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  • Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic Philosophy: Metaphysics and the Play of Violence by Daniel Tompsett
  • Bart Eeckhout
Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic Philosophy: Metaphysics and the Play of Violence. By Daniel Tompsett. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Daniel Tompsett's Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic Philosophy appears in a series called Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature. It is clearly addressed not just to Stevens experts, or students of Anglophone modernism, but to all those with an interest in the relations between literature and philosophy, aesthetic theory, and questions of metaphysics, ontology, and religion in a post-theological age. For those so inclined, it will be in many ways an exciting contribution that makes a strong, extended case for the relevance of pre-Socratic ontological thinking to Stevens' modernist brand of poetic philosophy.

Although Tompsett sets the stage by demonstrating Stevens' familiarity with pre-Socratic philosophers (mainly Empedocles, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Xenophanes), he does not see his argument as a simple case of influence studies. To be sure, for the philosophers at Harvard with whose work Stevens was thoroughly acquainted from his days as a student there (William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana) references to the pre-Socratics were standard fare. We also know that Stevens read, for example, John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy (1892), and wrote admiringly on that occasion about "the supremacy of a figure like Parmenides" (L 495). But in his introduction Tompsett makes clear he is not out to prove that the pre-Socratics somehow functioned "as a consistent source" for Stevens' poetic thinking, and the main sparring partners in his discussion of the ancient Greek philosophers' views of art are listed as "F. W. J. Schelling, Friedrich Hölderlin, George Santayana, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Gianni Vattimo, with critical input derived from Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jacques Derrida, and Em[m]anuel Levinas" (xiv). This is not name-dropping: they are indeed the thinkers on whose work Tompsett builds for much of the time. Among these, it is especially Heidegger, with his explicit return to the pre-Socratics, and Gadamer, with his hermeneutics developed in Truth and Method (1960), that seem to have been the triggers for the present reconsideration of Stevens.

If a return to the pre-Socratics to discuss the work of a twentieth-century American modernist poet is to have any value at all, it should be in circumventing and overcoming more established frameworks. Its purpose must be to offer refreshing ways of conceptualizing that build alternatives to more deeply entrenched, but not entirely satisfactory, forms of Western philosophical and theological thinking in the traditions of Platonism, Christianity, and various idealisms. And so we find Tompsett grappling repeatedly with Simon Critchley's presentation of Stevens in a Kantian tradition, or with Harold Bloom's insistence on the poet's romantic heritage. Tompsett tries to get behind and beyond such critical contexts to focus more squarely on the place of ontological thinking in Stevens' work. He finds this expressed both in poetic reflections on and aesthetic enactments of two key notions long familiar to Stevens critics: being and becoming. [End Page 113]

During his exploration, Tompsett proves to be greatly interested in the poet's gestures and figures of connection and primal unity, which he reads principally in the context of Parmenides' "blank monism" (Santayana's phrase quoted on 43), even when such ontological reductions to the One are frequently founded on a Heraclitean multiplicity and sense of polemos—the Greek word for war whose role in the analysis has affinities with what we would nowadays frame as Darwinian struggle. After patiently pursuing the fluctuating guises of unitary thinking at different stages in the development of Stevens' poetry (Parts II and III) Tompsett steps back to launch the second half of his inquiry. He questions how Stevens' attachment to pre-Socratic ontologizing gestures affects his attitudes toward religion (Part IV), and engages in a critique of the intrinsic violence of reductive ontological thinking, as well as of its inescapably mythological underpinnings, which together take up the final Part V. Not all stages of this argument are equally convincing or productive. The final chapter notably drifts off into tangential...

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