of anti-closure is closely linked to the social dimensions of the text, which, in this case, is predicated upon war. For a general discussion that links poetic anti-closure to war, see Kate McLoughlin’s Authoring War where she claims that “Structure, organization, design, conclusiveness, finality, ‘clinch’: the nature of wartime is to withhold any such indicators of ending” ().

. Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics



sense of recentness or newness and a sense of belatedness, which resists the fulfillment and the pull toward predetermined expectations of arrival and completion. In other words, a later reason represents a mode of thinking that creates a rupture in the progressive operation and closure of a system. It is this interruption in systematic thinking and reason that makes up an additional aspect of the inaesthetic dimensions of the poem. In “Notes,” the notion of a later reason is placed in a critical relation to regulative functions of reason rather than in diametric opposition to it. The resistance that Stevens’ poetry mounts to philosophy, is perhaps nowhere more explicitly stated than in his  poem “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” (CPP ). The title of this poem reflects Stevens’ interest in expressing the artistic and, more specifically, poetic claim to “ideas” on a primary level. By changing the common title of the “academy of fine arts” to the “academy of fine ideas,” Stevens ironically overturns the compartmentalized demarcations between the realms of art and thinking. Written at a time when Stevens engaged himself in the cause of establishing an independent academic chair for the study of “poetic thought and of the theory of poetry” at Harvard, his choice of title implies a way of imagining poetry’s autonomy from philosophy on an institutional level (L ). The idea of the distinctiveness of the poetic process of thinking from that of philosophy is, however, more radically enunciated, as we shall see, in the poem’s identification of philosophy and systematic thinking with the deadening logic of war. Previous readings of “Extracts” have rightly focused on the poem’s thematic engagement with war (Longenbach –; Brogan –), the idea of abstraction (Ragg ), the danger of aestheticism (Mao ; Longenbach –), and the metaphoricity of language, which undercuts the philosophical impulse to reach a form of stripped-off reality (Jenkins, Rage for Order –). Jenkins claims that “reality” in the poem is presented as accessible only as an already mediated entity that cannot be grasped outside of language (–). Brogan and Longenbach, on the other hand, examine the poem’s engagement with World War II. Focusing on Stevens’ treatment of the good and evil forms of death, Longenbach explores the opposition between the natural “good death” and the unnatural “evil death” of the masses at war that is accentuated in the second canto of the poem (–). Following Longenbach’s contextualized reading, Brogan



See also Goldstone, .



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

stresses Stevens’ formation of an inner mode of resistance – a “violence within” that withstands the “violence without” ensuing from the accumulated pressures of war (–). A crucial aspect, which is intimately linked to the poem’s sustaining preoccupation with the theme of war and the idea of abstraction, but remains unexplored in these earlier readings, lies in the text’s implicit confrontation with the imposition of a plane of order upon thought. This confrontation finds expression in the form of a close affinity between “systematic thinking” and “death”: Of systematic thinking . . . Ercole, O, skin and spine and hair of you, Ercole, Of what do you lie thinking in your cavern? To think it is to think the way to death . . .

(CPP )

While the use of “it” in the final line of this stanza hovers over multiple possible referents, one plausible interpretation might be that “it” refers to the “systematic thinking” which is carefully left hanging at the beginning. As he does with the final lines, Stevens leaves the statement unfinished in the opening lines of the stanza, while at the same time the inscription of the double ellipses invites the reader to connect the first and the last lines. If this possible reference of “it” is granted as valid, then, “systematic thinking,” brought into the context of war, is identified with a catastrophic dead end: “to think it is to think the way to death” (CPP ; emphasis added). Here, the “evil death,” which the speaker in part II compares with the death of thousands in war, takes the form of a more generalized and abstract sense of death that is correlated with the totalizing systematization of thought (CPP ). With this form of abstraction (death in its relation to thinking) the poem presents an engagement not only with the material destructiveness of war, which Brogan and Longenbach interrogate, but also with the mode of thinking that lies behind it. The link between “death” and philosophy is implied figuratively in part V where “philosophic assassins” turn against and shoot each other: In the end, these philosophic assassins pull Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains. The mass of meaning becomes composed again. He that remains plays on an instrument A good agreement between himself and night, A chord between the mass of men and himself,

. Stevens’ Wartime Inaesthetics



Far, far beyond the putative canzones Of love and summer. The assassin sings In chaos and his song is a consolation. It is the music of the mass of meaning.

(CPP )

The philosophic assassins of “Extracts” can be seen as modifications of the stone-masked “assassins” from “Life on a Battleship,” a poem that was discussed earlier in this chapter. In that poem, the “assassins” ostensibly resemble soldiers, firing “ten thousand guns / In mid-Atlantic,” under the command of the “Captain” of “The Masculine” (the ship), who, as pointed out earlier, is described as a descendent of “Descartes” – a philosopher who substantially prioritized reason and systematization before anything else (CPP ). In both poems, then, Stevens construes an affinity between war, on the one hand, and a specific type of philosophical thinking that is nourished by the primacy of reason, and by the impulses of totalization and systematization, on the other. What is conspicuous in “Extracts,” however, is the incorporation of a poet figure into the battle scene. The only remaining figure after the “philosophic assassins pull / Revolvers and shoot each other” corresponds to the image of a poet. This becomes palpable through certain references to the “imagination,” the “instrument” – recalling the image of the poet in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” – and to “putative canzones,” since canzone, apart from meaning literally song or chant in Italian, also refers to a particular style of lyric poetry. To be sure, the remaining poetic assassin is described as “Far, far beyond the putative canzones / Of love and summer” (CPP ). Situated in a postapocalyptic scene of war and death, the poet’s song must instead be “a consolation,” not a song of celebration “of love and summer.” Contrary to this reading, Longenbach claims that the remaining assassin of the poem is the one who sings “his systematic thinking” (). Yet, the remaining poet-assassin’s “song” is described as a song of “consolation” rather than as a product of “systematic thinking” that is identified as “the way to death”: “The assassin sings // In chaos and his song is a consolation” (CPP ). Just as the putative canzones cannot 

Stevens returns to the figure of the “assassin” in his long  poem “Esthétique du Mal,” where the “assassin’s scene” presents a destructive systematic totality that is formed out of a contemplative relation to reality: “a reality / Of the longest meditation, the maximum” (CPP ). The figure of the “assassin” is then seen from the perspective of the Russian revolutionary writer “Victor Serge,” who associates it with the “logical lunatic” (CPP ). Transposed to a politicized context, the assassin’s “intellectual structure” is considered to be out of touch with the “physical world” (CPP ).



