Survey Review of a Year's Essays on Stevens (review)

In "Frontiers of Writing," the essay that concludes The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney pays Wallace Stevens a compliment of the highest order when, speaking of the Loyalist majority in Northern Ireland, he claims that "everything and everybody would be helped were they to make their imagination press back against the pressure of reality and re-enter the whole country of Ireland imaginatively, if not constitutionally, through the northern point of the quincunx" (202). Heaney's ideas of reorder forge a direct link between Stevens's understanding of the imagination-reality complex and Heaney's own understanding of the relationship of writing to place (the northern quincunx being one of the five points of Ireland's places of writing he discusses in The Place of Writing). In making this link, they also foreground the major themes of many of the most engaging pieces of Stevens scholarship from the past year that I review here. Heaney's hopes for the imaginative integration of Ireland suggest that the challenge of realizing this new, borderless space lies precisely where Andrew Osborn, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, claims that poetic difficulty itself is located: "at the juncture between thought and feeling." Heaney understood all too well the extent to which affective drives press back (often violently) against what citizens might "know" would make for better actual conditions.

Pairing Heaney and Stevens illustrates some ways in which the material in this review (though not all of it) might be thought of in relation to recent scholarship on Stevens that has tended to focus on contextual and comparative strategies. While some of the pieces I read in this year's survey of Stevens scholarship take a strictly thematic approach to Stevens's work, many attempt to trace divides and to navigate difficult spaces through more typical acts of comparison and contextualization. Most do both. Difficulty, affect, spaces, and borders, with their implications of crossings and encounters, point up the specifically Stevensian juncture of difficulty, one that Cody Deitz claims, in his brief article "The Absent Center: Poetic Difficulty in Wallace Stevens's 'Man with a [sic] Blue Guitar XXII,'" is found in Stevens's phrase "the universal intercourse" (CPP 145), which "stand[s] in for the larger metaphysical exchange the poem represents" (Deitz 158).

Indeed, readers of this journal might recall that almost all of the essays in the Fall 2017 Special Issue touched in one way or another on difficulty in Stevens's poetry and the subsequent challenge of helping students navigate the aesthetic spaces they encounter there. Difficulty, to return to Andrew Osborn's definition, is "Resistance to swift and confident interpretation . . . experienced at the juncture of thought and feeling." Teaching Stevens, both in literature classes and in poetry writing workshops, has taught me that he is one of the best poets for instilling in students the virtues of slow and tentative interpretation. This is so because if the difficulty of his poetry is immediate, so, too, is the delight. Enjoyment is not deferred until students conquer the difficulty and finally "get" the poem. They can revel in the sounds and strange metaphors even as they are bewildered by them.

Davide Castiglione's article "Difficult Poetry Processing: Reading Times and the Narrativity Hypothesis" could have fit well with the Wallace Stevens Journal issue on teaching Stevens. Castiglione reports the results of an empirical reading test using E-prime reading speed software. First-year students from the University of Nottingham were given texts to read by Ezra Pound, Mark Strand, Jeremy Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, Susan Howe, J. G. Ballard, and Stevens ("What We See Is What We Think"). The result was, not surprisingly, that non-narrative poems like Stevens's had the longest reading times (Howe's text registered the longest average reading time, with Prynne second, and Stevens third) (116). Castiglione's aim was to explore empirical dimensions of stylistic difficulty and so "to work backward from effect to structure" (117...