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Wallace Stevens and the Cycle of Desire
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13229 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1987 |
3,913 Words |
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Milton J. Bates
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WORDS CHOSEN OUT OF DESIRE
Helen Vendler
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986
86 pp., $3.95
WALLACE STEVENS AND POETIC THEORY
Conceiving the Supreme Fiction
B.J. Leggett
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987
224 pp., $22.50
When the history of obscurity in twentieth-century poetry is written, it will show that literary critics have done their part to sabotage the lines of communication between the poet and his audience. For Wordsworth, the poet was "a man speaking to men." The men have remained, waiting more or less patiently to be spoken to, but the man (or woman) speaking has gradually faded from the scene, like Alice's Cheshire cat. T.S. Eliot, in his influential essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), replaced Wordsworth's "man" with "the tradition" and characterized the poet's progress as a "continual extinction of personality." Taking their cue from Eliot the critic rather than Eliot the poet, New Critics of the 1930s and 1940s taught us to speak not of the person in the poem but the persona, or mask. Heaven forbid that we should ascribe this fictive utterance to the creature of flesh and blood who wrote it! Contemporary critical theory has answered with a vengeance Eliot's prayer for the extinction of the self. In poststructuralist criticism, the "I" of the lyric poem no longer refers to anything outside the poem: it is merely a cipher in an enclosed linguistic system.
During the 1970s, Wallace Stevens' later poems became a happy hunting ground for this tribe of critics, due partly to their emotional austerity. As J. Hillis Miller observes in a landmark essay on "The Rock," "There is a bleak impersonality of tone and locution in Stevens' poem which forbids thinking of it or feeling it as the autobiographical statement of a recognizable person, the man Wallace Stevens, vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, author of Harmonium" (Georgia Review, Spring 1978). Though Miller singles out "The Rock" for its peculiar impersonality, he does not hesitate to generalize the doctrine he derives from it - namely, that the poem dismantles or "deconstructs" the very notion of authorial presence in a written text: "Self in the sense of individual personality is one of the major illusions dissolved by the poem."
Helen Vendler's On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems (1969) was one of the last major critical studies of Stevens to be published before he was appropriated by the deconstructionists. For the most part a formalist reading of the poems, On Extended Wings also uses the poetry to suggest Steven's sense of the world. In the process, it develops a fairly definite sense of the consciousness suffusing the poems. One associates this enterprise with phenomenological criticism, which J. Hillis Miller threw over for deconstruction during the 1970s. Did Vendler likewise recant her "naïve" belief in the presence of the poet? Emphatically not, to judge from her second book on Stevens, which reprints an essay first published in 1979 and the Hodges Lectures she delivered at the University of Tennessee in 1982. In Words Chosen Out of Desire, she asserts more defiantly than ever her conviction that poetry is the self-expression
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