Wallace stevens and the aesthetics of abstraction

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Wa l l ac e S t e v e ns a n d
t h e A e s t h e t ic s of
A b s t r ac t ion

Edward Ragg’s study is the first to examine the role of abstraction
throughout the work of Wallace Stevens. By tracing the poet’s interest in abstraction from Harmonium through to his later works, Ragg
argues that Stevens only fully appreciated and refined this interest
within his later career. Ragg’s detailed close-readings highlight the
poet’s absorption of late nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury painting, as well as the examples of philosophers and other
poets’ work. Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction will
appeal to those studying Stevens as well as anyone interested in the
relations between poetry and painting. This valuable study embraces
revealing philosophical and artistic perspectives, analysing Stevens’
place within and resistance to Modernist debates concerning literature, painting, representation and ‘the imagination’.
edwa r d r ag g is a poet and teaches at Tsinghua University,
Beijing. He is co-editor of Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (2008).





Wa l l ace S t e v e ns a n d
t h e A e s t h e t ic s of
A bs t r ac t ion
E dwa r d R ag g
Tsinghua University, Beijing

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© Edward Ragg 2010
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First published in print format 2010
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accurate or appropriate.


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.


From ‘A Thought Revolved’ (1936), Wallace Stevens



Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

page ix
x

Introduction: ‘Stevensian’ and the question of abstraction
1935–2009

1

1 The abstract impulse: from anecdote to ‘new romantic’ in
Harmonium (1923) and Ideas of Order (1935)

30

2 The turn to abstraction: Owl’s Clover (1936) and the ‘un-locatable’
speaker in The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)
55
3 The ‘in-visible’ abstract: Stevens’ idealism from Coleridge to
Merleau-Ponty

78

3.1Romantic adaptations: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Stevens
3.2Abstract analogues: Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, Stevens
3.3 The touch of Henri Focillon
3.4Coda: the New Criticism and abstraction

78
88
101
107

4Abstract figures: the curious case of the idealist ‘I’

110

4.1Taming ‘the guerrilla I’: the early poems of Parts of a World (1942)
4.2From ‘robust poet’ to idealist ‘I’: ‘The Noble Rider and the
Sound of Words’ (1942) and ‘The Figure of the

Youth as Virile Poet’ (1943)
4.3 The human abstract in ‘Landscape with Boat’ (1940)

5Abstract appetites: food, wine and the idealist ‘I’

5.1Tasting ‘Certain Phenomena of Sound’ (1942)
5.2Hartford Bourguignon: ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ (1942) and
Cymbeline

vii

110

119
129

136
136
143


Contents

viii

6 The pure good of theory: a new abstract emphasis

6.1 ‘Major man’ revised: ‘Paisant Chronicle’ (1945) and
‘Description Without Place’ (1945)
6.2 Writing ‘beyond’: ‘Repetitions of a Young Captain’ (1944) and

‘Three Academic Pieces’ (1947)
6.3 Pragmatic abstraction v. metaphor: ‘The Pure Good of Theory’
(1945) and Macbeth

166
166
174
185

7Bourgeois abstraction: poetry, painting and the idea of mastery
in late Stevens

204

Bibliography
Index

232
244

7.1 Mastery of life: at home with Wallace Stevens
7.2Conclusion

204
228


Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for

their support: Fiona Green, Jean Chothia, Frances Gandy, Lee Jenkins,
Maud Ellmann, Bart Eeckhout, Simon Critchley, the late Richard
Rorty, Charles Altieri, J. Hillis Miller, John N. Serio, Michael Schmidt,
Eleanor Cook, Wang Ao; Ray Ryan, Maartje Scheltens and the staff of
Cambridge University Press; Sara Peacock for her excellent copy-editing;
Paul Giles and the staff of The Rothermere American Institute; the staff
and Fellows of Selwyn College, Cambridge; Sue Hodson and the staff of
The Huntington Library, San Marino (also for permission to quote from
The Wallace Stevens Archive); Melinda McIntosh and Mike Milewski
of the University of Massachusetts (also for permission to quote from
Stevens’ copy of Henri Focillon’s The Life of Forms in Art); The University
of Chicago Library (for permission to quote from Ronald Lane Latimer’s
papers); The British Association for American Studies; The British
Academy; and Lu Zhongshe and the staff of the Foreign Languages
Department, Tsinghua University. Special thanks are also due to my parents, my parents-in-law, the late Tedman Littwin, Peter Roberts and, last
but not least, Fongyee Walker.

ix


Abbreviations

First citations present the full titles of Stevens’ works together, where relevant, with date of first publication and/or date of composition. Subsequent
references are undated. The following abbreviations for major editions
and other resources are used throughout:
BL

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria ed. James Engell
and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1983), 2 vols.

