Stevens, Williams, Crane and the Motive for Metaphor (review)

Robert Rehder, who teaches at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, has written a clear, straightforward, reasonable analysis of what three modern poets said about, and did with, metaphor. Perhaps it was unlucky that I turned to the book right after grading my American lit exams, and found he’d organized his thoughts along similarly prosaic lines: “discuss X (in this case, metaphor) in the work of three poets we’ve read this term, giving clear examples, and develop an idea of your own.” Professor Rehder is perhaps the last man to thank his typists for dealing with illegible handwritten drafts, and this is perhaps the last book that will be dedicated to R. P. Blackmur, his teacher from Princeton, whom he calls il miglior fabbro and “the greatest English critic since Coleridge.” Rehder gracefully declines to argue or engage with other critics, while acknowledging that he has learned much from reading them; his work is not based on new textual discoveries or a new slice of context to illuminate familiar works; rather, he reads some poems and prose texts together and distinguishes in each a different attitude to metaphor, which he quite rightly sees as central to the work of all three and indeed to the project of poetry itself. I found myself wanting to say “a New Critic—not that there’s anything wrong with that” in Jerry Seinfeld’s defensive tone of voice.

Since the book’s heart is in close reading, he cannot deal with a wide range of poems, and has chosen to help us tackle some thorny ones, including Stevens’s “Someone Puts a Pineapple Together” and Crane’s “Atlantis” section from The Bridge, rather than those with more surface appeal. He also begins by crediting what the poets themselves have to say about their use of metaphor: Stevens’s “Three Academic Pieces,” Crane’s exchange of letters about the “logic of metaphor” with Harriet Monroe, and Williams’s skirmishes with Stevens and objections to Crane provide a handy “compare and contrast” armature on which to hang the readings. So the book will be especially useful to those seeking a scorecard to tell the players apart, and also a good resource to those preparing to teach them. While the claim in the preface that “Metaphor is not an ordinary way of looking at a poet’s work” hardly rings true, there is still no better way to see what’s particular about a writer’s approach than by juxtaposing several, and he has made a good job getting at what is most Stevens about Stevens, most Crane about Crane, and where Williams is most like himself, in constructions most of us will recognize as constructions but nevertheless also . . . recognize. For instance: “Williams wants to possess the object, Crane wants to be possessed by it” (143). “Stevens enjoys arguments [. . .] Williams believes in plain statements. [. . .] Crane struggles with feelings that are almost out of reach or overwhelmingly present” (150). We come away seeing three plausibly distinct ways of answering the question of how imagination relates to reality, how ideas relate or should relate to “things” or “the thing”—and actually the whole question lies in between those two ways of stating it, since Stevens (“not ideas about the thing but the thing itself”) has already turned “concreteness” into an abstraction. “Resolutely anti-metaphysical, Williams finds his comfort in reality. [. . .] For Stevens, the motive for metaphor is the need to establish a relation between reality and the imagination. Crane uses the things of this world to reconstruct his feelings and wants to go through them, beyond them, to a meaning, a raison d’être that feels like wholeness and involves a reconciliation of primary conflicts” (85).

Rehder is unconcerned to give an account of “modernism” as such, since he feels period labels detract from an understanding of what makes a poet unique; to him, modernity begins with the increased self-awareness and self-consciousness of the Romantics (especially Wordsworth) and the...