Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/wsj.2023.a910932
Peter Hanchak, John N. Serio, Milton J. Bates, George S. Lensing
In Memoriam Robert Buttel (1923–2023) Peter Hanchak, John N. Serio, Milton J. Bates, and George S. Lensing Editorial note: Our Editorial Board Member Robert Buttel passed away on April 20, 2023, at the age of ninety-nine, at his home in Providence, Rhode Island. Bob had been the longest-serving Board Member of this journal: he started out in 1984, thus serving for nearly four decades. Below we would like to honor him with four personal testimonies by Wallace Stevens’s grandson, Peter Hanchak, our Honorary Editor John Serio, fellow Board Member Milton Bates, and former Book Review Editor and Board Member George Lensing. In the world of Stevens criticism, Bob’s name is remembered especially for two major books that have continued to be used by subsequent generations: his monograph Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium (Princeton UP, 1967), whose title we will italicize in its entirety below to make for easier reading; and a volume of essays, edited together with Frank Doggett, Wallace Stevens: A Celebration (Princeton UP, 1980), which not only showcased the work of a range of stellar critics at the time but also included important personal recollections by Holly Stevens and a variety of previously unpublished poetic and prose writings by Stevens himself. Personal Recollections I am privileged to have had the pleasure of Robert Buttel’s company over a significant span of years and in a variety of settings. He and his wife, Helen, were some of the most naturally gracious people I have ever known. They also maintained a wonderfully warm friendship with my mother, Holly Stevens, until her death in 1992. In the 1960s, after two trimesters at Beloit College, I visited Bob and Helen over the Christmas holiday and they asked me if I would recommend Beloit for their son, Jeffrey, who was one year behind me. Jeff liked his visit to Beloit and decided to attend, where, in fact, he also met and married a classmate of mine. After a year in San Francisco, I then transferred to Temple University, where I was able, once again, to spend more time with the Buttels. In the early 1970s, my first wife and I decided to flee the urban chaos of Philadelphia and join the “back-to-the-land” initiative by moving to rural Maine. After a nine-year stint, I returned to Philadelphia as a journeyman electrician and renewed my friendship with Bob and Helen. They had moved from their large home in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, to Front Street [End Page 262] in South Philly, where they had converted an old mattress factory into a spiffy modern home. I soon discovered Bob’s enthusiasm for tennis and I set up a spot and date and we bashed away for several hours, during which I received a precious tutorial. I later found out Bob had a national ranking in singles for his age class(!). In one of our wonderfully easy conversations, he confided to me that he was thinking of taking up golf, even though he was at an advanced age. I had played golf all through my youth and picked it up again in m
