Advances on Chaos: The Poetry and Esthetics of Stevens, Williams and Winters

Advanceson Chaos:The Poetry andEsthetics of Stevens, Williams andWinters Dick. Davis. Wisdom and Wilderness: The Achw,·ement ol Yvor Winters. Athens: The LfniH:rsity of Georgia Press, 1983.244 + xi pp. DarniM. La Guardia. Acfrance on Chaos: The Sanct1/l'mg lnzaginatio11ol Wallace Stevens. Hanover: Lfnivers1ty Press of New England. 1983,192+ xiii pp. GrosvenorPowell. Yvor Winters: An Annotated B1blwgraphyf(JJ<}-/<)82. Metuchen, N.J.: The ScarecrowPress, Inc., 1983.202 + vii pp. HenrvM. Sayre. The Visual Text ol William Carlos Hi/!1;ms. Urbana: University of m·inois Press. 1983152pp. LeonoraWoodman. Stan::aJ\.frStone: Wallace Ste,·en,and the Hermetic Tradition. West Lafayette: PurdueUniversity Press, 1983.195+ x pp. Teny Whalen·[W]eare new men ...not minors and invalids in a protected comer, not cowards fleeingbefore a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying theAlmighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark." 1 These words of Ralph Waldo Emerson's are more confident than the words of twentiethcentury writers, but they at least capture the hope and the aim of Wallace Stevens,William Carlos Williams and Yvor Winters- as that aim isunderstood bythe studies listed above. The works on Stevens and Williams vary in their degree of worth and readability, but they all make a contribution to advanced studies in the way theyupend the stock notion that these poets are solely and primarily poets of hedonistic empiricism, or poets of sensation alone. While Stevens was always quickto speak of the greatest poverty having to do with the inability to live in the physical world, and Williams is so famously quoted for his love of things over abstractions, both writers were wide awake to the insufficiency of a poetry of mere sensation, and both recognized the need to accumulate particulars and sort the imagery of the material world in the name of finding an order that inspires by way of its transcending suggestion of order past chaos, of a meaning beyond the welter of the world's plural tumble. The studies by David La Guardia, Leonora Woodman and Henry M. Sayre emphasize the advances on chaos made by their subjects, and in doing so they lift these poets above the charge that they are absorbed by the physical worldor are materialist in the final purport of their visions. Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 1986, 495-508 496 Terry Whalen La Guardia's Advance on Chaos is a clearly written, jargon-free work of criticism and scholarship which is primarily a close reading of the Stevens canon in terms of the poet's affinities with the philosophy and esthetics of Emerson and William James. The book is a masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship, a model work of practical criticism, and the best book in print on Stevens all in one stroke. La Guardia is scrupulous to a fault in paying his debts to other Stevens critics as he proceeds, even though his study has a freshness and originality of mind which guarantees its stability as a deep and searching book. · La Guardia characterizes Stevens' development as a poetic thinker in terms which sight him as guided by Emerson and James in a journey initially away from fixed abstractions and toward an empiricism that attempts to capture the non-teleological nature of the material universe. It is a journey which further includes an earned and atoned sensibility which advances on "chaos and the dark" by finding moments of harmony in the midst of the chaos of the empirical plane and recording a passing wonder at its mysterious face. Put in other terms, while Stevens is the poet of decreation who debarnacles the world of the artifice of received fictions, he also, in La Guardia's view, evolves anesthetic which recovers a sense of mystery sufficient to him forthe staving off of an existential despair. Advance on Chaos prizes James's influence on Stevens more than Emerson's, and it is especially animated in its realization that, like James, Stevens came to understand that any flexible, inclusive and truly valid vision of life must embody a compromise between "an abstract monotony and a concrete heterogeneity" (James, cited on p. 36). Stevens did not force intolerant abstractions and myths on the world; he sought to record, rather, the "melodic interludes of order in the chaotic flux" (p. 37) of reality, and to desigri a supple formal strategy for poetry so that it could enact the wisdom of an openly participating bent of mind. La Guardia refines such an overview of the Stevens canon with a careful analysis of each of Stevens' poetry volumes and his relevant essays on writing. "Stevens' first three books chart a gradual movement toward self-discovery and self-release achieved by decreating the world of fixity to discover its vibrant core," he says (p. 38), and the early poetry