As the reason destroys, the poet must create

– Stevens, Adagia

The historical exigencies of the 1939 s and 1940 s shaped Stevens’ vision of aesthetic autonomy not only with respect to poetry’s relation to political life, cultural demands, and socioeconomic pressures, as I have been tracing so far throughout the preceding chapters. Such exigencies, especially during the time of war, had also a crucial impact on his understanding of the relationship between poetry and philosophy, and formed, to a notable extent, his idea of the autonomy of poetic thinking from philosophical systems of thought. The relation between poetry and philosophy has long been a mainstay of Stevens criticism. Stevens’ poetry has been discussed and framed, over the years, with reference to a variety of philosophical perspectives, which, in one way or another, have been discerned in the contemplative and abstract dimensions of his work. The discourse of philosophy continues to serve as an important source for scholars who seek to explore the processes of poetic thought that characterize Stevens’ poetry. But perhaps we need to come at the relation between poetry and philosophy from a different perspective, a perspective that, by focusing on their distinctions, rather than potential affinities, may get closer to Stevens’ own framing of it.

One of the several instances that highlights Stevens’ views on the relation between poetry and philosophy is found in a letter from 1954, in which he responded to the literary critic Robert Pack’s complaint that his long sequence poem, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “does not really lead anywhere” (L 863). “In projecting a supreme fiction,” Stevens wrote, “I cannot imagine anything more fatal than to state it definitely and incautiously ... we are dealing with poetry, not with philosophy. The last thing in the world that I should want to do would be to formulate a system” (L 863–4). Stevens’ reply to Pack, who was a young scholar and editor at the time, marks poetry’s difference from philosophy by identifying the latter with a goal-oriented and systematized mode of thinking: Unlike poetry, philosophy not only seeks to “lead somewhere,” but also, importantly, it states its objectives “definitely” by way of formulating and building systems (L 863). Stevens’ take on the vexed relationship between poetry and philosophy, in his late career, resonates with his earlier reflections on the topic in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” (1943), a lecture he gave at Pontigny-en-Amérique at the invitation of the philosopher-poet Jean Wahl. Defining philosophy as the “official” and poetry as the “unofficial view of being,” Stevens went on to argue: “if the philosopher comes to nothing because he fails, the poet may come to nothing because he succeeds. The philosopher fails to discover” (CPP 667, 670).

What sense do we make of the critical attitude these remarks display toward philosophy, especially given that Stevens more often than not defined poetry in terms of thinking, not to mention the various philosophical traditions within which his poetry has been placed? His skeptical stance toward philosophy has captured the attention of a number of readers but stimulated little discussion of what it might mean with regard to poetic autonomy on the side of thinking itself. Goldstone has recently claimed that Stevens defended poetry’s institutional autonomy from philosophy in its academic form (166), and Eeckhout has interpreted Stevens’ “supreme fiction” as an attempt to “autonomize ... thought” (Wallace Stevens 148. These claims are not only exceptions to the run of arguments that seek to synthesize the line of thinking that underlies Stevens’ poetry with philosophical discourses. As such exceptions, they also call for exploring the various ways in which the idea of poetry as an autonomous form of thinking is brought into play and developed at different stages of Stevens’ poetics.

In a 1952 letter to the literary critic Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, Stevens complained that “recently” he had been “fitted into too many philosophic frames” and added: “if I felt the obligation to pursue the philosophy of my poems, I should be writing philosophy, not poetry; and it is poetry that I want to write” (L 753). Over the next five decades of literary criticism, Stevens’ characterization of poetry as the “act of the mind” (CPP 219), expressed in multiple ways in his oeuvre, would continue to intrigue readers of his poems and lead them through an increasingly large body of philosophical doctrines. In critical approaches that struggled to grasp the pertinence of philosophical issues in Stevens’ poetry, phenomenology, deconstruction, and pragmatism have been the dominant sources. While acknowledging the relevance of reading Stevens from a philosophical vantage point, recent criticism has underlined the problematic character of interpreting his poetry through the lens of a specific philosophical branch or a philosopher, and the risk of pigeonholing his work into a preestablished paradigm of abstract thinking.

In his Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing, for example, Eeckhout claims that “such analogies between a particular brand of philosophy and a highly unique body of poetry ... provide a set of angles, perspectives, and directions, but are not in themselves sufficient to generate valid readings” (6). Similarly, in his recent book, Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, Altieri repudiates readings in which “Stevens’s career is telescoped into the ideas of a particular philosopher” (5). Commenting on earlier accounts of Stevens and philosophy, Altieri asserts that even the title of Stevens’ 1951 lecture “A Collect of Philosophy” shows how, “at least” at this point in his career, “Stevens was simply not interested in writing poetry under the auspices of any commitments to particular bodies of philosophical work or school of thought” (5).

For anyone interested in rethinking Stevens philosophically, Altieri provides an alternative outlook by shifting from epistemological questions (such as “what does it take to know the world?”), which have been central to the philosophical reception of Stevens, to “what difference does it make for our sense of the world to be concerned with knowing it in particular ways?” (5). With this shift, Altieri undertakes a nuanced consideration of Stevens’ poetry that points to the potential it generates for creating value out of “aspectual thinking” in response to the world of fact as experienced under “conditions of modernity” (39–41). But despite the renewed approach Altieri offers to the relation of Stevens’ poetry to philosophy, he still shares the common concern with previous scholarship to portray Stevens as a “philosophical poet,” and thereby to elicit the distinct “commitment” of his poetry to “philosophy,” and more specifically to the phenomenological conception of value (2–5).