编者按:我们的编辑委员会成员罗伯特·巴特尔于2023年4月20日在罗德岛州普罗维登斯的家中去世，享年99岁。鲍勃是本刊任职时间最长的董事会成员:他于1984年加入，任职近40年。下面我们将以华莱士·史蒂文斯的孙子彼得·汉查克、我们的荣誉编辑约翰·塞里奥、董事会成员米尔顿·贝茨和前书评编辑兼董事会成员乔治·兰辛的四份个人证词来纪念他。在史蒂文斯批评的世界里，鲍勃的名字尤其因两本主要的书而被后人铭记:他的专著《华莱士·史蒂文斯:风琴的制作》(普林斯顿大学，1967年)，为了便于阅读，我们将其标题全部斜体在下面;和弗兰克·道格特一起编辑的散文集《华莱士·史蒂文斯:庆祝》(普林斯顿大学出版社，1980年)，其中不仅展示了当时一系列著名评论家的作品，还包括霍莉·史蒂文斯的重要个人回忆和史蒂文斯本人以前未发表的各种诗歌和散文作品。个人回忆我很荣幸在罗伯特·巴特尔的陪伴下度过了漫长的岁月，经历了各种各样的环境。他和他的妻子海伦，是我所知道的最自然亲切的人。他们还与我的母亲霍莉·史蒂文斯(Holly Stevens)保持着非常温暖的友谊，直到她1992年去世。上世纪60年代，在伯洛伊特学院(Beloit College)学习了两个月后，我在圣诞节假期拜访了鲍勃和海伦(Bob and Helen)，他们问我是否愿意为他们比我小一岁的儿子杰弗里(Jeffrey)推荐伯洛伊特学院。杰夫喜欢他的伯洛伊特之行，并决定参加，事实上，他也在那里认识了我的一个同学，并娶了他。在旧金山待了一年之后，我转到了天普大学，在那里我又有了更多的时间和巴特尔一家在一起。20世纪70年代初，我和第一任妻子决定逃离费城混乱的城市，加入“回归土地”的倡议，搬到缅因州的农村。工作了九年之后，我回到费城当了一名熟练的电工，并与鲍勃和海伦重新建立了友谊。他们从宾夕法尼亚州温科特的大房子搬到了南费城的前街，在那里他们把一个旧床垫工厂改造成了一个漂亮的现代住宅。我很快就发现了鲍勃对网球的热情，于是我约了一个地点和日期，我们一起打了几个小时，在此期间我得到了宝贵的指导。后来我发现鲍勃在他那个年龄段的单打比赛中排名全国第一。在一次非常轻松的谈话中，他向我吐露，他正在考虑打高尔夫球，尽管他已经年事已高。我年轻时一直在打高尔夫球，三十多岁时又重新打起来，成为一名受人尊敬的球员，差点数保持在11-12之间，经常在七十多岁时得分。鲍勃和我打了几个我最喜欢的球场，天哪!他学东西真快!一年多以后，他已经一杆进洞了，这是我从来没有做到的。他的性格，身高6英尺3英寸的大个子的长弧线，以及严格保持良好状态的奉献精神。他是我的好朋友，一个极好的健谈者，一个鼓舞人心的运动员。我会想念他的。文艺复兴时期的人罗伯特·巴特尔虽然是一位文学评论家，但却具有埃兹拉·庞德曾经说过的艺术家的特征之一:他们是种族的触角。鲍勃具有一种罕见的品质，他是最早看出诗人的与众不同的人之一。在20世纪40年代末，当时还没有一本专门介绍华莱士·史蒂文斯的书，大多数文章都是评论的形式，鲍勃选择了“夏天的凭证”作为他的硕士论文，其中有……
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/wsj.2023.a910919
Douglas Mao
A Graduate Seminar Roundtable: Introduction Douglas Mao IN FALL 2022, I taught a graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins called “1922 and Its Neighbors.” The course aimed to situate the most famous works of English-language modernism’s annus mirabilis—Ulysses, The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room—among other texts published between 1920 and 1924 (some canonical, some scarcely read today). In keeping with its title, the seminar also featured theoretical and historical writing on the question of the neighbor. One of the students in the course was Nora Pehrson, who had just accepted an appointment as new managing editor of this journal. Nora happened to mention to Bart Eeckhout—whose extraordinary helming of The Wallace Stevens Journal we also celebrate, and thank our stars for, here—that Harmonium was one of the texts we would be reading. Bart had the thought that members of the seminar might write up, for this anniversary number, a reflection on their encounter with Harmonium on the eve of its centenary. What would a group of young scholars, some well versed in Stevens but most coming with little prior acquaintance, find most noteworthy? The duo of short essays presented here is the result of that invitation. The seminar discussion, which took place in December 2022, was not structured in advance. It was a conversation, not a curriculum. The first poem the group lingered over was “Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges.” This was perhaps fitting given that “Cy Est Pourtraicte” was one of the earliest written of the poems eventually collected in Harmonium, but our seminar started with it out of an interest in the relation between storytelling and image in the volume. The subsequent discussion ranged over many poems (“The Snow Man” closed things out) and over questions of exoticism and epistemology, irony and intimacy, syntax and hypotheticals. What tied all these explorations together was a concern with how, in his first collection, this poet of solitaires attends to otherness. In the wake of the seminar meeting, six students from the course opted to sign on to the journal project. They decided to break into two groups of three, each of which would produce a short essay building up from elements of the seminar discussion. Each group drafted collaboratively, [End Page 228] received comments on its drafts from the other group and from me, and revised in response to those suggestions. One question on the table for our writers was how Harmonium ultimately engages with the idea of the neighbor—the central theme, again, of our larger seminar. Another was how to think about Harmonium a hundred years after its publication. The first of the essays inclines more to the former question, the second more to the latter. The two converge, however, on the crucial topic of Stevens’s address to everyday experience. For Julia Houser, Nora Pehrson, and Griffin Shoglow-Rubenstein, the Stevensian subject moves through a world populated with neighbors—not jus
