Chapter 14 - Poetic Thinking

Summary

Altieri’s chapter defines four basic modes of thinking in Wallace Stevens’s poetry. Harmonium (1923) reconceives what poetic thinking can be—from an ideal of cogent masculine argument to the possibility of thinking against generalization. Such thinking offers allegories that fascinate without resolving. And it shifts the sensuality of poetry from an emphasis on referring to sensuous detail to a lyric sensuality that is basic to the forms of concreteness established by the workings of the medium. Second, Stevens turns in Ideas of Order (1936) from valuing the eccentric to imagining how poetic thinking can become central to ordinary life. Third, by the final poems of Transport to Summer (1947), Stevens seems to become embarrassed by his own rhetoric of the hero and major man. He becomes increasingly concerned with blending the unreal of fiction with the work of realization, a concept strikingly parallel to Paul Cézanne’s idea of how art brings force and vitality to nature. Finally, that theoretical concern for blending fictionality with realization generates in The Rock (1954) a mode of poetic thinking inseparable from a sense of self-conscious dwelling that enables us to value the artifice present in even the most elemental of experiences.