Late Stevens

Reading BJ Leggett's excellent (& nice & short) Late Stevens. I really liked one of his earlier books, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory. He has a way of correcting (gently) the Stevens big shots, Bloom & Vendler et al.

Stevens, in a statement on "Auroras of Autumn" : "There are many poems relating to the interactions between reality and imagination, which are to be regarded as marginal to the central theme... [which is] the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized as a fiction, in which men could propose to themselves a fulfillment." (quoted by Leggett on p.1). & from the epigraph to 1st chapter : "The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." (from Stevens' Adagia)

Leggett's argument (which I'm just getting going with) is that many of Stevens' later poems (in The Rock, etc.) are intertextually aligned with "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and other, earlier poems on this "central" theme. & (to paraphrase) Leggett summarizes Stevens' focus on this theme, as a meditation on the idea that the fiction of reality is the generating dream of an inhuman mind - sagacious, inventive, changing, unaccountable, inexplicable... yet - as an imagination - showing a likeness to our own imagination. Leggett attends closely to some lines in the opening poem in The Rock, "An Old Man Asleep" :

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.
A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

The self and the earth - your thoughts, your feelings,
Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot.

The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,
The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.

He shows how these lines imply that the river & the chestnut trees are the thoughts of one of the "two worlds" (the earth) - that is, that the things of the earth, the "outside", are fictions of a greater, "inhuman" dreamer; & the "two worlds" are mingled together here, ambiguously joined.

So it seems the "supreme fiction" is a new expression of a very old idea... of the fictiveness (the "made" quality) of reality.

Kent's essay, noted below, links prosody to what was perhaps the main divide in 20th-cent. American poetries - bigger than that between "raw vs. cooked" or "New American vs. New Critical" (at least before the advent of deconstruction and langpo, anyway) :  the divide between symbolist/"idealist" and objectivist/"realist"  (Stevens/Crane/Eliot vs. Williams/Pound/Zukofsky, for example).
 
The divide represents a sort of inherent conundrum of thought & perception.  B.J. Leggett's book Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory argues that Stevens actually played both sides, pondering & negotiating his way around issues of imagination & reality.  His skill in doing so registered in the fascination, controversy, sheer volume of criticism of same.
 
I'm always jealous of this kind of well-organized well-informed essay.  But leaning as I do toward the Stevens end of the spectrum, I guess, I have a few quibbles.  There's a value judgement being made:  the line which includes Rakosi is supposed to represent a humbler, more active/passive, more direct apprehension of "things as they is"; Stevens' mode is seen as imposing a priori categories of interpretation on experience.
 
A problem with this analysis arises, though, when you grant the possibility that reality itself and the things of reality display order, logos, Dike, Tao.  Then the self-reflexive and circling "prosodies" - the rhythmic patterns which Kent describes so succinctly - may be understood as poetry's function or capability to evoke or represent such a situation of "realities-within-Logos".  And this may be, ultimately, at least as realist as the more indicative particulars of the WC Williams vein.

Have been reading Wallace Stevens lately, along with Leggett book previously mentioned (Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory). Also re-reading Hamlet's Mill (Santillana and Dechend), the terrific, crotchety essay on very ancient astronomy & archaic myth. Actually, the last 2 poems I've written (& posted here) reminded me of this book (rather than the other way around). (Some of the "deep-dive" adventures in the latter portion of Forth of July drew extensively on this material.)

Thinking a lot about some of Stevens' obsessions - the symbiosis of imagination & reality, the nature of the human myth-making capacity and its relation to religious belief. Pondering the "culture war" with fundamentalist Islam, & our own homegrown fundamentalisms.

Hamlet's Mill is fascinating by way of the window it opens on culture's deep past, exploring how star-reading was really the first form of literacy, and how myths are not merely projections of human relations, but attempts to comprehend real time measurements, and the meaning of time itself, through long & close observation of constellation/planetary movements. Of course now we understand that the ancient notion of movement was kind of an artificial planetarium (the earth as fixed plane around which stars revolved), but this doesn't diminish the incredible complexity & specificity with which ancient cultures tracked the stars.

I'm finding this archaic science of interest (as you can tell from those 2 poems), 1) because it was a global phenomenon, found in folklore of many many cultures, 2) it provides an interesting way to get behind or beneath mythological-imaginative projections & narratives, the rituals by means of which different cultures identify themselves, and 3) because star-gazing & myth-making were part of the traditional "serious" poet's vocation.

I used the sort of ballad-form refrain style in these 2 poems, not because I felt like imitating Yeats or Villon, but because, basically, it can be effective, I think.

Of course, was reading BJ Leggett's fine book again today, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory : the chapter dealing with what Stevens drew from Charles Mauron's book Aesthetics and Psychology, in particular the bit about the usefulness of obscurity:

the poem must resist the intelligence
almost successfully...

- which section pretty much contradicts everything I've been saying here. For Stevens, at least during a phase of his career, poetry opposes paraphrase and explanation... but I can't adequately paraphrase this excellent study right now...

"Resonance" and "Symbolism", Jonathan & Kent - they both seem relevant to the process I'm trying to outline. Resonance closer to Stevens, in that it has no implication of fixity of "image"; Symbolism - Yeats was clearly a symbolist of a sort - but the word seems too systematic, like allegory - for what I'm thinking of. Actually Greg's definition of "vision" seems about right.

The poem integrates its parts in such a way that they begin to resonate overtones of "symbolic" meaning, they are iconic pointers, aspects of a whole representation, with which the reader can identify or feel-with-affinity in several ways at once.
Such that a context is provided for individual images proper, or strings of imagery, which begin to echo in the reader's sensibility.

"Aura", writes Catherine... now that's hovering somewhere between resonance and vision!

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
                    - Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

Re-reading B.J. Leggett's useful book, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory. Interesting chapter on what Stevens may have been getting at with the title "It Must Be Abstract". How he drew upon I.A. Richards' book Coleridge on Imagination to come to a notion of how the mind - whether in perception ("the poet of reality") or imagination ("the poet of fictions") - always abstracts : that all words are imaginative abstractions, creations of thought. In this way he plays/works with the imagination/reality pairing, without getting stuck (like some of his critics) on one prong or the other.

Mandelstam somewhere: "Love the idea of the thing more than the thing itself."

Byzantine icons, Nicholas Cusanus. "God" being a human concept, a name, for something we cannot really grasp; humankind as imago dei one of its imaginative corollaries, a concept which can come to have meaning both in contemplation & action. Coleridge on the imagination as the expression of the divine "I Am". An imaginative idea of the economy of the earth. "O what a piece of Work is Man!"

Leggett shows curiously how Stevens was also heavily influenced by a biographical study of Giambattista Vico, about the same time Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake.