The Quest of Self in the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Michael Sexson (review)

Book Reviews283 Metacriticism is a valuable addition to the growing bibliography of essays on critical systems: the proponents ofthesesystems often engagein acrimonious debate rather than the balanced assessment of premises that Raval so nicely exemplifies. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER Arizona State University Michael Sexson. The Quest of Self in the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1981. 208p. Am I not, Myself, only half of a figure of a sort, A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turn Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone? Even though the formalist tradition has long been supplanted by other critical techniques, interpretations of Stevens have continued to focus primarily on the texts he produced. Stevens himself has remained an elusive figure, an "apparition" known only as the man who lived in the world as an insurance executive while writing some of the most important poems of the modern age. A reader of Stevens's poems finds many of the ideas and sensibilities that distinguish twentieth-century thought. The skewed, multiperspectival vision of a cubist is present throughout his work, as is the tendency toward abstraction, joined, as in a painting by Kandinsky, with an expressiveness that is both sensuous and spiritual. The tonal complexity of a Schoenberg score is present in his work as well, along with the sort of nihilism one finds in an existentialist's manifesto. A brash, iconoclastic inventiveness is there, too — the kind that pervades early twentiethcentury philosophy and science (especially theoretical physics). One could list a dozen more derivations and innovations (a typical way of coming to terms with Stevens's work) in an effort to explain what his poems are about. Michael Sexson, however, follows a different route. He is more interested in what Stevens's poems reveal, especially in regard to the poet's own inner life. Sexson believes that when Stevens's poems are read with the tenets of comparative mythology and depth psychology in mind, the path of a journey becomes apparent. Using the work of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Erich Neumann to corroborate his claim, Sexson argues that Stevens's poetry reveals the quest undertaken by the poet in his own personal search for self-awareness. The focus of Sexson's study, as his title suggests, is on the process of differentiation and discovery, not the goal. Following Stevens from the beginning of his career to the end, from "Harmonium" to "The Rock," through exceptionally perceptive readings of such works as "Ideas of Order," "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "Parts of a World," "Transport to Summer," and "The Auroras of Autumn" (all contained withingthe Collected Poems), Sexson presents a convincing argument. The "figure half seen," the poet behind the poems, the "man of themind" par excellence, shows himselfas a hero of sorts, a Ulysses, more than equal to the journey thrust upon him by thegods. 284ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW In the poem from which the epigraph for this review was taken, "Angel Surrounded by Paysans," the angel says "... I am the necessary angel of earth,/Since, in my sight, you see the earth again."As this line suggests, it is sometimes necessary to have an able guide in order to see the very ground on which one stands. Michael Sexson serves as such a guide to Stevens's poems. In this lucid, valuable, eloquently written book, he uncovers the bedrock ofStevens's world — the archetypes which shaped his life and work. JAMES KARMON California State University, Chico Michael C. Spencer. Charles Fourier. Boston: Twayne Publishers, G.K. Hall, 1981. 184p. Professor Spencer has taken on the formidable task of explicating thesocial and psychological theories of the early nineteenth-century French thinker Charles Fourier through a study of the letter's immense, confusing, and fantastical literary works. The result is a lucid, balanced, and highly readable analysis ofFourier's basic ideas and ideals and of his place in the history of Utopian literature and the development of modern thought. Spencer reveals a sensitive awareness of the ambiguities latent in Fourier's philosophy and in its literary formulation, wherein...