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  • Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity by Ian Tan
Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity.
By Ian Tan. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

Ian Tan’s book is the first extended study of Wallace Stevens devoted almost entirely to the conversation of Stevens’s poetic oeuvre with Martin Heidegger’s ideas about poetry, dwelling, and the event (das Ereignis). What sets the study apart from other scholarly books or essays that explore the relation between Stevens and Heidegger is, first, the comprehensive nature of Tan’s treatment of Stevens, which begins with Harmonium and proceeds all the way to the last poems from 1954–55; and second, the focus on Heidegger’s notion of the Ereignis. It is indeed the Ereignis that constitutes not only the pivot of Tan’s presentation of Heidegger but also the prism for his extensive analysis of Stevens’s poetry. The linchpin of Tan’s argument finds its explicit articulation in the section title “The Appropriative ‘Force’ of Ereignis and Poetry” (15). While many critical texts highlight the proximity (of poetic interests) between Stevens’s late poetry and Heidegger’s thought, Tan argues for adopting the Heideggerian lens for both early and late poems by Stevens. Such a lens does not mean that Heidegger’s work provides a rigid interpretative framework but rather that the understanding of the event as an opening to being (beyond metaphysical ideas and figurations) can be traced throughout Stevens’s poems and his reflections on poetry.

Chapter 1, which serves as the Introduction, locates Stevens, and more broadly the relation of poetry and philosophy, in the context of phenomenology [End Page 117] and post-phenomenological thought (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Nancy, among others), with the emphasis on the quasi-transcendental sense of presence elaborated there. The book patterns its approach after “the phenomenological significance of poetry in order to read Stevens’ poetic output as dramatisations of Heideggerian appropriations of Being” (16). This approach is developed in chapters 2 and 3, first by reexamining how Stevens and Heidegger can be read in conversation and then by outlining the significance of later Heidegger’s thought, especially about the event, for reading Stevens. Subsequent chapters trace the arc from Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium, through the relation between poetry and politics in the 1930s, to the idea of the Supreme Fiction, and the question of being in the late poetry.

Some of the most interesting insights come in chapter 4, “Considering Presence and Place in Stevens’ Harmonium,” and in particular the discussion of poems like “Sunday Morning” and “The Comedian as the Letter C,” which are rarely studied in the context of scholarship inspired by phenomenological thought and which are presented by Tan in terms of “poetic appropriations” of being, anchored in Heidegger’s discussion of the event and poetic dwelling. What is novel, at least to my knowledge, is that the reading of those early poems focuses on tracing proximity to being in terms of a non-metaphysical sense of presence evoked in them. Tan’s claim is that these approximations of being eschew the subject-object divide and move away from the representational view of language. Perhaps the most characteristic reading for this chapter comes in the section entitled “‘Sunday Morning’ and the Post-Metaphysical Poem” (73–75), in which Tan characterizes the poem’s crucial theme in terms of freedom toward “an authentic attunement facing Being and our possibilities to be” (75). While I like the emphasis on the relation to being, a more developed analysis of Stevens’s language in the poem, tracing its “post-metaphysical” openings, would be important in this context.

Chapter 5 examines the contentious interpretations of Stevens’s relation to politics, trying to nuance the approach to the political dimension of poetic writing, especially given Stevens’s predilection toward abstraction, which is often discounted as divorced from historical reality or uninterested in contemporaneous affairs. Tan’s position is that politics in Stevens does not manifest in terms of commitment, critique, or commentary but makes itself known through transforming our relation to the world by means of the imagination. In this manner, poetry “opens up the space for the engagement with the political because it remains separate without being entirely irreconcilable with it” (115). By maintaining poetic autonomy and “a consistent pragmatic skepticism about any ‘objective’ vision of political utopia or political doctrine,” Tan argues that Stevens’s poetry continually opens up and formulates the world anew (117). It is in this chapter that Tan draws a justifiably sharp contrast between a Stevensian poetics, especially its language of (re)creating the order of reality, and Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism and the idea of the Volk. Disagreeing with readings that characterize Stevens’s poetry as detached from immediate historical and political circumstances, he sees in it the potential for an openness that is missing from the political ideas of “the people.” Still, a more careful and substantive analysis of Heidegger’s work [End Page 118] from the 1930s would show that, however problematically, even perniciously, his remarks on the people (Volk) resonate in their historical context, Heidegger emphasizes precisely the historical sense of the people (not “an ahistorical” one, as Tan suggests [106]), which is kept open to the future and not simply bound to a preset destiny. As in the case of Stevens, Heidegger is also looking to poetry for sources of transformation in relation to dwelling in the world.

Chapter 6 expands on the notion of the Supreme Fiction as it comes to prominence in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and related poems. Tan reads the Supreme Fiction, and the importance of the “first idea” in “Notes,” through the prism of Heidegger’s call for philosophy to begin to think anew beyond the history of metaphysics. “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” is presented as a poetic statement that “opens up a non-metaphysical attitude towards the truth of poetry” (130). Tan stresses the way in which the notion of poetic fiction, as an illustration of the Heideggerian event, becomes true through its disclosure and unveiling of being into a language that marks the contrast between metaphysical closure and poetic openness (135–38). The chapter underscores the momentum of appropriation (of being into language), though it should be noted that such “appropriations” in Heidegger do not exclude a sense of foreignness, but in fact pivot on it: Heidegger emphasizes the fact that poetic language opens the homely as in essence “unhomely”; it seeks to be at home (Heimischsein) not just through but decidedly in being unhomely (Unheimischsein).

