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Wallace Stevens The Paradox of the Absolute: A Burkean Investigation
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In the midst of the Second World War, critical investigations
into modernist poetry were under construction. I. A. Richards' Practical
Criticism spearheaded the New
Critical approach, isolating poetry from the fray of history
and examining it with a scientific precision. Meanwhile, Kenneth
Burke was developing his dramatist theory of motives, which
coalesced in The Grammar of Motives, a work that began with
considerations of the comedy of human relations, or, as Burke was
fond of calling it, "the Human Barnyard." (xii). We could
say that while the New Critics were isolating poetics in the laboratory
and developing a criticism of vivisection, Burke was down on the
farm, slogging through the competitive barnyard of American capitalism,
seeking out what flourished and what withered there. In short, Burke
was searching out traces of motivations in ways that the New Critics
would not, teasing out poetic ambiguities, not from the anaesthetized
poem, but from the cultural environment that nurtured it. While Burke was writing his Grammar and publishing
sections of it in The Sewanee Review and other journals, Wallace
Stevens was formulating his own concept of poetics in relation to
the world, a subject of some import in this era of war, both on the
political and ideological fronts. "The Noble Rider and the Sound
of Words" and "The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet,"
both composed as speeches, were subsequently published in the Princeton
University Press in 1942 and The Sewanee Review in 1944,
respectively. The first speech is essentially a rhetorical defense of
the poet's removal from the fray of political concerns. The poet's purpose
is to create the "nobility" that will "help us to live
our lives" (NA 36); that is, he has a social role quite
apart from and more socially necessary than those modernist poets writing
politically didactic verse. The second speech is also a defense of poetry,
but this time the emphasis is on the significance of poetic knowledge,
which Stevens asserts is superior to philosophical knowledge. While
philosophy can only satisfy the reason, "the poet, in order to
fulfill himself, must accomplish a poetry that satisfies both the reason
and the imagination. [. . .] Thus poetry, which we have been thinking
of as at least the equal of philosophy, may be its superior" (NA
42-43). Burke read the second speech and apparently believed it
significant enough to comment on in his Grammar, which was published
just a year later, in 1945. Burke's analysis of that essay is worth
investigating, certainly to locate Stevens in the political concerns
of the time, which Alan Filreis has done at length, but also, I maintain,
to consider the philosophical inquiries that informed Stevens' theories
of poetry and his sense of the poet's place in relation to philosophy
and the larger culture. But before we proceed to such inquiries, I would suggest
that there are good reasons to believe that that Stevens was listening,
and interested. Perusing his letters, we find that in 1951, Stevens
wrote to Barbara Church of an upcoming trip to Bard College, where "they
are going to have a lot of other people there, whose names I forget.
Kenneth Burke is one of them"--in other words, Burke's was the
only name that stuck in his mind (CL 707). Subsequently Stevens
wrote both Theodore Weiss and William Carlos Williams of his regret
at not hearing Burke read at Bard (CL 712 and 716). While I have
not found any reference that proves that Stevens read Burke's Grammar,
it is clear that Stevens had his ear to Burke, and it would be strange
if he had not looked at Burke's analysis of the "Figure of the
Youth as Virile Poet." More compellingly, in his 1948 essay "Effects
of Analogy," when Stevens speaks of images as having origins
in emotion, he chooses a quote from a recent review by Burke that
Stevens had read "the other day" (NA 110). The
quote Stevens chooses from Burke bears some earmarks of a connection
with Burke's concerns regarding a scientist view of poetics. The
quote regards the marginalization of poetry in a scientist culture:
"in contrast with the doctrines of those who would confine
logic to science, rhetoric to propaganda or advertising, and thus
leave for poetic a few spontaneous sensations not much higher in
the intellectual scale than the twitchings of a decerebrated frog."