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/wsj.2023.a910931
Sara Laws
Reviewed by: Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics by Yunte Huang Sara Laws Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics. By Yunte Huang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. True to the goals of the “Thinking Literature” series in which the book is published, Chinese Whispers renders the difficult phrase “transpacific poetics” into a mode of reasoning in and about the world. Yunte Huang deftly moves between poetry, cybernetics, the insurance industry, linguistics, translation, calligraphy, computer science, nationalist cultural projects, and geopolitics, revealing how all these things have to do with the “transpacific” and even with “poetics.” The power of the book is its defamiliarizing effect. In Chapters One and Five, for example, Huang highlights the “transpacific” in contemporary definitions of “information.” In Chapter Four, in the course of relaying his tribulations in translating Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, he defamiliarizes Pound for an English-reading audience. As a result, the perhaps tired subject of Pound becomes interesting again as the story of a mentally ill mortal—not the giant modernist—who, confined in a psychiatric institution, is “obsessed with Chinese,” seeking out Chinese-English “family resemblances” in his unique mode of inquiry. Because of this obsession, Pound “points us in the direction of a world literature that is inherently translational and multilingual” (80). (Similarly, Huang rightfully claims to have defamiliarized Confucius for a Chinese readership in his 1990s translations of The Pisan Cantos.) These moments of brilliance are constellated throughout Chinese Whispers. Spaces between chapters feel like breaks in a series of excellent lectures, even if, like hearing a good lecture, the dazzle of a given chapter may leave some readers desirous of more precise conclusions. The book may not be ideal for an undergraduate audience, though I would recommend its inclusion in graduate seminars. Huang’s earlier work, notably his reevaluation of Moby-Dick in a Pacific context, made a huge impression by showing the innovative potentials of transpacific literary criticism. Since then transpacific studies has grown through the work of scholars drawn from various subfields. Chinese Whispers is a necessary addition to the field not because it corrects scholarly misinterpretations (even though Chapter Five does argue that “we have failed to see what is really at stake in Ernest Fenollosa’s seminal essay [‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’]” [116]) nor because the book reckons with American literary giants. Its contribution to the field of transpacific literary criticism is to show how integral the transpacific is—in the work of American poets like Wallace Stevens; in the life of esteemed scholars like Huang himself; and also, surprisingly, in the logics of the insurance industry. In Cold War America, the children’s game of Telephone was named “Chinese Whispers” because Chineseness at t
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/wsj.2023.a910929
John Gibson