Chapter 7 and the concluding chapter 8 explore Stevens’s later poetry and very last poems, respectively. Tan sees these works as representing “both a significant rupture from the expansiveness of the earlier poetry and a tentative coalescing of the themes he had pursued throughout his oeuvre” (139). Consequently, he reads them in terms of a poetic portrayal of being and of the relation to the world, emphasizing the tropes of grounding and journeying, as well as openness to otherness, in “The Auroras of Autumn” while relating them to Heidegger’s discussion of the way and the movement of language. Tan highlights “images that preponderantly suggest union and belonging” (145), downplaying, however, the questioning presence of Stevens’s triple use of the qualifying “as if” in the poem. In the end, Tan’s reading stresses “a new appropriation of this otherness” (146). Yet a few pages later, he seems to shift the emphasis, pointing to how “appropriation grounds the human being in the open totality of Being by opening up thought to what . . . exceeds it” (150). Keeping those two moments together, one could say that Stevens—not unlike Heidegger—sees poetic truth precisely in the way it paradoxically “grounds” humans in an openness to the “unhomely” (Unheim), so that all appropriations of being are always already open to the future, hinging upon the “unground” of the abyss (Ab-grund).

The subtitle of Tan’s important and innovative study, Poetry as Appropriative Proximity, illustrates both the nearness of poetry to the unfolding of being and the proximities between Stevens’s poetics and Heidegger’s thought. In fact, appropriative proximity becomes a trope for exploring the relation between poetry and philosophy. The book’s strength lies in negotiating this relation through the prism of Heidegger and thus in providing an overarching [End Page 119] Heideggerian interpretation of Stevens’s entire poetic oeuvre. In the course of his investigation, Tan provides an informative characterization of Heidegger’s thought (of his late writings in particular), which will help those unfamiliar with Heidegger gain a good sense of the philosopher’s key points about poetry, poetic dwelling, his critique of metaphysics, and the event. Overall, the pairing of Heidegger with the panoramic presentation of Stevens’s poetic work is convincing, and it also opens new avenues of critical inquiry into Stevens, especially for approaching his poems—including, significantly, his early poems—from the perspective of the event (the Ereignis) and its unfolding into/as language. This most welcome breadth of engagement with Stevens’s substantial body of writing, especially in the context of a phenomenological criticism of Stevens’s later poetry, makes one wish at points for closer readings of the peculiarities of Stevens’s language and the forms he adopts, be that in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “The Rock,” or shorter late poems. While Stevens can certainly be counted among those poets whose work emphasizes abstract thinking, his poetry also operates an extensive metaphorical and figural project, both building it up and undoing it, often in the course of the same poem. Tan’s noteworthy study deserves a much more extensive critical response, which I am sure will come in the future scholarship on Stevens. It should prompt us to investigate more closely the role of irony, the movement of “as if,” the exaggerated buildup of metaphor—only to have it “degenerate” instantly—in the context of Heidegger’s notion of the event. How is the opening to being enacted not only through the movement of ideas (poetic fictions) but simultaneously through the tensions between images, abstractions, rhythms, stanza patterns, musical nuances, and style?

One path may be pursued through Heidegger’s crucial differentiation between the word (the saying) of being, mentioned by Tan (126), and linguistic signs. It is in the text entitled The Event, as well as in On the Essence of Language and the Question of Art (Polity, 2023), that Heidegger underscores in multiple places the distinction in German between Worte and Wörter. The words (Worte) of being never coincide with linguistic signs, yet continue to echo in them, underwriting what is said in language through the play of the unsaid, which becomes disclosed yet not articulated or signified by signs. In Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger remarks, “Words fail us; they do so originally and not merely occasionally. . . . Words do not yet come to words at all, but it is precisely in failing us that they arrive at the first leap. This failing is the event as intimation and incursion of beyng [Seyn]” (Indiana UP, 2012, p. 30; translation modified). The distinction between the event-sense of the “word” and dictionary words as linguistic signs is elaborated in more detail in The Event, where Heidegger declares that “The word [Wort] is never known to metaphysics otherwise than as language, i.e., with respect to linguistic terms [Wörter]” (Indiana UP, 2013, 148; translation modified). In this context, it is poetry that can open language and its signs to the reverberation of the word beyond meaning or images. But to bring this “word” to resonance, as Heidegger points out in the Ereignis manuscripts and related texts, the event needs to take place properly as dis- or de-propriation. The Er-eignis occurs properly as the [End Page 120] Ent-eignis, or, as Heidegger writes on multiple occasions, the event takes place “ereignend-enteignend”—“appropriating-dispropriating.” This simultaneously appropriating and dis-appropriating movement resonates straightaway with the signature lines from “A Primitive like an Orb” “It is and it / Is not and, therefore, is” in a way that “Captives the being” (CPP 378); and perhaps with the poem “Metaphor as Degeneration.” Differently put, the tension between poetic saying and the meaning of linguistic signs underscored by Heidegger marks the relation between the homely and the unhomely and can be related to the play of appropriation and openness in Stevens foregrounded by Tan. This is one of the reasons why Tan’s insightful and thought-provoking instantiation of the proximity between Stevens and Heidegger opens a path for further inquiry into this nearness, inviting us now to regard all of Stevens’s output in the Heideggerian terms of sayings and appropriations of being.

Krzysztof Ziarek
University at Buffalo

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