This is strange and worth notice, because in locating analogies
with emotional origins, there are any number of poetic examples,
and indeed, this is the only example of analogy that Stevens uses
in the essay that is not literary. More importantly, the analogy
encapsulates Burke's concerns regarding Steven's poetic theory:
poetics as related to science and sensation, to motion rather than
action, to reflex rather than will. Furthermore, and perhaps most
telling, the passage reeks of the laboratory, of vivisection. One should not mince words here. When Burke identifies a concept as scientist, he is identifying a strategy that philosophizes human concerns out of the field of consideration, and for Burke such a strategy holds all the dangers of Nazi experimentation on the human subject. Scientism lies in opposition to his own dramatistic position, and this opposition parallels the difference between motion and action (The Rhetoric of Religion 39). For Burke, the scientist viewpoint has a sinister quality, which Randall Jarrell's equivalent indictment, that Stevens poetry lacks "the dramatic" (Poetry and the Age 141), fails to acknowledge. Jarrell's comment is purely aesthetic; for Burke, aesthetics are part of the consciousness of the age, and in this regard are never pure. In uncovering the scientism of Stevens' theory of the imagination, he is calling to our attention the fact that, for Stevens, the imagination works without will, or willful intelligence, that its operations are a sort of reflex action, which operates as a physiological necessity, and that a poet's success lies in keeping the rational will out of a process which is essentially biological: the reflex action of the poet's imagination when it is stimulated by the world creates poetry. This does seem to be Stevens' line of thought in "The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet," wherein Stevens defines poetry thus: [Poetry is] a process of the personality of the poet, his individuality, as an element in the creative process; and by process of the personality of the poet we mean, to select what may seem to be a curious particular, the incidence of the nervous sensitiveness of the poet in the act of creating the poem and, generally speaking, the physical and mental factors that condition him as an individual. (45) The personality of the poet, for Stevens, has much to
do with the nervous system, and little to do with society, at least
on the level of the poet's concerns during the process of creation.
The poet lives "a life apart from politics," and if he fulfills
a social role, he does so exactly by avoiding the social questions,
by as much as possible keeping himself free of them by attending only
to what is in him alone--his personality, his "nervous sensitiveness,"
"the physical and mental factors that condition him as an individual."
These are the faculties of the imagination, which he alone attends to,
and the personality can be defined in terms of the workings of the nervous
system, and further, the nervous system freed from consciousness, unaffected
by the social realm. The poet's sense of the world is inevitable. What
"The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet" suggests, "Effects
of Analogy" strengthens: "[a] man's sense of the world is
born with him and persists, and penetrates the ameliorations of education
and experience of life. His species is as fixed as his genus" (NA
120). Burke's placement of his critique of "The Figure
of the Youth as a Virile Poet" is interesting in this light,
offering us a sense of Stevens' influences from a 1940s perspective.
In categorizing Stevens under "agent," he is placing him
in a line that begins with Locke, Hume, Berkeley--empiricists seeking
knowledge through the senses. By Burke's accounting, their investigations
were pivotal in developing the scientist turn in modern thought.
In Burke's dramatic theory, a system that accentuates
the agent is essentially idealist. Quoting from the Encyclopedia
Britannica, Burke locates the idealist position in holding that,
"Apart from the activity of the self or subject in sensory
reaction, memory and association, imagination, judgment and inference,
there can be no world of objects" (GM 171). Burke elsewhere
defines idealist philosophy as viewing the world with an emphasis
on the agent; that is, that the idealist frame of mind hierarchically
favors the thinking subject over other aspects of Burke's dramatistic
pentad. Noting that the modern idealists are closely connected to
epistemic concerns, Burke asserts that "to approach the universe
by asking ourselves how knowledge is possible is to ground our speculations
psychologically, in the nature of the knower" (GM 172).
A system of thought that prioritizes the objective world, on the
other hand, is materialism, and we can see that the first system
holds that the man makes the world, and the second that the world
makes the man. In the "Agent in General" section of his
Grammar, Burke grounds his investigations of the idealist
tradition in the English empiricists, Berkeley, Locke and Hume,
rather surprisingly, he ends this section with Wallace Stevens,
specifically in finding a scientist aspect in Stevens' definition
of poetry, as set forth in "The Figure of the Youth as a Virile
Poet." Burke begins his discussion on Stevens by remarking
on the apparent, but ultimately false, antithesis of science and
poetry. Among the distinctions that concerned Burke in his age were the claims to "purity" in both science and poetry. Burke's Grammar repeatedly uncovers an pervasive scientism in the definitions being forged in his age, finding its rhetorical defense in the concepts of purity, both in the philosophic underpinnings of science and in the literary realm. He found both suspect. He credits Stevens' essay for revealing, "by reason of its very depth and accuracy," the transformations that a pervasively scientist perspective wrought upon his age. Generally, Burke locates this scientist aspect in that part of Stevens' essay that ingeniously merges imagination and reason through the essay's closing reference to the Minotaur. Of this creature, Burke says, "This fabulous hybrid [. . .] apparently symbolizes the union of a labyrinthine imagination (the 'unconscious') with the rationality of a poetic medium developed by deliberate conscious sophistication," (GM 224) which is a common enough way to read Stevens' poetic strategy. However, Burke's concern lies in Stevens' claim that the poet can pursue the epistemic questions, that, essentially, Stevens is claiming for poetry a scientific role:
