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  • Like a New Knowledge of Reality: Stevens’ Poetry at the End of the Mind
  • Brendan Mahoney

THE CLOSING LINE of Wallace Stevens’ final poetic statement in his Collected Poems, “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself,” reads: “It was like / A new knowledge of reality” (CPP 452).1 The line expresses a sense of finality that extends far beyond the poem itself. In her book Stevens and Simile, Jacqueline Vaught Brogan interprets the finality of this sentence to be indicative of Stevens’ decision “to conclude the final poem of his Collected Poems . . . with a simile that summarizes his entire poetic enterprise” (166). Although her claim might sound bold, I agree with it: what Stevens sought in his poetry was the discovery of a “new knowledge of reality”—a knowledge that reveals the “thing itself,” and not merely ideas or concepts about the thing. However, simply because Stevens sought this “new knowledge of reality,” it does not mean that he achieved it, either in his poetry or otherwise. In the closing remarks of his philosophical study of Stevens’ poetry, Things Merely Are, Simon Critchley concludes that “Stevens’s poetry fails” (87). The failure is not in the composition of verse—Critchley offers little commentary on the success of Stevens’ writings as works of poetry. Instead, he claims the failure is epistemological: it is Stevens’ poetic enterprise of discovering a “new knowledge of reality” that reveals the “thing itself” that fails.

In accordance with his primarily philosophical interests in Stevens’ work, Critchley proposes that the poet’s “entire work might be viewed as an extended elaboration of the guiding question of epistemology: the relation between thought and things, or mind and world” (22). By reading Stevens’ concepts of imagination and reality—which Critchley calls “the two master concepts of Stevens’s poetics” (23)—through the epistemological categories of mind/world or thought/things, he argues, “Stevens’s late poems stubbornly show how the mind cannot seize hold of the ultimate nature of the reality that faces it. Reality retreats before the imagination that shapes and orders it. Poetry is therefore the experience of failure” (6). Each poetic act attempts to bring the ultimate nature of reality into words, but time and again it fails. What emerge are not things themselves, but words, symbols, concepts, and so forth; and in that failure, the poet remains incapable of bridging the divide between mind and world, thought and things. [End Page 225]

The literary critics Marjorie Perloff and George Lensing agree that Stevens’ poetry fails to attain a “new knowledge of reality” that reveals the “things themselves.” Perloff reads “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself” as a work of irony, signaled most clearly by the poem’s title: “The title of the poem is particularly ironic because the poem, it turns out, presents, not the ‘thing itself’ at all, but a very individual ‘idea about the thing’—one man’s sense of the world” (339). For Lensing, the poem’s own lyrical language undermines the possibility that it could reveal the thing itself: “When, for example, we learn that the ‘cry’ is ‘part of the colossal sun,’ we see the synthetic powers of an active mind: a taxonomy deriving from an interior mind rather than the exterior world. As a result, the transition of the mind into the realm of spring inevitably signals ideas about the thing rather than the thing. It cannot be otherwise. . . . The poem makes this admission grudgingly” (Wallace Stevens 231).

While I would agree that the majority of Stevens’ works express and even accept the failure articulated by these three critics, I would argue that his later poems offer hints of a relationship between mind and world that moves beyond that of failure.2 In order to see those hints at work in his later poems, I would suggest that we need to attempt to read those works without the basic assumptions about the mind in the epistemological framework—i.e., that 1) the mind is distinct or separate from the external world, and 2) the only valid form of knowledge is propositional knowledge. Critchley does propose such a way of reading Stevens’ late poems: “his...

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