Survey Review of a Year's Essays on Stevens: Metonymies, or Sunday in the Park with Wallace

This past year's articles on Wallace Stevens complicate what sometimes seems an agon in earlier Stevens criticism between abstraction and materiality. The reprieve of not having to choose one version of Stevens over another is itself the subject of Al Filreis' "The Stevens Wars." Collectively, these new articles remind us that in reading Stevens, questions of cerebral withdrawal and empirical circumstance not only require but illuminate each other. As Stevens himself writes, in words quoted by Elizabeth Willis in her essay on "Lyric Dissent," "'the imagination and society are inseparable,' . . . there is 'a violence from within that protects us from a violence without'" (233). This inseparability is evident in the work of critics such as Stephen Burt, Bart Eeckhout, Bethany Hicok, Susan Howe, and David R. Jarraway. Reading Stevens' last two collections, The Auroras of Autumn and The Rock, alongside Jonathan Edwards' "Personal Narrative," Howe feels "the inexpressible sense of affection Edwards describes when referring to his reading as an ecstatic union between nature and scripture" (52). This union suggests that the non-necessity of choosing between world and lyric has a long (and for some, unsurprising) lineage. The variousness with which such unions surface in this year's Stevens criticism is inspiring, but so is the uncanny similarity in which they are trawled and troped across these disparate pages.

Burt's essay on "Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived," seems at first blush like an historicist contextualizing of Stevens' "The Plain Sense of Things" in relation to the "real" space of Hartford's Elizabeth Park, which "contains all the features that [Stevens' late poem] describes: greenhouses, a 'great structure' intended for celebrations (the Pond Estate House), a pond, and gardens of annual and perennial flora, including lilies" (328). Such empirical fastidiousness nonetheless yields a theory of Stevensian materiality far less familiar than usual forms of external historicist context.

At first, Burt's argument seems at odds with David Bromwich's reading of the same poem in "Destruction and the Theory of Happiness in the Poetry of Yeats and Stevens." Bromwich certainly would not find in "The Plain Sense of Things" "questions about urban planning in winter-prone regions" (Burt 329). Bromwich locates in Stevens and Yeats a Nietzsche-derived aesthetics of destruction, "when art turns against itself" (109). His argument culminates in aligning Stevens (but not Yeats) with Simone Weil. Weil's notion of decreation—or "the uncreated," versus the destructiveness of "nothingness"—informs, for Bromwich, Stevens' future-oriented (rather than Yeats's nostalgic) engagement with "the absence of a place" (126). And yet, following Burt, Stevens' Connecticut functions as veridical region that likewise is nearly definitionally abstract; his Connecticut, that is, ends up very much resembling Bromwich's erased locale. As Burt notes, "The spareness, the proximity to abstraction, that Stevens saw in Connecticut let him find there a ground for his late poems" (337). Burt's essay supplements and challenges Bromwich's account of placelessness—even as the latter circles back into its own particularity of impoverishment. The value of Burt's analysis is not in "solving" the poem by positing Hartford as answer to the text's riddle, but in theorizing (rather than merely juxtaposing) urban planning and public space as they relate to Stevens' particular poetics. Burt writes that "the Elizabeth Park poems . . . suggest that Stevens calls into being for himself and for any imagined readers a kind of figurative urban park . . . a space designed . . . for multiple simultaneous uses, by people of different ages and tastes" (331). The park, as lived space, suggests an inhabiting of Bromwich's irretrievable place, the fantasy that one could travel vastly within an austere (dare one say lyrical?) radius.

Traveling as simultaneously epistemological and empirical exercise returns in Eric Leuschner's essay on Henry James's and Stevens' equally vigorous experiments in the "ambulatory." The latter formulation, which Leuschner takes from the pragmatist philosophy of Henry's brother William, describes the "'ambulation' from an idea to the vicinity of its object" (65). Both object and idea exist in proximity, on the same metonymic level of reality...