Reviewed by: Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth by John Koethe John Gibson Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth. By John Koethe. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. John Koethe is rare among philosophers. He is an accomplished poet who has also produced excellent work on issues to do with skepticism, metaphysics, and the nature of the mind and self. In other words, he has had two careers, an academic one as an analytic philosopher working on the problems that define philosophy in the Anglophone academy, and a largely extra-academic one as a poet of practice and not profession. This, he tells us, has been a healthy arrangement, since it has allowed his poetry to issue “from an impulse internal to the poetic act” rather than “from pressures external to it” (65). After reading this superb book, one is inclined to say that the same is true of his academic career, since as a philosopher he has worked largely outside the culture of professional aesthetics and philosophy of art, and one suspects that his relative indifference to the debates that animate academic work in these disciplines is in good part responsible for the immense success of Thought and Poetry. The majority of the book’s eighteen chapters were revised after publication elsewhere, and the appendix on the mind-body problem, written especially for this volume, usefully situates many of Koethe’s claims about the role of subjectivity in lyric poetry in a broader and richer philosophical context. The chapters touch on a wide range of issues in criticism, poetics, and philosophy. The most exciting discussions in the book are concerned with the legacy of romanticism and the picture of the self implicit in the strands of modernism that grow out of it; the nature of the sublime; the allure of philosophical realism; and the relationship between poetry and philosophy. While there is the kind of frequent repetition one would expect of a volume of collected essays, each retelling appears in a new context and functions to add definition to the core ideas in Koethe’s philosophy of poetry. Koethe is a Wittgensteinian at heart whose poetic sensibilities place him near the New York School and especially close to the Eliot-Stevens-Ashbery tradition. Most striking is Koethe’s view of the relationship between lyric subjectivity and the external, extra-poetic world. Koethe’s account of this relation flows from his decidedly modernist sense of the anxieties and interests of the variations of romanticism that interest him—that is, lyric poetry that involves “the enactment of subjectivity, and the affirmation of it against the claims of an objective natural setting which threatens to annihilate it” (73). It is this threat of annihilation that takes on particular significance for Koethe, since it prompts a form of lyric expression that seeks to define the self against an “objective” setting and thereby to assert a form of aesthetic and moral freedom from it. Wha
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/wsj.2023.a910930
Rick Joines
Reviewed by: The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition by Margaret H. Freeman Rick Joines The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition. By Margaret H. Freeman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Borrowing her title from Wallace Stevens’s “The Rock,” Margaret H. Freeman gives us a fascinating exploration of how poetry “enables us to cognitively access and experience the ‘being’ of reality, all that is and is not, both seen and unseen” (1). Freeman develops the case that the poem as icon is an activity or function more than it is an object or artifact. Poetic iconicity is what a poem does as it maps ways to free ourselves from abstractions and concepts structuring our usual rationality. Freeman contends the iconic poem is an affective response to reality by the poet and then to the same reality by the reader. Through it, both have immediate experience of the self’s existence in a primordial, preconscious, preconceptual world. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s definition of an icon, Freeman calls the iconic poem “an emergent structure” (20). It provides access to “something else” through its formal elements, which help bridge “the ‘gap’ conceived between mind and world” (20, 38). This ontological connection creates a semblance (not an idealist representation) of felt life. Thus, the iconic poem is “embodied subjectivity” (16). It “engages both artist and respondent in opening up potentialities inherent in all creative making” (32). Readers of John Dewey’s Art as Experience will find much to appreciate, but also question, here, as Freeman updates the terminology of many of his arguments, though his book is never directly mentioned. The poems by Stevens Freeman discusses at length are “Domination of Black,” “Of Mere Being,” and “The Rock.” The section on “Domination of Black” is a masterclass on cognitive literary criticism, her sense of how poems both are and create affective responses, and the complex genius of how Stevens puts a poem together. She describes the kinesthetic movement of Stevens’s prepositions, sounds, colors, archetypes, and images. She details the poem’s affective schemata: anxiety, fear, container, cycle, path, motion, boundary, intake, and resistance. These figure into the poem’s agonist and antagonist force dynamics to embody a destabilizing physical and psychological feeling of fear. In this reading, she is less interested in interpreting the poem’s meaning than in exploring “what the poem is doing” (119). She convinces us of the soundness of her critical mode as she persuades us about how the poem’s simple yet intricate elements capture Stevens’s emotional and intellectual transactions between reality and his sensibility. Freeman’s discussion of “Of Mere Being” furthers her argument about iconicity. She poses the question of “how poetry can, constructed as it is by means of language, that very product of the intellectualizing, conceptualizing self, nevertheless break through its own barriers to access the pri
《作为象征的诗:审美认知研究》作者:玛格丽特·h·弗里曼玛格丽特·h·弗里曼著。纽约:牛津大学出版社，2020。借用华莱士·史蒂文斯(Wallace Stevens)的《岩石》(The Rock)中的标题，玛格丽特·h·弗里曼(Margaret H. Freeman)对诗歌如何“使我们能够在认知上接近和体验现实的‘存在’，所有存在和不存在，可见和不可见的东西”(1)进行了引人入胜的探索。弗里曼提出，作为偶像的诗歌是一种活动或功能，而不是一件物品或人工物品。诗歌的象似性是一首诗所做的，因为它描绘了将我们从抽象和概念中解放出来的方法，这些抽象和概念构成了我们通常的理性。弗里曼认为，标志性诗歌是诗人对现实的情感回应，也是读者对现实的情感回应。通过它，两者都能直接体验到自我在一个原始的、前意识的、前概念的世界中的存在。根据查尔斯·桑德斯·皮尔斯对偶像的定义，弗里曼称偶像诗为“一种紧急结构”(20)。它通过其形式元素提供了通往“其他东西”的途径，这有助于弥合“思想与世界之间的‘鸿沟’”(20,38)。这种本体论的联系创造了一种感觉生活的表象(而不是唯心主义的表现)。因此，这首标志性的诗是“具体化的主体性”(16)。它“使艺术家和应答者都参与到发掘所有创造性制作中固有的潜力中来”(32)。约翰·杜威的《作为经验的艺术》的读者会发现很多值得欣赏的地方，但也会有疑问，因为弗里曼更新了他的许多论点的术语，尽管他的书从来没有直接提到过。史蒂文斯·弗里曼(Stevens Freeman)详细讨论的诗歌有《黑人的统治》(Domination of Black)、《存在》(of Mere Being)和《岩石》(The Rock)。关于“黑人的统治”的部分是认知文学批评的大师级作品，她对诗歌是如何产生情感反应的感觉，以及史蒂文斯如何将一首诗组合在一起的复杂天才。她描述了史蒂文斯的介词、声音、颜色、原型和形象的动觉运动。她详细描述了这首诗的情感图式:焦虑、恐惧、容器、循环、路径、运动、边界、吸收和抵抗。这些都体现在诗歌的激动和对抗力量的动态中体现了一种不稳定的生理和心理上的恐惧。在这段阅读中，她更感兴趣的是探索“这首诗在做什么”，而不是解释这首诗的意义。她让我们相信她的批判模式是合理的，因为她让我们相信这首诗的简单而复杂的元素是如何捕捉到史蒂文斯在现实和他的感性之间的情感和智力交易的。弗里曼对《纯粹存在》的讨论进一步深化了她关于象似性的论证。她提出了这样一个问题:“诗歌是如何通过语言来构建的，它是理智化、概念化自我的产物，然而却突破了它自己的障碍，进入了原始的、范畴的”(51)。她用几种方式回答了这个问题。在《纯粹存在》的韵律中，她听到了一种对韵律形式的挣扎和渴望:“就好像一个抽象的韵律模式像一个看不见的幽灵一样徘徊在诗歌中语言重音模式的声学实现背后，之上或之下”(53)。然后，正是史蒂文斯的介词，他的台词的运动和静止，以及他千变万化的声音模式，帮助我们到达了“超越思想”(54)。棕榈树和像凤凰一样的外国鸟的歌声传达了“我们概念之外的世界”(55)。弗里曼对《纯粹存在》细致入微的解读说明了一首诗如何成为现实不断变形的标志性实例。她对史蒂文斯“在将经验概念化之前的原始存在”的生活方式的解释(57)将吸引许多对史蒂文斯试图想象事物本来面目感兴趣的人。弗里曼将《岩石》描述为“对存在本质的狂想曲”。它是“通过感觉认知的感觉-运动-情绪过程获得的本体论现实的启示”(133)。在讨论这首诗时，弗里曼提出了一个可疑的主张，对史蒂文斯来说，诗歌的目的是“创造无形的动物的外表，这是现实的本质。”这生命…