CPP Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose ed. Frank Kermode
and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997)
CW William Shakespeare: The Complete Works ed. Stanley Wells and
Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), compact edition
L
Letters of Wallace Stevens ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf,
1966; University of California Press, 1996)
OP
Opus Posthumous ed. Milton J. Bates (London: Faber, 1990)
RLP Ronald Lane Latimer Papers, University of Chicago (xeroxed
without serial numbers in The Wallace Stevens Archive)
WAS The Wallace Stevens Archive, The Huntington Library, San
Marino, California
WSJ The Wallace Stevens Journal ed. John N. Serio (Potsdam,
NY: Wallace Stevens Society, Inc., 1977–2009)

x


Introduction: ‘Stevensian’ and the question
of abstraction 1935–2009

The idea of life in the abstract is a curious one and deserves some
reflection.1
Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by
the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between
‘the nostalgia of the infinite’ and ‘the nostalgia for the infinite’
defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of
the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal,
and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé). Personism,

a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows
about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind
of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the
first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace
Stevens what la poésie pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing
to do with philosophy, it’s all art.2
[R]ecently I have been fitted into too many philosophic frames. As
a philosopher one is expected to achieve and express one’s center.
For my own part, I think that the philosophic permissible (to use an
insurance term) is a great deal different today than it was a generation or two ago. Yet 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.3

Frank O’Hara’s mock-manifesto ‘Personism’  – and the ironic movement of the same name ‘founded’ on 27 August 1959 over lunch in New
York  – testifies as much to O’Hara’s poetic relationship with Wallace
Stevens as it reveals how Stevens was viewed only four years after his
death. ‘Personism’ also recalls O’Hara’s brilliance in constructing a poetic
Wallace Stevens, Souvenirs and Prophecies:  The Young Wallace Stevens ed. Holly Stevens (New
York: Knopf, 1977), 90.
2
Frank O’Hara, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ in Selected Poems ed. Donald Allen (Harmondsworth: 
Penguin, 1994), xiii–xiv.
3
See L, 753.
1

1


2

Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction

‘personality’ equally as daunting and complex on the page as Stevens’,
if more beguiling for its surface, ‘personal’ appeal. O’Hara’s allegiance,
‘of the American poets’, to Whitman, Crane and Williams is clear.
But, as ‘Personism’ demonstrates, O’Hara had absorbed Stevens; just as
his range of international influences was as wide as, if not wider than,
Stevens’. ‘Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poésie pure was to
Béranger’: O’Hara is saying his ‘manifesto’ would, apparently, have proved
anathema to Stevens, just as ‘pure poetry’ could hardly have appealed to
Pierre Jean de Béranger, the French Republican whose popular ballads
initiated the scorn of Baudelaire. O’Hara intends a double-anachronism
where Béranger is trumped by the innovations of the later Symbolists and
Stevens is trumped by the advent of ‘Personism’ itself.
Stevens is probably the twentieth-century poet for whom the ‘nostalgia of
the infinite’ was most motivational. O’Hara alludes to de Chirico’s painting
of the same title (dated 1911, but composed a little later) with its distant yet
imposing tower flanked by a dominating, shadowy archway. In de Chirico’s
metaphysical phase, the ‘nostalgia’ experienced is inspiring and perhaps
reprehensible, refracted through Modernism’s soul-searching over questions
of reality and faith. Similarly, Stevens, despite his many affiliations with
French Symbolism, was no Mallarmé. As we shall see, a Mallarméan ‘pure
poetry’ of the ‘Idea’ was ultimately not something the Modernist Stevens
could endorse; and his initial 1930s ambivalence concerning abstraction
indicates a Modernist poet confronting the unsettling interim of two world
wars and the global economic consequences of the Depression.
As O’Hara knew, Stevens had also absorbed Modernist painting in
his own idiosyncratic way, undoubtedly affected by the representational
issues the new painting and sculpture confronted; even if, by his last decade, Stevens shunned the ‘professional modernism’ then quasi-canonical

by the 1940s and early 1950s.4 O’Hara probably read Stevens’ 1951 lecture
‘The Relations Between Poetry and Painting’ delivered at MOMA only a
few months before O’Hara would himself begin working there (MOMA
producing a pamphlet of Stevens’ paper). But it is, perhaps, Stevens’ theorizing bent that O’Hara’s wit intends to bait. Stevens could never have
been a ‘Personist poet’, if that ‘poet’ resembles the performance of the
intensely personal, yet elusive, ‘Frank’. However, Stevens did modify
his abstract spirit in his later career, oscillating between what this study
calls ‘cool’ and ‘warm’ abstraction.5 Indeed, would not Stevens have been
See L, 647.
The distinction is adapted from late 1940s and 1950s French art criticism. ‘Cool abstraction’
refers to the geometric ‘Art Concret’, ‘warm abstraction’ to more expressionist painting or any