Rather than adding to a long wave of critical attention by again conflating Stevens’ poetry with philosophy, I intend to focus in this chapter on their separateness. Beginning in the late 1930s, I will suggest, his poetry demarcates philosophical and poetic domains of thinking more distinctly than has generally been acknowledged. In a number of poems from Parts of a World (1942) and Transport to Summer (1947), Stevens posits poetry as an alternative site for thinking that is free from the systematic and preconceived imperatives of logic and reason, which he increasingly associates with philosophy. During the period that coincides with World War II and soon after, Stevens’ poems set out the possibility for delineating a space for thought that is equal to, and not dependent upon, philosophy for the activity of creating, altering, and grounding its own fictional or poetic ideas (CPP 676). In the second half of this chapter, we will see how the transformation of philosophy as a discipline in the United States under the cultural influence of war (especially the rise of logical positivism) shaped the dynamics of Stevens’ thinking about poetry and philosophy in this particular sense. As Bonnie Costello has suggested, out of his engagement with the cultural atmosphere during World War II emerged Stevens’ concern “with another war, the war that never ends between poetry and philosophy on the ground between art and politics” (Planets xi).

In this respect, the critical task of reconsidering Stevens’ dealings with philosophy can be enhanced by pursuing the various strains his poetry evokes between philosophical and poetic realms, instead of recuperating his philosophical affiliations that have so far been closely explored. The stakes of Stevens’ conception of poetry as a realm for thinking that is autonomous from philosophy can be viewed most productively by taking into account the notion of “inaesthetics” introduced by Alain Badiou. “Inaesthetics,” in Badiou’s words, refers to “a relation of philosophy to art which, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn it into an object for philosophy” (Handbook xii). As Alberto Toscano and Nina Power have argued, inaesthetics suggests reinvigorating the “relation between philosophy and literature as separate, if interacting, disciplines of thought” (xxvi). Rather than absorbing poetry into the discourse of philosophy, or seeing the two as interlocking discourses, inaesthetics offers a “productive schema, where the exploitative drive of philosophy or the contamination of philosophy by art are both avoided,” and “in this schema only,” for Badiou, “does the literary experience become an experience of thought” (Lecercle 199–200). An important characteristic of Badiou’s approach to poetry lies in his emphasis on the poetic transposition of the sensible or the perceptible into the non-sensible operations of thought procedures and ideas (Handbook 20–2). This characteristic, in turn, places his inaesthetics in a critical relation to the aesthetic regime of art, for which the distribution of sensible material in a given work of art, viz. aesthesis, is central (Rancière, Discontents 3). I will return to this point a little later in this chapter, but first, in what follows, I would like to draw attention to a number of instances where the distinction between philosophical and poetic modes of thinking undergirds Stevens’ poetry. Badiou’s insistence on the idea-producing yet nonphilosophical dimension of poetry offers a basis for elucidating this distinction as it applies to Stevens’ conception of poetic thinking.

In his long World War II–era poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942), Stevens explores this distinction through the figure of a “major man”–an abstract heroic poet-persona– who is portrayed as the “thinker of the first idea” (CPP 333). “Notes” is one of the most canonical poems in Stevens’ oeuvre, and it has been approached from a variety of interpretive angles. The imaginative formation of a secular belief in fiction as a response to the modernist “crisis of belief” (Jarraway 193–206), the exploration of the idea of abstraction, either as an escape from political and social realities (Perloff 41–64) or as a means to “re-connect” with “reality” (Ragg 91), the elusive engagement with war (Longenbach 249–73; Filreis, Actual 143), and the convergence of the philosophical “strains of idealism and pragmatism” (Bates 49) are among the main threads running through previous critical discussions of the poem. The philosophical stimulus, explicit in the poem’s persistent preoccupation with the notion of the “first idea” and the “major man” as a poet-thinker, has been well documented in earlier readings. Yet “Notes” also hints at an implicit resistance to the discourse of philosophy by combining a set of thematic and formal registers.

Just as he does in his near-contemporaneous lecture “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” (1943), Stevens incorporates in the poem a position with respect to philosophy by reflecting on the function of reason (CPP 335). In It Must Be Abstract, the first section of “Notes,” the speaker distinguishes the form of expression (the “idiom”) and “clairvoyance” of the “major man” from the mechanical applications of logical thinking: “They differ from reason’s click-clack, its applied / Enflashings” (CPP 335). Stevens’ use of the term “reason,” in earlier poems like “Dezem brum” and “Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial” signals the superiority of aesthetic sense and imaginative fulfillment over the rational: “Dezem brum” ends by asserting that “The reason can give nothing at all / Like the response to desire” (CPP 197). Similarly, “Meditation” concludes with a question that implies the irrelevance of reason and will compared with the sensual sources of poetic inspiration: “But what are radiant reason and radiant will / To warblings early in the hilarious trees / Of summer, the drunken mother?” (CPP 102).

Unlike these poems, which seem to discredit reason in favor of aesthetic sense, “Notes” develops a particular process of poetic “reason”–a “later reason”–that brings into focus what eludes the rules of “logos and logic” (CPP 334). The multiple notions of unintelligibility, inexpressibility, and irrationality, as they are envisaged in Stevens’ poetry, have often been understood in terms of a “post-romantic distrust of rationalism” (Eeckh out, Wallace Stevens 26). The elusive aspects of Stevens’ language and rhetoric have been read, in this context, as an intricately construed resistance to the demands of interpretation that is achieved by his staging of the limits of language and expression. However, in “Notes,” Stevens’ evocations of the unintelligible and the inexpressible, and his treatment of reason equally form modes of thinking that mark a distinction between the contemplative conditions of poetry and philosophy. The poem transposes, as we shall see, the unintelligible and the inexpressible (or the unnameable) into its conception of reason. This transposition, in turn, furnishes Stevens’ “supreme fiction” with effective tools for mapping out a distinctive territory to demarcate the conditions of poetic thinking.