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/wsj.2023.a910916
Andrew Osborn
Stevens’s Soil: Intelligence, Conceptual Affordances, and the Genius Beyond Andrew Osborn HEARKENING BACK to Harmonium at a hundred, one comes to “The Comedian” at the numeral C. Although the long poem’s transatlantic odyssey has now circled the sun a century, its bounds remain two notes-to-self: “man is the intelligence of his soil” and “his soil is man’s intelligence” (CPP 22, 29). The latter, Crispin confides, is “better,” “worth crossing seas to find” (CPP 29). But how so? And why soil? From the opening lines of the first and fourth of six cantos—that is, from the poem’s very beginning and its midpoint—the two claims demand to be contrasted and often are. Few of the many scholars who have offered readings of Harmonium’s longest poem over the century since its first publication fail to juxtapose them. Glosses have often been minimal or demonstrably inaccurate, however. Helen Vendler set a precedent for permissible brevity when she classified both as “epigram[s]” among the occasional “simplicities” that punctuate the poem’s “erratic gothic harmonies” and “coruscations” (On Extended Wings 39). While the maxims may appear less in need of explication than most of the poem’s surrounding language, the revised version defies simple restatement, and attempts to paraphrase it differ substantially. Because Stevens confined his use of soil as a noun to Harmonium—excepting two trivial instances in later-excised cantos of the very limited edition of Owl’s Clover published in 1936 by Alcestis Press—the word offers itself as ready ground for digging into how his first book’s forms of intelligence introduce yet differ from the genius that followed. Stevens’s soil is also a fertile site for exploring the extent of his materialism. Proceeding for the most part chronologically, I will show that soil for Stevens is importantly local and elemental, available for cultivation and settlement, a stable conceptual repository. As that last phrase suggests, because our reality is always phenomenal, mediated by the parts of speech we employ both to make sense of it and to imagine what may not be before us at the time, the images that we call world and the images that we call words intermingle. I take Crispin at his word when he equates “his soil” and “man’s intelligence,” and I seek to understand what this equation could mean, how it works, and what it implies for other matters of [End Page 164] Stevensian interest. Looking back from the early twenty-first century, I see my sifting of Stevens’s soil anticipated by the children of “A Postcard from the Volcano.” I find evidence that two decades before stating the “intimidating thesis” of “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” Stevens had all but convinced himself in “The Comedian” and another late Harmonium inclusion “that absolute fact includes everything that the imagination includes” (CPP 681). One may think of Crispin’s two maxims as tweezers pinching reality and the imagination together way back then. Related to thi