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

be the mode in which the poet sings in the middle of war, systematic thinking, by its pointing “the way to death,” cannot suffice for “that other one” who “wanted to think his way to life” (CPP ). Ultimately, in “Extracts,” Stevens stages a negotiation of the consoling role of poetry in a time of war, and he does so in a line of movements that runs from an examination of the death of masses in war (“evil death” / “good death”) to a more abstract sense of death that is coupled with systematic thinking and philosophy (“philosophic assassins”). Ultimately, the poem returns to the context of the actual war – the final section of the poem opens with a direct reference to war: “We live in a camp . . . Stanzas of final peace / Lie in the heart’s residuum” (CPP ). In this sequence of movements, the poem, while pointing to the mode of thinking that is complicit with the logic of war, renders both the social and philosophical dimensions of imposing and systematic configurations of thinking as cataclysmic and destructive.

. Logical Positivism and Resistance to Philosophy If thinking, and the activity of the mind, acquired a central place in Stevens’ poetry right from the start, a remarkable instance of which is “The Snow Man,” why in this particular period (the late s and early s) does his poetry and prose display a more immediate concern with the limits of reason and the autonomy of poetic thought from systematized and rationalized forms of thinking, which he associates with philosophy? If claims to aesthetic autonomy, as I have been arguing throughout this book, are contextually driven, then what are the most relevant historical and cultural forces that feed into the idea of autonomy from philosophical thinking in the case of Stevens? Is Stevens’ focus on the distinctiveness of poetic thinking a belated response to the rationalization of reason, systematization of thought, and goal-oriented progress that underpin the philosophies of the Enlightenment? And if so, are we to regard his conception of poetic thinking as part of the romantic tradition of resistance to the primacy of reason that widely informed the sensibilities of prominent romantic poets and writers (Harter )? One might find, without difficulty, the voice of a late romantic in Stevens’ exploration of the relationship between thinking in its philosophical and poetic modes. This is precisely what Bloom does in his “To Reason with a Later Reason: Romanticism and the Rational.” By identifying the later reason of “Notes” with the poetic imagination, he emphasizes Stevens’ revisionary attitude toward his romantic predecessors who equally

. Logical Positivism



worked against the rationalized and instrumental modes of reason by demonstrating the negative capability of poetry for “thought that protects us from thought” (–). The context of romanticism, given Stevens’ long-term interest in the notion of the romantic, might seem at first like a patent point of reference for examining the strain between poetic and philosophical approaches to thinking in his poetry from this period. However, there is good reason to look for a different context that may be of greater relevance here. First of all, it can be argued that in the s Stevens had moved away from his earlier interest in inventing a “new romanticism.” While that focus had played a pivotal part in the negotiation and renewal of his aesthetics in relation to the political and cultural climate of the s, as discussed in Chapter , it was no longer a dominant concern at this point. Already in , Stevens finds a “too lightly” achieved fulfillment in the “ordinary, everyday search of the romantic mind” (L ). A few years later in , in a comment on the romantic painter Delacroix, he claims that “what sustains the prestige of Delacroix is the fact that in his work there was something that was not at all romantic: an exacting intelligence that was able to formulate and study its ideas” (L ). Similarly, in contrast to his earlier endorsement of it, the “romantic,” in “Effects of Analogy” (), is seen as “old hat” and thus as “intolerable” (CPP ). Soon afterwards, in “Imagination as Value” (), in the context of a discussion regarding the philosophical movement of logical positivism, the “romantic” is considered to be outmoded. In this essay, it is more definitely rejected and replaced by the notion of the metaphysical: “the imagination as metaphysics will survive logical positivism unscathed” but “it is not worthy to survive if it is to be identified with the romantic . . . one wants to elicit a sense of the imagination as something vital. In that sense one must deal with it as metaphysics” (CPP –). Stevens’ assertion of the “imagination as metaphysics” is telling not only because it demonstrates his changed understanding of the aesthetic relevancy of the romantic, but also because it reveals a more immediate context than romanticism for his perspective on the relationship between the reflective scopes of poetry and philosophy: the emergence of logical positivism as a major field of analytic philosophy in the United States in the late s and s. Famous for its rejection of metaphysics and embrace of reason, logical positivism, which “intertwin[ed] and intensif 

For a discussion of Stevens’ shifting attitudes toward the romantic, see Ragg, – and Joseph Carroll, “Stevens and Romanticism,” –.



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

[ied] the philosophical strands that make up ‘the Enlightenment project,’” literally emigrated to American soil when the Vienna and Berlin Circle philosophers left Europe because of the approaching threat of World War II (LeMahieu ). As Michel LeMahieu explains: “the emigration of philosophers and mathematicians from the Vienna Circle and the allied Berlin Circle to American universities in the decade following  laid the groundwork for positivism to reach its apex in the two decades after ” (). As early as , Albert E. Blumberg and Herbert Feigl had coined the term “logical positivism” in an attempt to introduce the movement to the American intelligentsia (Cirera ). In the American Association of Philosophy meetings in the early s, the approach of logical positivism was seen as a success (N. Gross ). Its cultural reception on the literary scene, however, came only a little later. One of these receptive instances is an article, “What Is Logical Empiricism?” published in the Partisan Review in  – of which Stevens was a regular reader at the time. The author of the essay, William Gruen, underlined the advantages of logical positivism’s scientific, “anti-metaphysical” and “empirical” methodologies for the fields of “esthetics, ethics, and political thought” (qtd. in Reisch, Cold War ). But the cultural reception of logical positivist or logical empiricist philosophy in the United States is more complex than this single welcoming stance, which was shared by a number of New York School philosophers and Partisan Review critics such as Philip Rahv, Sidney Hook, and Meyer Schapiro (Reisch, Cold War –). Both from the right and from the left of the cultural spectrum, critical voices were also raised against logical positivism’s rejection of metaphysics and its insistence upon the absolute primacy of rationality, reason, and logic in theoretical thinking, and organization of knowledge ().







