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done an d accords with the considered judgement of the critical community.These reasons will emerge in du e course, but the basic justification for adoptinga philosophical perspective on Stevens is relatively straightforward. Philosoph-

ical concepts and proposit ions are the chief explicit subject-matter of Stevenspoetry, the effectiveness of which d epend s upon mobilizing and grasping wholephilosophical thoughts , which cannot be reduced to rhetorical effects: so that toregard Stevens meta-metaphysical mutter as merely rhetorical is as arbitrary asregarding, say, the treatment of Nature in romantic poetry as merely rhetoricaland external to its meaning. And to this it may be added that, on the plausibleassumption that metaphysics and poetry are both concerned with the funda-mental contours of human experience, it seems reasonable to suppose thatpoetry, at least poetry of a certain kind, may embody patterns of thought thatcan be re-articulated in explicitly philosophical terms.

My proposed line of in terpretation of Stevens is fairly simple and intended toidentify th e overall vector of his poetic project, without beginning to do justice toits subtleties and extraordinary suggestiveness; the quotations that I have usedare by an d large the plainer statements found in Stevens prose, rather than hispoetry (which it would take too long to set out and interpret).

Poetry, philosophy, and religion

It is generally accepted, in writing on Stevens, that he may be regarded, likeYeats and Eliot, as a modernist inheritor of the romantic tradition, one whose

poetry is in part a reflection on the nature and significance of romanticism. ButStevens differs from Yeats and Eliot - and from Pound and Auden, and perhapsany other poet in the English language - in reflecting on the nature of poetry interms that are self-consciously philosophical. The aspect of art that is ofoverriding interest to Stevens is its capacity to play a revelatory, meaning-sustaining role, and take up a position as a successor to religious belief. Thismassively ambitious, arguably extravagant conception of poetry and art -claimed by, for example, Shelley in his Defence of Poetry, and by Nietzsche in TheBirth of Tragedy - has led to a great deal of writing in aesthetics which attempts toexplain, in metaphysical terms, how art can be thought of as redemptive and avehicle of truth. By way of illustration, one might cite Clive Bells bold andforthright metaphysical hypothesis, to the effect that the significance ofsignificant form in art consists in its power to deliver acquaintance with Reality,that which lies behind the appearance of all things, the thing in it ~ e l f . ~

Much writ ing in this vein is doubtless highly unsatisfactory, but it is certainlynot pointless, and it testifies to the way in which art disposes us to attempt toarticulate a metaphysic that would account for and vindicate the strong claimsthat art is experienced as making. It is in this spirit that Stevens poetry takesmetaphysical notions as his main poetic material and makes the metaphysics ofart the principal subject of his poetry.

By way of background, regarding Stevens actual sources of philosophical

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material, there is no doubt that in addition to knowing the great works ofclassical and modern philosophy, including Kant, he read and absorbed some ormuch of Emerson, William James, Bergson, Santayana, Nietzsche and Vaihinger,and that he had an interest in and knew something, at least second-hand, ofHeidegger and Wittgenstein - amounting in all to a fair diversity of philosophicalideas and outlooks.

Regarding the relation of his poetry to philosophy, Stevens has much to say.On one rare occasion, Stevens sternly disavows any philosophical pretensions,asserting that his work has no serious contact with philosophy.6 Yet Stevenssubmitted a brief essay reflecting on the poetic nature of philosophical ideas to aphilosophy j ~ u r n a l , ~ and his representative view is that the materials and aimsof his poetry are one with those of philosophy, their difference lying at the levelof approach. There are sta tements to the effect that, if he could write the great

poem of poems, it would be a philosophical work; that poetry differs fromphilosophy only in so far as the probing of the philosopher is deliberate andthe probing of the poet is fortuitous; that philosophy is the official view ofbeing and poetry the unofficial view of being. (Stevens seems to have foundthe difference between poetry and philosophy harder to formulate than theirunderlying identity.) In the end, for Stevens poetry is at least the equal ofphilosophy and, even, may be its ~uperior:~ poetry may prove better atintegrating the ethical with the speculative ambitions of philosophy.

Also to be stressed is Stevens explicit sense of, and intention to uphold, aconnection between poetry and religious faith. Stevens describes poetry as acompensation for what has been lost in an age in which disbelief is soprofoundly prevalent: While it can lie in the temperament of very few of us towrite poetry in order to find God, it is probably the purpose of each of u s to writepoetry to find the good which, in the Platonic sense, is synonymous withGod. In a letter Stevens confesses that his trouble, an d the trouble of a greatmany people, is the loss of belief in the sort of God in Whom we were all broughtup to bel ie~e . ~ We find Stevens asserting that the major poetic idea in theworld is and always has been the idea of God and that God and the imaginationare one.l4 Stevens defines the following programme for poetry: The poetry thatcreated the idea of God will either adapt it to our different intelligence, or createa substitute for it, or make it unnecessary; poetry must take the place / Of

empty heaven a nd its hymns: in an age of disbelief [. . .] it is for the poet tosupply the satisfactions of belief. l5 He adds that it must do so on the condition -which underlines the kind of objective validity that Stevens sought for poetry -that the substitution of poetry for God should not occur just in the individualmind.16 In this way It is possible to establish aesthetics in the individual mindas immeasurably a greater thing than religi~n.~