is thus viewed as highly self-conscious in its discussion of epistemological issues, issues which are germane to the thinking of Emerson and James. La Guardia's appreciative criticisms of Harmonium, Ideas of Order and Parts of a World are crucial in this context; and his analysis of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" through the visor of James's concept of the "will to believe"-which has affinities with Stevens' "supreme fiction"-is close, in its gift for sighting confluence, to the respect for specifies there in the critic's recognition of the importance of Stevens' recurrent use of the emblem of "the rock" to represent the naked center of reality, as it relates to imagery found in James. There is an important public dimension to Stevens' evolving esthetic of ModernPoetry 497 poetry,and it is the poet's response to the reality of human suffering in the contextof World War II which personalizes his recognition of the inadequacy ofapplying rigid abstractions to life. Hence, '·Esthetique du Mal" is seen as animportant archway into Stevens' major phase because it is enwisened with aperception of the limitations of all concepts about evil and human suffering. Bythe end of that poem, we witness Stevens moving ''from the orthodox thinkingof Emerson to the empiricist thinking of William James. This was themajor adjustment of his later poetry" (p. 95). In other words: ''The discoveriesin ·Esthetique du Mal,' by purging the mind of spiritual structures, enableStevens to begin redeeming nature through the medium of his own visions,a process he initiates in 'Credences of Summer.' Commitment to a visionaryworld is also a pivotal phenomenon in the writings of Emerson and James.Stevens' mystic visions derive from both of them. For all three writers, visionarymoments are personal religious experiences, although in James' andStevens' case, not in any orthodox sense" (p. 109). La Guardia's analysis of the poetry of Stevens' major phase includes thoroughlyconvincing explications of ''Credences of Summer," "The Auroras ofAutumn" and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" in the light of the insightsand diction found in James's Varieties of Religious Experience. It is hiscompletely argued contention that, moving ''into his last years, Stevens' affirmationof existence in a world without structure does not falter" (p. 120). His(partly) revisionist reading of The Auroras of Autumn and The Rock in thelast two of his five chapters bears this out as Stevens' final triumph, his advanceon chaos as a poet of something like a temporary wonder. La Guardia seesa confluence between Stevens' mature poetry of accumulation, assemblage orprocess and James's "procedureless philosophy" (p. 125), and he demonstratesthe extent to which the poet's advance is toward a mystic participation IIborrow the phrase from Owen Barfield) in an apparently non-teleological universe. So, for La Guardia, Stevens' mature poem on George Santayana, "Toan Old Philosopher in Rome," is written by a poet who is reconciled to theheterogeneous universe as ·'sufficient to sustain the imagination's final puissant flick" (p. 169). The spiritual sufficiency of Santayana's declining yearsare analagous to the earned spiritual satisfaction Stevens arrived at in hisJames-inspired, pragmatic esthetic, his poetics of process. The clear poise and integrity of Stevens' sanctifying imagination is made engaging in Admnce on Chaos, and the solid achievement of this book is its abilityto trace Stevens' essentially imaginative solution to that conflict between order and chaos, between mind and reality, which is at the base of so much twentieth-century intellectual chagrin. One of the appealing writerly traits of the book is its comfortable allusiveness to background material. La Guardia's careful scholarship is almost always illuminating when placed next to the poetry itself. Most of the affinities that LaGuardia discusses are inescapably convincing because of hisgift for finding 498 Teny Whalen the relevant passages in Emerson and/ or James that help to make his case more than an idle or a simplyspeculative one. Leonora Woodman's scholarship in Stanza My Stone, by contrast, tends to rock back and forth between the merely decorative and the strainedly detailed at almost every turn, and this renders her book far less readable than La Guardia's. Stanza My Stone takes as its marginally credible thesis a suggestion that Stevens was profoundly influenced by the Hermetic tradition of philosophy and religion; but I think this isto mistake an interesting confluence of concerns with direct influence, and the habitual business of the scholarship in this book fails to provide the cement needed to make the case for influence a convincing one. In addition to an unhappy relationship between background awareness and close-up analysis in the book, there is·a formal stiffness inthe author's