Accessible Utopia: Animating Mimicry in Stevens's Theory of Poetry

Rhyming for the later Stevens does the imagination's work. . . .¹

—John Hollander, Vision and Resonance

Romanticism is then when everything being alike everything is naturally simply different, and romanticism.

—Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation"

"THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR" confronts the reader with a binary trope central to Wallace Stevens's poetry: the opposition between "things as they are" and "the blue guitar." To read the poem is to attend to its continuous sounding of its own rendition of the world, its attunement to how "A tune upon the blue guitar" renders "things . . . as they are"—"exactly" or otherwise (CPP 135). The partners in this dialectical duet are the sovereign subject and the intractable object, or, to use Stevens's own terms, "imagination" and "reality." The opposition between them, posed often and occasionally resolved only to arise again, suggests two possible roles for the lyric subject: the maker of a new world and the copyist of a preexisting one. Doubtless, we ought to heed the warning—issued, for example, by J. Hillis Miller—that Stevens's work refuses any universal metaphysics, particularly one that would assign the self any permanent role with respect to the world (257–58). Few readers of Stevens, I imagine, would demand such a thing. But the opposition itself as well as the choice, however impossible to make, between the agency of the imagination and the agency of reality—whether we understand this choice ethically (as Miller does) or phenomenologically (as, more recently, Simon Critchley does in Things Merely Are)—continue to frame philosophical interpretations of Stevens's work.

Whether figuring a landscape or a figure within it, whether a placeless meditation or a meditation in a place, whether "Description Without Place" or "The Idea of Order at Key West," Stevens's poems continually reflect upon their own status as reflections of a reality outside them. The "sea" moving before the "she" of "The Idea of Order at Key West" is before the lyric subject not only spatially but also temporally (CPP 105): it precedes the words that name, or sing, it. If that is indeed so, however sovereign the lyric speaker of the poem may be, or however generative the speech acts it performs, the world will always have precedence, and thus priority, over the word, the thing over the thought. To reverse this priority, it would seem, would require that the place—the landscape of sea, shore, and sky—be the result rather than the cause of both song and poem. And however deconstructively aware we may be of the undecidability of this question of priority, of the naïveté of asking which comes first, the question persists within the terms of an interpretation that distinguishes between art as creation and art as imitation, between romantic modernism and mimetic realism.

In this essay, I would like to offer a model of mimesis that dispenses with the choice between creating and imitating by defining imitation not only as a creative act, but also, more radically, as an act that the self learns from the very reality it imitates. Rather than passively copying the world, imitation actively participates in its creation by repeating the very method by which the world creates itself. To understand the imagination's relation to reality in Stevens's poetry, we must see imitation not in opposition to the imagination but as its primary method, a method modeled on the structure of reality itself. What I propose, in other words, is an idea of imitation that is itself an idea of order. For such an idea of imitation we must look not to Aristotle's mimesis but to Walter Benjamin's essay "On the Mimetic Faculty," or what in an earlier version he called a "Doctrine of the Similar," which, in several crucial aspects, bears a striking resemblance to the theory of poetry Stevens presents in The Necessary Angel.

I propose that we read Stevens's theory of poetry as a theory of rhyme. Or, to be more precise, that we read the relation between the central terms of his poetics—reality and imagination (theorized...