In canto IX of It Must Be Abstract the speaker underscores that the figure of the “major man” originates from reason and not from “apotheosis”; yet the form of this specific reason is defined as the “hum of thoughts evaded in the mind”:

He comes,

Compact in invincible foils, from reason,

Lighted at midnight by the studious eye,

Swaddled in revery, the object of

The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind,

(CPP 335)

The evasive sounds of thought, which the speaker invokes here, resonate with the form of thinking that is specified earlier in the poem in relation to the “first idea” (CPP 329–30). Emblematically encapsulated by the image of the “sun,” in the opening of the poem, the first idea is approached through a mode of thinking that, rather than striving for ultimate clarity and categorization, allows its object to be perceived “in the difficulty of what it is to be”: “The inconceivable idea of the sun / .../ Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be / In the difficulty of what it is to be” (CPP 329–30). In “Notes,” both the major man and the first idea, as the central markers of the poem’s thought process, create a resistant surface– a “difficult visage”–that sets a limit to rational operations of the mind (CPP 336). This resistant surface– much like the “brune figure” of a later poem, “Man Carrying Thing” (1946), that “resists / Identity”–is charac terized in “Notes” as a fundamental aspect of poetic thought that evades categorical and instrumental reason (CPP 306). “The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind” provides a rhythmical counterpoint to the steady and automatic beat of “reason’s click-clack” (CPP 305). The rhythmical differ entiation between the automatic cadence of reason and the free-floating metrical style of the poem itself (the spontaneous rising and fading pattern of blank verse) records also a formal and musical dissonance between the poetic and discursive modes of thought.

The poetic object of thinking, then, is what resists being classified or “named,” and operates at the threshold of the intelligible and the nameable (CPP 329). Unnameability and unintelligibility are not obstacles to the

process of thought within the realm of the poem, precisely because the poem posits the state of indeterminacy as one of its enabling conditions for thinking. This does not imply, however, that Stevens’ poetic operations of thinking remain ultimately confined to a state of imprecision and indeter minacy. In “Man Carrying Thing,” for instance, regarding the “uncertain particles” of the “certain solid” and the unexplored, “secondary” parts of the “obvious whole” culminates not in an incessant flux of ambiguities, but in a new form of clairvoyance emerging out of a temporally extended state of contingency (CPP 306). This state is metaphorized by a long-lasting “storm”: “Out of a storm we must endure all night, // Out of a storm of secondary things), / A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real. // We must endure our thoughts all night, until / The bright obvious stands motionless in cold” (CPP 306). Likewise, in “Notes” the evasive “hum of thoughts” with which the speaker meditates on the “first idea” is, as the poem unfolds, imbued with a “candor” that “for a moment” taps into a commonly shared glimpse of immaculacy: “The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea ... It satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning / ... / The poem, through candor, brings back a power again / That gives a candid kind to everything” (CPP 330–1).

In both of these instances spontaneity and contingency are vital to the poems’ movement of thought that facilitates passages from indiscernibility to a state of momentary precision. In “Man Carrying Thing” the emphasis on the “sudden” occurrence of “thoughts,” and in “Notes” the recurring expressions of instantaneity and unpredictability, such as “for a moment,” “quick of this invention,” “balances that happen,” “moments of awakening,” “suddenly,” “momentary,” etc. point to a spontaneous impulse arising from the processes of thinking enacted in each poem (CPP 330, 334–5, 343). It is possible to read these spontaneous moments of insight in terms of epiphany, as Harold Bloom has done, by describing the main drive behind Stevens’ approach to the first idea as a form of “secularized epiphany” (Poems 189). However, unlike the strictly individual and subjective experience of epiph any found in the works of other modernists such as Joyce and Woolf (Kim 155), the impulse of spontaneity and the focus on contingency in these poems create temporal zones of insight that do not emanate from an individual mind. As the persistent use of plural pronouns, i.e., “we,” “our,” “ourselves,” and “us,” indicates, these temporal zones of sudden understanding emanate from a collectively shared, intersubjective dimension that is embedded in the poems’ reflective processes of thinking. Indeed, the speaker in the very beginning of “Notes” points exactly to this by warning, “Never suppose an inventing mind as source / Of this idea nor for that mind compose / A voluminous master folded in his fire”; the “major man” and the “major abstraction” are “commonal” (CPP 329, 336). As Eleanor Cook has judiciously observed, Stevens’ use of the word “common” in “Notes” signifies not only a sense of the ordinary and the quotidian but also “asense of the communal,” which results from a consideration of “what things may truly be held by a people” (Word-Play 167, 11).

Spontaneity and erratic moments of shared insight open up new pro cedures of thinking as well as a distinctive pedagogical paradigm that treats the irrational as rational: “We shall return at twilight from the lecture / Pleased that the irrational is rational” (CPP 351). An alternative pedagogical process, evoked by such figures as “ephebe,” “Clouds” that become “pedagogues,” “structures” of academies” blurred in “a mist,” and the poet’s “petty syllabi,” makes up a running theme throughout “Notes” (CPP 329–30, 332, 334, 351–2). The poem’s pedagogical take on the f irst idea is stimulated by a specific form of thinking that is geared toward expanding the boundaries of instituted and accepted modifications of reason, and toward teasing out the limits of the rational. In “Man Carrying Thing,” this thinking is figuratively brought into play through the impres sionistic and opaque images of the “man” (“brune figure”) and the “thing he carries,” and in “Notes,” it revolves around the first idea as a fictional and mythical invention (CPP 331). A specific cognitive mode, which departs from straightforward reason without abandoning the rational, forms the basis of the poem’s alternative pedagogy.