writing style. Stanza My Stone is punctuated with self-conscious lectern locutions like "Let us move the argument one step further" (p. 37), comments which forget the courtesy we feel in books where audience is remembered as a presence of real people who eat, sleep, laugh, cry and live here only briefly. Woodman unconsciously agrees with La Guardia that Stevens is more, far more, than a narrowly empirical, materialistic poet. Again like La Guardia, she is interested in the mystical or religious shape of the poet's vision. Nevertheless, ifLa Guardia details the contours of that dimension in Stevens byway of analysis of Stevens' pragmatism, Woodman is differently attentive to Stevens' central concern with the "ultimate poem" and his preoccupation with transcendental man. It is her intention to maintain that ... Stevens is a deeply religious poet whose work is as consistent and systematic as any rigorous reader might wish, once we recognize his spiritual purpose. Stevens, I shall urge, held a vision of spiritual regeneration which he repeatedly outlined in many of his poems. His subject is not "natural" man but transcendental man-or at least the possibility of transcendental man-and it belongs to the venerable and well-defined Hermetic tradition which not only nourished his creative genius but gave him a rich and abundant storehouse of image and symbol-even, in many instances, the very architecture of his poems. Since, for reasons I shall later explore, Stevens offered this vision of human transformation in the vocabularj of aesthetics, my first concern willbe to examine the textual evidence that clarifies the meanmg of "pure poetry" and the "ultimate poem," phrases Stevens sometimes used to distinguish two levels of poetry. I turn next to "Owl's Clover," Stevens' longest poem and the one m which he most clearly defined mankind's ..common god" (OP, 59), synonymous in the poet's arbitrary lexicon with "pure poetry" and equivalent to the transcendental Man of the Hermetic tradition. Chapter 3 considers this tradition in detail, outlining its premises and symbols to clarify the uses Stevens made of them. Succeeding chapters consider the relation of the Hermetic Man to the ··supreme fiction"; the spiritual reciprocity between imagination and reality-variation~ of the Hermetic doctrine of correspondence; the decreation and recreation of the self and nature that constitute the metamorphic stages of the Hermetic meditation; and the Hermetic theory of transcendental perception that lies at the core of Stevens' account of human transformation . In the final chapter, I turn to Stevens' native Pennsylvania, in order, thereby, to suggest the means by which he encountered the Rosicrucian tradition (the corporate form of modern Hermetisml that appears to have profoundly influenced his creative life. (pp. 4-5) ModernPoetry 499 Thelength of this summary passage is perhaps tolerable, given its ability toprovidea window on what isultimately an immensely complicated exercise inarchetypal criticism. Moreover, since I find this to be the least engaging ofthe five books under review, it can stand also as a potential invitation to otherreaders who might anticipate, from these words, more value in the book thanI have found. StanzaMy Stone counts heavily on our agreement that the poet's symbology suggestsprecisely the pattern which Woodman knows from elsewhere is a compellingand important one. This kind of archetypal criticism tends to superimposemeaning and pattern on the work, that is to say; and when the poethimself gives little more than obscure evidence of an interest in the critic's background material, we should remain restrained about the credibility ofthepattern as a controlling one in the poet's vision. Woodman does not manage to convince me that Stevens was vigorously interested in Rosicrucianism and, in the final chapter (a chapter we have beenled to believe will be a clinching one) where she posits "the means by whichhe encountered the Rosicrucian tradition" (p. 5), we find somewhat gainsayingsentences like these: "The critic who would probe the origins of Stevens'spiritual commitment faces a formidable task, dictated in part by thenature of the Hermetic vision, traditionally known as an 'operatio secreta artis,'in part by Stevens' habitual reticence and indirection. Above all, critical exegesis is hampered by the absence of biographical detail that would supplementour meager knowledge of Stevens' formative years" (p. 147).What follows these comments-ones that almost self-erasethe book's credibility-is abriefanalysis of "The Comedian as the Letter C," a poem which most agree (anyway) expresses a hunger for transcendence. This last chapter also includes a brief history of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood in Pennsylvania (given as a wooden aside), and it finishes with a quotation from H. Spencer Lewis' Rosicrucian