Unmediated Impasse of Modernity

I begin with the Stevens poem published originally in Parts of a World (1942), which lends this book its title, with one evident revision, "How to Live. What to Do."

Last evening the moon rose above this rockImpure upon a world unpurged.The man and his companion stoppedTo rest before the heroic height.

Coldly the wind fell upon themIn many majesties of sound:They that had left the flame-freaked sunTo seek a sun of fuller fire.

Instead there was this tufted rockMassively rising high and bareBeyond all trees, the ridges thrownLike giant arms among the clouds.

There was neither voice nor crested image,No chorister, nor priest. There wasOnly the great height of the rockAnd the two of them standing still to rest.

There was the cold wind and the soundIt made, away from the muck of the landThat they had left, heroic soundJoyous and jubilant and sure.

Strangely, Joan Richardson, Stevens biographer and scholar extraordinaire, does not discuss this titular poem, aside from a throwaway line ("How to live, what to do—it matters what you pay attention to"), though the lines of the poem giving this book its subtitle weave their ways throughout it. Such a significant piece being missing feels like neither dereliction, nor chance, but intentional. Richardson must want her reader to discover in this absent poem something key. Likely, she wants the reader to identify with the two figures in the poem, the speaker (or "the man") and the other (or "the companion.") In this lyric's plot, these deliberately vague figures can play the roles of lover and beloved, poet and muse, archetypal first man and first woman, or Adam and Eve from Milton's conclusion to Paradise Lost (1667), perhaps even Dante and Beatrice as they observe the cosmic Love that rolls through all things. But of course, these two figures may be no more than wind-blown vagabonds in a depression-haunted derelict America. Finally, they can be parsed as animus and anima of one self, interior paramours of the post-romantic psyche, from Shelley to Jung. Clearly, the poem testifies to the modern waste land in which there are no more gods, heroes, priests, or singers ("choristers"). In such a world, one must start pragmatically, mindfully, and open-mindedly, from scratch: all those facts of modernity acknowledging, with the cutting sound of wind (Shelley's West Wind come around again?), its "heroic sound / Joyous and jubilant and sure."

The thirteen chapters of this short provocative book are not so much radically different perspectives, or ways of looking at Stevens, since they follow upon each other as if composed as a single long argument or common imaginative stance, divided up after original composition. Richardson brings to bear, here all in one place, the discourses she has been using in her earlier work. These discourses are biographical (a la her ground-breaking two volume biography), pragmatist (William James and Peirce, as well as Emerson's "transcendental" anticipations), mystical (Eastern mysticism especially), and philosophy of science (the Whitehead of Science in the Modern World on up through Stevens' lifetime) and even current science—quantum physics and neuro-biological. The often-anachronistic resulting portrait of Stevens is of a modern poet, in the best American tradition of Whitman, Dickinson, and Emerson, who accepts the idea of the modern world being post-apocalyptic with respect to religious and most traditions. Stevens as thus starts mostly from scratch, thereby making the poetry's subject the exploration of this new empty space and the haunting reverberations that resound from the pre-linguistic babblings of the infant's acquisition of language to the philosophical poet-critic's highest abstractions, from ironic fumblings with syntax and grammar and excursions into philological history, on to the most rarefied of etymological deviations and blind alleys, the most refined of epistemological and phenomenology of...