Although logical positivism was initially a reaction against rationality (what seemed rational but was not) and was initially critical of Enlightenment philosophers such as Descartes for their metaphysical leanings, the movement’s philosophers still drew on some of the fundamental ideals such as the primacy of reason, logic, systematization, and rationality that were part of the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment (Hinman ). “Vienna circle émigrés included Rudolf Carnap to Chicago, Herbert Feigl to Iowa and then Minnesota, and Kurt Gödel to Princeton; from the Berlin Circle, Carl Hempel to CCNY and then Yale, and Hans Reichenbach to UCLA” (LeMahieu ). While Reisch discusses the critical reception of positivism from the left, the right-leaning attacks were formulated, as we shall see a little further in this chapter, by the founding figures of New Criticism like Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom.

. Logical Positivism



From his letters and essays we know that Stevens was aware of the growing cultural impact of logical positivism in the s. The clearest evidence of this awareness is found in “Imagination as Value” () where he critically examines passages from the logical positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic () and refers to one of the opponents of the logical positivist movement, Ernst Cassirer, in the context of a discussion regarding the relationship between “imagination as metaphysics” and “reality”: “When we consider the imagination as metaphysics, we realize that it is in the nature of the imagination itself that we should be quick to accept it as the only clue to reality. But alas! we are no sooner so disposed than we encounter the logical positivists” (CPP –). Although Stevens’ explicit objection to logical positivism, as evidenced by “Imagination as Value,” comes rather late in the s, he had at least second-hand knowledge of the movement already in the early s from reading and responding to Allen Tate’s Reason in Madness (), which was replete with criticisms of logical positivism’s view of literature and poetry. Moreover, as a  letter to his friend Henry Church demonstrates, Stevens came across some of the seminal prose pieces that emerged out of a “collective counterattack” against the conservative hostility toward logical positivist thought, such as Sidney Hook’s essay “The New Failure of Nerve” that appeared in the January-February  issue of the Partisan Review (L ; Reisch, Cold War ). The importance of this context for a discussion of Stevens’ relation to philosophy lies mainly in the “dismissive attitude” of logical positivism toward poetic thinking and production of ideas (LeMahieu ). Although it met with forceful critique, in gradually achieving an influential cultural position from the late s onwards, the logical positivist school and its commitment to scientific precision, logic, and rationality posed an implicit 



References that indicate Stevens’ awareness of logical positivism in his letters, Commonplace Book, and essays include Ransom’s “Artists, Soldiers, Positivists” (L ), which ends with the claim that “the value of the aesthetic increment, so promiscuous in its naturism, is entirely illusory according to the Positivists” (), Stevens’ comment on Carnap and poetry (L ), his discussion of “logical” and “empirical” forms of knowledge and of Bertrand Russell in “The Figure of the Youth” (CPP ), and the note on C. E. M. Joad’s “Logical Positivism, Fascism, and Value” in his Commonplace Book (). See also Stanley Cavell, “Reflections,” , Goldstone, , LeMahieu, Fictions of Fact and Value, –, Tompsett, , and Eeckhout, Wallace Stevens, –. As Reisch explains, Hook’s essay was the first of a series that was originally designed to formulate a secularist response among the New York philosophers to the Neo-Thomist attack against positivism, and the “assault against scientific method” in philosophy. See Reisch, “From ‘the life of the Present,’” –. On a more general level Hook’s essay was a thoroughgoing critique of what he defined as the “refurbishing of theological and metaphysical dogmas” and “the belief that myth and mysteries are modes of knowledge” ().



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

challenge to the theoretical competence and conceptual validity of poetry (Adams ; Cavell ). The categorical opposition between poetry’s “pseudo-statements” devoid of “theoretical sense” and the meaningful statements of philosophy and science was one of the powerful manifestations of this skeptical attitude (Carnap qtd. in Adams –). The logical positivist insistence upon linguistic precision and validity led to a categorization of poetry as a cultural field whose sole purpose is to express feelings and sensations rather than to convey genuine thought and knowledge (Adams ). Indicative of this entrapment of poetry into the realm of feelings and sensations were also the positivist “separation of reason from imagination,” facts from values and fiction, and the effort to demarcate a discursive boundary between the fields of “art” and “theory” (LeMahieu ; Adams ). It is thus perhaps not accidental that in the early s Stevens frequently underlined the importance of the study of poetic theory to the extent of making a clear effort – as mentioned earlier – toward establishing an independent chair of poetry at Harvard (L ). Given Stevens’ apparent preoccupation with the idea of autonomy from philosophy, the period’s philosophical attitudes toward poetry might provide a key to the inaesthetic dimensions of his poetry. To this end, in the following, I will briefly trace the cultural impact of the logical positivist school on the literary scene of the period. Logical positivism’s view of poetry as an invalid ground for the objective verification of statements and for producing knowledge partially prompted a new phase in the so-called ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy for a number of modernist poets and critics, and a broader consideration of the two in the case of Stevens. In his attempt to trace the historical phases of the rivalry between poetry and philosophy, Hazard Adams explains how logical positivism in the s came to engender a challenge to the idea of poetry as a legitimate form of thinking and knowledge (). Extending from the late s into the s, this challenge was taken up by a variety of literary critics and poets, ranging from Kenneth Burke and Allen Tate to prominent 



Eight years later, Stevens’ interest in the academic study of poetic theory had only increased: “there is nothing that I desire more intensely than to make a contribution to the theory of poetry . . . If there is a great non-existent or inaccessible subject which badly needs attention, it is the theory of poetry” (L ). Even though the legacy of positivist thought in western philosophy extends back to the nineteenth century, its twentieth-century offspring in the United States during World War II reinscribed, as LeMahieu demonstrates, an enduring influence on literature and literary criticism that extended well into postwar American fiction and poetry.

. Logical Positivism



modernists such as Eliot and Williams. In one of “The Moot” meetings that took place in , for example, Eliot described the “motive behind logical positivism” as a “craving for dogmatism” while asking “what form the opposition [to it] would take” (qtd. in Clements ). Tate’s collection of essays, Reason in Madness () – which Stevens read and commented on only a few months before he embarked on writing “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” – was a straightforward attack on what he called the “complete triumph” and the “intellectual hypocrisy of the positivistic movement” (, ). In associating the movement with what it initially rejected (religious dogmatism), Tate complained about the “failure of the modern mind to understand poetry on the assumptions underlying the demi-religion of positivism” (). It was partially based on a sense of shared disapproval of the logical positivist approach to art that, in , John Crowe Ransom proposed to Tate the compilation of an Encyclopedia of Unified Art and Religion as a response to the popular positivist International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (Quinlan ). But not unlike other New Critics like R. P. Blackmur and I. A. Richards – whom Stevens read extensively in the early s – both Tate and Ransom, despite their defense of poetry against logical positivism, sought to employ a positivistic discourse to establish a scientific ground for literary criticism (Quinlan –; Katz ). Critical reactions to logical positivism, however, were not limited to the conservative founders of New Criticism like Ransom and Tate, but extended to radical leftists such as the New Masses editor Max Eastman, and later to the pluralist philosopher Horace Kallen (Reisch, Cold War ). Another influential literary critic of the time who did not belong to the New Critical circles, and who often opposed its members, was Kenneth Burke. His response to logical positivism entailed a focus on the performative aspects of poetic language as “symbolic action,” rather than building his case upon a defense of poetry as a form of “knowledge” (Wess , –).







