Wallace Stevens And The Apocalyptic Mode

Afterword

Afterword Ending with Strand and Ashbery I want to begin my conclusion by quoting from a response to an earlier article of my own—“Wallace Stevens’ ‘Puella Parvula’ and the ‘Haunt of Prophecy’”—that appeared in the Wallace Stevens Journal special issue entitled Approaching the Millennium: Stevens and Apocalyptic Language (, no. , fall ). In his “Afterword: Last Words on Stevens and Apocalypse,” Langdon Hammer wrote that the difficulty of distinguishing between apocalyptic and antiapocalyptic strains in Stevens’s work (such was the main concern of my article) “looks ahead to the postmodern condition, defined as a certain impasse: the break with apocalyptic thinking in postmodernism remains a mode of apocalypse, Woodland argues, ‘in its very desire to transcend history .’” (). Hammer’s response is in every way fair and judicious, but I want to question two words—“looks ahead”—just as in my introduction I questioned Tyrus Miller’s observation that late modernism “anticipates” postmodernism. In my article, I had not been thinking of Stevens as a poet who looks ahead to postmodernism; and I hope that one issue that becomes clear in this book is how the apparent resemblances between modernism and postmodernism have more— in fact, everything—to do with postmodernism’s status as a development of and reaction against modernism. As Hutcheon puts it, “modernism literally and physically haunts postmodernism” (Poetics ) or “is ineluctably embedded in the postmodern” (); postmodernism “marks neither a simple and radical break from [modernism] nor a straightforward continuity with it: it is both and neither” (). It seems important to remember, too, not only that “our sense of what modernism was remains . . . fluid,” as Longenbach rightly notes (“Jorie Graham’s” ), but that some of this fluidity is generated by the tensions and contradictions within modernism. This is hardly a new point; Linda Hutcheon gives a useful summary of canonical readings of this aspect of modernist aesthetics on page  of A Poetics of Postmodernism, and Charles Bernstein’s brief “Pounding Fascism: (Appropriating Ideologies—Mystification, Aestheticization, and Authority in Pound’s Poetic Practice)” offers, in its understanding of how “Pound has systematically misinterpreted the nature of his own literary production,” a penetrating account of one of modernism’s main sites of tension: Pound, or part of him, wished to control the valuation of the materials he appropriated by arranging them in such a way that an immanent or “natural” order would be brought into being. As Pound seems to acknowledge in the final movements of the (for the moment) standard version of the poem, The Cantos never jells in this way. For Pound this was a measure, no matter how ambivalent he may have been about the evaluation, of the failure of The Cantos. In contrast, the success of The Cantos is that its coherence is of a kind totally different than Pound desired or could—in his more rigid moments—accept. For the coherence of the “hyperspace ” of Pound’s modernist collage is not a predetermined Truth of a pancultural elitism but a product of a compositionally decentered multiculturalism. (Poetics –) Bernstein’s ironizing of Pound’s “failure” has its charm, though there are reasons to question its assumption of a certain teleology of cultural history, a teleology that seems to culminate in the work of Charles Bernstein, among others. The tensions and contradictions in Pound’s Cantos may be best conceived not in terms of a failure to be postmodern but in terms of a successful realization or embodiment of the contradictions inherent in modernism: the modern is that discourse that breaks with the aesthetics of the past in order to preserve them more effectively. My readings of Stevens attempt to show how this tension operates in his work. Admittedly, Pound and Stevens would appear to operate at almost opposite extremes of the range of poetic practices employed in the first half of the last century—Pound an apparently radical disrupter of formal conventions , Stevens one who stays closer to certain syntactic, metrical, and stanzaic norms—and are nearly as far apart in their overt political ideologies. Yet in its own way, Stevens’s poetics enact an endless questioning of the poetic and intellectual past and of its own formulations while—again in its own way—seeking to preserve something from that past, trying to find “what, after much testing, will hold” (Cook, “King James” ). Ending with Strand and Ashbery  In Stevens’s poetry, then, this modernist tension tends to be greatest when not only...