Manual in which he describes the Harmonium. We are supposed to keep Stevens' title in mind while reading Lewis' description; but Lewis' words are not at all surprising: "Harmonium-A state ofharmony. The metaphysical meaning when applied to the relationship of humans is a unity of thought, agreement of purpose, the direct communion orkinship of souls. As applied to the relationship of the Cosmic to the human soul,it means that state of ecstasy where the human becomes conscious of the attunement of the natural forces of his being with the Absolute or the source from which they emanate." The drift of this passage certainly gives it a general sympathy with Stevens' vision. Yet it is a wide sympathy which could be sighted in hundreds of other poets as well. Stanza My Stone is an interesting book but not a central one on Stevens since, in the author's own words in her concluding sentence, "we may perhaps never know the extent of Stevens' indebtedness to this particular formulation of the Hermetic doctrine ... " (p. 163). 500 Teny Whalen Given the relative remoteness of the external evidence mustered in this book, we are left looking for a value in the book in its (sometimes crabbed) readings of the individual poems; and while some of the close readings are ingenious-particularly the reading of the problematic "Owl's Clover"-they are more often than not distracted by the author's enthusiasm for the arcana of the Hermetic tradition. Nonetheless, Stanza My Stone will no doubt make itsway as a possible source of some annotations of Stevens' poems; and,inan idiosyncratic way,it isof worth for its insistence on Stevens' undeniable identity as a searching religious poet. Henry M. Sayre's The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams successfully attacks the misnomer that views Williams as a poet who is absorbed bychaos (Yvor Winters has his place in this other view), a poet who was incapable of finding a sufficient esthetic for his desire to bring about a "reestablishment of order" (quoted from Williams, p. 108). Sayre's work includes the insights of many other Williams advocates (Joseph Riddel, for example), but his discussion of the importance of visual art as inspiration to ideas of order in Williams is the basis of a crisp and original reading of the canon. This bookis occasionally strained, even heavy-handed in its evaluation of the imagesof order in Williams' poetry, but it is fulsomely credible in its claim that the poet kept the dream of order alive in his work, and that he reconciled himself to the limits of authentic dreams and ideas of order in the culminating dialectic of Paterson's descending pages. Sayre's study is a richly informative one, by virtue of its knowledge of modern painting and photography and its clarifying grasp of Williams' relation to their experiments. His crispest sentences have a fine summary ability, and in his many paragraphs on Williams' progress as an artistic philosopher, or art critic and poet, he informs and widens our awareness of both Williams· struggle and his final poise as one who advances on chaos aided by the insights enacted in related arts. So, for instance, Williams shared with Kadansky's expressionism, with cubism, and with surrealism a sense that m the abstract lay a revelation of order which might unify the chaos of modernity. His work is the record of a constant effort to discover a place for abstraction in his poetry-an effort complicated, howevef\ by his honesty: his realization that the order discovered in most modem work is one independent of objective reality, rather than one integrally related to it many organic sense. Thus his poetry is torn by two seemingly contradictory allegiances: he believes m the necessity of order, the design of abstraction, but he will not deny the multiplicity and chaos of experience merely to satisfy this necessity. (p. 29) Bearing La Guardia's Advance on Chaos again in mind, it is arguable, that is, that Williams isat least as committed to abstractions about order as is Stevens. There is perhaps more chaos and clutter in Williams' volumes, but Sayre is convincing in his claim for Williams' heroic struggle with the issue and his arrival at his own kind of triumph over its difficulty. For Sayre, Williams· poetry includes a hunger for order- hence the poet's high regard for painting and photography, and his occasional use of orderly stanzaic patterns-and ModernPoetry 501 hehasa candid (and almost countervailing) awareness of the duality of honest artwhen it is true to the chaos of human experience and the physical world. Truly profound art, in Williams' view (and in Sayre's) must remember and alsoseek ideas of order, but it must as well encompass the multiplicity and chaosof the new. Sayre'sanalysis of Williams' partial debt to the cubists and surrealists is finely apposite. It is from them that Williams learned a skill for apprehending