4
5


Introduction

3

intrigued by O’Hara’s playful claim that ‘Personism’ is ‘so totally opposed
to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction
for the first time, really, in the history of poetry’? To what value can the
abstract wheel turn and come full circle? In O’Hara’s case, the answer is a
pregnant ‘zero’. In other words, this ironically original, ‘true abstraction’
represents the poet pushed to the extreme of the personal in verse, thereby
becoming an abstract version of the poet:  genuinely removed from the
work rather than artificially divorced from it.
O’Hara could not have raised this issue in this way without Stevens’
prior posing of the question of abstraction. For a poet so affected by

the ‘death of the gods’, the lingering desire to capture the idea of ‘the
infinite’ or transcendent remained a strong feature throughout Stevens’
work.6 Simultaneously, Stevens’ poetry reveals a poet equally sensitive as
O’Hara to the implicit stances which the varying abstractness of his writing involves. For Stevens, abstraction represented a question of artistic
and philosophical proportions; and yet his natural inclinations were those
of O’Hara (adamantly in the ‘all art’ camp), resistant to assimilation into
‘too many philosophic frames’. Nevertheless, the philosophical leanings
of Stevens’ writing and its engagement with ‘abstraction’ are unmistakable. What Stevens made of philosophy is most noticeable in his expression of an abstract vocabulary, albeit a rhetoric essentially jettisoned in his
late career as the poet absorbed the consequences of abstraction.
Without doubt, Stevens remains among the more enigmatic, reclusive, cosmopolitan, oft quoted (but under-read) and seriously playful of
the American poets to have emerged during the Modernist era. By turns
shy, brash, idiosyncratic, straight-talking, disinclined to read publicly (and
fiercely private), Stevens stage-managed his late-blossoming poetic career
from the confines of his vice-presidential office at The Hartford Accident
and Indemnity Company. Stevens had written poetry from his youth. But
it was only having discovered an initial niche in the new art and literature
of international Modernism that he gave voice to the striking performance
pieces of Harmonium (1923), many of which appeared in the ephemeral
pages of the little magazines. It would be some twelve years before Stevens
published a second volume: the defensive and defiant Ideas of Order (1935).
By the mid-1930s Stevens sought a poetic idiom adequate to the task of
addressing the role of abstract representation in an increasingly violent and
abstraction championing spontaneous creation or the ‘unformed’ (‘Art Informel’/‘Tachisme’).
See Anna Moszynka, Abstract Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), 119–20, 129.
6
See CPP, 329.


4

Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction

pressingly ‘real’ world. What the poet had learnt from Modernist and also
Impressionist painting was, by 1935, in serious need of realignment and
refinement if the increasingly abstract tenor of Stevens’ poetry was to have
any meaningful relationship with a wider world.
Put differently, Stevens’ initial embrace of Modernist art and the nominal ‘pure poetry’ of his first phase led to the desire to justify a modernized ‘pure poetry’ during the turbulent 1930s, not least following
Stanley Burnshaw’s criticism of Ideas of Order.7 Stevens became increasingly ambivalent about abstract forms of artistic representation at the very
point where his own poetry tended toward an abstract aesthetic: one that
would eventually leave ‘pure poetry’ behind (even though the charge of
‘irrelevance’ would continue to stick).
This book is principally interested in the turn to abstraction and its
influential aftermath that occurred in roughly 1935 in Stevens’ work. That
the place of abstraction in Stevens remains underappreciated, misunderstood and the subject of considerable debate, makes careful groundclearing desirable. How did abstraction become a question for Stevens
as a poet? How has the issue of abstraction engaged Stevens’ critics? Did
Stevens’ attitudes toward abstraction change and do we find different
expressions of abstract writing throughout the corpus?
The book proceeds in broadly chronological fashion to exemplify how
Stevens came to discover and absorb abstraction, providing new readings of the poetry and prose which chart the development of Stevensian
abstraction in the mainstay of the poet’s career from 1935 to 1955. Chapter 1
analyses the abstract impulse in Stevens’ writing and its nominal relations
with ‘pure poetry’ as expressed in Harmonium and Ideas of Order. Chapter
2 explores Stevens’ turn to abstraction in the mid-1930s – as exemplified in
The Man with the Blue Guitar – focusing on the emergence of a novel textual speaker (addressed in Chapters 4 and 5) with Picasso’s influence as a
backdrop. Chapter 3 explains the philosophical relations between abstraction, idealism and phenomenology in Stevens’ work, illustrating how the
poet’s embrace of abstraction was conditioned by Romantic and phenomenologist leanings (the British Romantics, Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty and
Henri Focillon feature prominently). Chapter 4 then analyses the place
of abstract figures in Stevens’ mid-career, especially a neglected speaker,
Stevens’ idealist ‘I’, suggesting how this figure conditions an aesthetic
Stanley Burnshaw, ‘Turmoil in the Middle Ground’ New Masses 17 (1935), 41–2. For retrospective views, see Alan Filreis and Harvey Teres, ‘An Interview with Stanley Burnshaw’ WSJ 13.2

(1989), 109–21, and Burnshaw’s ‘Reflections on Wallace Stevens’ WSJ 13.2 (1989), 122–6.