While in canto II of It Must Be Abstract the implication is that the “philosopher” and the “priest” are, or have been, equally driven by an (intransitive) “desire” toward the first idea, for the poet the first idea resides in a fiction like a “hermit in a poet’s metaphors” (CPP 330). Thus, importantly, the poet’s difficulty in “Notes” lies neither in grasping the origin of the first idea (it is fictional; “an imagined thing”) nor in dissecting or deconstructing it as an essentialist category of thought (CPP 334). As the speaker in the first section of It Must Give Pleasure articulates, the poet’s difficulty lies in capturing from the “irrational moment” of perception “its unreasoning” (CPP 344–5). This sentiment toward unreasoning is in keeping with the poem’s underlying motive for establishing f iction as a field of possibility for thinking that is set apart from regulative and imposing configurations of thought. Toward the end of “Notes,” this resistance to established models of reasoning is expressed through the f igure of the “sophisticated” “Canon Aspirin,” “the man who has explored all the projections of the mind” (L 445).

Commenting on the first of the “Canon Aspirin” cantos, Cook claims that it may serve as a potential “trap for the unwary, inviting allegoresis but so far resisting our intelligence quite successfully” (Word-Play 254). The narrative of “Canon Aspirin,” as Cook notes, does not lend itself to a straightforward reading, yet the references to “thinking,” “knowing,” “reason,” and “order” do suggest the importance of this figure for an understanding of the poem’s thought procedure. As another figure for the poet as thinker, Canon Aspirin “imposes orders as he thinks of them,” and “establishes statues of reasonable men” (CPP 348–9). In rejecting this figure’s institutionalizing frame of thought, which is tangible in the symbolic act of installing “statues” to canonize certain applications of reason, the speaker claims:

He imposes orders as he thinks of them,

(...)

Next, he builds capitols and in theircorridors,

Whiter than wax, sonorous, fame as it is,

He establishes statues of reasonable men,

Who surpassed the most literate owl, the most erudite

Of elephants. But to impose is not

To discover. To discover an order as of

A season, to discover summer and know it,

To discover winter and know it well, to find,

Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,

Out of nothing to have come on major weather,

It is possible, possible, possible. It must

Be possible.

(CPP 348–9)

If the possibility of knowing without “having reasoned at all” in its normative senses resides in a new “fiction,” this fiction itself requires disrupting, and moving away from established constructions of thought, or as Stevens puts it, from “all existing fictions” (L 431). Canon Aspirin does the opposite by idolizing and instituting “statues of reasonable men” along the “corridors” of his legislative “capitols” (CPP 348). Ultimately, Canon Aspirin shares the same limitation as the philosopher whom, as we have seen earlier, in “The Figure of the Youth,” Stevens associates with a failure to “discover” (CPP 670, 349). This failure is also at the core of a later poem, “The Role of the Idea in Poetry” (1950), where, placed in a genealogy of thought directed toward an end (“determined thereto”), the philosophers are defined as “patriarchs / Of truth” (CPP 457). In contra distinction to the philosophers’ drive toward the determinate, which allows “nothing” to evolve from the end of the “day” (“the evening’s edge”), the poetic voice records the evening’s “form” expanding into a “new-found night” (CPP 457). The role of the idea in poetry, unlike in philosophy, is identified as one of discovery.

The earlier Stevens of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” engages in the idea of poetry enabling an alternative mode of thinking by identifying the musical inflections of the poet-guitarist with a contingent and unruly form of reason: “I know my lazy, leaden twang / Is like the reason in a storm; // And yet it brings the storm to bear. / I twang it out and leave it there” (CPP 138). The transforming shapes of the “wind,” the “sea,” and the “falling snow,” which the poet describes in drifting metaphors, have a quality to mock (“satirize”) the “geographers and philosophers” who, unaware of the constancy of change, seek, ironically, to “shift the shifting scene” in their chartings of the world (CPP 147). Similarly, in “Life on a Battleship” the speaker rejects the prospect of the philosopher- “captain” of “The Masculine” (the ship), who, defined as a descendant of Descartes, charts and imposes “rules of the world” (CPP 199). Toward the end of the poem, the speaker confronts the figure of the philosopher-captain and his “Regulae mundi.” The philosopher subordinates parts– the particular sound of each instrument: the “thump” of the “basses,” the “smack” of “fiddles,” the “yahoo” of “horns,” and the “strike” of “flutes”–to an undifferentiated “whole.” The speaker in turn, asserts, “Your guns are not rhapsodic strophes, red / And true” (CPP 200–1).

In “The Woman That Had More Babies Than That”–the poem that immediately follows “Life on a Battleship”–“The old men, the philosophers, are haunted” by the “maternal voice” of a female figure whose “sense of speech” is posed as an antidote to the masculine lineage, which, in “Life on a Battleship,” Stevens links to philosophers (CPP 202). Quite differ ently from these poems, in “Asides on the Oboe,” Stevens plays upon a nuanced sense of analogy between the philosopher and the poet as thinkers, but marks an essential difference on the basis of a “final belief” in a “fiction” that (as we have seen) is further developed in “Notes”. The poem begins with the assertion that the “philosophers’ man” who “alone still walks in dew / ... / Concerning an immaculate imagery” is not enough to replace the discarded “gods” and “heroes” (CPP 226). As an alternative, the “final belief” in a “fiction” that is postulated in the prologue of the poem enables the invention of an “impossible possible philosophers’ man” (CPP 226). This alternative fictive figure is, then, seen at once as a communal source of elegiac consolation for the war and as paradoxically apart from extraneous influence: “It was / .../ as we heard / Him chanting for those buried in their blood, / In the jasmine haunted forests, that we knew / The glass man, without external reference” (CPP 227).

Taken together, these instances indicate not merely a posture of anxiety about the value or supremacy of poetry over philosophy, but a concern with specifying the conditions for poetic thinking within the fictional register of each poem by distinguishing its processes and function. It is in this constitutive gesture of investigating and determining the conditions for poetic thought that a claim to autonomy and a view of poetry as a particularized form of thinking emerge as principal features of Stevens’ poetics. The issue at stake, therefore, is not to decipher an underlying antagonism between poetry and philosophy as a thematic constituent of Stevens’ poetry. What is at stake, rather, is to trace the ways in which Stevens’ poetry both presents itself as a thought process and reflects on the conditions of that process without the supervision of philosophy as the authoritative source for the production of thought.

