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1. Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete
- University of Massachusetts Press
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Chapter 1 WALLACE STEVENS, ECO-AESTHETE sS According to most of Wallace Stevens’s prominent critics, the poet is anything but ecologically oriented. Helen Vendler, for example, describes Stevens as expressing three “large manners” in his poetry: his “ecstatic idiom” of secular and earthy joys, a “despairing” mood that “anato mizes a stale and withered life,” and a “tentative, diffident, and reluctant search for a middle route between ecstasy and apathy” (On Extended Wings 13). For Vendler, the “true” Stevens most often expresses the “middle route,” and it is this same Stevens who is unmoved by the material particularities of the natural world: “The lively things of this world—human, animal, vegeta ble—do not touch him as they did Keats or Wordsworth; he cannot become a sparrow or a stoat; he is not transfixed by a girl, a gibbet, and a beacon; the minutiae of the scene pass by unobserved; the natural cast of his eyes is upward, and the only phenomenon to which he is passionately attached is the weather. Natural forms, even when they are drawn from particular Pennsylvania or Connecticut landscapes, are generalized, abstracted, made almost anonymous in his poetry” (47). Vendler goes even further to claim that, in spite of poems such as “The Man on the Dump” and “The Comedian as the Letter C,” poems of rich specific detail that express his “ecstatic idiom,” Stevens is actually repulsed by the material fecundity of nature: “When he is faced with the gross heterogeneity of the world he recoils” (50). To abbrevi ate an old argument: for Vendler and others, Stevens’s “imagination” takes precedence over “reality.” 19 20 s chapter i Albert Gelpi makes a similar claim in his comparison of William Carlos Williams and Stevens. In Gelpi’s account, Williams sounds like a much more likely practitioner of ecopoetics, even though both poets work to “reclaim the imagination from the ruins of Romanticism” (10). The primary disagree ment between the two poets lies in the stark difference, according to Gelpi, between the “polar aspects” of modernism: Imagism and Symbolism. “In terms of the subjectobject split,” Gelpi claims, “Imagism represents the attempt to render the objects of experience, Symbolism the attempt to render subjective psychological and affective states” (12). Williams, working in the Imagist mode, was “bent not on transforming but on revealing the object,” whereas Stevens, an heir of the French Symbolist tradition, placed art in a “violent opposition” to nature (13). If an ecological stance involves recogni tion of and respect toward the objects of nature, then Williams certainly sounds more ecocentric in Gelpi’s formulation: “Williams’ language eschews metaphoric indirection to focus consciousness on the object; Stevens’ lan guage indulges in metaphor to establish its fictive and selfreferential inde pendence of the object” (16). Gelpi draws a stark contrast between Williams’s Imagism, supposedly on the side of nature, and Stevens’s Symbolism, sup posedly antinature. The received biographical account of Stevens does not help counter act the image of him as antinature, for he is most often characterized as an effete, urbane, hedonistic, welldressed dandy who delighted in exotic treasures and sweet treats. A dandy aesthete believes (or behaves as if he believes) that art is more real than nature; as Oscar Wilde famously echoed Baudelaire, “Life imitates Art” (311). The characterization of Stevens as dandy is partly accurate, but it is also incomplete and tends to obscure other aspects of his character. Like Whitman, Stevens contained “multitudes” and fol lowed Emerson’s dictum that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (125). Gyorgyi Voros draws out aspects of Stevens often ignored in the familiar portrait of him, such as his marathon walks (sometimes twenty miles) in the country every weekend and the many journal entries in which he makes close, detailed observations of nature: “Larkspur is various and is to be known by the rabbitheadlike corolloa . . . the calix—generally pur ple, or mixed purple and pink” (Souvenirs 44). Still, despite his dismissal of idealism as an “intolerant form of sentimentalism” (Souvenirs 209), Stevens was hesitant in going completely in the opposite direction toward absolute naturalism and materialism. Like Dickinson and Wordsworth before him, Stevens uses the microscope as a synecdoche for the positivistic tendency of [44.201.24.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:38 GMT) Wallace Stevens, Eco-Aesthete S 21 science which he dislikes; he warns against merely looking at “Nature with microscopes...