The Unnecessary Angel

My first formal introduction to Wallace Stevens occurred during the fall semester of 2005 in a course entitled "Pound, Eliot, and Stevens." It was taught by a highly reputable and well published scholar of modernist poetry who, it turns out, was also retiring at the end of the academic year. The weeks spent studying Pound and Eliot seem quite conventional now that I have taught both poets myself. We read them in relation to Browning and Donne, sampled their greatest prose hits, and briefly situated them within the larger context of modernist aesthetics. The classes on Stevens differed. I recall our first discussion where the professor wrote figures and colors on the board along with their corresponding meanings: the Fat Girl was the earth, the Rabbi was an image of the scholar, Major Man contrasted with the General, the green that smacks in the eye stood for reality, red was imagination, and the purple of Hoon was royalty. My notes offered a Stevensian Rosetta Stone and, by the end of the semester, the annotations in my copy of The Collected Poems overwhelmed the margins. Beginning with "Earthy Anecdote," they gradually reveal the philosophical morality play that pits reality, those bucks clattering over Oklahoma, against the firecat of imagination. The resolution to the drama occurs on the last page where I circled the phrase "a new knowledge of reality" (Stevens 1990, 534) and wrote "the whole of Harmonium = the fat girl."

There is surely a pedagogical necessity to introducing Stevens in such a manner. Students lack the historical context to know why one would associate purple with royalty and my notes identifying the wind with inspiration and spirit reveal romanticism to have been a significant gap in my reading. Can we fully appreciate Stevens as the Ignorant Man he wishes his readers to become? Returning to Stevens as a graduate student, I was quickly disabused of my undergraduate education after encountering Frank Kermode's reproach of "critics who systematize Stevens" (Kermode 1989, xvii). Reading literature no doubts risks schematization. Narrative help us make sense of the world. It is a basic human need to assimilate whatever appears foreign into an easily digestible script. Teaching literature exacerbates the need. If a professor wishes to demonstrate the originality of a text, how it breaks with tradition, then the student must learn the story of that tradition. Even if teachers of literature abandon context, the attempt to model the act of reading risks putting on display a replicable performance. Students hunger for that revelatory paradigm or schema or a reusable method. We dislike discovering how "the squirming facts exceed the squamous mind" (Stevens 1990, 215).

Paul Bové's Love's Shadow emphasizes a sentence from Kermode that precedes my earlier citation: "even philosophy comes more easily than poetry" (Kermode 1989, xvii). The dominance of philosophical thinking, and subjugation of poetry, lies at the heart of Bové's profound and penetrating critique of the academic institution of criticism and, I imagine based on my undergraduate experience, the teaching of literature in general. Bové is too familiar with the janitor's poems one finds on the dump and chastises those critics who unthinkingly recycle the contents. He charges them with systematic readings, indicts their will to totalization, and admonishes the alacrity with which they yield to professional demands or critical fashions. As he puts it toward the end of the book:

Academic critics come to work on art and culture prepared with ways of speaking that are recognized within official culture…while arguing against capital from within the richest elite institutions in the most inhumane capitalist society history has known…[and they] make an intellectual and political mistake, compounding an ethical failure, when they decide to throw everything they can at a body of art or an archive of cultural materials. They compound the error when they not only argue a priori that no work is accessible except through one or more already authorized and sometimes invisible codes of apperception, but also make the study of these codes the sole object of their attention, drawing intelligence away from the delightful study of imitation. The very force...