Here it is worth noting that one of the early contributors to The Encyclopedia of Unified Science was the prominent American pragmatist John Dewey. As R. W. Sleeper has elucidated, Dewey’s contribution to the encyclopedia, Theory of Valuation (), marks a point of historical convergence, though short-lived, between the projects of pragmatism and logical positivism in the United States (). See Tate’s Reason in Madness, –. For a detailed discussion of Ransom’s critique of positivism and his defense of literature as a form of knowledge, see Mark Jancovich’s The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism, –. Especially logical positivism’s rejection of metaphysics prompted opposing positions within Marxist circles. For a brief discussion, see Reisch, Cold War, .



Autonomy and Philosophy: “Reason’s Constant Ruin”

Meanwhile, for a poet like Williams, whose conception of poetry had long been centered on the aesthetic “embodiment of knowledge,” logical positivist claims that poetry “does not contain knowledge” and has “no theoretical sense” (Adams ) remained deeply troublesome. Indeed, in Paterson (–) Williams’ materialist conception of the mind as an incomprehensible object suggests an “anti-philosophical” attitude toward “positivist comprehension,” which clashes with the “formal pragmatism and logical positivism inborn to so many of Williams’ aphoristic mutterings” (Steven –). Williams’ strategic attention to the simultaneous vagueness and accuracy (“vague accuracies”) of language and reality leads to a confrontation with philosophical certainty in his poem: “Pithy philosophies of / daily exits and entrances, with books / propping up one end of the shaky table— / The vague accuracies of events dancing two / and two with language which they / forever surpass—” (Paterson ). These direct and indirect responses indicate the importance of logical positivism on the American philosophical scene and in cultural discourses. They also show how critics and poets engaged in staking out their literary positions vis-à-vis logical positivism but to quite different effects. To return to Stevens, his emphasis on the imagination’s capacity to offer contingent and open-ended processes of thought, which widen the scope of reason and rationality, can be read in light of this shift in the historical development of philosophical thought. While Stevens’ persistent attention to what eludes logical comprehension (especially in “Notes”) can be said to be a characteristic of any (modernist) literary text, such attention, when contextualized, implies more than just a general approval of the hermeneutic complexities created by poetic expression. By placing the unintelligible and the inexplicable at the heart of his aesthetic, Stevens’ poetic thinking implicitly counters the logical positivist idea that what lies beyond the logical standards of judgment and verifiability cannot be said, and thus must be passed over in silence (Wess ). In the first part of this chapter, we have already seen how Stevens, in “Notes,” brings notions of the unintelligible and the unsayable (that which “must bear no name” or cannot be “named”) to the forefront of his   

See especially Williams’ collected prose pieces entitled The Embodiment of Knowledge. For a discussion of Williams and positivist rationalism, see also Christina Oltmann’s “PoeticsPoems-Politics,” –. By falsely radicalizing Wittgenstein’s distinction between the sayable and the unsayable (what can and cannot be said), logical positivists aspired to expel what does not meet the standards of rational assessment. For a detailed discussion of the divergences between Wittgenstein and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, see LeMahieu, –.

. Logical Positivism



conception of poetic thinking of the first idea. In a later poem, “Two Versions of the Same Poem: That Which Cannot Be Fixed” (), the unsayable or the unnameable is metaphorically invoked once again in the form of the “thrice-triple-syllabled” and the “never-named” that are engendered by a “self” whose “body” is “swollen // With thought, through which it cannot see” (CPP ). Toward the end of the poem’s first section, the self’s awareness of “difficult images of possible shapes, / That cannot now be fixed” is defined as a state of “reason’s constant ruin” (CPP –). By persistently evoking aspects of thought that escape the reach of intelligibility and expressibility, Stevens’ poetics not only undertakes an exploration of the limits of meaning and language, but also refuses to comply with the philosophical demands and restrictions then placed upon what constitutes “valid” thinking. In this sense, Stevens’ poetry enables a differentiated space for the production of ideas, and forms an independent relation to the act of thinking that resists the pressures and limitations posed by logical positivism. Certainly, Stevens’ exploration of the relationship between philosophy and poetry, as it may be traced in his poetry from this period, cannot be reduced to a reaction to logical positivism. Yet I have tried to show that at least one main source for his increased attention to the resistance of poetic thinking to philosophy can be found in the new logical and analytic turn the latter took with the emerging influence of positivism in the late s and early s. European logical positivism met with an eager reception in the United States, and was rapidly translated into native forms of philosophical discourse, which concurred with the founders on the necessity of accuracy and analytic structuration of thought, employing a view of poetry as “dispensable for serious thought” (Adams ). On the basis of such contextual information, the importation of logical positivism might be seen as a plausible source for understanding Stevens’ enunciation of the autonomy of poetic thinking from philosophy in his poetry from this period. At a time when American philosophy took a new route that polemically cast doubt upon poetry’s capability for thought, Stevens chose to orchestrate that capability while strategically accentuating the independence of poetic thinking from the pressures and impositions of philosophical discourse. Stevens’ self-conscious inaesthetics, in this sense, is best understood if we take the cultural rise of logical positivism into account.

