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  • Survey Review of a Year’s Essays on Stevens
  • Edward Ragg
Survey Review of a Year’s Essays on Stevens Page(s) from a Tale: Some Contours of Current Stevens Criticism

The online concordance of Wallace Stevens—a superb resource assembled by John N. Serio and Greg Foster, and made possible by the late Bill Ford—incorporates a downloadable database tracking the frequency of individual words. Although such words can be searched by frequency and rank via the online concordance, the database provides an instant picture of the most popular words to have flowed from Stevens’ pen.

Leaving aside the all-important articles, conjunctions, pronouns, and prepositions that often take on special values in Stevens, the words “man,” “night,” “things,” “sun,” “mind,” “will,” and “world” are especially frequent. Those preoccupied with the critically well-established imagination-reality complex—and its attendant color symbolism—will discover that “green” (just) trumps “blue” in frequency in Stevens’ work. Those given to phenomenological accounts may turn a wry smile that “being” and “nothing” hold precisely the same frequency. Prosodist close-readers, allying the rhythms and resonances of Stevens’ verse with larger concerns, will find “sound” and “place” weighing in equally. And those of us who have combined the poet’s love of gastronomy with his overall aesthetics will discover “bowl” just nudging “book” for space in Stevens’ choice vocabulary.

Whatever potential critical stories these discoveries might tell, making a selection of representative essays from last year’s body of Stevens criticism is inevitably partial. But the narrative(s) implied in selection find resonance in one strand of Stevens criticism that unites the others: namely, narrative itself. This is Milton Bates’s concern in his “Stevens and Modernist Narrative.” Bates acknowledges that narrative has not been a staple of traditional Stevens criticism; that Stevens, for many, is “not a narrative poet” (160). But, following on from Daniel R. Schwarz’s Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Bates returns to the quest poem “The Comedian as the Letter C” to analyze both Stevens’ narrative strategies and the implicit issue of the poet’s sense of his own career.

Harnessing Roman Jakobson’s poles of metaphor and metonymy, as expressed in the narrative theories of David Lodge and Peter Brooks, Bates not only elaborates the wide range of narrative vehicles Stevens’ poetry employs—anecdote being a persistent feature—but also reveals how “Stevens emphasizes the metaphoric dimension of his stories by stripping them of structural metonymies” (165). This leads to some fascinating critical questions. For example: “Did [Stevens’] fondness for metaphor compromise his effort to fashion a credible image of the supreme fiction?” (169). No doubt this was a tension Stevens relished; and Bates deftly suggests that for “every reader who endorses the journey . . . to a metaphoric summit, there is another who finds meaning in the return to homely metonymies. The Stevensian odyssey embraces both” (172).

The term “odyssey” is especially apt. A veteran Stevens scholar, Bates returns here implicitly to his own critical narrative as author of Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (1985). This essay, as with others selected below, is, likewise, [End Page 278] especially interested in Stevens’ own career. Not just building on the “Comedian,” but analyzing Stevens’ response to George Santayana’s life story and demise in “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” Bates suggests: “Stevens imagined an obituary . . . in which metaphoric closure is both a figurative death and the prelude to contemplation—posthumous contemplation . . . —of life’s metonymies” (170–71). He identifies a “masterplot” informing Stevens’ late lyrics as they reflect on old age, death, achievement, failure, and the implied narrative of the poet’s own career.

Rachel Cole, in “Rethinking the Value of Lyric Closure,” similarly considers not only the sense of an ending, but whether or not poems may be said to end at all. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s published lecture “The End of the Poem” and previous discussions of “lyric” as a nominal category, Cole observes the “belated turn toward an ethics of lyric” (384). Rightly disputing the notion that lyrics have limited ethical value because they may “turn away from closure,” Cole subtly qualifies: “I do not believe we need to...

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