‘Without human meaning’: Stevens, Heidegger and the Foreignness of Poetry

Abstract

To remark that Stevens’ poetry develops, throughout his long career, as poetry about poetry — that is, as poetry preoccupied with investigating and expounding the goals and limits of writing poetry — would be to state the obvious. What still merits further attention, however, is the direction in which Stevens’ poems, in their continuous preoccupation with post-Romantic poetic paradigms and twentieth-century philosophical notions, point us: namely the idea of taking poetic language toward what Stevens himself calls ‘the end of the mind’ (CPP 476). On the one hand, the notion of the end of the mind is emblematic of the boundary between the subject and the object (or mind and reality) in Stevens; and, as such, concerns the possibility of a ‘beyond’ to the imagination and subjective perception, one which would open poetry to ‘the plain sense of things’ (CPP 428). On the other hand, the end of the mind marks the limit of human meaning and feeling, as Stevens observes. This ending indicates also the moment when poetry puts into question the notion of ‘man’ and its central role in the anthropocentric organization of reality. One might call this the ‘dishumanizing’ moment of poetry, when poetry attempts to take language beyond meaning as such. Accordingly, this chapter develops this latter reading of the ‘end of the mind’ in order to examine the foreignness intimated in poetry: namely that aspect of poetic language which, within the proliferating human meanings and truths, sounds like ‘a foreign song’ (CPP 476).