Stevens and Simile: A Theory of Language by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan (review)

266 Shorter Book Reviews Jacqueline Vaught Brogan. Stevens and Simile: A Theory of Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. xiv + 214 pp. Jacqueline Brogan's book describes how Wallace Stevens' poems refuse to ''acceptor articulate'' either of two views of language completely or clearly. One sees using words to name things as magically making those things exist; the other sees words as merely labels that may mislead. Stevens used metaphors with the first view, similes with the second, or so Brogan claims. She sees the subject of his poems as poetry itself, the relationship between imagination and reality, and says we need both because each depends on the other. But does the world's reality depend on what we imagine? Did dinosaurs live because, millions of years later, humans imagined them? Brogan seems to admire Stevens' poems too much to read them critically, and so does not seem to notice that Stevens' metaphorical name-calling tells us more about him than about his ostensible subjects, or that calling words "the making of the world" and "God and the imagination ... one'' does not make either true. Brogan seems to think that seeing the world without the sacred Universals of the first view is to be staring into an' 'abyss'' we must avoid. She seems to take the myth about Adam naming animals in Eden so literally that she thinks the animals exist because Adam named them, as if Adam were God, and what words mean remains inherent in the words (as in ''Why are they called pigs? Because they are so dirty''). She seems not to notice the world beyond our words, or its connectedness , or that meaning remains a matterof connections. Like T.E. Hulme and John Crowe Ransom, she apparently supposes poetry should use only the images that metaphors and similes name, and that science uses only abstract symbols. But science, poetry and English generally all use six types of meaning, types defined by the connection between the sign and what it means. In about 1890, C.S. Peirce defined the first three: 1. images, maps, and other Icons resemble what they mean; 2. clues, symptoms, and other Indices result from what they mean, and so indicate that their causes at least did exist, in the past; and 3. words, numbers, and other often abstract and arbitrary Symbols remind someone of something. Each of the second three reverses in the firstthree the connection between the sign and what it means: -1. opposites contrast and vary with one another, rather than resembling something else as Icons do; -2. omens mean the future results they may cause, rather than resulting from what caused them in the past and meaning those past causes did exist, as Indices do; and -3. examples present concrete and natural parts of what they mean as samples, rather than being merely abstract and arbitrary reminders of something else, and dependent upon our memories-the difference between a rock and a mountain and the words with which someone may choose to name that mountain. Shorter Book Reviews 267 We can understand poems and define styles by how they use these six, as with Eliot's Icon-his reaction to the world as a waste land, whose sterility and confusion seem symptoms of his emotional state. Stevens seems to use few factual Indices, Omens or Examples, which may explain why his poems so often use negations and such markers of fictions as as if; his poems seem a retreat from the world's connections, and Brogan's explanations of language's connections too incomplete to serve as the theory of language her sub-title promises. Robert Ian Scott Department of English University of Saskatchewan Burton Raffel. Politicians, Poets and Con Men: Emotional Hist01y in Late Victorian America. Hamden: Archon Books, 1986. xi + 220 pp. Burton Raffel's book is a collection of ten brief biographies of men and women whose careers in politics, journalism and literature blossomed during the late nineteenth century. Raffel's purpose in this study, as in its predecessor, American Victorians: Explorations in Emotional History, is "to re-enter a vanished emotional world ... [in order] to make the boundaries and something of the nature of that...