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Reviewed by:
  • Making the Poem: Stevens’ Approaches by George S. Lensing
  • Justin Quinn
Making the Poem: Stevens’ Approaches.
By George S. Lensing. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018.

In a passage that defends Wallace Stevens’s war poetry, George Lensing remarks: “The poem could not end the war but it could contribute a momentary surcease from its all-absorbing envelopment” (95–96). Clearly aware of both the present ways in which we politicize culture, and of those ways’ provenance, he would like to foster realism in our expectations of what poetry can do. Pace Auden, it makes something happen, but what exactly, and to what extent? Lensing’s defense is germane to Frost’s definition of poetry as a momentary stay against confusion, and in its turn is not far from the Victorians who wished their poetry to console. Hyped up on ideas like transgression and rupture, academic criticism often overlooks this older function of the art, and in the process weighs down poetry with political expectation. In this sense, Making the Poem: Stevens’ Approaches is an opportune reminder. But in one or two other ways it is a cautionary tale for the close-reading critic.

For New Criticism is Lensing’s framework: “I read Stevens sympathetically,” he remarks, “a bias I willingly own; theory here is always subordinate to the poem” (2). At the heart of this book are long close readings of two poems, “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Here Lensing brings a lifetime of admired scholarship to the poems’ smallest turns of tone and connotation, ranging through biography, philosophy, literature, and history, judiciously adducing the material that illuminates Stevens’s lines. But while all is subordinated, if not quite to the poems themselves, then to their close reading, this is nevertheless not a type of “new criticism” that, say, René Wellek and Austin Warren would endorse. Against their injunctions to exclude history, biography, psychology, and political theory from the reading of poems, Lensing happily throws the doors open, having learned from a critical biographer like Milton J. Bates as well as New Historicists like Alan Filreis and James Longenbach; there is even an equable citation of Louis Althusser.

Such critical generosity organizes the study itself. It is refreshing to encounter a critic who thinks about the form of their own work in the same way that a poet might about the form of their poem. The first chapter traces the biographical origins of “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” drawing on Elsie’s diary as well as on what Stevens wrote about the cruise that inspired the poem in 1923. The second chapter is entitled “The Poem Itself,” and consists mainly of a close reading of “The Idea of Order at Key West.” This is primarily of a postromantic aspect, as Lensing traces various agencies through the serpentine syntax of the poem. There is much talk of the pathetic fallacy and Stevens’s cancelings of it, as well as of the philosophy of George Berkeley. There are forays into briefer poems, as Lensing explores how they might help us read the major work. He considers it as song, “a harmonic of musical counterpoints, overtones, and [End Page 134] mounting cadences seeking to contain the poem’s own verbal song, its own keener sounds” (48). If the last quotation disappears into itself, it could be that Lensing here comes up against the limits of what we can say about poetry’s musicality. The following chapter is entitled “The Social Context,” and mainly considers the arguments for and against Stevens as a political poet. The chapter’s final assertion that “no poet of his time was more political” (121) is so finely hedged that it’s undercut; nevertheless, it is good to have Lensing’s excursus through the debates that influenced Stevens and the later debates through which Stevens influenced us. The following chapter, “The Music of the Poem,” suffers overall from the problem mentioned above in relation to the reading of “The Idea of Order.”

The final chapter considers Stevens’s publication history in Britain and his subsequent reception there, as well as in Ireland. Lensing has written about Seamus...

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