Coda

Autonomy’s “New Beginnings” and Spatiotemporal Expansions In , near the end of his career, Stevens delivered an acceptance speech upon receiving the gold medal from The Poetry Society of America. In it, he asked: “What is the apt locale of the genius of poetry?” (CPP ). Elaborating on this question, which conjointly concerned the “position of poetry in the world today” and its “social impact,” he argued that poetry stands in a fluctuating and double-edged position: “In one direction it moves toward the ultimate things of pure poetry; in the other it speaks to great numbers of people of themselves, making extraordinary texts and memorable music out of what they feel and know” (CPP ). “In both cases,” he concluded, poetry constitutes its “own locale,” as a self-directing and separate entity that is based in a “moving solitude” and in “secrecy” (CPP –). In these few remarks, Stevens weaves together two seemingly disjunctive attitudes toward the place and the function of poetry, by describing it both as a distinct realm of activity severed from the world, and as a socially engaged practice reaching out to embrace common experience and existence. His speech articulates a twofold dynamic concerning the role and positioning of poetry in collective life, one that, as I have argued throughout this study, had preoccupied him and remained central to his poetics at least since the mid-s. It has been one of the primary tasks of this book to pursue the evolving tension between these mutually constitutive and competing positions of aesthetic separation and social engagement as it manifests itself in Stevens’ writing from the s to the s. In the preceding pages, I have suggested that underlying the poet’s simultaneous commitment to the social relevance and solitude of poetry is a particular version of modernist autonomy that is relationally framed and historically embedded. Contrary to commonly received accounts of modernist autonomy as a false attestation of art’s freedom from worldly concerns, in Stevens’ poetry, 

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

autonomy is expressed in ways that carry distinct contextual and historical implications. Rather than a means of excluding history and literarypolitical exigencies, the version of autonomy envisioned in Stevens’ work gives rise to new nodes of interaction between his poetry and its material conditions during the Depression and the build-up to World War II. The purview of autonomy in Stevens’ case, in this sense, should best be regarded not as an impediment, but as a productive condition that accompanied his attempt, in the s, to turn his aesthetic process into a more engaging and historically conscious practice. Approaching Stevens’ poetry from this understanding, throughout this book, I have sought to draw out the effective role the question of autonomy plays on a number of distinct and complementary levels, devoting attention to both the thematic and formal elements of the poet’s work. These include Stevens’ exploration of the “intimacy” and “distance” between social and poetic domains, his architectural configurations of poetic function, his imaginative figurations of collective agency, and the much-contested issue of his poetry’s relation to philosophical thinking. I start out by arguing that even in poems that appear to be about the autonomy of the individual self, Stevens’ use of lyric address, intertextual dialogue, and rhetorical strategies reveal broader historical currents with which his poetics of autonomy reckons. By implementing a spatial dialectic between social intimacy and aesthetic distance, Stevens’ lyric fashions a specific mode of autonomy that responds to a historical crisis of verse brought on by the Depression. I suggest that the poetic trope of autonomy not only evolves in a critical dialogue with the period’s prominent disputes over the social immediacy or the separate status of art. It also enables Stevens to model alternative forms of lyric subjectivity that exceed the confines of a private and self-meditative poetic horizon. The spatial sensibility that characterizes Stevens’ poetry and his conception of autonomy can be traced, as I have shown, by focusing attention on his poetic construction of architectural archetypes and built environments. Stevens engages in issues of poetry’s autonomy, its social function, and cultural status, by means of making up places for poetry. While architectural tropes form a crucial part of Stevens’ work from his first collection, Harmonium (), to the last, The Rock (), the spatial imagery in his poetry of the s is given particular depth and resonance. Stevens’ buildings incorporate the desire to demarcate an independent aesthetic territory that seeks to condition how poetry passes into contact with social reality. The desire to stake out a separate aesthetic terrain involves a quest for new forms of social and historical engagement that stand outside

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existing models of literature’s collective and political import in the s. These forms of engagement, as discussed in Chapter , include Stevens’ dealings with the cultural reception of the literary past, the poet’s relation to urban space, and poetry’s communal appeal. The significance of the question of autonomy for Stevens’ poetic formations of collectivity is intensely at work in one of his most complex and politically resonant long poems, “Owl’s Clover” (). I read the poem’s collective affiliations in light of the influential efforts of the period’s radical writers and poets to address, and to represent, the working-class masses and the people. Stevens’ poetry, I argue, not only questions the ways in which collectivity is poetically and rhetorically produced, but also interrogates the political and aesthetic limits and possibilities encoded in separation and autonomy for constructing a globally inclusive model of communal presence. My readings of Stevens’ poetry disclose how multiple historical and extra-aesthetic currents underlie and motivate his assertion of aesthetic autonomy. Investigating this aspect of his poetics allows us to recognize that, in Stevens’ poetry of this period, artistic and social concerns do not constitute mutually exclusive poles or antagonistic principles, but intrinsically linked and coexisting positions. His version of autonomy is charged with both aesthetic and political implications, which I explore by taking Rancière as a theoretical interlocutor. Placing Rancière in conversation with Stevens illuminates two main points. First, it helps identify and explore Stevens’ contradictory affirmations of the collective relevance and solitude of poetry, not as a confused tangle of opposing elements, but as a paradoxical knot that binds aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy. What aesthetic autonomy entails both for Stevens and for Rancière is the possibility of framing a separate sense of space in which new forms of sensory relations, and new forms of poetic and collective subjectivization take shape. The aesthetic production of these forms signals at the same time a commitment to the social fabric of collective life that testifies to its heteronomous foundations. It is out of this mutual interplay of autonomous and heteronomous elements that the political and social dynamics of Stevens’ aesthetics come into view. Second, Rancière’s approach to the politics of aesthetics affords a perspective that is not primarily focused on the politics of the individual poet – not Stevens’ own personal political stance – but explores how the poems themselves produce positions and frame situations by which they both depart from and at the same time speak to their cultural-political situation. But while Rancière’s approach to aesthetics certainly helps us illuminate crucial traits of Stevens’ poetry, his