It is particularly important to keep the scientist "heresy" in mind when we are reading so good a statement, by so good a poet, on his own theories of poetry. [. . .] The irony is that, whereas the study of esthetics was a typical product of the modern idealistic philosophies, and although, with the weakening of religious certainties, art was often made the very basis of evaluation for all human ways, the typical idealist vocabularies were essentially scientist in their approach to artistic innovation. Precisely at the time when the term "imagination" gained greatly in prestige [. . .] theories of art took a momentous step away from the understanding of art as action and towards a lame attempt to pit art against science as a "truer kind of truth." The correct controversy here should not have been at all a pitting of art against science: it should have been a pitting of one view of science against another. (226)
Specifically, Burke locates "the most scientist term of all" in Stevens' use of the term "sensation" (225). The idealist constructs knowledge of the world via empiricism, or what can be verified by sensation, and his account of the world is one of motion, as opposed to the social realm of action. Along these same lines, we can speak of the difference between perception, the exercising of the sense faculties; and conception, or ideas developed in the social realm. In his ecocritical reading of Stevens' poetry, Robert Pogue Harrison points out Stevens' attention to the process of perception over established conceptions. In seeing the world through conceptions, the eye is mediated by, and essentially blinded by, "the historical, linguistic, and conceptual encrustations which the phenomenon has accrued over time." Harrison argues that these encrustations are necessary for human habitation, that the wilderness of stripped perception, while it may be Edenic, is not a world in which we can build a society. The social world cannot exist without concepts. Taken to its extremes, mere perception is the state of the decerebrated frog, whose senses cannot make sense of things. To be sure, this is a dire sort of description of what poets have
long called visitations by their muses, or what can be likened to the
knowledge of the mystic or the saint, as Stevens himself suggested:
"and we may be certain that in the case of poets, the peers of
saints, those experiences are of no less a degree than the experiences
of the saints themselves" (NA 51) Or, as William W. Bevis
has examined at length, we could call it a meditative process, whereby
the poet reaches a heightened perception, and is able to say that "I
am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor
less than those around me" (NA 63). Burke's location of
this state as a sort of pure empiricism of sensation calls to our attention
that for Stevens, the poet must "resist the intelligence almost
successfully" (OP 197) to reach a poetic knowledge. The
point is, on the one hand, that this state is defined physiologically,
and outside of dramatic action; on the other, that Stevens regards the
poet's knowledge as a superior sort of knowledge of the physical realm,
a superior means through to the epistemic answers. Thus in regarding Stevens' poetic theory as scientist, by Burke's definition,
we need to look for a tendency to perceive the world in terms of motion
rather than action--in other words, a passive reflexivity of the mind
in its perception of the world, a vision devoid of conceptual understandings,
of cultural and logical connections. Stevens sometimes insisted that
his poems do not "mean" anything, and by this he seems to
have meant that they were accurate recordings of perceptions, not conceptions.
This is an essential requirement of Stevens' quest to find the age's
"nobility," for the encrustations of conceptions from prior
ages, which have found their way into the connotations of language,
need to be reconfigured in order to express the nobility of the age.
That is, the modernist poet is doing the same thing with words that
a painter is doing with paint or a musician is doing with sound--re-imagining
the world, unleashing it from the cultural associations by which we
interpret it, so that we may interpret it anew. To Stevens, the difference
between philosophical and poetic truth is "the difference between
logical and empirical knowledge" (NA 13). Imagination and
poetry are paired in opposition to reason and philosophy, and we can
see that the pairing proceeds to the unconscious, sensation and perception
on the one hand; and the conscious and conception on the other. To see how this works, it is useful to examine the process that operates in "Domination of Black," which Stevens himself identified as devoid of ideas, at least in his intention. Not incidentally, he also identified it in 1942 as his best poem, over a quarter century after writing it (Vendler 65). That he identified it as such just a year before writing "The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet" makes it a pertinent example of how the "process of personality" works in creating poetry. In a 1928 letter, Stevens explained how the poem is to be read:
I am sorry that a poem of this sort has to contain any ideas at all, because its sole purpose is to fill the mind with the images and sounds that it contains. A mind that examines such a poem for its prose contents gets absolutely nothing from it. You are supposed to get heavens full of the colors and full of sounds, and you are supposed to feel as you would feel if you actually got all this.(CL 251) One does "get all this"--Stevens' poem is vividly hued and
beautiful in its abstractness, much as are the paintings of Klee,
whom Stevens much admired. And one does feel "as you would feel":
the speaker does not need to announce his fear. The poem's vivid imagery
being overwhelmed by night throws us into the realm of the incomprehensible.
The abstractness of the poem lies partially in that the image is abstracted
into colors: the colors of the bushes, the colors of the peacock tails,
the colors of the heavy hemlocks, all emanating from the fire of the
originating scene, "At night, by the fire," and recomposed
into the images that arise, spontaneously, from the speaker's imagination.
