Stevens, Wallace,--1879-1955--Criticism and interpretation

Wallace Stevens sought to remove the false image of God in
order to find truth and reality. His various attempts to
dispel the myth of religion can be traced through his poetry
and correspondence. His poetry can be divided into five
phases, each illustrating Stevens's changing attitude toward
God. In phase I Stevens employed simple substitution,
replacing the image of the supreme with common objects. In
phase II he looked for ''the god within man" while increasing
his efforts to remove the illusion of God. Phase III was
one of transition, where Stevens rejected former theories
and sought a new direction to follow. In phase IV he
concentrated on exposing the myths and defining reality. At
the end of this phase, he reviewed his progress and found
himself no nearer to his goal. Stevens lacked focus in
phase V due to this disappointment; he died before settling
on a new theory.

A detailed analysis of Wallace Stevens's poetics reveals
close parallels with Aristotle's theory of mimesis.
These parallels are most notable in regard to the definition
of mimesis as it pertains to poetry, language,
nature, reality, and imagination. An exploration of these
parallels firmly establishes Stevens as an Aristotelian,
and therefore provides an important aid in understanding
his use of poetic devices such as diction, metaphor, and
persona.

Wallace Stevens's poems alluding to hands yield one of his most profound topics of interest: reality (the external, natural world) versus the imagination (the internal mind). The human hand offers a unique perspective of the complex, often problematic worlds in which the artist exists. In terms of the external world, the hands are the most common means of sense experience. For many artists, the hands act as a medium through which expression of art is delivered. During inspiration, an artist therefore takes an experience of the world, filters it through the imagination, and then creates art by combining mind and sense experience. It is the complications involved in this process of creation that the forthcoming analysis explores. The philosophical insight of Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Husserl, and William James offers ways of interpreting the intricate creative process apparent in Stevens's poems. By visualizing the necessary altered state of perception through Stevens's language, one can then better understand the acquisition of the ideal state, or "phenomenal body."

In "Esthetique du Mal," one of his later poems, Wallace Stevens considers existence from a variety of critical and philosophical perspectives, among them various moral, aesthetic, political, theological, and philosophic "epistemes" that condition how humanity perceives and experiences the world. These epistemological "modes" dictate how we live and perceive the world about us, providing preconceptions that shroud understanding and obfuscate ontological explanation. What Stevens accomplishes in "Esthetique du Mal" is to create a dialogue with various historical and philosophical "schools," systematically confronting and rejecting their perspectives, and creating a movement toward Martin Heidegger's "aletheia" to uncover the ontological substructure that exists beneath the individual's experience in the world. This movement of "uncovering" and exposing the nature of what it means "to be in the world" is a journey to an ontological substructure that allows Stevens to arrive at a dynamic, ontological proof: that existence is full of "reverberating" possibilities, not solitary and "univocal" statements.

The titles of Wallace Stevens's poetry assist in an explication of the poems. Stevens's titling techniques force the reader into a complicit involvement with the text before the commitment to read is even made. By asserting a strong presence in his titles, Stevens is able to engage the reader in an exploration of what is possible for the imagination. He presents his poetry as a foil for the actualization of his audience. Potentials are experienced and made real by this active involvement with the poems, which in turn permits them to reveal their hidden meanings. A recursive responsiveness to Stevens's titles during the enjoyment of his poems rewards the reader with some answers to Wallace Stevens's masterful mystery. His management of titles is a part of the syntactical expression that is central to a full experience of his poetry.

The poetry of Wallace Stevens demonstrates a process of creativity through motion, color, and sound imagery. This process is one of creating or discovering a supreme fiction or a temporal ideal or order that will suffice for now but will continue in motion and change. A momentary blending of the imagination and reality creates this ideal poetry. Chaos, disorder, death, and decay are metaphors for the activity of decreation, which must precede creation in many poems. Nature constantly changes, but it does so with a pattern. The patterned motion in the poetry is a circular motion toward a center of form, balance, and perfection. Color imagery demonstrates a process much like the one that Newton demonstrated in the colors that make up light. Sound imagery evokes "inherited Memory" which we use to recreate a new fiction.

The interaction between mind (consciousness) and world (sensory phenomena) is explored in depth by poets William Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens, with particular attention given to the role of imagination. In The Prelude, Wordsworth describes events from his own early life, encounters between mind and world, leading to the development of a poetic sensibility. Stevens, writing in a playful, improvisational style very different from Wordsworth's, examines a variety of encounters between characters such as Crispin in "The Comedian as the Letter C" and external reality. For both poets, the boundaries between mind and world are indeterminate, and the question of supremacy in their dynamic relationship is unresolved. Yet the sense of a "something" that grounds this interplay, what Stevens identifies as "Being," leads the ever-active imagination to do its work, at home in the world.

Wallace Stevens's poem "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together" contains his most complete figure on the workings of the self's noetic cosmos, the figure being a system of three planets, which accounts for the development of reason from its first stages all the way to its highest in art. This figure provides unusual insight into the most prominent theoretical issues in his poetry: the relationship between reality, reason, and art; and the relationship between subjectivity, intentionality, and externality.

William Hogarth in The Analysis of Beauty, first published in
1753, names the pineapple as the almost perfect form. It combines
the oval and the cone and, further, is ornamented to achieve a
balance between variety and simplicity. Wallace Stevens, always
concerned with forms and the metaphors they engender, uses the
pineapple as subject of a major poem, "Someone Puts a Pineapple
Together," and elsewhere in his work it appears as a forceful
image. Hogarth recommends that the artist study his subject from
within the form, to achieve a fuller realization of its exterior,
a technique often practiced by Stevens, whose thinking may
proceed from the center of a given form--or idea--to the outside.
Hogarth's stated belief that variety is essential to beauty finds
confirmation in the poetry of Stevens, who is known for the
diversity of his vision.

The state of liminality, as defined by Mihai Spariosu and exemplified by Wallace Stevens and Charles Baudelaire, is a significant one, transitional in its "structure," and one in which a vital activity takes place. Namely, this activity is the moving between worlds, states, or perceptions, and the choice of new ones, or of considering new potentialities. Essentially, this idea of being in limbo and the result of this state of "in-betweenness" is that we emerge from a relatively indeterminate, contemplative, and subjective space with an ultimate satisfaction or heightened or altered awareness. Much of Stevens's poetry, especially his later poetry, exemplifies a meditative contemplation of being, while Baudelaire's poetry portrays the liminally sublime, ghostly being in a transitional urban world. Both poets demonstrate such concepts of transition and ultimate coping in a modern state of flux.