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

strict emphasis on “aesthetic experience,” as I suggest, presents a limited, and less variegated scope of autonomy compared to that of Stevens’ poetry. Furthermore, his comprehensive periodization of the aesthetic regime – stretching from the nineteenth century to the present – tends to undermine specific cultural-historical shifts, such as the one that marked the s, a period during which, as I argue, Stevens’ poetics of autonomy evolved. Chapter  takes a different tack than the preceding ones to reevaluate the reflective dimension of Stevens’ poetics and its relation to philosophical thinking in dialogue with Badiou. Badiou’s inaesthetics offers a different configuration of art’s autonomy than Rancière’s, regarding, particularly, the relationship between poetic and philosophical thought. For Badiou, rather than representing or imitating what is empirically perceived or experienced, art engages in a truth process of its own that is defined as both “singular” and “immanent” (Handbook –). In seeking to disrupt the codependency between art and philosophy, his thought establishes the necessity of acknowledging the autonomy of the work of art and the procedures of thought produced by it. I take his approach to poetic thinking as a useful point of departure to step out of the tendency of trying to translate the meditative and reflective dimensions of Stevens’ poetics into philosophical discourse, a practice widely shared among the philosophically oriented critics of Stevens. Thus, the point of bringing Badiou’s framework into the discussion of Stevens’ poetry is not to set up a parallel between his philosophical model, on the one hand, and Stevens’ poetic thinking on the other. Instead, the notion of inaesthetics becomes the enabling occasion for a focus on the divergences, rather than the affinities, between Stevens and philosophy, and for a move to a historically contextualized understanding of his poetry’s resistance to the philosophical school of logical positivism. In pursuing these lines of inquiry, my main point has been to demonstrate that in Stevens’ poetry the idea of autonomy does not simply assert a mode of aesthetic enclosure, but serves to model and develop the forms in which the relationship between the poetry and the wider sociohistorical and cultural matrix is expressed. More broadly, I have sought to underline these points of connection in order to expand the theoretical scope of our thinking about modernist forms of autonomy beyond conceiving it as an illusory retreat from societal constraints or as an essential proof of literary distinction and value. Stevens’ poetics invites a more subtle approach to 

I discuss the divergences between Badiou and Rancière on the topic of autonomy in Chapter .

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the problem of autonomy, one that, instead of eliciting established designations of the term, investigates how modernist texts themselves pursue, question, and negotiate autonomy in relation to the specific cultural conditions that gave rise to them. Analyzing the relational dynamics of Stevensian autonomy, in this sense, points to the necessity of rethinking autonomy’s meanings and implications, more generally, with respect to modernist texts, and, more specifically, in the context of the s. Finally, I would like to raise a number of questions regarding what the question of autonomy might offer for further studies of Stevens’ poetic practice, and for the field of new modernist critical practices more broadly. How does the question of autonomy relate to the current situation of reading Stevens’ work within what is often referred to as the expanded field of new modernist studies? What are the broader critical implications of revisiting autonomy for contemporary discussions of literary and artistic modernism(s)? Short of giving definite or full-scale answers to these questions at this time, I will make a few tentative suggestions. I will begin by charting briefly the main features that characterize the new directions modernist studies have taken in the last decade. I will then try to identify in what ways the problem of autonomy might still be relevant to the expanded field of modernist studies, and to some of its new methodological interventions. In their critical survey, “The New Modernist Studies,” Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz have identified three interrelated strands of theoretical and methodological “expansion” that characterize the present state of the field (; emphasis in the original). The first of these, which the authors call the “vertical” expansion, reexamines divisions between high and popular forms of cultural production with the aim of inserting longneglected works of mass culture into critical considerations of modernism (, ). The second strand, that is, the “temporal” expansion, concerns the periodization of modernism and the chronological delimitations that are set to determine the time frame of its emergence and development (). Recent scholarship in this vein seeks to widen modernism’s traditional temporal ambit by emphasizing its “ongoing emergence” and by questioning the boundaries that confine the modernist period roughly to the first half of the twentieth century (–). The third and last strand is the spatial one, which involves moving away from the exclusive focus on European and North American frontiers of modernism. It suggests a broader terrain of modernist literature to be charted “whether by identifying charged nodal points in which diverse traditions converge, or by throwing out lines of connection to well-known figures on the received

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maps of modernism” (Wollaeger ). Rather than reading modernist texts within their “purely local” settings, the spatial turn offers a comparative and “transnational optic” by which to approach works of literature, be they hyper-canonical or peripheral (Berman ). In order to show how multifarious versions of modernism take shape by way of transnational encounters, the spatiotemporal expansion – on which I will focus in the remainder of my discussion – emphasizes the mobility of cultural trends and forms across space and time. It emphasizes patterns of correspondence, exchange, and circulation between local and global frames of literature. One of the common and oft-pronounced aims is to trace literature’s border-traversing capacities, and the cross-cultural affiliations between and within literary works. In his A Transnational Poetics, for example, Jahan Ramazani points to the ways in which both “modern and contemporary poets” perceive the poetic imagination as “a nation-crossing force that exceeds the limits of the territorial and juridical norm” (). His discussion of the “modernist bricolage” demonstrates how the import of non-Western cultural elements into high modernist texts (such as Pound’s adaptation of Japanese haiku and Eliot’s incorporation of Eastern elements in The Waste Land), while not entirely devoid of exoticism, still creates a dialogic relation between Western and Eastern texts and contexts (). As Ramazani argues, pursuing canonical modernisms’ transnational circuits provides an alternative framework to the kind of “criticism that reduces high modernist . . . ‘appropriations’ [of non-Western cultural materials] to orientalist theft or primitivist exoticism” (). The spatiotemporal broadening of modernist studies suggests a number of potential avenues for investigating the continuing relevance of modernist autonomy, and for rethinking its broader meanings and applications – a specific version of which I have undertaken in relation to Stevens’ poetics. First, approaching modernism from a global perspective points to the possibility of examining literary and artistic claims to autonomy in works that lie outside, or at the margins of the modernist canon. Such a perspective might not only reveal multiple histories of autonomy, but also give new insights into the formal and contextual elements of literary works themselves. The theoretical significance of autonomy for new modernist studies is well attested by the very recent A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (), which enlists “autonomy” in its appendix of concepts that need further exploration to expand our understanding of modernism in a global context (). A comparative view on non-Western and EuroAmerican literary visions of autonomy can provide new directions both for

