5 - ‘Resist the intelligence almost successfully’: Wallace Stevens

Summary

The fatal problem with poetry: poems.

Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (2017: 32)

There is a poetry of the abstract; if you do not like it, even if it is firmly rooted in the particulars of the world, you will not like Stevens.

Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens (1989: 46)

Let us think about it and not say that our abstraction is this, that or the other.

Wallace Stevens, letter to Hi Simons, 28 January 1943 (LWS 438)

The chief defect of humanism is that it concerns human beings. Between humanism and something else it may be possible to create an acceptable fiction.

Wallace Stevens, letter to Henry Church, 18 May 1943 (LWS 449)

The world? The human as inhuman? That which thinks not,

Feels not, resembling thought, resembling feeling?

Wallace Stevens, ‘Things of August’ (CPWS 493)

There is no denying the visibility of abstraction in Wallace Stevens. ‘Abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ are words so regularly offered up in the plain view of Stevens's poetry and prose as to have already shaped a critical field. ‘Abstract’, maintains Edward Ragg, is ‘Stevens’ most unavoidable term – that part of the Stevensian rubric most requiring translation’ (Ragg 2010: 57). Ragg's thought-provoking 2010 study, Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction, encapsulates a critical preoccupation which includes, in the case of Charles Altieri's work, two different attempts at addressing the question of ‘why Stevens must be abstract’ (Altieri 1985, 1989). Yet abstraction's facility for disappearance haunts even these most attentive commentators. ‘Both Ragg and I’, writes Charles Altieri in Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity (2013), ‘think that Stevens uses “abstraction” in two fundamental ways, but neither of us is quite capable of keeping the differences in view’ (Altieri 2013: 253).

Altieri's ‘two fundamental ways’ probably refer to Edward Ragg's argument concerning a change in the orientation of Stevens's poetry toward abstraction from around 1937 onwards. Before this point, Ragg argues, Stevens's references to abstraction are overt, and they tend to refer to ideas, such as ‘theory of poetry’ or ‘supreme fiction’, that help to ‘realise particular poems’. After this point, abstraction becomes gradually internalised in the poetry as a principle closer to aesthetic autonomy.