In this poem, colors are turning, not things, as if the mind's operation
of distinguishing what they mean has been deactivated--this is another
element of the poem's abstraction. There is no reason that the poem
evolves an analogy between the flame and the peacocks crying out in
the hemlock trees. They are, after all, only the colors that flicker
in the flame. The image springs from the flame without the interface
of conscious decision. It doesn't mean anything, but it is still emotionally
powerful. One could say that fear is a reflect reaction to the images
the poem conjures. Yet it is the nature of the mind to not only sense but to make sense,
and although we are (relatively) comfortable looking at colors as "just
colors" and sounds as "just sounds," registering them
only on the unconscious, emotional plane, we are less comfortable with
the idea that words are "just words." The images connote concepts,
and Helen Vendler's excellent reading (66-67) pulls the poem out of
its abstraction. In her interpretation, the hemlocks become "Stygian
hemlocks," and even suggest suicide; the fire represents "household
life"; and in the peacock's cry Vendler hears "human feeling."
The poem comes to mean a human crying out against the approaching darkness,
against death, which is itself personified, as it "comes striding."
We might add that the peacock is a venerable symbol of Christ and resurrection,
which in a era of lost faith has been reduced to a vainglorious show
of majesty; and that this bird, divested of its glory, cries out, ineffectually,
from the hemlocks that killed Socrates. If one takes the next step,
and say that killing Socrates is equivalent to obliterating the dualism
between sensation and reason, then the poem can be read rhetorically,
as a vision of the dualistic viewpoint's destruction. The destruction of these symbols (or more accurately, with Stevens,
we should say the decreation) is abetted by the abstraction of the scene
into mere color and sound. But does the poem merely offer us color and
sound for our enjoyment, as Stevens contends; or are Vendler and I,
and anyone else that notices the culturally laden connotations of the
poem, injecting "prose contents"? Steven's comment in "The
Relations between Poetry and Painting," originally a 1951 speech
given at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, is worth noting: "Does
not the saying of Picasso that a picture is a horde of destructions
also say that a poem is a horde of destructions? When Braque says 'the
senses deform, the mind forms,' he is speaking to poet, painter, musician
and sculptor" (NA 161). It seems clear that the senses are
deforming in this poem, while the mind is simulaneously forming. Stevens insisted that "Domination of Black" as a poem of
"pure" perception; Vendler's interpretation is primarily a
conceptual one. In Burkean terms, one could say that Stevens' account
is scientist, an account that only admits to the empirical admission
of qualities. By this I mean that the poem is an account of qualities,
colors and sounds, in motion; and is composed by means of persistent
attention to extension, or position, of one thing in relation to another,
which the poem attends to in its grammatical emphasis on prepositions.
Vendler's interpretation is dramatic: the poem's speaker is concerned
with human action, or rather the paralysis of action in the face of
the overwhelming domination of darkness, death, and the implacable turning
of the planets. It is read in terms of conceptions, or cultural cultural
encrustations, a handy example being Vendler's "Stygean hemlocks."
The poem's only verb of purposeful movement is "striding."
Two things stride in the poem, and two things precede the fear that
pervades the poem's final tone: the color of the hemlocks (black against
the twilight sky) and the night (or blackness again). Striding is an
intentional, forceful movement, but neither the speaker nor the peacocks,
capable of having such intention, stride. Thus, the poem places intentional
action outside of cognizance and into color, or out of conception and
into perception--or out of the speaker and into the scene. Against this
action of colors, the two cognizant elements of the poem react--that
is, they act against--with voice only: the speaker voices the poem,
in fear, and the peacock cries. The turn of colors, like the planets
in the black sky, have intention, against which the speaker, and peacock,
can only cry out. Vendler reads "Domination of Black" in relation to what she calls the "question of magnitude," by which she means the degree of individual's significance in relation to the universe. She developed this perspective when being struck by the line "Crispin was washed away by magnitude" from "The Comedian as the Letter C" (Wallace Stevens 61). The issue of magnitude, of man's relation to the universe, is thematic in Stevens, and his poetry, according to Vendler, contemplates "Hamlet's contrary views of man; that he is a fellow crawling between earth and heaven or, conversely, that he is a masterwork angelic or even godlike" (62). To parallel this thought using Burke's vocabulary, Crispin (as well as Stevens) is caught in the agent-scene ratio, a perspective that Burke exemplifies by Jonathan Swift's Laputans (GM 8), which, like Stevens' "Comedian of the Letter C," is a satire of philosophy. Like Swift's Gulliver, Crispin shrinks and swells alarmingly. He overwhelms the environment, indeed the world, with his "cloak of China, cap of Spain," only to find himself a "skinny sailor" and then, upon the flux of the waters, "merest minuscule in the gales" (CP 28-29) In his expansive state, he is a pantheistic god, encompassing the globe; but at sea, like Titan, he dissolves into the scene. . . . . . Triton incomplicate with that As agent, Crispin is godlike, and takes all into himself, at which
point he loses himself in it. In Burkean terms, Crispin contracts according
to Burke's "paradox of the absolute," a dialectical law key
to his writing, which states that absolutes are transformative places
wherein they turn into their opposites. "Note that, dialectically,
the concept of the 'pure' personality itself contained its dissolution
as its ultimate destiny. For, by the paradox of the absolute, a "pure"
person would be an "im-person" (GM 80). That is, that
if the personality creates without any input from the conscious will,
then the result will be one of complete necessity. There will be nothing
left of what we tend to think of as personality--choice, for instance.