To all of these s tatements testifying to Stevens conception of poetry a s arenovation of religious faith one might add, for what it is worth, the biographicaldata concerning Stevens (qualified) attachment to the Lutheran church of hisDutch ancestors in Pennsylvania, and his conversion, on his deathbed, toCatholicism. @ Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1994


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It is worth noting how Stevens differs from the other great modernist poets onthe question of the relation of poetry to religion and belief. Stevens, unlikeYeats, seeks to break cleanly with the past, and does not either recycle oldmythologies, or attempt to model a new, personalized mythology on the old.And Stevens, unlike Eliot, was not able to find a faith and settle the question ofbelief independently of poetry; Stevens would not have endorsed Eliotsinsistence on a division of labour: for a poet to be a philosopher he would haveto be virtually two men [. . .] A poet may borrow a philosophy or he may dowithout one. It is when he philosophizes upon his own poetic insight that he isapt to go wrong. Stevens, by contrast, regarded poetry as necessary to createbelief, an d remained in this respect a full-bloodedly romantic artist, a s Eliot wasnot.

Stevens mundo

I now want to sketch the poetic world which is set up by Stevens poetry.Stevens conceived of his poetry as forming a whole, in the sense that eachindividual poem is conceived as a contribution to his writing of one great poem.Within Stevens total poetic world, what he calls his mundo,20 there are aplurality of seasonal worlds - of spring, summer, autum n, and winter - throughwhich the protagonist of his poetry moves in a cyclical fashion. Each seasonalworld is not just the differently coloured world of a different mood, bu t rather

involves a different identification, and employs a different criterion of reality.For this reason the successive seasonal worlds in Stevens poetry exclude oneanother not jus t psychologically but also conceptually, an d their temporal ordersymbolizes a conceptual order, of different conceptions of reality. The narrativein Stevens poetry consists in movements between the different seasonal worlds,this temporal movement symbolizing changes in the subjects sense of reality.The seasonal worlds are interrelated in so far as each refers implicitly to theothers, the world of winter representing itself as a negation of the world ofsummer and vice versa. And towards the fact that we circulate between seasons,Stevens is ambivalent, representing it sometimes as a form of imprisonment, atother times as a p e n , welcome, wholly natural fact. The protagonist of Stevenspoetry is a meditator, whose transitions between seasonal worlds result from, orconsist in, movements of thought: in a Stevens poem there is no drama orpsychology apart from the meditative, impersonal amplification of ideas, andinterconvers ion of ideas and images. Stevens poetry is richly laced with images,but he is distinguished from his admired Symbolist and Imagist precursors byhis refusal to identify the consummation of his poems with an autonomoussymbolic image:2 his poetic symbols do not transcend the claims of the intellectbut rather remain embedded in a discursive, reflective context. (Stevens saysthat images should have a realistic explanation and tha t the poetry of thoughtshould be the supreme poetry.22) This is not to say that Stevens poetic

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protagonist is a bare thinker without desire: his desires are tied to hisconceptions of reality and manifest themselves in his thought.

The significances of each seasonal world for Stevens are roughly as follows.The world of winter - as in Stevens much-anthologized poem The snow man -is the world that Stevens starts from, his primary season (it takes us back to animmaculate beginning and realizes what he calls the first idea23). The winterworld is not the everyday world, but the world stripped of all human,anthropocentric features, a world characterized by the absence of i m a g i n a t i ~ n . ~ ~This bare, stark reality Stevens regards as at once uninhabitable a nd beautiful,on account of its purity, freshness and absence of human disorder. We arrive atthe world of winter via an operation of subtraction on the ordinary world(Stevens calls it abstraction): the world of winter is a contraction of the ordinaryworld, created through disposing of the clutter of ordinary beliefs, habits and

practices, and it exposes the features of the ordinary world that make it humanlyhabitable as illusion, mythology and the residue of projection. Stevens describesit as a world that does not move for the weight of its own heaviness: in thiscomplete poverty, objects, though solid, have no shadows, and though static,exert a mournful power.25 We have been left feeling dispossessed and alone ina solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, inwhich the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness andemptiness.26 This pressure of reality is spiritually violent, it may be said, foreveryone alive.27 Accordingly, Stevens vision of the world of winter may beidentified with reality as conceived in any metaphysic that aims to exclude, byreduction or elimination, those features of reality which have a human face.Because the winter world confronts the poetic subject as a reality that iscomplete and self-sufficient, it induces consciousness of poverty, a key term forStevens: poverty is awareness of the indifference of reality to human concerns(fact in its total bleakness28), rendering the human subject powerless toimagine into reality those features that are necessary to make it habitable. As itmight also be put, the contracted world involves exchanging the world, in thesense of something that a human subject can properly be in, for mere reality:worldhood is subtracted from reality and we cease to inhabit a world. So in asense winter signifies our annihalation: the snow man sees nothing and isnothing himself.29 This is quite different from a sense of the world as tragic,