7


Introduction

5

influenced by Cézanne’s notion of abstraction. Chapter 5 capitalizes on
this analysis to address the under-explored relations between Stevens’
meditations on gastronomy and abstract reflection (with Stevens’ idealist
‘I’ forming an important bridge). Chapter 6 then focuses on Stevens’ jettisoning of an overt abstract vocabulary as his writing moved into a more
pragmatic mode of abstract inspiration. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses how
Stevens’ mature abstract work relates to his domestic life, combining artcollecting, gastronomy and poetic meditation. In other words, the various
expressions of abstract writing with which Stevens experimented  – his
‘cool’ and ‘warm’ abstract performances  – only found full voice in the
‘bourgeois’ ruminations of his late career.
What emerges is a Stevens attracted to the mental processes enabling
abstract figuration rather than a poet mimicking abstract painting in verbal form. ‘The Public Square’ (1923) with its ‘slash of angular blacks’ is,
perhaps, an early exception; but the mature Stevens was motivated by
ideas concerning abstraction rather than the realization of a pared-down
poetry of abstract implication.8 Once he had embraced abstraction as a
positive force in his writing – around 1937 – the main aesthetic challenge
Stevens faced was exploiting what abstraction offered. This would see him
dispatch the overt abstract rhetoric and specialist symbolism of ‘Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction’ (1942) and embrace a more boldly abstract
verse reflecting on the ‘baldest’ concepts:  ‘metaphor’, ‘resemblance’,
‘description’, ‘analogy’, ‘the ultimate poem’. However sparse these concepts appear, Stevens crafted from them a verse of humane abstract meditation whose various expressions are intimately pursued throughout.
Opposite ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, some readers may be surprised not to discover a detailed reading of this doctrinal poem.9 My

interest has rather been in those poems of abstraction that surround and
chime with ‘Notes’ throughout Stevens’ career; those which are perhaps
more a realization of abstract powers than Stevens’ more ‘theoretical’
poem can claim to be. Whilst I believe ‘Notes’ can be exonerated of
the aloofness to ‘reality’ laid at Stevens’ door by Marjorie Perloff, this
oft-read text – which has functioned as a vortex in Stevens criticism –
only adumbrates what abstraction was coming to mean to Stevens in
1942.10 Certainly, the poet was able to capitalize on his aesthetic discoveries in other 1942 texts (see Chapter 5’s readings of ‘Certain Phenomena
CPP, 91.  9  Ibid., 329.
See Perloff, ‘Revolving in Crystal: The Supreme Fiction and the Impasse of Modernist Lyric’ in
Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism ed. Albert Gelpi (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 41–64.

8
10


6

Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction

of Sound’ and ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’). But Stevens also sensed that the
trumpeting of abstraction in ‘Notes’ erred on too cold an aesthetic front,
hence perhaps his later proposition of a final, if unrealized, section for
the poem: ‘It Must Be Human’.11 As Chapter 6 makes clear with respect
to ‘Paisant Chronicle’ (1945), perhaps the ‘major man’ of ‘Notes’ was simply too abstracted to come alive for Stevens, even as he modified the
figure in this later poem.
Of course, this study does make repeated reference to ‘Notes’, and contextualizes the concept of a ‘supreme fiction’ in Chapter 3. However, I have
sought elsewhere to distinguish between this poem’s nominative power –
in contrast with ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’ and ‘Description Without Place’

(1945)  – and the abstract spirit of Stevens’ post-‘Notes’ verse.12 Whereas
‘Notes’ persistently names and signals its objects of aesthetic interest  –
even where it ironizes nomination (‘But Phoebus was / A name for something that never could be named’) – the mature Stevens realized he could
fashion abstract poetry without recourse to an overt idiom, at least not
the abstract terminology of his 1942 work.13 For the mature Stevens, a
robust abstract poetry would never have to declare ‘The major abstraction is the commonal’; but rather would demonstrate or imply such an
imaginative possibility. What ‘Notes’ calls an ‘abstraction blooded’ other
Stevens poems would have to achieve, as the poet jostled with the innate
problems of conveying the ‘[i]nvisible or visible or both:  / A seeing and
unseeing in the eye’.14 From the poet who declared as early as ‘A HighToned Old Christian Woman’ (1922) that ‘Poetry is the supreme fiction,
madame’ to the architect of ‘The Pure Good of Theory’  – discussed at
length in Chapter 6  – it is the evolution of Stevensian abstraction that
concerns the present work.15
But what picture has Stevens criticism painted of the poet’s abstractions? Scholars whose careers have shaped contemporary criticism  –
Altieri, Bloom, Donoghue, Frye, Hillis Miller, Kermode, Vendler – have
all battled with Stevens before themselves becoming subject to the
skirmishes of younger scholars.16 Today, being a ‘Stevensian’ is not, at
See L, 863–4.
See Ragg, ‘Good-bye Major Man: Reading Stevens without “Stevensian”’ WSJ 29.1 (Spring 2005),
98–105; ‘Love, Wine, Desire:  Stevens’ “Montrachet-Le-Jardin” and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline’
WSJ 30.2 (Fall 2006), 194ff.
13
CPP, 329.  14  Ibid., 336, 333.
15
Ibid., 47.
16
Select works include: Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens:  The Poems
of Our Climate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); Denis Donoghue, Connoisseurs
11