Burke uses the theological example: "if nature was deemed [. .
.] to be a perfect exemplification of God's will, then nature's design
would accurately represent the design of God " Thus the will of
God is indistinguishable from the reality of nature, and Triton, as
well as Crispin, dissolves in the waves. Likewise, in Burke's reading of the idealist movement in philosophy, he uncovers a trend that begins by featuring the agent, so that the scene is but a (dangerously solipsistic) manifestation of the sensing subject--the world emanates from the man--but develops into a scientist empiricism that discounts the agent through the grammatical operation of synonymity. When Berkeley equated the intelligible with the sensible, the former became a redundancy and could be dropped; and down the road to Hume, ideas can fall out of the world of human action and be described as mere motion, as they are purely impressions of the sense organs (GM 181-182). Perversely, the idealist in this reading hierarchizes the agent only to deny him action, the workings of the intelligence become ones of mere motion, and a sense of the sovereignty of human action is diminished. As an example of the agent-scene ration, Burke offers Seurat's pointillist paintings, "which carry the sense of consistency between scene and agent to such lengths that his human figures seem on the point of dissolving into their background" (GM 9). Here, as in "Domination of Black," the scene is abstracted into dabs of color. In the agent-scene ratio, the agent requires a scene to contain it, and rather paradoxically, the idealist's agent-oriented perspective ends by dissolving the agent into the scene: "To define or locate 'man' in terms of 'nature [. . .] is to 'dissolve' man 'into' nature" (GM 26). This danger is one that Jonathan Levin locates in William James' idea that "life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected" (Wallace Stevens 212), which Levin asserts is key to Stevens' poetry. Speaking of James' sense that life is process, au unfolding of becoming rather than a stasis of being, he comments that "there is a significant price to be paid for this participation in the dynamic energies of the universe, since the self is left vulnerable to the dissolution of whatever one understands as constituting one's deepest nature, one's human "self" (ibid.). Of course, as Stevens realized, there is no choice in the matter: the duality of man and nature is a fiction, a product of the "false imagination," and the true imagination knows this:
No longer do I believe that there is a mystic muse, sister of the Minotaur. This is another of the monsters I had for nurse, whom I have wasted. I am myself a part of what is real, and it is my own speech and the strength of it, this only, that I hear or ever shall. (NA 60) The muse, and that transcendent realm she is said to descend from,
are fictions, and this is a statement of disbelief, but it is also a
call to pay attention to this reality, which is the only reality.
The dualism of man and nature is a fiction, and the poet's task is to
make this clear. It is this realization that makes Stevens an important
poet to the ecocritics.
In the collapse of religion, there is likewise a collapse of dualism,
and the philosophical distinctions based on the dualism of man and nature
fall apart also. As John Elder proclaims, "America's poetry of
nature arises from the fever of cultural dividedness--man against nature,
past against present, intellect against senses--but discovers grounds
for reconciliation in the inextricable wholeness of the world"
(Imagining the Earth 1). Look in the terrible mirror of the sky. The world as a reflection of the self is a standard Romantic conceit, but for Stevens it possesses a marked centrality. Harold Bloom, Harrison and others have placed Stevens in the American transcendental tradition as a way of examining his relationship to the environment. Harrison sees in Stevens a desire to get beyond the "false imagination" of solipsism, wherein the world is only a reflection of the self, to the "true imagination," wherein the mind is able to perceive nature "as it is," bared of its historical garb. Harrison uses "The Snowman" to illustrate, and certainly in this poem we can see the dissolve, or the seeking to perceive the dissolve, between the self and the scene. We can also see it in "The Comedian of the Letter C," by noticing that the opening aphorism, "Man is the intelligence of the soil," is corrected to "his soil is man's intelligence" (CP 27 and 36). The difference is key: in the first, man imbues the scene with intelligence, and in the corrected aphorism, man's intelligence is derived from the scene. However, to say that the poet strives to get to that pure perception, a vision stripped of historical garb, involves us in a paradox, for Stevens also insists that poetry does just the opposite.. In "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" Stevens makes clear that the poet strives to create a life of the imagination--a nobility-- which acts as a buffer between ourselves and reality, to make reality bearable by re-imagining it. The poet strives not to perceive nature bared, but to clothe it in nobility, which he defines as "the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality" (36): But as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same. Possibly this description of it as a force will do more than anything else I can have said about it to reconcile you to it. It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation, and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us live our lives.