Picasso, Cézanne and Stevens’ Abstract Engagements

Abstract

To consider Stevens’ persistent attention to the idea of things (or places), particularly in a Transatlantic context, naturally raises the vexed question of abstraction. This is not merely because Stevens’ middle career evidences a growing interest in an abstract poetic. It is also because mental conception involves abstracting phenomena and giving that data ‘reality’: a never-ending process of imaginative renewal both for the mind itself and a frequent element in Stevens’ writing. My phrase ‘abstract engagements’ refers, then, to two aspects of Stevens’ work: first, the poet’s tireless grappling with a notion of poetic abstraction and, second, the idea that Stevens’ abstract meditations on people, places — what one poem calls ‘The News and the Weather’ (CPP 237) — are paradoxical connections. For, rather than conceiving Stevens as a victim of his own abstractions, as a poet out of touch with his cherished ‘actual world’ (L 292) — as Marjorie Perloff has argued with reference to Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) — I suggest Stevens’ own brand of abstraction actually marks the poet’s paradoxical contact with ‘reality’, at the very least its interrogation. In an idealist loop which is hardly solipsistic, Stevens’ meditation on mind and ‘reality’ as poetry is directed by his abstractive spirit.