Stevens, Auden: Whose Age Was It Anyway—and Why Do We Care?

THE LIVELY DISCUSSION occasioned by the 2013 Modern Language Association panel on “Stevens, Auden, or Both: Whose Age?” and continued in the present issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal had the mission to think about two “major men,” as Stevens would say—and, ostensibly, to weigh them against each other. The poet vs. poet binary reiterates a framework that has proven durable. It revisits a re-visitation: an earlier MLA roundtable, the 2000 “Pound vs. Stevens Revisited,” which spurred a suite of essays printed in the pages of this journal in 2002. Those essays in turn reappraised the 1982 article in which Marjorie Perloff first posed a question we are stilling wrangling with, “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?”¹ In 2002, some contributors probed the usefulness of Great Author binaries. Perloff called her own earlier polemic “reductive,” an evaluation echoed by Alan Filreis (182). Charles Altieri proposed an Era of Eliot followed by a compound Era of Pound/Stevens, marked by their multiple shared projects such as a “second-order lyricism” (231). A proposition of commonality was also made by Patricia Rae in her discussion of Pound’s and Stevens’ similar “agnostic and pragmatic spirit” (155). Douglas Mao agreed, with some reservations, that modernism might be known as the Pound Era, setting aside likely contenders Eliot, Stein, and Auden (“How” 175). Filreis also noted that the way Perloff positioned herself and Harold Bloom as “counter-presences” in her original essay echoed the opposition of the two poets and “present[ed] us with a compelling and still-relevant model of Pound/Stevens” (182). Indeed, somewhat like Russian dolls, the squaring-off of modernist poets has been nested within the pitted allegiances (aesthetic, philosophical, coastal) of twentieth-century American poetry critics. This mirroring stems from a central, unresolved issue in the institutionalization of literary studies, which I will explore in this essay: how to distinguish between the scholar and the critic.

Although the “major man” framework in poetics—“The Age of ‘The Age of,’” as Jed Rasula calls it (57)—can be traced back to antecedents such as Hugh Kenner’s watershed study The Pound Era, it is alive and well in recent books such as Ruth Jennison’s The Zukofsky Era and Aidan Wasley’s The Age of Auden. In 2013 it is timely not just to propose the Age of Langston Hughes or Gertrude Stein, but also to review how and why questions have arisen around whom the age belonged to and the metrics used to make that determination. The remarkable durability of the clash-of-the-titans debate in Modernist Studies calls for some reflection about its structure and why it has proven hard to shake. It is a structure invested in legacies and progress narratives, undergirded by a discourse of aesthetic judgment and taste, which is to say, cultural capital. Is the “Whose Era Was It Anyway” conversation simply about major men—or, put more baldly, genius? Why is this literary debate distilled to just two figures? Does the question’s syntax simply echo the basic structure of how literary movements are often imagined, which is to say, as an ever-unfolding dynamic in which the moderns heave themselves up and over the ancients? What are the criteria for appraisal—influence, legacy, innovation, representativeness (which poet best emblematizes a moment)? Should the modernist “era” be awarded—minus the cash prize—to the poet “whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition,” as the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Prize annually awarded by the Poetry Foundation specifies? If “Whose Era” entails evaluating who changed the poetry of his or her moment, it is, at bottom, an inquiry into genealogy, as we imagine literature’s arborescence. How can we avoid envisioning a poetic development inexorable as the flow of the Mississippi River toward its delta, depositing the alluvium of poetry in the contemporary moment? Since it is impossible to escape presentism in evaluating the past century’s worth of poetry written and poetics formulated, the “Whose Era” question seems destined to say most about our contemporary moment, the values we hold, and the power structures in which...