(NA 66) To be sure, the poet creates his nobility from what is really there--his intelligence comes from the soil. But yesterday's nobility is dead to us because nobility is a living thing, and it dies just as we do. New poets are needed to create the nobility of the age. The knowledge which creates this nobility, we might say, is the superior knowledge that the poet has as compared to the philosopher. Remembering that Burke suggested that the controversy between philosophy and art "should have been a pitting of one view of science against another" (GM 226), we might ask what "science" the poet has that allows him knowledge of nobility. In attempting to answer that question, Stevens' poetry has long been subject to philosophical investigations, and has been analyzed as influenced by a long list of philosophers. With Levin, I find it most useful to look at those which he was acquainted with in his youth, those thinkers that nurtured the Harmonium. Certainly James' strong influence on the "The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet" is unquestionable, as Stevens himself acknowledged it (CL 476). Burke did not examine Stevens in terms of James' influence; instead, he examined both men from the scientist one, and in considering the claims of "purity" in both science and poetry, he searches for their origins in the English empiricists. When we look at philosophy and poetry as both paired and opposed, that is to say, paired in a mutual goal of epistemic knowledge and opposed in terms of means, it is worth noting that Stevens called our attention to Locke and Hume's desire for perspicuity, or a cleansing of all figurative elements of language used in the pursuit of knowledge. While these empiricists took the tack of attempting knowledge of a verifiable reality by fashioning a purely denotative language, Stevens aimed for knowledge through the opposite channel--through figurative language. In "The Noble Rider," Stevens frames the two approaches in terms of the effects of stressing denotation or connotation, and defines the modern age as one that stresses the latter: [A] language, considered semantically, evolves through a series of conflicts between the denotative and the connotative forces in words; between an asceticism tending to kill language by stripping words of all association and a hedonism tending to kill all language by dissipating their sense in a multiplicity of associations. These conflicts are nothing more than changes in the relation between the imagination and reality [. . .] The use of words in connotative senses was denounced by Locke and Hobbes, who desired a mathematical plainness; in short, perspicuous words.(NA 13) Here we see both poetry and philosophy allied with asceticism and hedonism, and although they are polarized, they both do the same thing: they "kill language," and I think we can read this as a dissolve of the interface in the agent-scene ratio, a way of getting to the direct perception of reality, past the encrustations of language. Further, they both do the same thing in the other direction: they both evolve language. The ends are similar; the means are opposed. In this statement we can see the equivalent roles of creation and decreation that Stevens discusses in his 1951 essay, "The Relations between Poetry and Painting"--"that decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated" (NA 174)--the necessary step before the creations of the age--the creations of the age's nobility, can begin. When we ask where this creation of nobility takes place, it is profitable to look to James' epistemology, and a likely place to look is his "Essays in Radical Empiricism," a work that Stevens may well have been acquainted with, either in his readings of James or at Harvard. In the beginning of the first chapter James claims that he has been suggesting to his students the "nonexistence" of consciousness "for seven or eight years," which is within the perimeters of Stevens' Harvard years, furthermore, Stevens credits James' influence in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," as we have said. Here we see James from a positivist angle, and when he speaks of the difference between thought and thing, James notes that "the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus's time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person's mind." James solves this problem easily: just as one point can be on two intersecting lines, an object can be both in the mind and out there, both a thought and a thing. James is considering the simultaneous existence of an object from the
springboard of Locke: "The entering wedge for this more concrete
way of understanding the dualism was fashioned by Locke when the made
the word 'idea' stand indifferently for thing and thought." James
goes on to say that "[t]he peculiarity of our experiences, that
they not only are, but are known, which their 'conscious' quality is
invoked to explain, is better explained by their relations--these relations
themselves being experiences--to one another." From here, the discussion proceeds in Lockean terms--in considering the in-here/out-there in terms of adjectives, or qualities. As thing, the experience is extended; as thought, it occupies no space or place. As thing, it is red, hard, heavy; but who over heard of a red, hard or heavy thought? How can the one experience in its thing-function be made of them, consist of them, carry them as its own attributes, while in its thought-function it disowns them and attributes them elsewhere? There is a self-contradiction here from which the radical dualism of thought and thing is the only truth that can save us. As a side note, we can note that Gertrude Stein, another student of
William James, certainly did think of red, hard, and heavy thoughts.
