Relations to Knowledge: The Trope of the Book in Stevens's Poetry

THE WORD "BOOK" is a key term for Wallace Stevens, appearing more than fifty times in his poetry. As both a word and a metaphor, "book" plays a crucial role in his epistemological inquiries, allowing him to plumb the relation between reality and the imagination. Epistemology has long been deemed one of his chief concerns as a poet, and as such has been among the principal subjects of Stevens criticism. There have been occasional attempts to pin down a coherent philosophy in his writing, from Daniel Fuchs's argument in 1963 that his epistemology is based more in "sense perception" than reason (129) to the philosopher Simon Critchley's claim in 2005 that many of Stevens's ideas elaborate on the theories of Immanuel Kant (23). Others have pushed back against this sort of analysis by arguing that to read Stevens as a philosopher is to bring to the poems the wrong kinds of questions and expectations. Denis Donoghue reminds us that "Stevens was not a philosopher, a systematic thinker. . . . Moment by moment, poem by poem, he committed himself to the 'mental state' of the occasion, doing his best to make it lucid" (228).

Tracking the word "book" across Stevens's poetry prompts us to return to the topic of epistemology. By seeing how Stevens exploited this image over the course of his writing, we can detect patterns and shifts in how he viewed the mind's relation to the world. Importantly, this exercise allows us to consider the poet's ideas while keeping our focus on his language. Since I cannot do justice to all the instances of "book" in his poetry, I will focus particularly (though not exclusively) on three volumes between which his use of this image changed substantially: his first published book, Harmonium (1923); his wartime volume, Parts of a World (1942); and his first collection after the war, Transport to Summer (1947). Taken together, these examples reveal a gradual shift from a conflict, in the early poetry, between knowledge and sensual experience, to a concern, around World War II, as to whether knowledge that has been granted authority can be trusted, and finally, to a resolution after the war that knowledge can best be achieved not as a set of fixed truths but as something negotiated between reader and writer in the realm of the imagination.

In Stevens's first collection, knowledge tends largely to be sensual, so that to know the world is to apprehend it through the body and the senses. As there are clear biblical undertones to this idea, it should come as little surprise that "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" associates books with the apple of Eden:

An apple serves as well as any skullTo be the book in which to read a round,And is as excellent, in that it is composedOf what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.But it excels in this, that as the fruitOf love, it is a book too mad to readBefore one merely reads to pass the time.

(CPP 11)

The speaker begins by layering three successive images—apple, skull, and book—and then shuttles between these throughout the rest of the stanza, connecting the knowledge of love with the knowledge of death. Yet the stanza ends not with a fear of mortality, but a worldlier fear of banality: "a book too mad to read / Before one merely reads to pass the time." The grammatical crisscrossing—whereby "read" goes from an infinitive clause at the end of the sixth line to the main verb of the seventh line, only to be qualified by "merely"—highlights a paradox: love can only be understood once it has ceased to be experienced in full force, at which point it has also ceased to be of much interest. The poem thus stages a tension between sensual experience and intellect, and asks us to consider how far better it would be for this metaphorical book to remain unread—for us to experience the world sensually but not to intellectualize it.

Harmonium is full of books that are...