patternsas they emerge from the plane of the world in cooperation with the alertartistic mind. This is a source of momentarily perceived harmonies in art,even if it is no guarantee of an ultimate harmony in either the human conditionor the universe as a teleological possibility. Sayre's book is thick withsuch careful realizations, and its analyses of particular paintings are usuallyvery precise. There are absorbing analyses of Juan Gris's Dish of Pears and Open Window-see pp. 21-39, which also include reproductions ofthese paintings-after which he makes the following kinds of judgments: ...Gris's work is the product of the same dialectic between mind and matter that we find in Williams.Gris defines the modern experience of form as the expression of a concrete reality which belongs to the human mind alone, in which the mind represents itself and which is finallythe "coherent unity" or abstract design of the canvas. The objective world remains for Gris a vast disarray of things which he must analyze in order to detect the "elements of the same category" which will allow him to realize this formal unity. (p. 35) Realityneeds us: the order is in the artist's mind, even though the world cooperates by way of its provision of data. The art is a crafted bridge. Sayre is also adept in his focus on Williams' tutelage under the example of theStieglitzcircle of American artists. Williamswasinspired byAlfred Stieglitz' photography because of the ameliorative effects inherent in his choice of subjects,especially in his works (like The Flatiron,reproduced on p. 54) that discover perspectives on modern urban settings which manage to soften, humanize and give order to the visual squalor that is otherwise so usually suggestive of the spiritual dearth of twentieth-century American culture. Stieglitzdignifies reality by lifting it into artistic space, by giving it a locus of ostensible order in the domain of the human imagination. ~ayre analyzes such poems as "A Bastard Peace," "View of a Lake," "The Agonized Spires" and "Classic Scene," using the visor of Stieglitz' reconciling esthetic, his bringing of human meaning to what is obstinately chaotic in the world (pp. 58-62). Relatedly, he argues that in such poems as "Wheelbarrow " Williams isdrawing on Marcel Duchamp's method of finding for the essentially unpoetic subject an artistic meaning, once the object is dignified inartistic space. Sayre is also concerned with the "look" of Williams' words on the page. "Visual"in this book refers also to Williams' experiments with stanzaic patterns and line lengths as seen, not in traditional terms of measure, but in the actual sight of pattern in the relative width of his lines. There is an unsurprising 502 Terry Whalen analysis of "Fine Work with Pitch and Copper" in related terms (p. 85),and Sayre has, I think, a tendency to make too much of Williams' use of the so-calledtriadic variable foot in his later poetry. He sees such technical matters, however, as an index of Williams' sustenance of his dream of order and his advance on chaos. So it is fitting- if not thunderously essential - that Sayre would feel pressured to use this detail as support for his contention that Paterson is more of a seamless whole than many earlier critics have been willing to allow. Sayre understands and never oversimplifies the anxiety about chaos in Paterson, but he persuades us that there is a further order to the poem and that it is visible to those who remain awake to Williams' evolving esthetic. That esthetic is one which respects artistic symmetry but is also unafraid of the stuff of the chaotic world (even if, as with the inclusion of the Marcia Nardi letters, this means that the seams of the poem are stretched very close to the ripping point). Absolute, ultimate ideas of order might be fugitive, might have disappeared or are dead as credible syntheses; but the dream of order can be kept alive with an awareness of the temporary order that the poem embodies in its own symmetries, and it is also kept alive by the inclusion of celebrations of works of art (the paintings of Brueghel, for example), celebrations of the fact of art in the world. The method of Paterson is collage, and Sayre brings us back to this standard view with a freshness of appreciation. Collage is an appropriate structure, he says, since Collage turns the space of the art object into an arena of ambiguity. The autonomous existence of the work of art is challenged by the intrusion of the "real" into its space. Conversely, the "real" ismetamorphosed-in a manner analogous to Duchamp's metamorphosis of the urinal by placing it in the context of the museum-by its sudden placement in the realm of art. Collage presents us with a space in which the common object, in all its banality, is elevated to the realm of "high art," and "high art," with all its pretension, is relegated to the world of things. In terms of