Badiou’s inaesthetics, in this sense, offers an adequate way to consider Stevens’ poetics of thinking, insofar as it provides an approach that will not be tempted to construe the manifestations of poetic thought as imitations of philosophical reflection. The purpose of employing the notion of in aesthetics is not, therefore, to hold up particular aspects of Badiou’s claims about poetic thinking as direct analogies to Stevens’ poetry. It is rather to take up its deliberate dismantling of the codependency between poetry and philosophy, and thus foregrounding the autonomy of poetic thought, as a generative starting point for revisiting Stevens’ poetic enactments of thinking. Nevertheless, a founding aspect of in aesthetics, implied by Badiou’s characterization of poetry strictly in terms of the “Idea,” marks an important divergence from the way thinking is organized and produced in Stevens’ poetry, and thus needs to be addressed at this stage.

While in Badiou’s framework, poetry is seen as producing an autonomous procedure for thinking, the poetic and linguistic figurations of sensorial material within the sphere of a poem are always, and rather axiomatically, identified with the ideational elements of thought: “What the poem declares is that things are identical to their idea” (Handbook 43; emphasis in the original). For Badiou, rather than representing or imitate ing what is empirically perceived or experienced, poetry engages in a thought process of its own by subtracting thought from the “immediate and sensible presence of objects” (During 147). In this schema, all sensible matter that is poetically formalized constantly disappears into the procedures of thought that the poem stages (Handbook 22). Thus, Mallarmé Mallarmé’s “Tomb,” “Swan,” and “Rose,” and Rimbaud’s “Christ,” “Worker,” and “Infernal Groom” are all seen as emblems or figurations of ideas that “engineer the sensory presentation of thought” (Handbook 20, 30). It is by means of transfiguring (not transcending or elevating) the perceptible or sensible material into a happening or the “event of the Idea” that the poem provides a point of excess that the sensible alone is incapable of achieving (Polemics 144): “Through the visibility of artifice, which is also the thinking of poetic thought, the poem surpasses in power what the sensible is capable of itself. The modern poem is the opposite of a mimesis” (Handbook 21).

The transposition of the poem’s references to sensible objects into thought mechanisms and ideas indicates not only a rejection of mimetic representation, but also, as Rancière has pointed out, an anti-aesthetic stance grounded in Badiou’s skepticism toward placing poetic material on the side of sensation (Discontents 75). Even though Stevens is one of the poets whose work has inspired Badiou’s approach to poetry, the constant dissolution of the sensible into the ideational is not entirely compatible with Stevens’ poetics of thinking. This is because Stevens’ poetry does not always allow its images of sensible objects to vanish into its thought procedures and operations of ideas. In poems like “Man Carrying Thing” and “The Role of the Idea” Stevens lets the sensible material– in the former, the “certain solid,” which consists of the “brune figure,” the “thing” he carries, and the “storm,” in the latter, the “evening” and the “night”–serve as figures for the presentation of a thought process. In other poems, however, objects resist being deployed as operative vehicles for the orientation of thought.

“Study of Two Pears” (1938) is a good case in point. It introduces an object-oriented focus on the sensible form and the physical location of two pears that are depicted with a painterly eye. As with the “figure” that is “not / An evading metaphor” in “Add This to Rhetoric” (CPP 183), the “two pears” in this poem “resemble nothing” other than themselves: “The pears are not viols, / Nudes or bottles. / They resemble nothing else” (CPP 180). The speaker details the shape (“curves,” “round”) and the color (“touched red,” “various yellows / Citrons, oranges and greens”) of the pears suspended in space: “Bulging toward the base / ... / Tapering toward the top” (CPP 180–1). Even though the poem has often been analyzed in terms of its painterly qualities, and especially with reference to still life, as Eeckhout has also observed, in the third stanza, a possible analogy with painting is implicitly canceled out (Wallace Stevens 160–1). The figuration of the pears is not a two-dimensional visual projection of the object on paper or canvas: “They are not flat surfaces / Having curved outlines” (CPP 181). The poem’s rejection of ekphrastic representation entails also an implicit negation of mimesis– the reproduction of the sensible qualities (roundness) of the object (pears) on a flat surface (paper). This negation of mimetic inscription, however, does not suggest– as Badiou would have it– a “disappearance of the sensible” into the idea of the poem (Lecercle 201). The title’s “study” of two pears, and the opening phrase of the poem, “Opusculum paedagogum,” imply at first glance that the pears are deployed as pedagogical or instructive tools for the proposition of a thought process or an idea. However, by the end of the poem, this possibility is countered; the pears are explicitly removed from an intending human subject: “The pears are not seen / As the observer wills” (CPP 181). Thus, in spite of the earlier reflection on the “way they are modelled,” by the end of the poem, the pears are severed from a thinking agency and from any intentionality.

The removal of the object from a reflecting and willing subjectivity is not because the “observer” has failed to grasp the object. Nor is it because the poem has reached a point of dualistic opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. It is, rather, because the poem entails an attempt to present the object independently of a confronting and thinking subject, which is achieved by way of registering a speculative description of the object’s sensible qualities. In other words, instead of staging the vanishing point of the sensible, the poem directs attention to the separate ontological existence of the object apart from thought. It starts out with the task of construing an alternative pedagogy (“Opusculum paedagogum”) in a similar way to “Notes.” But in the end, the syntactic modeling of the sensible object is kept from being transposed into the hypothesized and ideational paradigm of this task.