12


Introduction

7

least in North America, a cranky activity; and, as recent conferences
reveal, critical interest in Stevens will excite equally vociferous debate
in the twenty-first century and no doubt beyond.17 More even than
Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Moore, Pound or Williams, Stevens continues
to upset and inspire critics in the extreme. Arguably, he achieves first
place among twentieth-century poets for garnering the largest groups of
detractors and zealots, ones for whom abstraction often proves a burning issue.
As Lee Jenkins has observed, Stevens’ early reputation on both sides
of the Atlantic was dogged by charges of dandyism, effeteness, even irresponsibility; charges variously traced to fin de siècle Aestheticism and the
Symbolist-inspired ‘pure poetry’ of Harmonium.18 Gradually, more positive accounts of Stevens’ relations with Aestheticism, Symbolism and
the Romantic poets have emerged.19 Nevertheless, doubt persists as to
whether Stevens has anything to say, irrespective of his undeniable talent
for poetic speech; raising suspicion his own work is hopelessly ‘abstract’
in a pejorative sense.20 From the late 1980s to the present, following the
aftermath of deconstructionist criticism, debate surrounding Stevens’
responses to social and political realities – particularly the Depression and
the Second World War – has been especially acute.21 But whilst historicist
accounts have yielded vital information about Stevens’ quotidian existence  – as poet, art-collector and surety bond lawyer  – there is obvious
disagreement as to how Stevens’ times affected his poetry and vice versa;
of Chaos:  Ideas of Order in Modern American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984); Northrop Frye, ‘The Realistic Oriole: A Study of Wallace Stevens’ in Wallace Stevens: A
Collection of Critical Essays ed. Marie Borroff (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), 161–76;

J. Hillis Miller, ‘Theoretical and Atheoretical in Stevens’ in Wallace Stevens: A Celebration ed.
Frank Doggett and Robert Buttel (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1980), 274–85;
Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens (London: Faber, [1960] 1989); Helen Vendler, ‘The Qualified
Assertions of Wallace Stevens’ in The Act of Mind:  Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens ed.
Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis Miller (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965),
163–78.
17
‘Celebrating Wallace Stevens:  The Poet of Poets in Connecticut’ (2004), University of
Connecticut; ‘Wallace Stevens’ (2004), University of London; ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens
in Europe’ (2005), Rothermere American Institute, Oxford. See WSJ 28.2, 29.1, 30.1.
18
Lee M. Jenkins, Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2000), 3–4.
19
See Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985); Michel Benamou, Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1972); George Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and
Stevens (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
20
See Marjorie Perloff, ‘Pound/Stevens:  whose era?’ in The Dance of the Intellect:  Studies in the
Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 2.
21
See Melita Schaum, Wallace Stevens and the Critical Schools (Tuscaloosa, AL:  University of
Alabama Press, 1988), 100–28, 129–82.


8

Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction

and it has been especially hard for historicist criticism to align contextual

politics with poetic practice.
Painted most negatively, Stevens is usually accused of being doomed
to a kind of aloof abstraction that disabled him from writing verse
adequate to his epoch; despite his avowal that the poet of ‘any time’
must discover ‘what seems to him to be poetry at that time’.22 He is frequently charged with writing without feeling; and even ‘Stevensians’,
as Bates observes, can find the poet ‘emotionally unsympathetic’.23
Typically, the ‘abstract side’ of Stevens’ writing disappoints readers
who want literature to have an overt relationship with everyday life.
Halliday, despite his admiration, mounts ‘a moral critique of Stevens’
as a writer whose work apparently embodies ‘an objectionable withdrawal […] from caring about […] individual other persons’.24 Such
didacticism overlooks not only the range of Stevens’ work, but the
reach of poetry itself. Sadly, the tendency to equate ‘the abstract’ with
‘the inhuman’ has triggered the majority of misplaced charges of obliviousness on Stevens’ part.
This nominally ‘inhuman’ side assumes a different complexion, however, once a more imaginative ear is given to abstraction. Vendler suggests
Stevens’ poetry specializes in ‘second-order reflection’ – rather than ‘firstorder personal narrative’. But, as Vendler suggests, this dichotomy masks
something subtler: ‘the distinction is so crude as to be false, because all
good poetry pretending to be first-order poetry […] is in fact implicitly
second-order poetry by virtue of its having arranged its first-order narrative in a certain shape’.25 Thus Stevens cannot be superficially a ‘secondorder’ poet who transmutes ‘first-order’ concerns for precisely the reason
Vendler gives for the distinction’s failure to hold. Nevertheless, the idea
that an abstract poetic has an abundantly human task is given weight
by the calculated poetic interaction of ‘second-order’ and ‘first-order’
concerns.
Sympathetic critics, therefore, counter the inhumanity charge by suggesting Stevens, like Yeats, is a high-priest of the imagination, an American
CPP, 639.
See Jenkins, Wallace Stevens, 3; George Lensing, ‘Wallace Stevens in England’ in Wallace
Stevens: A Celebration ed. Frank Doggett and Robert Buttel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980), 130–48; Carolyn Masel, ‘Stevens and England: A Difficult Crossing’ WSJ 25.2
(2001), 122–37; Milton J. Bates, ‘Pain is Human: Wallace Stevens at Ground Zero’ The Southern
Review 39.1 (2003), 169.
24

