Aspect-Seeing and Stevens' Ideal of Ordinary Experience

I did not at all anticipate the emerging interest in the poetry of ordinary life or everyday life. I am enough of a modernist myself to believe we have plenty of ordinary life without asking our poetry to submit to it. But one would have to be a fool not to appreciate the appeal of the notion, especially when developed by as fine a literary critic as Siobhan Phillips, who has written by far the best account of Stevens' relation to this topic in her recent book, The Poetics of the Everyday. In general, the topic appeals because we want poetry to be about something, because we are suspicious about claims for the sublime with its temporality of singular events, and because we want poets not to be snobs but respectful of a common social order. The poetics of the everyday allows us to satisfy all three wishes.

Of course, such naked satisfaction is forbidden to academic literary criticism. Yet when one reads Phillips one appreciates how such satisfactions can be embodied in intricate intellectual performances. There are, in fact, very good reasons why poets would engage the everyday, and why critics would value their thinking. Phillips' basic argument seems compelling: Stevens begins with something close to contempt for ordinary life, and for the temporality of repetition that is a necessary part of it. On the need for ecstatic time he was one with the modernists. But eventually he realized that there is no escape from alienation and its pseudo-heroics without reconciliation with the everyday. Phillips' formulation has the intense and pointed logic of a major critical mind: "Stevens can overcome dualistic malady [of 'The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad'] with the commonplace patterns that once seemed the malady's ground" (80). Even when he changed styles to embrace the process of thinking in time, it was only in The Rock that the Penelope of "The World as Meditation" could turn "the terrified farewells of 'The Auroras of Autumn' into the peaceful routine of 'An Ordinary Evening'" (108). Penelope's way of absorbing the sun through repetition "overcomes the elegiac" (108) that seems of a piece with wanting to live a life of exalted moments.

I have no quarrels with Phillips' sharp account of Stevens' ultimate project, realized differently in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" and in The Rock. (Phillips does not acknowledge those differences because she is more interested in the logic these poems share than in the styles by which they explore different levels of the everyday.) Her argument achieves two significant public values. First, she brilliantly articulates what can follow from accepting repetition: along the lines of Kierkegaard, agents can find that "the resignation of individual retrospection can paradoxically provide a new sense of identity and conception of history" (Phillips 100). One gains a "forward-looking acceptance" (100) by which to replace the traditional lyric's commitment to elegy for what has made the self different from the ordinary. Second, she makes a powerful argument that "diminishment brings one closer to the novelty in an ordinary round, to a fresh perception of one's consistent world. The poem's insistence [Phillips is talking here about 'Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself'] registers that perception as it demonstrates the effort it demands, making Stevens's final work the fresh inscription of an endless duty" (110-11). Hence "Kierkegaard describes patience rather than desire as the opposite of despair" (109). And because that attitude lessens the centrality of individual retrospection, it affords a new everyday sociality (88). Repetitive time is potentially everyone's time, and the care for what repeats and so is central in life is potentially everyone's care.

I do have three quarrels with this account of the poems in The Rock. The first two are relatively minor. I see no sense of duty on Stevens' part in registering these perceptions. It is not the case that necessity drives the perceptions; rather, Stevens is concerned that one see the perceptions "as a necessity requires" (CPP 428). What necessity requires is an attitude toward the world perceived rather than...