which would give it a human reference.For Stevens, the movement from the everyday world to the contracted worldis neither an accident nor the result of an arbitrary error. It is rather a firstattempt to fulfil our desire for reality, to know the world as it is in itself it meetsour need for contact with reality as it impinges upon us from outside, thesense tha t we can touch a nd feel a solid reality which does not wholly dissolveitself in to the conceptions of our own minds.30 The problem is that fulfilment ofthis need brings in its wake frustration of our most fundamental need for ahabitable world. Stevens writes:

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How cold the vacancyWhen the phantoms are gone and the shaken realistFirst sees reality.31

The world of summer, by contrast, is the world apprehended in the full blazeof what Stevens calls imagination, the mental power that pervades everydayhuman experience but realizes itself most fully in poetry and art, where itrepresents the world as a fulfilment an d incarnation of value, more thanadequate for the purposes of hu man habitation. Again, the world of summerdoes not correspond to the ordinary world, of which it is rather a transfiguration(a positive transfiguration, since the contracted world may also be described as atransfiguration, of a negative sort). The object of artistic transfiguration is thereal world of everyday experience, to which the work of art has re fe re n ~ e .~ ' Andwhat art does in recasting the world amounts to more than merely redescribingit, or appending new features to it: in the versatile language of aspects, theworld comes to be seen under a new aspect, which pervades it and with which itis fused. (Poetry records 'fluctuation of the whole of a p p e a r a n ~ e ' . ~ ~ ) So, whereasthe contracted world of winter represents implicitly the everyday world asillusory, as containing appearances of things to which nothing in realitycorresponds, the transfigured world of summer represents it as incomplete, asfailing to display the full, abundant, valuable features of reality.34 Thetransfigured world restores the character of worldhood to reality and intensifiesits habitability.

Stevens' paradigms of transfiguration are the great poems of visionary, arch-

romanticism - Blake and Shelley are strongly present in Stevens' poetry - but itis clear that for Stevens art in general, especially music, has the power oftransfiguration. The transfigured world is furthermore identical with the worldas Christianity has in the past been able to conceive it, under conditions of faith,grace and moral goodness; but for Stevens, because religious representations aredefunct and have long since ceased to fulfil the desire for reality, this role hasbeen passed on to ar t. Art and religion are affiliated in that 'both have to mediatefor us a reality not ourselves'; the poet 'seeks / God in the object itself'.35 Stevensseems to suggest that experience of transfiguration is available only at severalremoves, in that it is necessarily mediated by art and can exist only as objectifiedin the work of art, rather than being self-ascribed by the artist . Stevens evenseems to suggest that his own poetry can do no more than show the possibilityofa poem, the poem of poems, which would successfully transfigure the world.

Between the worlds of winter and summer hovers the ordinary world. ThisStevens identifies with a sense of reality that is provisional and uncertain,reflecting his conception of the ordinary world a s a place of transit ion betweenthe great an titheses of winter and summer. The ordinary world lies outside thecompelling visions of winter and summer, but it falls under their shadows.Because it does so, and because there is in the ordinary world an absoluteconceptual distinction between what is real and what is unreal or fictional, it isunclear in the outlook of the ordinary world how the categories of reality and



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fiction apply - how they apply both to the contracted and transfigured worlds,and to the ordinary world itself.36

Stevens' phrase, 'the plain sense of things',37 is a crucial expression of theuncertainty about reality that Stevens locates in the ordinary world. Plainnessalternates for Stevens between denoting the ordinary factuality of ordinarythings, and the special, hard sense of reality which characterizes the contractedworld of winter. The plain sense of things is therefore Janus-faced: on the onehand, it is attached to the sense of things as unproblematically ready-to-hand inthe ordinary world; on the other, it signifies poverty, the sense of theunconditional independence of things experienced in the contracted world, inwhich respect Stevens describes 'plain things' as having a '~ a v a g e r y ' . ~ ~ Thecontinuity and affinity between the ordinary an d contracted worlds which theplain sense of things establishes has several important consequences. First, it

means that the reality of the contracted world is experienced as confirmed by theordinary world , to the extent that the contracted sense of things is just aheightened expression of a sense of reality that is already in play in ordinaryexperience. Second, it means that everyday experience suffers from instability,due to its tendency to fasten onto whatever it finds most solid and draw us into apicture of the world from which we are excluded.39 ('The mind is the mostterrible force in the w~rld',~" Steven says, and needs to stand guard againstitself.) Third, the plain sense of things, once it has received full expression in thecontracted world, determines a standard of hardness which things musthenceforth meet in order to qualify as real - a point which will have importancelater for how we are to unders tand the transfigurative power of art.

