Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity by Ian Tan (review)

Abstract

Goldfarb engage these problems from an original direction via a provocative comment from Stevens: “Personally, I like words to sound wrong” (L 340). Stevens’s preference is observed in lines that are simultaneously stunning and challenging to pronounce, such as the conclusion of the opening stanza of “The Plain Sense of Things”: “Inanimate in an inert savoir” (CPP 428). Eeckhout and Goldfarb subtly reveal the sonic complexity of that line and present it as characteristic of “a poet who actively foregoes the satisfaction of harmonic arrival” (72). The co-authors cite Theodor Adorno’s essay “Music, Language, and Composition” as a guide to their approach to Stevens. Music and language, Adorno writes, both entail “a temporal succession of articulated sounds that are more than just sound” (qtd. on 3), which is to say, sounds organized in non-arbitrary, expressive ways. “Applying such principles to our readings of Stevens’s poems,” Eeckhout and Goldfarb write, “helps to accentuate the musicality intrinsic to them” (4). The term “musicality” is helpful here. It indicates an aesthetic property which music models but of which music is not the only example. Maybe, if we follow Eeckhout and Goldfarb’s investigations, and experiment with the uses of terms like melody for literary criticism, we can begin to describe “poetic music” as the particular kind of music it is.