Paterson, the waste and junk of which the city is composed, and the newspapers which record the transience of our day-to-day lives, find themselves elevated into the poem. (pp. 94-95) Viewed in this context, Paterson is seen as honestly inclusive of the chaos of reality, and as far more than a bundle of scraps from life because it also places art objects within itself and celebrates them next to the tumble of our daily experience. Sayre concludes that "Paterson denies the possibility of ever realizing the dreams of the synthesis with which it had begun, but it does not deny the reality of the dream itself" (p. 108). Its greatness, to use a different diction, lie-sinits simultaneous celebration of the ideas of order enacted in art and in its consent to the heterogeneity of the living world. Sayre thinks (many do not, except in a very broad way) that this is what makes Willianis' canon so powerful as a creative response to the chaos of modernity. Sayre's careful depiction of the poet's struggle with the issue, and his convincing rendition Modern Poetry 503 of the way in which he makes peace with it, smoothes and improves the readability ofPaterson, I think- and the coherence and readability of countless other postmodernist works of self-conscious poetry that are inspired by Paterson's method. What is undeniably durable about The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams is its success, indeed, in making Williams more ~oherent than his detractors have realized, and it thereby reopens the question of whether or not the poet's advance on chaos is a satisfyingone. Williams'poetry is certainly somewhat circumjacent, at times, and his method of collage is perhaps even asconducive to befuddlement as it is suggestive of a convincing sensation of encompassing complexity-so, given this fact, Sayre's crisp reading of the canon is an especially valuable one. Grosvenor Powell's Yvor Winters: An Annotated Bibliography, 1919-1982 and Dick Davis' vVi'sdomand Wilderness: The Achievement of Yvor Winters areboth extensive, encompassing and first-classworksofadvanced scholarship. Together, they act as an omnium gatherum on Winters, a comprehensive commentary on him as poet, critic, teacher and ethical man. Powell has already in print a full-length critical study of Winters' poetry, Language as Being in the Poetry of Yvor Winters (1980),so it is not surprising that this bibliography in the reputable "Scarecrow Author Bibliographies" series is seasoned and sensible in the objectivity of its annotations, and that it is especially succinct in its Introduction and in the detailed annotations on Winters' primary works. Davis and Powell agree with one another-without necessarilysayingso-on many important points about Winters' achievement. They share, quite centrally, the idea stated by Powell that we must "come back to the fact that Winters was essentially a poet and that he praises just those qualities in poetry that most critics think that he rejects: qualities of consciousness, the unparaphrasable feelings motivated by language and form. He was interested in poetry first, not in morality and metaphysics; but critics, unable to intuit what he prized, assume that he was not interested in poetry but in various other things" (p. 13). Davis and Powell also share the truth that Winters' criticism was the working out of his own change of early direction from being a romantic poet, to becoming a more orderly, classical and postsymbolist poet in his mature years. As Powell puts it: "Winters began as an extreme variety of romantic mystic.... He was not a man of classical temperament attacking romantic innovation. He was a romantic innovator who had discovered the dangers of such innovation" (pp. 6-7).Far from a caricature of the inhibited man, he was an intense and emotionally capacious figure who knew by experience the appeal of the romantic attitude to life. Both books prize Winters' advance on chaos as a movement from fear of absorption by chaos (wilderness) through a recognition of the power, stability and ethical necessity of discursive thought in art (wisdom). 504 Terry Whalen One of the advantages of Powell's useful cross-referencing of secondary annotations on Winters' work is that it is a system which quietly shows us the extent to which a series of critics have absorbed different depths of influence from one another. Such a devotion to neatness of mind, on Powell's part, also means that it is possible to find groups or clusters of reviews, review articles and essays (for instance) which vary in response to any given dimension of Winters' work. Given this sorting grace in Powell's 342 secondary items (there are 424 primary works by Winters cited), it is a bit surprising that some items which appear to be alike are not actually cross-listed. For example, in the relevant case of Davis' book there are not cross-references to quite obvious critical samenesses like John Finlay's article on Winters' poetry (item 533,p. 122)- an article which shares in some of Davis' ideas (or vice versa)- and Michael Channing's 1974 Ph.D. dissertation (item 707, p. 166), which is, in the visage of its description by Powell, amazingly close to Davis' view of the dialectical growth of Winters' poetry. In short, the cross-referencing in the secondary sources section is more lax than Powell's almost completely thorough sifting performance in the primary sources. There are, too, a few oversights in Powell's entries which another reviewer has noticed. 