Wallace Stevens' Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric by Angus J. Cleghorn (review)

HUMANITIES 317 provinces low (and Saskatchewan and Alberta were the hardest hit of all the provinces), and the Progressives came apart at the seams, western influence within Confederation lessened considerably as did King=s interest in the region; that interest would never return. Wardhaugh is quite right to conclude that the decline of Liberalism in the west began, not with John Diefenbaker=s stunning rise to power in 1957B58, but during the King years. If this book has one weakness, it might be that it pays rather little attention to the Second World War. Wardhaugh devotes seven chapters to the years from 1919 until 1940, but only one chapter addresses the period after 1940. There is almost no discussion of the conscription issue in the Second World War, an issue that resonated with many westerners. Still, this is a minor quibble for an otherwise impressive study. (GALEN ROGER PERRAS) Angus J. Cleghorn. Wallace Stevens= Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric Palgrave. xii, 236. US $49.95 In Wallace Stevens= Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric, Angus J. Cleghorn uses Stevens=s self-conscious rhetoricity as a point of entry into the debates over Stevens=s place in literary history B modernist or postmodernist? B and over the political and ideological underpinnings of his work. Implicitly arguing against the negative assessments of such critics as Marjorie Perloff and Frank Lentricchia, Cleghorn portrays Stevens as a writer who >takes on huge systems of knowledge and power= and >practices what is now known as the postmodern enterprise of parodying ... established ideologies, forms, and tropes= (22), with particular emphasis throughout on how Stevens deconstructs those >systems ... of power= and >ideologies.= Stevens emerges as a poet with a radical political purpose, one who teaches >readers to be attentive to the powers of language so that when rhetorical power is wielded, people can understand the contexts and motives of words in order to judge them,= and, in Cleghorn=s concluding chapter, as one who helps readers dismantle the seductive or coercive rhetoric of late consumer capitalism. Even some aficionados of Stevens=s work may be surprised by the last statement, and unsurprised to read that Cleghorn=s study seems most successful when delving into the complexities of Stevens=s rhetorical strategies rather than dwelling on their utility B intended by Stevens or not B in the fight against capitalism. In Cleghorn=s reading of Owl=s Clover, which forms the book=s centerpiece, Stevens=s rhetoricity is convincingly related to the poem=s overt scepticism of both political absolutism and statesponsored monumentalist aesthetics. A subtle reading of >The Idea of Order at Key West= offers a Stevens more suspicious of Romantic idealizations of imagination than most canonical readings do, and Cleghorn=s attention 318 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 throughout to what he calls Stevens=s >aggregating metonymy= provides a welcome alternative to previous critical emphasis on metaphor and symbol in the poetry. But Cleghorn=s conviction that Stevens=s metonymic organization serves as a weapon against the totalizing tendencies of synecdoche also provides the basis for criticism of his own study. Occasionally Cleghorn offers glimpses of a Stevens who does not conform to the book=s dominant interpretation: he ascribes to Stevens, for example, a >modernist optimism that something else could rise from the ashes= of his decreations, and is disappointed that >Life on a Battleship= >ends by repeating the synecdochic power of one part for the whole.= Besides suggesting that the latter gesture could disappoint only those who believe that Stevens=s poetry must be postmodern if it is to remain valuable, these comments point towards another rhetoric in Stevens=s poetry, a rhetoric of centres, of genealogical continuities, of heroes, masters, and major men, and towards a complex affective stance on Stevens=s part towards these figures that does not quite support Cleghorn=s reading. But neither of these countervailing tendencies is explored in any detail. The book itself, in other words, falters when it too resolutely employs the synecdochic logic it opposes B taking one part of >The complicate, the amassing harmony= for the whole. (MALCOLM WOODLAND) Angela T. McAuliffe. Between the Temple and the Cave: The Religious Dimensions of the Poetry of E.J. Pratt McGill...