If “Study of Two Pears” marks a degree of resistance to the disappear ance of the sensible object into an element of thought, in other cases, things, by maintaining their sensuality and corporeality, bear witness to socially and historically specific conflicts and intricacies. In “A Dish of Peaches in Russia” (1939), the immediacy of sensual experience that is engendered by seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling a dish of peaches is, in the opening stanzas of the poem, associated with bodily/erotic pleasure and love: “With my whole body I taste these peaches, / I touch them and smell them / ... / I see them as a lover sees” (CPP 206). In a detailed reading of the poem, Costello notes that the search for the subject of this experience, namely, the consistently posed question of “Who speaks?” locates the object in a historically specific setting (Planets 34). In the third stanza, the speaker is identified as a dislocated “I”–an “exile” from Russia under Stalin’s rule. As a number of critics have observed, the sensual experience of the peaches provokes a scene of memory by which the dispersion of the exiled self and history fuse into the poem: “They are full of the colors of my village / And of fair weather, summer, dew, peace / .../ I did not know / That such ferocities could tear / Oneself from another, as these peaches do” (CPP 206). The sensual experience of the object (“peaches”) provides access to a past, demonstrating the effects of historical change and political conflict absorbed by the self. Thus, rather than withdrawing or “subtracting”–to use Badiou’s terminology– from the experience of the sensible object to achieve an experience of thought, by retaining the sensible, the poem enters into a historically particular site of conflict. As such, it displays the influence of historical forces on the exiled subject’s socially bound self-understanding, and thus on his identity.

The conceptual frame of in aesthetics, as these readings attempt to show, might strain and crack when set in close dialogue with Stevens’ poetry. But despite this, Badiou’s focus on poetry’s capacity for producing thought that is unconditioned by philosophy, while at the same time not entirely subsumed under the sensible, provides a useful perspective on Stevens’ poetic process. Those of Stevens’ poems, such as “Notes,” that primarily deal with the imaginative production of ideas both present themselves as a form of thought and investigate the conditions for that thought without inviting the support of philosophical discourse.

When, in “Notes,” Stevens tells us that “The first idea was not our own. Adam / In Eden was the father of Descartes,” he implicitly positions the thinking of the first idea vis-à-vis the fields of philosophy and religion (CPP 331). The notion of a first idea bears upon both philosophical and religious thinking in their respective views of origins and beginnings. The primacy of a projecting mind is what binds, in this context, the Cartesian account of the “cogito” and the Judeo-Christian narrative of dominion that is intrinsic to the story of Adam’s linguistic and symbolic act of naming animals and other natural beings. Thus, the poem, in its approach to the first idea, acknowledges a shared dimension between poetic, philosophical, and theological modes of thought. However, instead of denoting a dependency of poetry on philosophy or religion, or of identifying either field as the legitimate source of the first idea, the speaker goes on to designate a separate site from which the poem and its thinking of this idea are extended. In opposition to the notion of a projecting mind, common to both Cartesian and Adamic narratives, and expressed, above all, in the line, “Eve made air the mirror of herself,” the speaker claims:

But the first idea was not to shape the clouds

In imitation. The clouds preceded us.

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place

That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

(CPP 331–2)

The “muddy centre before we breathed” connotes a place immersed in deep time and prior to human history. Despite its preceding human existence and thought, however, this site (the “articulate” and “physical myth” that “preceded us”) is paradoxically tied to the poetic imagination. The possibility of thinking, envisaging, and elaborating on this “huge abstraction,” as Stevens called it (L 444), demands expanding the imaginative and speculative scope of our thinking, which is immanent to the process of poetic creation. Thus, unlike the biblical and Cartesian dis courses of beginnings that center upon the mastery of human reason over nature, the poetic notion of the first idea identifies a place of origins that requires an imaginative or fictional intervention in our thinking without granting superiority to the human mind and, especially, as in the case of “Canon Aspirin,” without imposing forms of reason. What is implied, among other things, in the poem’s evocation of the Adamic source of origins and of Descartes– who, as Stevens noted with reference to this specific section of “Notes,” stands as a symbol for “reason” (L 433)– is the distinction between, on the one hand, poetic, and, on the other, philosophical and theological configurations of thinking (of the “first idea”).

While it may seem excessive to draw a generic distinction between poetic and philosophical modes of thinking by means of a single poem’s reference to a single philosopher, Stevens’ commentary on “Notes” testifies to the urgency of distinguishing poetry from the stage of philosophical thinking, an urgency we can read in the texture of his effort to articulate a supreme fiction. The particular drive toward this distinction in Stevens’ development of “Notes” is expressed in a letter to Henry Church from 1942, which raises the issue of poetic autonomy from philosophy in relation to his supreme fiction:

It is only when you try to systematize the poems in the NOTES that you conclude that it is not the statement of a philosophic theory. A philosopher is never at rest unless he is systematizing: constructing a theory. But these are Notes; the nucleus of the matter is contained in the title. It is implicit in the title that there can be such a thing as a supreme fiction. (L 430)

Stevens’ remark on the way the poem operates with a non-philosophical arrangement recalls his response to Robert Pack, which, as we have seen in the beginning of this chapter, draws a contrast between his poetry and forms of systematized thinking expressed by philosophy. Here, Stevens transposes the issue of poetic independence from philosophy into a context that is more specifically concerned with the structure and form of poetic articulation. Reflecting on the question of poetic distinction in the same letter, he sets out to argue that, “the articulations between the poems are not the articulations one would expect to find between paragraphs and chapters of a work of philosophy” (L 431). At stake in these emphases upon the specificity of poetic articulation and form of “Notes,” as several commentators have argued, is the fragmentary and at the same time musical connotations attached to the notion of “notes” pressing against the limited horizon of system-building. As Osborne Hardison and Leon Golden put it: “Notes are notes, the reverse of system” (328).