史蒂文斯的《土壤:智慧、概念上的支持和超越的天才》安德鲁·奥斯本回到《和谐》，读到“喜剧演员”的数字c。尽管这首长诗的跨大西洋之旅现在已经绕太阳转了一个世纪，但它的界限仍然是两个自我注解:“人是土壤的智慧”和“土壤是人的智慧”(CPP 22,29)。Crispin透露，后者“更好”，“值得漂洋过海去寻找”(CPP 29)。但为什么呢?为什么是土壤?从六章的第一章和第四章的开头，也就是说，从诗的开头和中间，这两句话需要被对比，而且经常被对比。自哈莫里姆首次出版以来的一个世纪里，许多学者朗读了哈莫里姆最长的诗歌，很少有人不把它们并列在一起。然而，光泽往往是最小的或明显不准确的。海伦·文德勒开创了一个允许简洁的先例，她把这两首诗都归类为“警句”，在偶尔出现的“简洁”中，点缀着诗歌“飘忽不定的哥特式和声”和“闪烁”(《展翅》39)。虽然这些格言似乎不像诗中的大部分语言那样需要解释，但修订后的版本拒绝简单的重述，并试图对其进行大不相同的解释。由于史蒂文斯将土壤作为名词的使用局限于harmoni(除了后来在阿尔塞蒂斯出版社1936年出版的猫头鹰的三叶草限量版中被删节的两个小例子)，这个词本身就为深入研究他的第一本书中智慧的形式与后来的天才有何不同提供了一个准备好的基础。史蒂文斯的土壤也是探索他的唯物主义程度的沃土。按照时间顺序，我将展示，对史蒂文斯来说，土壤是重要的地方和元素，可用于耕种和定居，是一个稳定的概念库。正如最后一句话所暗示的那样，因为我们的现实总是现象性的，通过我们用来理解它和想象当时可能不在我们面前的东西的语言部分来调解，我们称之为世界的图像和我们称之为文字的图像混合在一起。当Crispin把“他的土壤”和“人类的智力”等同起来时，我相信他的话，我试图理解这个等式可能意味着什么，它是如何运作的，以及它对史蒂文森感兴趣的其他问题意味着什么。从21世纪初回望过去，我看到了《来自火山的明信片》(A明信片from the Volcano)的孩子们所期待的我对史蒂文斯土壤的筛选。我发现有证据表明，在提出“令人生畏的论点”《青年作为阳刚诗人的形象》的20年前，史蒂文斯几乎在《喜剧演员》(the comedy)和《Harmonium》后期的另一部作品中说服了自己，“绝对事实包含了想象所包含的一切”(CPP 681)。人们可能会认为Crispin的两条格言是镊子，把现实和想象夹在一起。与这种紧张的合并相关的是水平土壤与智力的关系，这似乎会降低智力。这样做有助于人们认识到史蒂文斯的天才是不同的。诗的天赋比智慧更重要，而其他元素的天赋，无论是陆地、海洋还是空气，都超出了我们的理解范围。虽然他的诗歌具有约翰·塞里奥所说的“史蒂文斯的‘地方事件’”的特点，但《和谐》的作者并不是一个将一个地方的精神拟人化为天才场所的人。在许多关于《作为字母C的喜剧演员》的最引人注目的叙述中，出现了两个关于土壤的常见说法，在我看来，这些说法应该不那么常见。首先，土壤通常被解读为所有物质的喻意，包括Crispin所处的环境或环境、外部世界和整个现实。第二，Crispin修订后的格言经常被描述为一种逆转，即土壤假定了智力最初似乎拥有的代理(作为一种决定性因素或想象力的来源)。显然，前一种解读是错误的;在某种程度上，我惊讶地发现没有人……
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/wsj.2023.a910912
Bart Eeckhout, Florian Gargaillo
Still Whipping Hullabaloos among Spheres Bart Eeckhout and Florian Gargaillo Allow,Therefore, that in the planetary sceneYour disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,Proud of such novelties of the sublime,Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,May, merely may, madame, whip from themselvesA jovial hullabaloo among the spheres. —Wallace Stevens, “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” WALLACE STEVENS’S first book of poems, Harmonium, was published by Alfred A. Knopf on September 7, 1923, less than a month shy of the poet’s forty-fourth birthday. It didn’t exactly make a splash. Though Mark Van Doren in The Nation predicted that someday a monograph would be written about it (and other contemporary volumes), and that Stevens’s work would be more “durable” than much of what “passed for poetry in his day,” he still called Harmonium “tentative, perverse, and superfine,” and wondered out loud, “What public will care for a poet who strains every nerve every moment to be unlike anyone else who ever wrote[?]” (40). Van Doren’s skepsis about the book’s ability to find an audience seemed to be borne out at first. Robert Rehder recalls how, “During the 1924 Christmas season, two young poets, Richard Blackmur and Conrad Aiken, found that the first edition had been remaindered in the basement of Filene’s, the Boston department store, at 11 cents a copy.” (The regular asking price was $2, the equivalent of $35 a century later according to the US Inflation Calculator.) Blackmur and Aiken recognized the book’s merit and bought all the copies to send as Christmas cards to their friends. The poet took a more ironic view of the book’s sales. Around July 1924, he wrote to Harriet Monroe: “My royalties for the first half of 1924 amounted to [End Page 131] $6.70. I shall have to charter a boat and take my friends around the world” (L 243). (Rehder 36) Recognition was slow to arrive, then, but it did arrive over time. Today, a first printing of Harmonium fetches anywhere between $2000 for a copy in not very good shape and $6000 if it’s in better condition and includes the rare dust cover jacket. Stevens’s friends around the world typically gather nowadays in countries he never managed to visit himself, though they usually forget to charter a boat. A special commemorative issue such as this can even find itself edited by a Belgian and a Frenchman collaborating across two continents. Then again, Rehder’s anecdote is telling not only for how it recalls the languishing copies of Harmonium in the belly of Filene’s: it also reminds us how Blackmur and Aiken, as fellow poets, already knew better than to leave the remaindered books on the table. Another up-and-coming poet who had just published her own first volume, Marianne Moore, was simply bowled over by Stevens’s idiosyncratic gifts. Her review of Harmonium, published in the January 1924 issue of The Dial, aligned Stevens’s artistry resolutely with Shakespeare’s “nutritious permutations” (51).