The philosophical intention of Stevens' poetry

From what has just been said, it follows that Stevens' poetry is philosophical inthe straightforward sense that it is concerned with what the world is like as awhole in the most fundamental respects: his poetic world charts metaphysicalpossibilities, and symbolizes the moods which he takes to correspond todifferent senses of reality. Some interpretations stop at this point, makingStevens into a kind of (mere) phenomenologist of metaphysical thought, a poet

who expresses the what-it-is-like corresponding to different metaphysicaloutlooks. But there is a further aim to be detected in Stevens' poetry, whichmakes it philosophical in a stronger sense. Stevens means not just to representour perplexity as subjects of the ordinary world exposed to varying andinconsis tent senses of reality, but also to participate in the att empt to identifyreality and so to go some way towards transcending the cycle of seasons andresolving our met?physical perplexity. If this is so, then Stevens intends hispoetry as an equivalent of philosophical enquiry. This may sound strange, but areason for thinking that Stevens' intention must be philosophical in this strongsense is the absence of a satisfactory alternative: that is, the incoherence ofsupposing that Stevens, whilst taking the fundamental concerns of poetry to be



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metaphysical, has only the circumscribed intention of representing thoseconcerns, without actively responding to them; or the unacceptability ofsupp osing that his poetry plays the trick of pretending to take questions of truthseriously, while having all along only the intention of creating beautiful poeticappearances (making his poetry a kind of aestheticism in bad faith).

If Stevens poetry is philosophical in intention, then it must aim at truth, andsince the truth that Stevens aims at is metaphysical, his poetic solutions must beintended to have philosophical analogues, even though these are not stated inthe poetry a nd even though Stevens himself may not be able to tell us what theyare. By way of confirmation, we find Stevens saying that he means to regard theimagination as metaphysics; that truth is the object of both poetry andphilosophy; that the imaginative projection of poetry raises question ofrightness and touches the sense of reality - poetic truth is an agreement withreality.41 If it is asked how it is possible for poetry to carry out this intention, ofconverging on philosophy, the answer must be that poetry can impose on itselfconstraints that a re simultaneously cognitive and aesthetic, by virtue of whichpoetry may answer to something outside itself. Poetry with this intent ion differsfrom other poetry in that it will seek to express and persuade us of its ownagreement with reality. Such philosophically intended poetry can of course onlyrefer to the world that it constructs, from the inside, as a fiction, but it maynevertheless leave hints, oblique indications, that invite its readers to think of itsconstructions as truth s. O n my interpretation, this is what Stevens poetry does.If the concept of mimesis were not associated with the assumption that theobject of imitation is known in advance of the art that aims to reproduce it, an

idea that Stevens would reject, Stevens poetry might be described asmetaphysically mime tic.

There is a widespread interpretation of Stevens according to which his poetrysets ou t from the irremediably fictional, false premise that its world, the world ofpoetry, is the real world. Thus, Kermode says: Stevens commits himself to thebiggest of all as-ifs; he behaves as if poetry and the imagination are everythingthat is humanly important (and therefore everything that is at all important).Consequently he felt himself to be dealing incessantly with th e But if myinterpretation is correct, this is the opposite of what is really going on in Stevens:for if Stevens poetry were a s Kermode says premised on a n equation of poetrywith reality, then it would in fact have assumed exactly what it means toestablish. Stripping Stevens poetry of the realist obligation to answer tosomething outside itself would leave it without coherent motivation, withnothing to prove and nothing to do.

Stevens poetry talks at length of itself as a fiction, but for Stevens fiction doesnot preclude truth; fiction may correspond to reality. Similarly, when Stevenstalks about the imagination he has in mind a power that is shared by poets andordinary people and does not exclude acquaintance with reality (just asColeridge identifies the faculty of poetic creation with Kants transcendentalimagination). For Stevens, the fact that something is imaginary or owes itself tothe work of h um an or poetic imagination does nothing to rule out a claim to its



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truth : what it means for something to be imaginary is just for it to resonate withthe human mind and answer to a human purpose. Thus the concept ofimagination may be compared to light: the imagination stands in the samerelation to reality as light to the visible world. Like light, it ad ds nothing, exceptitself.43 The imagination comes from outside the object, and to that extent doesnot belong to reality, but in illuminating its object, it reveals what is alreadythere. The imagination does not add to reality; it is an activity like seeingthings. 44

Stevens intention to write visionary poetry that meets the condition of truthleads him to distance himself from what he considers false romanticism, whichbelittles the imagination and engages in minor wish-fulfillments and evadesthe pressure of reality.45 True romanticism, which has to be something morethan a conception of the mind, purges itself of everything false and increases

the feeling for reality.46 The poet is the intermediary between people and theworld in which they live [. . .] not between people and some otherThe final poem will be the poem of fact in the language of fact.4s Stevens looksto poetry for inherent order; he says that the world to which poetry refers mustbe physical, and that poetry m ust culminate in The poem of pure reality /Untouched by trope or deviation; it must proceed Without evasion by a singlemetaphor, so that there is nothing in poetry that does not correspond toreality.49 The poet commits himself to reality, which then becomes hisinescapable and ever-present diffi~ulty.~ The target of art is belief how easy itis suddenly to believe in th e poem as one has never believed in it before; we sitlistening to music as in an imagination in which we believe.51