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thinking about modernisms’ transnational encounters and for interpreting autonomy’s different cultural, historical, and social meanings. Second, focusing on modernism’s push-and-pull dynamics between local and global frameworks opens up new questions concerning the literary works’ relation to issues such as autonomy from the pressures of the state and the nation, from cultural-linguistic belonging, from officially sanctioned forms of identity, and from attachment to place, all of which potentially entail political and aesthetic consequences. Such ramifications, as I show in the case of Stevens, might come to the fore insofar as we regard autonomy not as absolute freedom from these pressures and concerns but as a relational claim that negotiates and produces new responses to them, by implementing styles and forms that make such negotiation possible. Indeed, as Piotr Gwiazda has recently argued, with reference to the genre of poetry, “any attempt to describe how poetry responds to national and global politics requires a thorough reexamination of the idea of poetic autonomy” (). He has called for a “reconsideration” of the term, “especially in view of topics like poetry’s function in times of war and peace, its role in exposing ideological mechanisms, [and] its inquiry into the meaning of national identity” (). Although Gwiazda’s work is primarily focused on contemporary poetics, he consistently spotlights the ties poets like Adrienne Rich among others developed with modernist predecessors, making visible similar concerns about poetry’s civic role and “social autonomy” (). His reading of Rich’s “An Atlas of the Difficult World,” for example, illuminates how “the social fragmentation of poetry from life” plays an important part in her vision of poetry’s worldly entanglements (Rich qtd. in Gwiazda ). As Lawrence Joseph has argued, especially with regard to “Atlas,” Rich’s “emphasis on the autonomy of art” along with her commitment to sociopolitical matters enables her to respond to the pressures of the “difficult world,” in a similar way that Stevens did in the s (, ). Indeed, Rich’s attempt to move beyond established dichotomies “between engaged and disengaged art,” between “solitude” and “community,” between the “ivory tower” and the political import of art (Gwiazda –), not only coincides with certain aspects of Stevens’ poetics as discussed in this study. It also demonstrates that modernist concerns with autonomy remain operative and have an afterlife in later poetic works such as Rich’s – a point that proves to be relevant to the issue of modernism’s temporal expansions. Finally, most significantly for the findings of this study, scholarly attention to the global dimensions of modernism raises questions about the uncertain relation of modernist forms of cultural expansion and

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circulation with those extraliterary and material mechanisms that are key to the emergence and development of globalization. If modernist literature, as recent scholarship has shown, is historically inflected by the globalized conditions of modernity – increased especially in the early twentieth century—the question is: How do modernist literature’s cultural border crossings and contact zones develop under the pressures of socioeconomic and geopolitical legacies of circulation and exchange? In what precise relation do canonical modernism’s cross-cultural contacts, for example, stand to “uneven flows of [cultural] translation, transmission and appropriation” set out historically by colonial and “inter-imperial” networks of globalization (Huyssen ; Doyle )? This line of questioning does not suggest resorting to a model of criticism, which, as Ramazani has argued, risks reducing canonical modernism’s transnational engagements to orientalist assimilation or exoticizing primitivism (Transnational ). Rather, it seeks to reinforce an ongoing interrogation into how and in what ways modernist visions of transnationalism conceive alternative spatial imaginaries and literary-cultural encounters. Are there instances in modernist texts that critically and consciously reflect how their own imaginative itineraries differ from, or potentially resist, dominant historical and spatial networks of globalism? This is exactly the point at which the problem of autonomy might stimulate relevant discussion, and gain significance beyond the nostalgia for a long-challenged vision of aesthetic freedom. Reconsidering the problem of autonomy in a global context may help us identify how modernist transnationalism, intercultural mingling, and connectedness might be in line with, or distinct from other crossover effects of extra-aesthetic and global mechanisms. Indeed, as I have touched upon in Chapter , Stevens’ Depression-era poem, “Owl’s Clover,” points precisely to this problem in its depiction of the Western statue’s imaginative transposition from the United States to Africa. The poem dramatizes the quest for a globalized vision of the “imagination, extended beyond local consciousness . . . to be held in common by South, West, North and East” (L ). The search for this shared collective imaginary is met with pressures produced by a subset of economic and geopolitical forces: the “factories” of Western landowners, Italy’s fascist invasion of Ethiopia, the “diplomats of the cafés,” the “Seraphim of Europe,” and the overarching prevalence of material depravity (“Ananke”) as depicted in the poem create a nexus of sociohistorical constraints that trouble the poetic imagination’s global circuits. In “Owl’s Clover” Stevens shows the entanglements of a globalized poetic

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imagination with ideological pressures exerted by Western economic expansion, colonial rule, and fascist war. Stevens does not allow for an easy flow from the local to the global, but this is not because his poetry locks itself into the local. To the contrary, it is because, as I have suggested, without interrogating the power dynamics at the heart of its own border crossings, and without a negotiation of autonomy vis-à-vis external pressures, the poem cannot produce a collective imagination that is shared – and not imposed – between “South, West, North and East” (L ). Instead of emphasizing cross-cultural connectivity, proximity, and exchange, Stevens explores the transnational and global encounters of poetry by elucidating the possible ruptures and slippages that the construction of an expanding and contact-seeking imagination inevitably faces. Stevens’ view of the imagination’s global reach provides one instance that shows the possible relevance of the problem of autonomy to considerations of modernisms’ cultural and spatial expansions worldwide, a development that has come to occupy center stage in contemporary critical debates in modernist studies. The social and political dimensions of Stevensian autonomy suggest further lines of inquiry that prove relevant to the new critical and methodological approaches modernist studies have developed in recent decades. Reexamining the various meanings and implications of modernist autonomy from a culturally and geographically expanded angle might reveal multiple transnational histories of autonomy with a potential to enhance our understanding of global modernisms, including specific reference to Stevens’ poetics. Reading Stevens’ poetry has been and continues to be a challenging task because of his thoroughly dense and elusive style, complex rhetoric, and persistent resistance to external reference. The contemporary critical focus on temporal and spatial expansions of modernism poses productive challenges, and presents new possibilities for reading his poetry. The concept of autonomy opens up, rather than blocks, one of these multiple interpretive possibilities.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W., –, – Althusser, Louis,  Altieri, Charles, , – Autonomy and heteronomy, , , , –, –, , –, , –, , , –, , ,  art for art’s sake,  from philosophy, , , –, –, –, –,  from the market, ,  in aesthetic theory, – in Stevens criticism, , –,  lack of, ,  modernist autonomy, –, –, –, , –, , , , , See also modernism personal autonomy, , , –,  relational autonomy, –, , , –, , , , , –, , , ,  spaces of, , –, , , –, – Stevens’ vision of, –, –, , –, –, –, , –, –, , , , –, –, , –, , –, , , , , –, , , –

Cohen, Milton A.,  Coleridge, Samuel T., – Communism, , , , , ,  Community. See Stevens, Wallace, themes and ideas in, collectivity Cook, Eleanor, – Costello, Bonnie, ,  Critelli, Steven M., –

Babbitt, Irving,  Badiou, Alain, ,  inaesthetics, , , –, –, ,  Bates, Milton J., – Baudelaire, Charles,  Benjamin, Walter, –, ,  Bishop, Claire,  Bloom, Harold, , , , ,  Breton, André,  Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught, , , , – Brown, Nicholas,  Bu¨rger, Peter, – Burke, Kenneth, , , – Burnshaw, Stanley, , –, , 