Mark Halliday, Stevens and the Interpersonal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 94.
25
Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens:  Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1988), 75.
22
23


Introduction

9

Coleridge without Coleridge’s metaphysics, an Emersonian who knew
a thing or two about pain; even, paradoxically, because of a superficial
indifference to suffering.26 As Stevens himself remarked: ‘Sentimentality
is a failure of feeling.’27 Certainly, Stevens stands to one side of the crowd,
scrutinizing how poetry becomes a viable part of life; a writer unlikely
to be swept up by political or literary movements even as he was influenced by them.28 The place of abstraction in that project is undeniable;
but the impetus for this study emanates from the misconceptions that
very abstract aesthetic has aroused.
One upshot of sympathetic historicist work, however, has been an overemphasis on the role Stevens’ poetry plays in responding to political and
social issues. Although Cleghorn declares Stevens ‘ideologically elusive’,
he suggests ‘Description Without Place’ exacts a ‘deconstruction’ of the
‘expansionist rhetoric’ of American foreign policy in 1945.29 Schaum views
Stevens as ‘centrally political’, arguing the poet ‘provides startling insights
into the fictions of history, the rhetorical “illusions” by which we as social
beings live and act’.30 Similarly, Brogan finds Stevens to be a ‘very politically involved poet’ who ‘dismantle[s] false public rhetorics’.31 Filreis also
claims Stevens’ misgivings about the New Critics – especially Allen Tate’s
ferocious response to the ‘Brooks–MacLeish’ call for a nationalistic war
literature – led the poet to adopt a ‘nationalist’ stance during the 1940s.32

Yielding to the pressure to answer Perloff’s damning appraisal of Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction, such responses over-state Stevens’ readability as a
politically concerned poet, sacrificing the particularities of the poetry to the
general argument that poetry challenges commonsensical understandings
of the world/‘reality’.33 Whilst Stevens criticism has been enriched by reexamination of the interaction between history, politics and poetry, there is
See Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature:  Emersonian Reflections (London: Faber, 1987),
178–80.
27
CPP, 903.
28
See CPP, 665.
29
Angus J. Cleghorn, Wallace Stevens’ Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric (New York: Palgrave, 2000),
24.
30
Melita Schaum, ‘Lyric Resistance: Views of the Political in the Poetics of Wallace Stevens and
H.D.’ WSJ 13.2 (1989), 204, 200.
31
Jacqueline Brogan, ‘Wrestling with those “Rotted Names”:  Wallace Stevens’ and Adrienne
Rich’s “Revolutionary Poetics”’ WSJ 25.1 (2001), 19, 23.
32
Alan Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1991), 80.
33
See Perloff, ‘Revolving in Crystal’, 41–64. Perloff refers explicitly to the Cummington Press edition. Elsewhere I refer to ‘Notes’ as a single poem, as it appears, tardily, in Transport to Summer
(1947).
26