2 These are minor criticisms, and this annotated bibliography is the authoritative one now, superceding Kenneth A. Lohf and Eugene P. Sheehey's Yvor Winters: A Bibliography (1959). Moreover, Powell's bibliography has a useful working structure that I have experienced at the desk level by consulting it now and again when reading Davis. Partly because of Powell, I was constantly aware of the shadows of other critics in Davis' book. Davis' study appears to derive a few of its main insights from others, but it is by the same token a comprehensive work, and its nicely appreciative, tight analysis of Winters' poetry and criticism renders it an important and enjoyable study. Powell and Davis do not set out to persuade us that Winters is an especially saintly man; but, for all of his somewhat Ezra Pound-like irritability-his saucy locutions, his impatience with other minds, his culture-managing airsWinters does emerge from the pages of these books as one of the most serious, solitary and scrupulously moral men ever to have walked the face of the earth. Davis'book particularly gives us a portrait of the artist as an existentially authentic being (my words), one who takes on a sensibly heroic stature in the weight of the peculiar good will (his manners aside) that marked his nature. In short, Powell and Davis end up accounting for Winters without doing any apologizing. As a poet, critic and cultural commentator, Winters swam against the stream of modern experimentalism in the arts, and did so because he felt the proximity to madness in romanticism in his own spiritual life, perceiving it also as destructive of the talent of others. This self-criticism made him a very different and dignified man. It also made him a stoical and orderly (ThomisticAristotelean ) poet and critic who relentlessly ransacked the American litera- Modern Poetry 505 ture of two centuries, and especially the English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for models of sensible form and statement that might serve as a staying power against the disease he called romanticism-a disease he in his early years was infected with, and in his mature years saw as an inadequate response to the chaos of the elemental and social drama oflife. Winters' advance on chaos was very different from that of Stevens and Williams, but his triumph over the threat of chaos' intrusion on the mind was equal in strength to theirs. Winters characterized himself as a man who espoused a rare "Theism," but others have been happy broadly to classify him as a Christian in at least the demeanor of his ethics and in the tragic sense of his metaphysical view. Yet, while no label is adequate to the depth of the thinking in his spiritual journey, it seems to me that in the anxiety of his struggle with the threat of meaninglessness, in the individual strength of his moral seriousness and the stoicism of his confrontation with death, the label '"existentialist" most properly captures his battle with chaos. It also puts him, for all of his unique identity, into at least some kinship with Williams and Stevens. Davis sees something very like this sort of an affinity when he accounts for Winters' shift from an early enthusiasm for Williams' and Stevens' poetry to a later reservation about Stevens and a clear dismissal of Williams (pp. 208-14 ). Winters initially appreciated in both poets what Davis terms-speaking of Winters on Stevens-their knowledge of the "chaos of experience existing over against man's consciousness which Winters [himself] constantly posits" (p. 209). They knew the abyss. Winters was later to dismiss what he saw as Stevens' hedonistic response, and he came close to lampoon in hisrejection of what he sawasa fragmentation and mute nominalism in Williams' _work.Winters' rudimentary affinity with these writers, nevertheless, remained in his shared awareness with them of what, in words on Stevens, he called "the situation of the isolated man in a meaningless universe" (p. 209). He responded to Stevens' and Williams' recognitions, but he rejected their unstable solutions; in both writers he saw an absorption in the obliterating effects of an inept empiricism. In its very title Wz'sdomand Wilderness stresses the centrality of this dialectic. Stevens, Williams and Winters each in his own way confronted ''chaos and the dark" (to recall Emerson's phrase which began this essay) and, while their struggles with and victories over the abyss were quite different in the end, they each took their poetry and their esthetics outward to the limits of mind. In Winters' words, they would finally define "the boundary at which contemplation ceases" (Davis,p. 185).Because of these new studies of Stevens and Williams it is now safe to say that both poets were as systematic, in the long run, as was Winters, in their struggle with the division between mind and matter. Like Winters, they measured what was available to them in the 506 Terry Whalen traditions of art and thought that they admired. They produced a poetry which grew out of their considered responses to a potentially meaningless universe. They faced the abyss with the hope suggested to them by the intellectual order which is art, the systematic encouragement which is philosophy and esthetics at their most flexible and orderly, and the all important sense of the mystery of existence that remains when all is said and suffered and done. There are roots that clutch out of the stony rubbish of modernity, and the achievements of Stevens, Williams and Winters testify to this. These studies of such veterans of thinking about "chaos and the dark" help also to underline an overlooked truth largely absent in a great deal of the wasteland and confessional poetry of this century-that ideas of order in the testament of much art and poetry, and a durable capacity for temporary wonder, can amount to a courageous and sufficient response to the tragic division between mind and reality that is the inheritance of the modern spiritual condition. Stoically confronting the chaos without giving in to it, keeping alive the dream of order when faced with it, and lighting the dark with reason and the imagination without being simple about it-these are the bases of the poetry and esthetics of Stevens, Williams and Winters. They are the bases, too, of their artistic heroism in that strangely post-Christian, but also post-wasteland temperament which also informs the most creative and worthwhile writing in the post-World War II period. Significantly, it is Thom Gunn, a poet who has absorbed much of the wisdom of Yvor Winters' poetry and esthetic, who still owns some of the finest words in print about Winters. They are words which- because of the studies under review-could at least in part be seen as applicable to Stevens and Williamsas well. In "To Yvor Winters, 1955,"Gunn speaks of the difficulty of living in "a half-world, not ours nor history's," and he speaks also of how easy it is for the thoughtful person in such an existential fix to "submit his passive faculties/To evening, come where no resistance is;/The unmotivated sadness of the air/Filling the human with his own despair." In the third and final stanza of this poem he moves above the darkness suggested by the visage of a non-teleological universe, and pays tribute to Winters' intelligent response to the reality of the "half-world": But sitting in the dusk-though shapes combine, Vague mass replacing edge and flickering line, You keep both Rule and Energy in view, Much power in each, most in the balanced two: Ferocity existing in the fence Built by an exercised intelligence. Though night is always close, complete negation Ready to drop on wisdom and emotion, Night from the air or the carnivorous breath, Modern Poetry Still it is right to know the force of death, And, as you do, persistent, tough in will, Raise from the excellent the better still.3 507 If"Rule and Energy" are more strong, obvious in Winters' individual poems and in his mature criticism, it is also clear that in Stevens and Williams a similarrule and energy is visible in their collected works, despite their critical detractors (including Winters) who mistake their confrontation with chaos asan absorption in it. The persistent desire to transcend the dark, in all three writers, and the different ways in which we can notice their "Ferocity existing in the fence/Built by an exercised intelligence," give to them a profoundly courageous artistic presence which is unifying and memorable past all of their many differences. Notes 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ..Self-Reliance," as quoted by David M. La Guardia in Adi-ance on Chao.!i, p. 3. 'See Richard Hoffpauir's review in English Studies in Canada, 11/3 (Sept. 19851,379-81. Hoffpauir says that Powell ..overlooks at least five items from the 1959 bibliography by Kenneth Lohf and Eugtne Sheehey. fails as did they to note Allen Tate's important 1928review of The Bare Hills, and omits a few recent articles (including at least three from the late Canadian journal, The Compass). But most of the important ones are here" (p. 381).·Thom Gunn ...To Yvor Winters, 1955,"in The Sense ot'Mm·emellt (1957;London, 19681,pp. -14-45. ...