The intention to truth is expressed clearly towards the close of Stevensgreatest poem, Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction. Here the protagonist hasliberated himself from the deprivations of winter by having recourse to theresources of his own mind and imagination, but he then confronts the impasseconstituted by the fact that to impose is not / To discover. And so he reachesout to the thought that it must be possible

To find the real,To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of a n absolute52

This absolute or supreme fiction is the proposition, whatever it may be, thatwould secure the t ruth of Stevens transfigured world, converting its impositionsinto discoveries.

To attribute a philosophical intention to Stevens is not to say that the task ofpoetry is for him purely and dispassionately cognitive. Stevens does think ofpoetry as striving to identify reality, but this cognitive description of its goal isfor Stevens only one way of picking out a desire that is fundamentally both adesire simply to get hold of reality - to be presented with it - and to discover thatreality is valuable or value-sustaining. Stevens thinks of metaphysical desire,the lure of the real, the desire to enjoy reality,53 as primordially an undivided



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combination of cognitive and non-cognitive elements: it is, one might say, adesire for reality-as-value, a world that is both in-itself and for-us. Only after thisprimordially unified desire has led us in to the contracted world of winter, in

which reality is apprehended as valueless, do its two aspects come apart andinto conflict with one another. This defines the task of imagination and poetry asthat of undertaking a second attempt to know reality, in a form that wouldreintegrate it with value and remedy our poverty. So for Stevens, poetry must,in addition to knowing reality, give pleasure and contribute to manshappiness, but the pleasure that it is to give is not a mere pleasure but aliberation an d justification, a kind of justice, a purification, a health.54

So, to summarize, for Stevens the object of poetry is to make the worldhumanly habitable, and to do so on the condition of truth, that is, by way ofdiscovering reality to be humanly habitable. Poetry does this by expressing atransfigured vision of the world and making good its claim for the reality of thisvision, which entails that it must converge with philosophy, as does Stevensthought that what makes the world uninhabitable and is responsible for ourpoverty in the first place, is a surrender to a certain, contracted conception ofreality. Hence the need for poetry to fight on two fronts: at the level of how theworld is actually pictured, and at a reflective, philosophical level, at which itsredeeming picture of th e world is to be validated. Presupposed in all this isStevens sense of t he insufficiency of ordinary experience of the world,unassisted by poetry and the great works of imagination, to protect itself againstits tendency to poverty and uninhabitability. In this light, the ambition thatStevens has for his poetry cannot be charged (as romanticism is often charged)

with reflecting a mere greed for value, or a culpable failure to appreciate thevalue that is already available in the ordinary world.

Vindicating transfiguration: metaphysical strategies

If transfiguration is an experience that represents itself as veridical but at thesame time as breaking with ordinary experience of the world, then the questionarises immediately (as soon as one steps outside the experience of transfigurationback into the ordinary world) of its claim to truth . For Stevens, the vindication oftransfiguration - that is, finding a reason to believe in transfiguration - is thecentral poetic problem (in any art, the central problem is always the problem ofreality), an d if what was said earlier is correct, then its poetic solution, if it hasone, m ust have a philosophical analogue.

We may begin by ruling out one view which has been entertained of Stevensmetaphysical s trategy. This interpretation says that transfiguration is for Stevenssimply a n assertion of the will to believe over the reality of fact. That would be tointerpret Stevens as bluntly asserting of fiction, as fiction, that it is true,immolating himself on the contradiction that the unreal is real. Now this is aninterpretation that one might in some circumstances want to make of a poet -regarded perhaps as a last-ditch, tragic gesture - but it makes no sense of



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Stevens, whose poetry aims to make desperate gestures unnecessary, and forwhom a paradoxical assertion of the reality of fiction would mean nothing moreinteresting than a surrender to the pleasure principle. Stevens must beinterpreted as maintaining the distinction between fiction and reality, adistinction which his poetry underscores at every point, not least when itexpresses the uncertainty of the ordinary world as to w hat is an d is not real.%Poetic success cannot for Stevens consist in a brute, unrationalized affirmation ofthe reality of fiction.

