Stevens as Modernist: The Intensities of Harmonium

Abstract

Stevens as Modernist: The Intensities of Harmonium Charles Altieri FOR THIS CELEBRATION of Harmonium’s centenary, my central concern is to provide an account of how I see crucial aspects of the book as establishing the most intelligent and possibly the most intensely moving of the founding poetic texts in American modernism. I mean by “modernist” an imaginative resistance to Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic intellectual practices achieved primarily by stylistic means. Modernist strategies seek to release potential affective and contemplative investments blocked by these orientations of consciousness. My guide here is Wallace Stevens’s interest in Friedrich Nietzsche. But for now I will be content with mentioning B. J. Leggett’s superb commentary on Stevens’s interest in that philosopher.1 I have to devote my time instead to arguing that Stevens’s 1923 volume is considerably more experimental in its pursuit of imaginative processes for mapping new ways of thinking, feeling, and writing than is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In my view, Eliot’s poem is the best Victorian poem ever written, with essentially the same laments as Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gypsy,” but modernized in two important ways. Rather than envisioning the poem as an expressive act by a speaker, Eliot treats the poem as virtually an expressive act performed by a culture in need of a cure for its anomie. In order to have what seems almost the entire white Euro-American culture represent itself, Eliot has to deploy a full modernist array of stylistic innovations—from the force of acute juxtapositions to devices that produce a continually incomplete presentation, where what is not said often seems more telling than the actual words spoken. The second mode of modernization is thematic and structural. The poem does not merely lament the death of god but foregrounds by means of the suffering the poem exhibits a need for something like a global religious conversion made appealing most strikingly by Eliot’s invocation of Sanskrit wisdom. But in this poem the wisdom cannot be acted upon because the three kernels of wisdom must be interpreted in conceptual terms, and interpretation inevitably reinstitutes the modes of self-interest and self-concealment that were major features of the cultural problems producing a waste land in the first place. [End Page 156] What does Stevens do differently that more fully adapts modernist stylistic innovations to what are plausible cultural needs? Let me enumerate the ways by commenting on five particular poems, with the final poem enabling me to offer some comments about the volume as a whole. My opening discussion will be of an intimately connected pair of poems stressing Stevens’s sense of the intellectual crisis he thought poetry had to address. The first dramatic gesture captures the difficulties involved in escaping Romantic ideals grounded in the powers of subjective expression. “Nuances of a Theme by Williams” dramatizes William Carlos Williams’s tendency to allow his presentations intended to purify poetry of Romantic rhetoric still to pander to the Romantic need for the work to reflect some inner feature of human need and hope. Stevens wants to address an ancient star this way: I Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,that reflects neither my face nor any inner partof my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing. II Lend no part to any humanity that suffusesyou in its own light. (CPP 15) There are two crucial features of this poem central to the volume at large. First we have to ask what is so bad or dangerous about humanity suffusing the star in its own light. One answer is that we will never learn anything that is not contained by that light. But Stevens’s emphasis is more concrete: if our own light determines what we see, we will have little sense of mystery and even less regard for the wonders that the senses bring when they mediate realities that are not pre-scripted. In fact, it is our responsiveness to sensation throughout the volume that affords a distinctively modern positioning of self-consciousness within these poems. Ironically, the Enlightenment constantly theorized about the importance of sensation, but then immediately sought to categorize sensations...