Yet, if we take a closer look at the formal arrangement of “Notes,” we find a careful and highly elaborated structure comprised of three parts, with syntactically aligned titles made up of aphoristic imperatives: It Must Be Abstract, It Must Change, and It Must Give Pleasure. Each of these parts consists of ten individual poems; each poem contains seven stanzas; and each stanza features three lines. As Harvey Gross has remarked: “The line and stanza patterning of [the poem] would delight a medieval poet’s sense of the power and significance of number” (242). Or as Bloom has argued: “Despite Stevens’ assertion that ‘Notes’ is not a system, the form of the poem itself is systematic” (“Critical” 75). What does this carefully formed structure tell us, then, about Stevens’ relation to systematization in light of his claims about philosophical and poetic modes of thinking? One way of approaching this question is to recognize that the poem displays not a rejection of organized structure as such, which would determine the relation of Stevens’ supreme fiction to systems only negatively, but a structural arrangement that allows its formal and thematic elements to move into new states.

The heterogeneity of the poem’s seemingly confined form, which Marjorie Perloff has pejoratively called a “perfect geometric whole” (47), operates on several different levels. The consistent numbering of each canto is tempered by an unnumbered final section preceded by a dash between the stanzas, which Stevens originally intended to set apart from the rest of the sequence of thirty numbered poems. The rhythmical pattern of blank verse, as mentioned earlier, is loosened by transitory shifts into other cadences. Stevens’ deployment of figures such as “major man” and “Canon Aspirin,” the narrative of the “mystic marriage in Catawba” and the narrative of “Nanzia Nunzio” gesture toward the epic (CPP 346, 342). The form of address and contemplative elements of the poem by contrast correspond rather to its lyrical mode and design. Throughout the poem, elements of epic and lyric form alternate, and shade into one another. The flexibility at work in the poem’s formal instabilities and prosodic extensions, while highly concealed to the novice reader, allows for the channeling of new forms, extending “Notes” well beyond a meta-communicative affirmation of one of its imperatives, that is: “It Must Change.” As such, they complicate the tendency “toward” the totality and finality of a closed system at the level of self-organization and form, which, in his letter to Church, Stevens links to the compositional logic of philosophical thinking.

Importantly, and in contrast to this claim, the unnumbered, final section of the poem might be seen as serving as an epilogue or coda to mark a more settled closure rather than eschewing a systematic finality. But the poem’s final section takes on board more new questions and antinomies than it resolves. Moving unexpectedly into the context of war (largely unacknowledged elsewhere in the poem), the coda addresses a soldier, juxtaposing the poet’s contemplative war “between thought and day and night” with the actual war: “Soldier, there is a war between the mind / And sky, between thought and day and night / .../ It is a war that never ends. // Yet it depends on yours” (CPP 351–2). Stevens is careful, here, in not pressing this “parallel” too closely; the respective “wars” are seen as “Two parallels that meet if only in // The meeting of their shadows” (CPP 352). The poet’s never-ending war within, an outcome of which is the poem itself, is designed to display a solacing or elegiac role in relation to the soldier’s war without: “The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines / ... / the bread of faithful speech” (CPP 352). In short, while identifying war as the historical precedent and actual condition of its construction, the coda postulates the interminability of the poem’s contemplative process (“that never ends”) instead of reinforcing a conclusive ending to it.

Stevens’ use of a coda, in this regard, is reminiscent of Eliot’s in “Four Quartets” whose concluding quartet, “Little Gidding,” was published in the same year as “Notes” (1942). Filtered through the form of musical arrangement, Eliot’s poem, in its own ending, looks forward to a new beginning rather than to a settled closure: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (CP 209). It is perhaps not surprising to find in both poets’ sense of endings a desire for inventing new beginnings as a form of political longing, considering the war-torn world surrounding them. But in the case of “Notes,” the coda of the finely formed triad extending from internal to external “war” also has implications that shed further light on the relation between poetic thinking and system-building, which Stevens identifies as a distinctive form of philosophical discourse.

Acknowledging and incorporating what was largely excluded from the body of the poem (the context of war), the coda expresses an afterthought that interrogates the actual conditions of the poem’s production and social function. It is, in this sense, not simply a follow-up to the preceding sections of the poem, but a departure or extension, both thematically and formally, from the seemingly closed frame, or what Bloom has called the “system” of “Notes” (“Critical” 75). With its argument for the counter-finality of the poem’s making and thinking, the coda as an afterthought suspends the closure of the poem as a unitary system. This state of what we may call afterness or lateness (of thought) is indeed thematized as an integral aspect of poetic thinking in the middle of the poem. In the first and fourth cantos of It Must Give Pleasure, the line of thinking after or later is invoked in terms of a “later reason” and characterized as the nexus of the poem’s reflective scope: “We reason of these things with a later reason” (CPP 345–6). “To speak of a later reason,” as Maria Santos has recently pointed out, is to “postulate a broken, or interrupted, reason: a later presupposes an earlier reason” (21). The notion of a later reason, which speaks to the temporal structure of thinking, denotes both a sense of recentness or newness and a sense of belatedness, which resists the fulfillment and the pull toward predetermined expectations of arrival and completion. In other words, a later reason represents a mode of thinking that creates a rupture in the progressive operation and closure of a system. It is this interruption in systematic thinking and reason that makes up an additional aspect of the in aesthetic dimensions of the poem. In “Notes,” the notion of a later reason is placed in a critical relation to regulative functions of reason rather than in diametric opposition to it.

The resistance that Stevens’ poetry mounts to philosophy, is perhaps nowhere more explicitly stated than in his 1940 poem “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” (CPP 227). The title of this poem reflects Stevens’ interest in expressing the artistic and, more specifically, poetic claim to “ideas” on a primary level. By changing the common title of the “academy of fine arts” to the “academy of fine ideas,” Stevens ironically overturns the compartmentalized demarcations between the realms of art and thinking. Written at a time when Stevens engaged himself in the cause of establishing an independent academic chair for the study of “poetic thought and of the theory of poetry” at Harvard, his choice of title implies a way of imagining poetry’s autonomy from philosophy on an institutional level (L 358). The idea of the distinctiveness of the poetic process of thinking from that of philosophy is, however, more radically enunciated, as we shall see, in the poem’s identification of philosophy and systematic thinking with the deadening logic of war.