For similar reasons, the neo-Nietzschean, deconstructionist in terpretation ofStevens must also be incorrect. On this account, Stevens poetic solution to theproblem of belief in transfiguration lies in problematiz[ing] cognitive certaintyin all its demolishing the gigantic myths of truth and metaphysicalreality, and evading any commitment to determinate meaning: in such a way

that the world becomes an overt fiction, poetry is sustained simply by force ofwill, and the poets only commitment is to avoid being drawn out of textualidealism into the illusion that there is such a thing as truth. This sort ofinterpretation - which has the virtue of taking Stevens philosophical intentionsseriously - turns Stevens in to a global i r ~ n i s t . ~ ~ Now the mode of performanceand technique that constitutes irony proceeds from a point set over and againstordinary, credulous consciousness, and facilitates moments of pseudo-liberation.It rests essentially, at some level, on evasion and indifference to truth. Stevenstells us however that the value of poetry lies in its contribution to ordinaryconsciousness, which depends upon its capacity to answer a demand that istruth-orientated. Embracing global irony cannot have recommended itself to

Stevens, again for the reason that, for him, it would have amounted to poeticfailure.59

It is natural to suppose that the solution to Stevens problem, philosophicallyexpressed, must lie in a partial retreat from realism - that is, in some sort ofmoderate, non-Nietzschean anti-realism. The kind of anti-realism that may seemto be required here is that which asserts a link between the repudiation ofrealism, and the admission or readmission of value into the inventory of reality.60Anti-realism may seem to be the right strategy to attribute to Stevens because itwas realism - the desire for unconditional, extra-ordinary reality - that led usinto the contracted world in the first place; and so it may seem that rejectingrealism is what is necessary to get out of it . This is in fact the line ofinterpretation pursued in nearly every extended commentary on Stevens.61 Theview of Stevens as an anti-realist has of course in recent times been made toseem self-evidently correct, since anti-realism became an orthodoxy in literarycriticism and literary theory. Also, of course, anti-realism has been widelyregarded in philosophy in this century, both analytic and Continental, asproviding the path back from the scientistic to the manifest image. And it is notdifficult to find material in Stevens poetry that can be interpreted as anti-realist(mans truth is the final resolution of everything. Poets and painters alike makethat assumption: The notion of absolutes is relative62).

The train of thought that leads one to suppose that anti-realism is necessary to



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get out of the contracted world goes something like this. The world contractswhen, and only when, a distinction between appearance and reality isintroduced which makes independence from the mind the criterion for reality,

and presses the idea of mind-indepenedence very hard - by, for instance,aligning it with physical causal efficacy, or with the property of being such to asto figure essentially in idealized scientific theory. In view of this diagnosis ofhow we arrive at the contracted world, it follows that the world can be de-contracted so long as reality is construed in a way that allows it to be tied to thehuman subject: so it is held that the real contents and features of the world maybe identified with those that are grounded in, an d implied by, those of our socialand epistemic practices, habits of representation, accepted forms of discourseand so on, that meet certain standards of rationality, convergence of judgementetc. - standard s that are sufficiently undemanding as to allow value to count aspart of the fabric of reality.

This line of thought is of course open to a further development, which someanti-realists pursue. This is to say that reality is not only mind-dependent, but isa t least in part constituted in a positive sense by the mind, which enjoys a degreeof latitude in deciding what to make of reality. Thus reality is to be recognized asplural, as not having any one correct description. At the limit, where anti-realism becomes relativistic, it will be said that the concepts of t ruth an d realityhave no genu ine application outside some particular version of the world. Andat this point it may seem that one has arrived at a philosophical picture thatmaps neatly on to Stevens valorization of imagination and fiction: anti-realismpushed as far as pluralism or relativism seems to grant the poet the required

freedom to create the world as imagination dictates, subject only to whateveraesthetic conditions constrain poetic success - thereby allowing poetry to beregarded as making up true versions of reality.

Despite all this - and, as said earlier, it is the line adopted by mostcommentators on Stevens at some point or other - anti-realism, althoughintriguing to Stevens and a metaphysical possibility which he certainlyentertained, could not have provided him with a satisfactory means oi escapefrom the contracted world or vindication of the transfigured world.

There is, in the first place, the following consideration. The contracted worldis characterized, for Stevens, by a savage sense of the worlds independence:that is wha t gives it its force and convincingness, and underlies its peculiar kindof beauty. Now if this is what the experience of the contracted world is foundedon, then introducing the thought that the world is in the required sensedependent on the hu man subject cannot make enough of a difference. If thecontracted world has the compelling, cognitively irresistible quality that Stevensrepresents it a s having, th en counterposing to it the thought that reality is mind-dependent will necessarily be ineffective: since this thought will seem to bedirectly falsified by the brute, experientially given fact of the contracted worldsunconditional independence. So rather than the worlds contraction beingdispelled a s a minimalist illusion, it is instead the thought of realitys mind-dependence that will give way, just as Hume found his philosophical



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convictions evaporating on leaving his study. And w e are then back to regardingvalue as mere, unreal projection. From the point of view of the contracted world,anti-realism is equivalent to a mere reassertion of the ordinary world, one whichfails to take into account the ordinary worlds tendency to contract andexperience itself as illusory. The point here is simply that, if there is (as Stevensassumes) a hum an desire to discover that value has reality or, otherwise put,that reality includes value, an d a human tendency to experience value as unreal,then the desire for reality, the desire to discover of reality that it includes value,is one that anti-realism cannot fulfil. Of course, anti-realism may then a ttemptto persuade us tha t rationality and convergence of judgement (or whatever) arewhat really count, that reality per se is ultimately unimportant or somehow not agenuine category, but this would be another story altogether, requiring arevision of ordinary consciousness.

