Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value by Charles Altieri (review)

Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity is an ambitious book that brings together in a relatively short space some of the longstanding preoccupations of one of our most serious and searching critics of modern poetry. First, it aims to encompass the whole arc of Stevens' career from Harmonium to The Rock, and to describe it as a narrative of development—even improvement. Second, as the title suggests, it takes this "conceptual overview" of Stevens' career as an opportunity to deepen our accounts of literary modernism as a response to a "crisis" of value (viii), and to identify those aspects of the poet's response that hold the most promise for meeting the "demands of modernity" as we continue to encounter them in the present. Charles Altieri's Stevens is not a belated romantic: he does not present moments of heightened feeling as disclosures of a deep truth about the world. Nor, however, is he a modern in the manner of Ezra Pound, who understood the creative power of form as "a gift to the world" (25) and an "incarnation" (28)—the achievement of a will unregulated and unsanctioned by social convention or moral wisdom. Stevens' most valuable poetic achievements aim, not at the imaginative triumph over a world of fact, but at the intensification of our capacities to value aspects of that world. Stevens' poetry shows us what it looks like to be attached to shifting imaginative stances toward "things as they are." By embodying those stances and attachments in a voice, he holds out the possibility that readers might use the poems as a resource for identification, transforming their own experiences with new feelings about "the possibilities in things" (34).

Some of these claims—about the trajectory of Stevens' career toward a reconciliation with "the normal," or about modernism's crisis—will seem familiar to the reader of modernist criticism (though the book does much to deroutinize and deepen them). Altieri's most original contribution is the one promised by the subtitle: Toward a Phenomenology of Value. The "toward" here identifies the book as part of a larger argument—one that spans more than a decade of critical work, and which is still ongoing—for poetry's distinctive contribution to philosophy. Here, Altieri pits Stevens against ethical readings ("analytic," pragmatic, or deconstructive) that conceive of literature as setting the particularity of life or the word against the generality of the law or the concept. On Altieri's account, such approaches remain restrictively bound to problems of epistemology. The domain of value, as Altieri reminds us, is broader than the domain of ethics. "Values" are not propositions to be believed or objects to be affirmed; they are affective possibilities guiding thought and action that reside in our responsiveness and commitment to "situations." Altieri's account of Stevens' career is crucially defined by the shift from the epistemological problems with which he is so frequently identified (how is it possible for our minds to know the world?) to a problem that Altieri takes to be less frustratingly unresolvable: "what difference does it make for our sense of the world to be concerned with knowing it in particular ways?" (5; emphasis added). Rather than seeking in vain to balance "things as they are" with the changes brought forth by our instruments of description and reflection, Stevens aims to body forth what Altieri calls the "intensities" that lie within our descriptions (25), demonstrating what is "humanly capable" in an idea (6) without imposing the believing obligation of philosophical system to which it belongs.

These are abstract formulations; and sometimes over the course of the book, one finds oneself wishing for a clearer definition of terms. (More specifically, I wished for a more explicit engagement with value theory and the "value problem" in recent epistemology, and for Altieri's most patient exposition of the concept of value itself, which can be frustratingly elusive.) But for Altieri, such abstraction is very much...