Previous readings of “Extracts” have rightly focused on the poem’s thematic engagement with war (Longenbach 69–71; Brogan 21–2), the idea of abstraction (Ragg 153), the danger of aestheticism (Mao 205; Longenbach 217–21), and the meta phoricity of language, which undercuts the philosophical impulse to reach a form of stripped-off reality (Jenkins, Rage for Order 41–3). Jenkins claims that “reality” in the poem is presented as accessible only as an already mediated entity that cannot be grasped outside of language (41–3). Brogan and Longenbach, on the other hand, examine the poem’s engagement with World War II. Focusing on Stevens’ treatment of the good and evil forms of death, Longenbach explores the opposition between the natural “good death” and the unnatural “evil death” of the masses at war that is accentuated in the second canto of the poem (70–1). Following Longenbach’s contextualized reading, Brogan stresses Stevens’ formation of an inner mode of resistance– a “violence within” that withstands the “violence without” ensuing from the accumulated pressures of war (21–2).

A crucial aspect, which is intimately linked to the poem’s sustaining preoccupation with the theme of war and the idea of abstraction, but remains unexplored in these earlier readings, lies in the text’s implicit confrontation with the imposition of a plane of order upon thought. This confrontation finds expression in the form of a close affinity between “systematic thinking” and “death”:

Of systematic thinking ...Ercole,

O, skin and spine and hair of you, Ercole,

Of what do you lie thinking in your cavern?

To think it is to think the way to death ...

(CPP 231)

While the use of “it” in the final line of this stanza hovers over multiple possible referents, one plausible interpretation might be that “it” refers to the “systematic thinking” which is carefully left hanging at the beginning. As he does with the final lines, Stevens leaves the statement unfinished in the opening lines of the stanza, while at the same time the inscription of the double ellipses invites the reader to connect the first and the last lines. If this possible reference of “it” is granted as valid, then, “systematic thinking,” brought into the context of war, is identified with a catastrophic dead end: “to think it is to think the way to death” (CPP 231; emphasis added). Here, the “evil death,” which the speaker in part II compares with the death of thousands in war, takes the form of a more generalized and abstract sense of death that is correlated with the totalizing systematization of thought (CPP 229). With this form of abstraction (death in its relation to thinking) the poem presents an engagement not only with the material destructiveness of war, which Brogan and Longenbach interrogate, but also with the mode of thinking that lies behind it.

The link between “death” and philosophy is implied figuratively in part V where “philosophic assassins” turn against and shoot each other:

In the end, these philosophic assassins pull

Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains.

The mass of meaning becomes composed again.

He that remains plays on an instrument

A good agreement between himself and night,

A chord between the mass of men and himself,

Far, far beyond the putative canzones

Of love and summer. The assassin sings

In chaos and his song is a consolation.

It is the music of the mass of meaning.

(CPP 231)

The philosophic assassins of “Extracts” can be seen as modifications of the stone-masked “assassins” from “Life on a Battleship,” a poem that was discussed earlier in this chapter. In that poem, the “assassins” ostensibly resemble soldiers, firing “ten thousand guns / In mid-Atlantic,” under the command of the “Captain” of “The Masculine” (the ship), who, as pointed out earlier, is described as a descendent of “Descartes”–a philosopher who substantially prioritized reason and systematization before anything else (CPP 199). In both poems, then, Stevens construes an affinity between war, on the one hand, and a specific type of philosophical thinking that is nourished by the primacy of reason, and by the impulses of totalization and systematization, on the other.

What is conspicuous in “Extracts,” however, is the incorporation of a poet figure into the battle scene. The only remaining figure after the “philosophic assassins pull / Revolvers and shoot each other” corresponds to the image of a poet. This becomes palpable through certain references to the “imagination,” the “instrument”–recalling the image of the poet in “The Man with the Blue Guitar”–and to “putative canzones,” since canzone, apart from meaning literally song or chant in Italian, also refers to a particular style of lyric poetry. To be sure, the remaining poetic assassin is described as “Far, far beyond the putative canzones / Of love and summer” (CPP 231). Situated in a postapocalyptic scene of war and death, the poet’s song must instead be “a consolation,” not a song of celebration “of love and summer.” Contrary to this reading, Longenbach claims that the remaining assassin of the poem is the one who sings “his systematic thinking” (217). Yet, the remaining poet-assassin’s “song” is described as a song of “consolation” rather than as a product of “systematic thinking” that is identified as “the way to death”: “The assassin sings // In chaos and his song is a consolation” (CPP 231). Just as the putative canzones cannot be the mode in which the poet sings in the middle of war, systematic thinking, by its pointing “the way to death,” cannot suffice for “that other one” who “wanted to think his way to life” (CPP 231).

Ultimately, in “Extracts,” Stevens stages a negotiation of the consoling role of poetry in a time of war, and he does so in a line of movements that runs from an examination of the death of masses in war (“evil death” / “good death”) to a more abstract sense of death that is coupled with systematic thinking and philosophy (“philosophic assassins”). Ultimately, the poem returns to the context of the actual war– the final section of the poem opens with a direct reference to war: “We live in a camp ...Stanzas of final peace / Lie in the heart’s residuum” (CPP 233). In this sequence of movements, the poem, while pointing to the mode of thinking that is complicit with the logic of war, renders both the social and philosophical dimensions of imposing and systematic configurations of thinking as cataclysmic and destructive.

GÜL BILGE HAN . «WALLACE STEVENS ANDTHEPOETICSOF MODERNIST AUTONOMY»

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