Reading Wallace Stevens: Rhetoric and Representation

Abstract

It is an oddity of our intellectual discourse that literary studies are becoming more abstract, even as social sciences are becoming more empirical. We are adopting the discarded and discredited Marxist apparatus, and speaking as sociologists did a decade ago. But in speaking of Stevens, do we not need an empirical criticism that speaks to his fascination with what he called ‘Local Objects’ (in a poem of that name), objects which ask and receive definition from ‘a spirit without a foyer’ – a trope he used for himself as poet? As Stevens wrote, ‘The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact’ (PM, 206). I think what Helen Vendler has called Stevens’s ‘brutality of style’ – which she sees in his early work – indicates how his mind seeks to come to terms with the roughness, intrusions, resistances of life: the everyday and pedestrian as well as the disruptive, the disappointing, the ephemeral, and the mediocre.¹ The essence of a Stevens poem is the continuing dialogue – the ever-changing process – between the mind and the world, and the continuing quest within the mind for the appropriate language – what might be called the semiological quest – to render that dialogue.