The more extreme, pluralist or relativist form of anti-realism also fails toprovide Stevens with a solution. What the subject needs in order to move out ofthe contracted world is a reason to reject or at least put in question thecontracted worlds claim to exhaust reality. The thought that reality is what themind makes it, or that it exists only in a plurality of versions, cannot d o this,since once again it will seem to be directly contradicted and overturned by theexperience of the contracted world as being the way it is without anycontribution from the mind. A truth-orientated subject will not be able topersuade itself out of i ts belief in the reality of the contracted world.Consequently the thought that reality is open to being created by the mind will,once again, dissolve ineffectually in the face of experience of the contracted

world. From the point of view of the contracted world, the thought that reality isopen to creation can mean only that, from a point of view outside the contractedworld, it may be possible to experience reality as if it were open to creation andso to will a different, more habitable version of the world. But what pluralist orrelativist anti-realism cannot do is provide a cognitively sanctioned motive formoving out of the contracted world towards such a realization of freedom in thefirst place. The pluralist o r relativist anti-realist interpretation is in this way n obetter off than that which regards Stevens vindication of transfiguration asresting on a brute will to believe in fiction.

If all of th is is right, then the anti-realist interpretation of Stevens fails to takeseriously his view that poetry and imagination must come to terms with thepressure exerted by the hard sense of reality in the contracted world. Withregard to the many places in Stevens poetry where he may seem to be anavowed anti-realist, I think these should be seen in the light of a different viewof his underlying strategy, to which I will turn in a moment. From an exegeticalpoint of view, w hat th e anti-realist interpretation of Stevens registers is only onespecific moment in his poetry, in which the whole sense of the question ofreality temporarily seems to disappear. (Reality is a vacuum.63) But this anti-realist moment is recorded in Stevens poetry not as a moment of resolution, butalways as a pause or moment of suspension, to be succeeded by yet anotherburs t of metaphysical activity, a repeated a ttempt to fulfil the desire for reality.



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The full reason why t he anti-realist interpretation of Stevens fails to give himall that h e needs is its failure to take account of, and respond to, th e fact that thesense of reality itself undergoes a transformation as a result of the contraction of

the ordinary world: the criterion of reality, as much as th e contents of the world,undergoes contraction, so that it comes to seem that application of the concept ofreality can be fixed in only one way, by the criterion of hardness. As it might beput, the concept of reality becomes wedded to a particular way in which objectsare given. The anti-realist urges us to regard the contents of the contractedworld, and those of the ordinary and transfigured worlds, as on a par andequally real, by scaling down our sense of reality an d weakening our concept ofwhat it is for something to be real. This however is to ask us to return to the(edenic) situation of the ordinary world before it had undergone contraction,when all things ready-to-hand, it may be supposed, were experienced withoutdifferentiation a s equally real. But after the experience of contraction, things areexperienced as having unequal degrees of reality, and this differential in thesense of reality is taken to validate the contracted criterion of reali ty, on the basisof which the conten ts of th e ordinary and transfigured worlds come out asunreal. The anti-realists proposal clashes with this fact.@ It makes the anti-realist demand , logically, like that of an empirical idealist who asks us to regardour experiences of perceiving external objects an d our experiences of mentalimages as differing only with respect to their vivacity or some other phenomenalproperty, and not with respect to their veridicality.

Now, if what is required to get out of the contracted world is an experience ofthe world as having all of the hardness of the contracted world and yet as

valuable, then this condition is impossible to meet: since any experience of theworld as valuable necessarily makes it answer to a hum an purpose and so seemto lack the mind-indifference of the contracted world, and hence - by thecontracted criterion of reality - come out a s unreal. On this condition, then, thecontracted world is inescapable.

But it is not t rue that a n exit from the contracted world requires an experienceof the world as simultaneously hard in the way of the contracted world andvaluable. There is another possibility. There is no contradiction in thinking thatthe world has value by virtue of how it is in itself, independently of us. If weretrace the steps tha t lead to the contracted world, we find that its implicit claimto have captu red all of the content of the ordinary sense of reality, the plainsense of things, is illegitimate. Nothing obliges us to identify reality with itsmost contracted form. There is nothing in th e ordinary world that determines usto think tha t a world with less in it, a poorer world, is any more likely to be thereal world than a world with more in it, a richer world: the ordinary world givesno instructions one way or the other on that point. The assumption that realitymay be identified with whatever picture of the world tends to crystallize out ofordinary experience in any one particular direction, such as that of poverty, iseither arbitrary or circular. Reality as it is experienced in the ordinary world isricher than the contracted world: this must be so, or the contracted world wouldnot be able to display the ordinary world as an illusion. So, just because the



