Raw Perception, Phenomenal Experience, and Selfhood in Stevens' Poetry: What We May Learn from a Contemporary Scientific Theory of Consciousness

The primary purpose of this article is to reconsider the poetry of Wallace Stevens through the lens of a recent scientific theory of human consciousness proposed by Nicholas Humphrey, a British cognitive psychologist who is known for defining and emphasizing the scientific distinction between two separate systems, "sensation" and "perception," that lie at the core of the subsequent analysis. Secondarily, my purpose is to explore some of the broader implications of such a reconsideration for poetics in general. Although Stevens could not have known of Humphrey's theory, which is of recent vintage, its simple scientific elegance casts long rays of light backward on the philosophical turmoil in his poetry.

As the philosopher Simon Critchley has argued in his extended essay Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (2005), Stevens had difficulty articulating his philosophical positions in prose. One reason for this, I believe, is that the poet did not always understand their implications or preconditions himself, despite the evocative power with which they are on display in the particulars of his poetry. John N. Serio has astutely observed that Stevens' poems "sometimes surpassed even his own [i.e., Stevens'] cognitive understanding" (xx). I will contend here, however, that Stevens produced a luminous body of poetry that encapsulates the subjective torment of a highly intelligent and educated man who, at the end of his life, unconsciously took a dim view of the implications of Humphrey's subsequent theory—a theory that can be viewed as a glass half-full or half-empty, as we shall see. After reviewing the core principles of Humphrey's recent theory of phenomenal consciousness, I will attempt to integrate his theoretical framework into analyses of several poems by Stevens. This will be followed by an exploration of some of the broader implications of this marriage for poetics in general. Finally, I will draw a number of conclusions and place them briefly in a historical critical perspective, highlighting the manner in which the current synthesis is to be distinguished from prior efforts to survey Stevens' work through the eyes of various philosophers whose work subsumed phenomenology and/or epistemology in the more philosophical and traditional sense, as opposed to Humphrey's theory, which takes its cues from, and is buttressed by, clinical observations and preliminary experimental evidence. I hope to show that the new conceptual framework adduced by Humphrey serves as a particularly rewarding up-to-date context in which to consider questions of human phenomenal consciousness that previous Stevens critics have tended to address especially through older philosophical writings. With due deference to the fascinating interpretations of prior philosophically oriented critics, I will contend that it is time for an interpretative "reboot" that opens a new window onto what may have driven Stevens in his philosophical obsessions. Inevitably, the synthesis that follows bears some similarities to the renderings of others, although my hope is that the fresh dimensions will also be readily apparent.

Before proceeding any further, it may be helpful for the reader to recognize the somewhat unusual crow's nest from which I have canvassed Stevens' work. I am both a physician-scientist with experience in research, and a poet, rather than a poetry critic from academia. Lest anyone believe, however, that my scientific orientation has cultivated a dismissive attitude toward what neuroscientists would consider "archaic" philosophical terms with no modern relevance, I will stress that I believe current science is unable to explain artistic truths or, for that matter, provide a grand unified theory of the universe. Although I may not agree with others that Edmund Husserl's work, for example, is the optimal glass through which to view the canon of Wallace Stevens, I would like to mention that—to paraphrase what Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Primacy of Perception has said of Husserl—I too have attempted to navigate a course between the "Scylla of psychologism" (55) (or, more generally, science) and the Charybdis of that which seems inductively unknowable (i.e., philosophical constructs and the poetry to which these...