10

Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction

obviously a danger in implying Stevens was this politicized, however ‘political’ his apolitical gestures appear and however much political readings
might engage the prosodic and other poetic features of Stevens’ work.34
Historicist accounts have also shied from abstraction, unless the
concept is linked with the poet’s early isolationism or the later political dimension of Abstract Expressionism. But the tendency to defend
Stevens excessively derives from the sheer abstract ambiguity of his often
enigmatic verse. With critical hindsight, it also appears that Stevens’
own abstract terms seemingly resist novel interpretation. ‘Major man’, a
‘new romantic’, a ‘supreme fiction’, ‘the first idea’, ‘the death of the gods’,
‘the imagination–reality complex’, ‘the fluent mundo’, ‘the abstract’
itself: the choice terms of Stevens’ mid-career furnish the reader with a
ready-made vocabulary for reading back into the poetry. It is an idiom
which provides the illusion that Stevens’ work constitutes a ‘harmonious whole’, a tendency critics assume the poet encouraged in wanting to title his 1954 Collected Poems ‘The Whole of Harmonium’ (even
although Stevens actually spent a lifetime resisting a collected edition of
his work).35
Several critics complain of the effects abstract, and often binary,
terms serve critically. Leggett laments the ‘imagination-reality terminology that has plagued Stevens criticism for decades’.36 Cleghorn observes
‘[b]inary oppositions function significantly in the Stevens critical legacy’.37
Proponents of a ‘theory’ through which readers can navigate Stevens’
work often strive in vain to discover the ‘metaphysic’, as Frye assumes,
that informs his ‘poetic vision’ or the ‘theory of knowledge’ that informs
Stevens’ ‘metaphysic’.38 Typically, in the absence of a discernible ‘theory’,
critics harness another vocabulary for support, either beyond or deriving from Stevens. Donoghue’s 1980 epiphany where he reports wanting ‘to give up [Stevens’] privileged terms, or to go beyond or beneath
them’ is telling, as is Vendler’s contemporaneous move to a vocabulary of
‘desire’.39
Filreis admits: ‘Those of us who have tried to make manifest the political life of an apparently
unpolitical poet found the requirements of the project were so daunting […] that we had to
make short work of sound in readings of poems where the music of words is obviously central’,

‘Sound at an Impasse’ WSJ 31.1 (2009), 21.
35
See L, 834, 829.
36
B. J. Leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory:  Conceiving the Supreme Fiction (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 80.
37
Cleghorn, Wallace Stevens’ Poetics, 3.
38
Frye, ‘The Realistic Oriole’, 161.
39
Denis Donoghue, ‘Two Notes on Stevens’ WSJ 4.3/4 (1980), 44; Helen Vendler, Wallace
Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).
34


Introduction

11

Comparative work on Stevens has, therefore, proven critically popular.
Stevens’ abstract vocabulary appears less intimidating when contextualized
through Nietzsche, William James, Emerson, the British Romantics, other
American Modernists, or various Continental thinkers and writers. Not
only does comparison provide Stevens’ readers with various intellectual and
poetic contexts, it deflects the totalizing power Stevens’ mid-career vocabulary wields. For Stevens criticism has not only suffered from binary oppositions or enigmatic terms. Its main abstract figures, championed in ‘Notes’,
feature frequently in self-confirming readings of the poet’s work. A critical
idiom, ‘Stevensian’, establishes a hermeneutic circle in which the corpus itself
‘revolv[es] in crystal’, where every phase of Stevens’ writing is reducible to the
terminology that actually only dominates the period in which Stevens first

embraced abstraction: 1935–45.40 Among this book’s claims is that the ‘fluent
mundo’ is not co-extensive with the Stevens corpus; that Stevens’ need to
create a vocabulary advertising abstraction was born of the early 1930s and
did not survive the mid-1940s; that it was not until his final decade that he
fully absorbed abstraction; and that, if Stevens is to be read afresh, a revisionist account of how and why he was drawn to ‘the abstract’ must be found.
My concern, therefore, is more with re-examining what abstraction
represented to Stevens  – through a combination of close-readings and
review of the documentary evidence, published and unpublished  – and
less with arguing with Stevens critics on their own terms. As pragmatism
cautions, the latter would only give credibility to the very vocabulary one
wants to re-interpret or transcend.41 One example of ‘Stevensian’ at work,
however, should suffice in demonstrating how approaching so ‘abstract’ a
subject as ‘Stevensian abstraction’ requires careful choices of vocabulary.
Harold Bloom reads ‘Notes’ through Stevens’ ‘first idea’, the abstract
notion that poem itself scrutinizes, observing:
For Stevens, an image is an obsession […] and so he tries to demystify it by a
reduction to its First Idea, a Fate or reality supposedly beyond further reduction.
But […] he undergoes a recognition of the First Idea (itself an ‘imagined thing’
or image) and then finds he is in danger of being dehumanized by this Freedom
of substitution, since substitution is its own meaning, as though to-put-intoquestion was what would suffice. Thus Stevens moves on to a fresh recognition
or retroactive meaningfulness of the First Idea as a potentia (both Power and
passion) or pathos, or as he says […] the fiction that results from feeling.42
CPP, 351.
See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 8–9; Philosophy and Social Hope (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), xviii.
42
Bloom, Wallace Stevens, 170.
40
41

