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  • “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself”
  • Robert Pogue Harrison (bio)

I would like to take the occasion of this special issue of New Literary History to ponder the idea of nature in Wallace Stevens’s poetry—this by way of pondering a distinctly American idea of nature which many “ecocritics” among us are eager to reaffirm but one which I personally do not embrace, for reasons that will become clear at the end of this essay. I choose to focus on Stevens for two principal reasons. First, because I think his poetry is a wondrous testament to that American idea of nature. Second, because his poetry has always perplexed me, and I hope through this exercise to unperplex myself somewhat with regard to the baffling abstraction into which his poems seem to recede, and out of which they seem to be generated. What does that abstraction have to do with his idea of nature? That is one way of phrasing the question I intend to pursue in these pages. My suspicion is that it has everything to do with it. In any case I am convinced that I will not understand any of Stevens’s poems adequately without first coming to terms with the idea of nature embedded within them. 1

I will begin with a proposition: “idea” and “nature” are essentially homologous in the thought of Wallace Stevens. By this I mean that “nature” is not something of which we find an “idea,” in the sense of a cognitive concept, in his poems. Nature is the birth, or coming into being, of the idea as such. There is probably no better place to begin elucidating this abstract and otherwise obscure assertion than with the opening of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” where Stevens’s use of the term “idea” suggests that the idea of nature and the nature of the idea are correlated:

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun.

You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it. [End Page 661]

Never suppose an inventing mind as source Of this idea nor for that mind compose A voluminous master folded in his fire. 2

It seems altogether appropriate that in a poem that speaks of retrieving or rediscovering the “first idea” Stevens should harken back to the archaic etymological sense of the word “idea.” In Greek idein means to see, and is related to eidos, the outward aspect or look of something. The idea is to be perceived, not conceived. The sun in its idea is “inconceivable” because mental conceiving and representing are secondary activities of the mind, whereas ideas are primary phenomena as they appear to an “ignorant” eye, prior to knowledge. The idea perceives the phenomenon in its first appearance; indeed, it enables the phenomenon to appear at all, for without the idein there is no eidos. (“Reality as a thing seen by the mind, / Not that which is but that which is apprehended,” is how Stevens puts it in a later poem [CP 468].)

When seen in its idea the sun is “washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven / that has expelled us and our images” (CP 381). This heaven of originality remains uncontaminated by the a posteriori images, myths, and anthropomorphisms by which humans have conceived the sun or given it figurative names that falsify its nature. This pure heaven seems reminiscent of Plato’s ineffable realm of absolute ideas (eidoi), to be sure, but I would like to leave aside the Platonic background of “Notes” and emphasize instead the poem’s invocation of Eden, which strikes me as radical and provocative. The Eden of the Bible for Stevens was not primary, was not a heaven of ideas. Even in its prelapsarian state it was already in some basic sense fallen, insofar as it was already taken possession of by a “false” or falsifying human imagination:

The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes And Eve made air the mirror of herself

(CP 383)

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