In any case, James' answer is the differing relations in which the "objects"
or "ideas" exist, inwardly or outwardly. The room that I sit
in is both out there and in my mind, and the point of intersection is
the act of perception. Out there it exists in relation to its history:
it is 30 years old, the rent is so many dollars, the plaster cracked
when the foundation shifted seven years ago. But the room in my mind
has a personal history, dictated only by my imagination, and it can
be mine all my life, rent-free. Without glossing the various distinctions James makes in this empirical
investigation, we can locate the place were the dualism of in here/out
there dissolves for James: I refer here to appreciations, which form an ambiguous sphere of being, belonging with emotion on the one hand, and having objective 'value' on the other, yet seeming not quite inner nor quite outer, as if a diremption had begun but had not made itself complete. This is the place where, for James, the dualism of thought and thing dissolves. "Diremption," with its connotations of a forceable separation between man and wife, as well as an abnormal separation of leaves, brings the discussion out of the clouds and down to earth. Undoubtedly James was playing with this word, as the discussion proceeds to this imagined objection: "The dualism is a fundamental datum: Let no man join what God has but asunder" (ibid.). The alchemical place of transformation, then, where change is possible, is in appreciations, in much the same way that Locke's paradox of substance is a place of transformation for Burke. They are, essentially, the same place, the place where qualities float free, where they do not have anything standing under them. It is the place where the empiricists' dualism collapses, and from here James can argue against this dualism by showing that consciousness as an entity is "fictitious," a fable that the philosophers have constructed out of mere breath. "The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them" (ibid.). Consciousness becomes a purely physiological phenomenon, a process of the living organism, and it is in this place of literal inspiration that poetic inspiration takes place, and is actuated into utility in the sphere of appreciations. In the sphere of appreciations, the spirit of the age, the inspiration of the men who breath there, makes its transformation. Certainly we can add nobility to this list of appreciations, and examine Stevens' discussion of nobility, his appreciation par excellence. Stevens is finding the nexus of metamorphosis in that diremptive state where appreciations create an indefinable situation, which recreate the world and make it more bearable. In "The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet," Stevens speaks of the making of the poem through the portal of the in here/out there alchemy, an alchemy of the imagination: A poem is a particular of life thought of for so long that one's thought has become an inseparable part of it or a particular of life so intensely felt that the feeling has entered into it. [. . .] [A]nd for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there--few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings. (NA 65-66) In "The Noble Rider," the purpose of poetry is to create the nobility of the age, and he defines this nobility as a wave-like force. It is not made of the poem's words, no more than the wave is made of the water; the wave, and the poem's nobility, are processes, forces, not reifiable into the stuff of what they are made: "But as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same" (NA 35-36). "It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality." Note the violence, and then the sexuality of these lines: the tension between diremption and ingress, a physical movement of force against force. This is where the poet, or at least the poet with the personality of Stevens, works, in the liquid movement that Stevens found, we might say, in the agent-scene ratio. This is a realm where the location of personality, or what we commonly term consciousness, is not definable as "in me" or "out there." The distinction made here between reality as outside and the imagination inside locates the crux of Stevens' philosophical concerns, and that small part of "the intelligence" that the poet must not resist. Perhaps the most vital distinction here between Stevens' poetry and the empiricist philosophers that he had absorbed is that Stevens does not seek a fixed position on the issue: there are no set boundaries in the agent-scene ratio. The agent-scene ratio, as we have seen, is a transformative area where the agent, whether that be the individual, God, or the collective society, encompasses all of the the scene, and at this point we are at Burke's "paradox of the absolute," a point that "alchemically" transforms the emphasis from agent to scene. What is inside and what is outside is up to question, and it was this question that the idealist philosophers grappled with. Stevens' refusal to fix the relation between the two may bring his work against charges of abstraction, even incoherence, but his poems, in remaining unfixed, also seem in this age to be truer to the physicists' understanding of the world in process. As Stevens expressed late in his career, "philosophy has long dismissed the notion of substance and modern physics has endorsed the dismissal [. . .] How, then does the world come to appear to us as a collection of solid, static objects extended in space? Because of the intellect, which presents us with a false view of it" (Rotella 102). Reason may want the boundary distinctions satisfied, but this is not the desire of the imagination. The difference between the rationalist and the imaginative thinker is evident in Harmonium, and "Six Significant Landscapes" (CP 73-75) spells this out. "Rationalists, wearing square hats,/ Think, in square rooms,/ Looking at the floor,/ Looking at the ceiling./ They confine themselves/ To right-angled triangles." They confine themselves to the clear-cut, indisputable. The room is comprehensible; its lines are clear. But the room is empty. Locke would only verify those qualities that "do really exist in the bodies themselves"--"solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number." On the other hand, colors, smells, tastes and sounds are suspect, allotted in Locke's