12

Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction

Bloom struggles here to illuminate Stevens’ ‘first idea’, despite harnessing
his own Emersonian ‘triad’ of Fate, Freedom and Power. Bloom’s enigmatic ‘American Orphism’ cannot ultimately compete with Stevens’ terminology, as his resorting to both the ‘first idea’ and troping the poet’s
own phrases demonstrates (‘what [would] suffice’, ‘the fiction that results
from feeling’).43 This is not to imply Stevens’ work does not reflect on itself
or that it is illegitimate to refer to Stevensian terms per se. It is to stress the
tendency of an abstract vocabulary to dominate interpretation; although
I distinguish between Stevens’ terminology in situ and ‘Stevensian’, the
critical language requiring translation into less abstract idioms.
Stevens created, therefore, a seductive idiom which can encourage
uncritical familiarity (Leggett wittily observes that Bloom himself suffers
an ‘anxiety of influence’ over Stevens’ poetics).44 Richardson even insists on
the necessity of learning Stevens’ ‘language’ before approaching his verse.45
But this strategy risks foregrounding only one element of Stevens’ achievement at the expense of reading the poetry intimately. Similarly, if criticism
can only make limited use of ‘Stevensian’, comparative studies can suffer
from reifying a substitute language in place of reading Stevens at all. For
example, Bové’s analysis of ‘The Snow Man’ (1921) shows more familiarity
with Heidegger than it does with Stevens and risks rendering Heidegger
and Stevens unintelligible. Referring to Stevens’ ‘listener’, Bové writes:
He is ‘nothing himself,’ that is, he is ontologically identical with the other insofar as they are both part of ‘what-is’ existing in and by virtue of ‘nothing’ […]
He senses the falsity of the dualistic separation of res cogitans and res extensa and
sees the primordiality of Being-in-the-World, alongside the World, as a structure
of his own Being.46

Pragmatist discourse also urges not investing foundational or ‘metaphysical’ priority in any one vocabulary. Rorty wryly comments of Heidegger’s
language: ‘Heideggerese is only Heidegger’s gift to us, not Being’s gift to

Heidegger’ (he also brings Heidegger and Derrida to task for re-capitulating what Heidegger himself calls ‘the tradition of onto-theology’).47 For
Ibid., 5; see CPP, 218–19, 351.
Leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 70.
45
Joan Richardson, ‘Learning Stevens’s Language: The Will & the Weather’ in Teaching Wallace
Stevens:  Practical Essays ed. John N. Serio and B. J. Leggett (Knoxville, TN:  University of
Tennessee Press, 1994), 140–55.
46
Paul A. Bové, Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), 190–1.
47
Richard Rorty, ‘Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Reification of Language’ in Essays on
Heidegger and Others:  Philosophical Papers Vol. ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 65; ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’ in Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays:  1972–1980)
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 100.
43

44


Introduction

13

Rorty that tradition specializes in spawning dominant master vocabularies with illusory qualities. Referring to Derrida, he warns: ‘We may find
ourselves thinking that what Heidegger thought could not be effed [sic]
really can be, if only grammatologically’.48 To trope Rorty, ‘Stevensian’ is
only Stevens’ gift to us, not the Abstract’s gift to Stevens.
Unsurprisingly, the word ‘abstract’ has occasioned conflicting debate.
Leggett notes the confusing tendency of associating abstraction with a)

isolating ‘reality’ without the interference of the imagination and b) creating poetry opposed to the concrete and physical.49 It will become clear
that I consider Stevensian abstraction an idealist process that coincides
with neither of these positions. Leggett himself traces Stevens’ ‘abstract’
to the poet’s reading of I. A. Richards’ Coleridge on Imagination (1934).
Although Leggett is right to link Stevensian abstraction with Coleridgean
idealism, I suggest a need to go beyond Richards’ Coleridge to the
Biographia Literaria and other idealist phenomena for support. Clearly,
no single textual source of influence exists for an imaginative process that
evolved gradually in Stevens. It is, therefore, through a range of vocabularies that Stevens’ ‘abstract’ may be read afresh. The point of focusing on
the term is not merely that ‘major man’, a ‘supreme fiction’ and Stevens’
other figures are abstract. One simply cannot understand the poet Stevens
becomes, both during 1935–45 and throughout his career, without some
account of what abstraction meant to him personally and in practice.
As Patke observes, Stevens’ 1900 journal entry, noting that ‘the idea
of life in the abstract’ was a subject worthy of ‘some reflection’, proved
prophetic for the poet’s career.50 But what specific critical arguments concerning abstraction should be grasped? Stevens’ occasional companion
Richard Eberhart appreciated how the abstract quality of Stevens’ writing represented ‘a spring to […] contemplation’.51 Anthony Hecht, though
ambivalent, observed Stevens’ interest in ‘the very beauty of the abstract
formulation of things’.52 Doggett, meanwhile, suggested Stevensian
abstraction ‘contains something of the drama of being and of a specific
existence’.53 Ellmann, keen to dispense with treating Stevens the man
and poet as categorically distinct, remarks:  ‘Stevens presented a mode
Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’, 101.
Leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, 34.
50
Rajeev S. Patke, The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens:  An Interpretative Study (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 130.
51
Richard Eberhart, ‘Notes to a Class in Adult Education’ Accent 7.4 (1947), 251–3.
52

Anthony Hecht, ‘A Sort of Heroism’ Hudson Review 10 (1957–8), 607.
53
Frank Doggett, Stevens’ Poetry of Thought (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press,
1966), 216.
48

49