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/wsj.2023.a910920
Julia Houser, Nora Pehrson, Griffin Shoglow-Rubenstein
The Place of the Neighbor in Harmonium Julia Houser, Nora Pehrson, and Griffin Shoglow-Rubenstein IN A 1906 JOURNAL entry, the twenty-six-year-old Wallace Stevens expressed a sentiment that would go on to become something of a commonplace in his reception both as a poet and as a literary personality: “I detest ‘company’” (L 89). But if the young Stevens’s asociality here sounds absolute, the scare quotes also indicate a possible interest in alternative notions of what company could be. Must it be human? Some fifty years later, Stevens would attest to his enduring ambivalence about his fellow humans in a letter to Robert Pack in which he reported having long considered making humanness the fourth essential feature of modern poetry: “For a long time, I have thought of adding other sections to the NOTES [i.e., ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’] and one in particular: It Must Be Human. But I think that it would be wrong not to leave well enough alone” (L 863–64). The attraction of the human was almost enough to make it as important as the other three criteria he had already elaborated: abstraction, change, and giving pleasure. But Stevens ultimately chose to leave it out. We would be mistaken, however, to view this demotion or diminution of the human as tantamount to a total rejection of sociality. Although Stevens’s poetry has often been read as a “Place of the Solitaires”—to borrow the title of a poem from Harmonium—his first volume in fact displays a multifaceted attitude toward the possibilities and prospects of intersubjective connection. From images and sounds to objects and creatures, allegories and ideas to environments and worlds, Stevens produces a vibrant ecology in which entities human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, real and fictive commune. That communion isn’t always harmonious. “Earthy Anecdote,” the collection’s opening poem, stages a confrontation between the “bristl[ing]” antagonism of the firecat and the avoidant “swerv[ing]” of the bucks (CPP 3). The bucks continually turn this way and that, attempting to shake the firecat off, but it anticipates their reactions, coercing them into an exhausting game of evasions. A mood of hostility dominates the episode; but at the same time, a sense of cohesion and regularity emerges from the predictability of the interaction between these apparent opponents. What appears to be a confrontation turns out to be cooperative as well, taking on the aspect of a hypnotic choreography. The consistency and interdependence [End Page 230] of the animals’ movements is reflected in the poem’s neatness and organization at the level of the line. “Every time” the bucks go clattering across Oklahoma, they get diverted by the sight of the firecat bristling in their path, and the lines themselves repeatedly stop short and change course in anticipation of prepositions and conjunctions: Wherever they went,They went clattering,Until they swervedIn a swift, circular lineTo the right,Because of the firecat. (CPP 3
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