terminology to secondary qualities; if we lost our sense faculties they would vanish, and to Locke this means that we cannot accept them into any verifiable reality independent of the agent. To Locke, what is inside--sensation, and the imaginative thinking that sensation triggers--is suspect, and attending to our sense faculties bring us to a false view of what is real. Stevens, with backup from modern physics and philosophy, takes the opposite position. The rationalist cannot conceive of a world without fixed substance, and so falls into error. This is the position of critics who ally Stevens with process philosophy, and this understanding of reality in Stevens is as old as Heroclitus, as is the poignant comedy of the human condition as we try to find meaning in the flux. It is the way to knowledge through sensation, not intellect. Thus poetry, and particularly the purest, intellect-free poetry, connects us to reality "Six Significant Landscapes" offers six views of the inside-outside, and the third stanza offers the world of the imaginative thinker: I measure myself The poet encompasses as far as his senses can reach. However, he is
also endangered by the invasion inward. He may be taller than any tree,
but he cannot bear the ants invading his shadow. Where does the human
end and the environment begin when the night is a female, when "the
absent moon waits in a glade/ Of your dark self"? When Stevens spoke at The Museum of Modern art in 1951, he again spoke of the necessary role of the poet to save us from desolation. Differentiating between two types of modern poetry, "one that is modern in respect to what it says, the other that is modern in respect to form"--that is, one that is didactic, and one that refuses didacticism, searching only for the sublime composiiton--he speaks derisively of the first kind: "[o]ne sees a good deal of poetry [. . .] in which the exploitation of form involves nothing more than the use of small letters for capitals, eccentric line-endings, too little or too much punctuation and similar aberrations. These have nothing to be alive" (NA 168). Again he comes back to the word "sensibility," and ventures a lengthy definition of its place in poetry. What he comes to here is a different perspective than his definitions in "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet." "In the earlier essay, the artist's nerves determine the creative process. Comparing the poet to the musician, he notes that "[i]f a man's nerves shrink from loud sounds, they are quite likely to shrink from strong colors and he will be found preferring a drizzle in Venice to a hard rain in Hartford. Everything is of a piece. If he composes music it will be music agreeable to his own nerves" (NA 48). In the later essay, this nervous sensibility has been markedly reduced, the shrinking away from a loud sound--in this case "an outburst on the trumpets"--is negligible to the creative process. Yet if one questions the dogma that the origins of poetry are to be found in the sensibility [. . .] we find that the operative force within us does not, in fact, seem to be the sensibility, that is to say, the feelings. It seems to be a constructive faculty, that derives its energy more from the imagination than from the sensibility. (NA 164) The differences between the earlier and later essays are notable. Not only nervous sensibility, but also the sensibility of "the feelings," are no longer of import. What the poet uses is intelligence--a remarkable reversal from his adage that the poet "must resist the intelligence almost successfully.". "[Shakespeare] was not dependent of the fortuities of inspiration. It is not the least part of his glory that one can say of him, the greater the thinker, the greater the poet" (NA 165). Here he does not speak of the "personality of the poet," but the "artist as a person" (163), a subtle change, perhaps, but one that places the creative process in the realm of the will, in the compass of human action. The shift in emphasis is the shift from focusing on one aspect of the Minotaur, the unconscious, to the other, the rational will. What can one say of such a remarkable reversal in viewpoint? Is it a change of perspective, or only a change in vocabulary? In the end, we have to remember that the Minotaur is a hybrid, but still one animal; and Stevens was a poet, not a philosopher. The essays collected in The Necessary Angel present us with a body of work that is in many ways as subtle and artistic as Stevens' poetry. Although one may approach them looking for a definition of poetry, and indeed one receives much of worth, one is struck by the same qualities of thought which Harrison calls " the baffling abstraction into which [Stevens'] poems seem to recede, and out of which they seem to be generated" (661) In the collection's introduction, Stevens quotes himself: "The real is constantly being engulfed in the unreal. . . . [Poetry] is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock" (viii). In other words, to explain poetry, Stevens gives us his poetry, and we remain baffled in the abstractness. Perhaps, though, we become more ourselves. Works Cited Please note the following abbreviations:
Bevis, William W. Mind of Winter: Wallace Stevens, Meditation, and
Literature. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1988. Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate. Ithaca,:
Cornell University Press, 1976. Burke, Kenneth. The Grammar of Motives. New York: Prentice Hall,
1945. ---. The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1961. Elder, John. Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature.
Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985. Filreis, Alan. Wallace Stevens and the Actual World. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1991. Harrison, Robert Pogue. "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing
Itself." New Literary History, 30.3 (1999). 661-673. James, William. "Does Consciousness Exist?", Chapter 1 in
Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longman Green and Co
(1912): 1-38. <http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/%7Elward/james/James_1912/James_1912_01.html> Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age. New York: Knopf, 1953. Levin, Jonathan. The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.
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