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,  Goldstone, Andrew, –, , –,  Great Depression, , –, , , , , –, , , –, –, –, , –, , , , –, ,  Greenberg, Clement,  Gwiazda, Piotr, 

Church, Henry, ,  Cleghorn, Angus, , , 

Delacroix, Eugène,  Denning, Michael,  Descartes, René, ,  Eeckhout, Bart, , , , , –,  Eliot, T. S., , , , , , ,  Farrell, James T.,  Filreis, Alan, –, , , , , , –, , , – Freud, Sigmund,  Frost, Robert, 

H. D.,  Halliday, Mark, –, –,  Harrington, Joseph,  Hegel, G. W. F.,  Heidegger, Martin,  Howe, Susan, –,   Westerly Terrace, – Impersonality, , –, 



Index Jameson, Fredric,  Jenkins, Lee M.,  Joyce, James, ,  Kalliney, Peter, – Kant, Immanuel, – Kelly, Michael,  Kermode, Frank,  Kohlmann, Benjamin,  Latimer, Ronald,  Leggett, B. J.,  Lensing, George,  Longenbach, James, –, , –, , –, , – Lyric form, , , , –, –, , ,  MacLeish, Archibald, – Mallarmé, Stéphane, , –, ,  Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, – Mao, Douglas, ,  Marxism, , –, , ,  Meillassoux, Quentin,  Miller, J. Hillis,  Modernism, , , –, –, , , , , , , – and romanticism, , – and the avant-garde, – high modernism, , , , ,  in the s, –, –, –, –, , – transnationalism, –, –, See also “The Comedian” Modernist studies, , , , –, , –,  spatiotemporal expansion of, – Moore, Marianne, , , ,  New Criticism, The, , –, , –,  New Deal, The, –, ,  New Historicism, ,  New Masses, , , ,  New York Intellectuals, The,  Nickels, Joel, , –, – Olson, Liesl,  Pack, Robert, ,  Partisan Review, –, , , – Perloff, Marjorie,  Phillips, Siobhan,  Philosophy and poetry, , , , –, –, ,  deconstruction, –, 



logical positivism, , , –,  phenomenology, , – pragmatism,  Poirier, Richard,  Potts, Alex,  Pound, Ezra, , ,  Proletarian literature,  Quinn, Justin, ,  Ragg, Edward, ,  Ramazani, Jahan, ,  Rancière, Jacques, ,  aesthetic regime, –, , ,  and the notion of aesthetic autonomy, –, , –, –, –, – on Badiou’s inaesthetics, ,  periodization, ,  perspective on modernism, , – politics of aesthetics, , , , –, –, , –, –,  Resistance in Adorno, – in Stevens criticism, –, ,  resistant form, – Stevens’ notion of, , , , , , , , , , , , See also autonomy Rich, Adrienne,  Riffaterre, Michael, – Rivera, Diego,  Rodin, Auguste,  Rolfe, Edwin, – Romanticism, , –, See also Stevens, Wallace, themes and ideas in, romanticism Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, – À M. Villemain, –,  Sandburg, Carl, – Schiller, Friedrich, –, ,  Shelley, Percy B., ,  Sicari, Stephen,  Siraganian, Lisa, , –,  Spanish Civil War, The, , ,  Spurr, David, ,  Stevens, Wallace, themes and ideas in abstraction, , , –, –, , –, –, , , , –,  affirmation, – architecture, , –, , , –,  audience, , , , , , – collectivity, –, , –, , , –, , , –, –, –, , –, –, –, –,  colonialism, , –, , ,  dance, –



Index

Stevens, Wallace, themes and ideas in (cont.) distance and intimacy, , , , , ,  epiphany, – fascism, , , , , –, , –,  flâneur, ,  intertextuality, –, ,  ivory tower, –, ,  metaphysics, – pedagogy, ,  pure poetry,  reason, –, –, , –, –, – romanticism, , –, , – systematic thinking, – Stevens, Wallace, works of A Collect of Philosophy,  A Dish of Peaches, – A Fading of the Sun,  A Postcard from the Volcano, ,  A Thought Revolved,  A Weak Mind in the Mountains,  Academic Discourse at Havana, –, – Add This to Rhetoric,  Anecdote of the Jar,  Architecture,  Arrival at Waldorf,  Asides on the Oboe,  Botanist on Alp (No. ),  Botanist on Alp (No. ), ,  Connoisseur of Chaos,  Effects of Analogy, –,  Evening without Angels, – Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas, – Ghosts as Cocoons, – Gray Stones and Gray Pigeons,  Imagination as Value, ,  Life on a Battleship,  Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery,  Lions in Sweden,  Man Carrying Thing,  Mozart, , –, ,  Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, , –,  Of the Surface of Things,  Owl’s Clover, , , , , –,  "Re-Statement of Romance, , – Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,  Secret Man, –,  Study of Two Pears, – The Comedian as the Letter C, , , ,  The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,  The Irrational Element in Poetry, , 

The Man on the Dump,  The Man with the Blue Guitar, ,  The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words, ,  The Place of the Solitaires,  The Public Square,  The Role of the Idea in Poetry, ,  The Sail of Ulysses,  The Sick Man,  The Snow Man, ,  The Weeping Burgher,  The Woman That Had More Babies than That,  Things of August,  Two Versions of the Same Poem,  United Dames of America,  Winter Bells,  Adagia,  Harmonium, , , , , ,  Ideas of Order, , , , –, , , , , , , ,  Parts of a World, , , ,  The Auroras of Autumn,  The Man with the Blue Guitar, , , , ,  The Necessary Angel,  The Rock,  Transport to Summer, ,  Symbolism, , See also Stevens, Wallace, themes and ideas in, pure poetry Szalay, Michael, –,  Taggard, Genevieve,  Tate, Allen, , –, – Terés, Harvey, ,  Trotsky, Leon,  Usable past, – Valéry, Paul,  Vendler, Helen, , –, , –,  Voros, Gyorgyi,  Wahl, Jean,  Walkowitz, Rebecca,  William Phillips and Philip Rahv, , , ,  Williams, William Carlos, –, , , , – Woolf, Virginia,  World War II, , –, , , , , , , , –, ,  Zukofsky, Louis, 