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336 Sebas tian Gard ner

contracted world gives intense expression to one component of our ordinarysense of reality does not mean that it captures everything that is contained inthat sense of reality. To suppose so is to run the concept of reality together with

the contracted criterion of reality. What is true of the experience of thecontracted world - an d this does make an irreversible difference to our sense ofreality - is that it presen ts us with a luminously clear apprehension of what it isfor something to be real, and thus with one paradigm of a real thing. But grantingthis does nothing to rule it out, or make it harder to think, that there are otherthings in reality than those that show u p in the contracted world, which are justas real as, an d real in the very same sense as, the contents of the contractedworld, even though they cannot be experienced in the same way. That theseuncontracted conten ts of reality cannot be experienced with the same quality ofhardness m eans that they cannot be known to be real in the same way that thecontents of the contracted world are known to be real; but this, once again, doesnot prevent them from being real. So long as we respect and draw o n the realistssharp distinction between how things are and how we experience them, the factthat the transfigured world is one whose reality we cannot experience in thesame way that we experience the contracted world may be simply a fact aboutour relation to reality - the asymmetry need not be read back into reality itself. Inthis way it becomes possible to ground the transfigured world on s trands in theordinary worlds sense of reality, its plain sense of things, other than thosewhich precipitate us into the contracted world and become fixed in thecontracted criterion of reality.

All of this Stevens himself spells out. He says that poetic truth is a factual

truth, but not clear, bare fact, rather it is fact possibly beyond [normal]perception in the first instance and outside the normal range of ~ e n s i b i l i t y .~ ~The extension of the mind beyond the range of the mind, the projection ofreality beyond reality gives rise to a degree of perception at which what is realand what is imagined are one: much of the world of fact is the equivalent of theworld of imagination.66 The great poem is the disengaging of (a) reality.67Poetry seeks out th e relation of men to facts and may touch with theimagination in respect to reality: absolute fact includes everything that theimagination includes. This is our intimidating thesis.68

This realist strategy is distinct from that of the anti-realist, because it does notsay at any point that reality consists in anything less than unconditional mind-independence. What it says is, first, that the particular experience of the rnind-independence of things which is characteristic of the contracted world is notthat in which being real consists; and, second, that experience of the contractedworld exemplifies only one, of perhaps indefinitely many possible ways ofcoming into contact with the contents of unconditionally mind-independentreality. So the concept of reality, the conception of what it is to be real, is heldconstant: wha t hap pens is that -b y exploiting the realists idea that how thingsare, and how we experience them may come far apart - our conception of ourpossible modes of access to reality is enlarged, to a point where it is thinkablethat the transfigured world is the real world. The crucial respect in which the

0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1994


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realist strategy differs from the anti-realist is that it accommodates and does notdeny t he differential in our sense of reality that results from exposure to thecontracted world.

The security of the ordinary world

This realist strategy has, arguably, the air of being a metaphysical long-shot, butthere is I think no satisfactory alternative as regards finding a philosophicalanalogue of Stevens' poetic project, or vindicating visionary romanticism ingeneral. Supposing it hangs together, the question is, How much does itestablish?

Well, what it clearly does not establish is that the transfigured world, asopposed to the contracted world, is the real world. It does not show this, sinceall that h as been shown is that there are strands in the ordinary sense of reality,the plain sense of things , that lead to the contracted world, an d others that, viathe medium of art, lead to the transfigured world; and that nothing in theordinary world provides a non-arbitrary reason for identifying reality with theone world rather than the other.

But this is still to have established something, for what is thereby secured isthe equilibrium of the ordinary world. The transfigured world, a s an antithesis tothe thesis of t he contracted world, provides the necessary, cognitivelysanctioned counterweight to the pull of the contracted world, an antidote to

contraction. Transfiguration takes th e value and habitability of the ordinaryworld an d concentra tes these features, yielding a world the experience of whichis sufficient to match in intensity the antithetical experience of the contractedworld. It is true that transfigurative experience does not have the hardness of thecontracted world, but it nevertheless supplies, by virtue of the distinguishingfeatures of aes thetic experience, a kind of matching equivalent: it presents itsobjects in an aesthetically heightened light for which the same kind of cognitive,self-validating role may be claimed as for the hardness of the contracted world.(This presumably is what underlies Bell's metaphysical hypothesis, that insignificant form we are acquainted with 'the thing in itself'.) The fact, shown byart, that the transfigured world can evolve out of and is accessible to theordinary world, shows that th e ordinary world, its plain sense of things,contains within itself immanently the possibility of transfiguration a s much asthat of contraction. ('The significance of the poetic act then is that it ise ~ i d e n c e . ' ~ ~ )Because the scales are now evenly weighted, the ordinary world,positioned between the antitheses of winter and summer, is made secure, andthis is enough for the purpose of making the world habitable. In this way, and infull accordance with Stevens' aspirations, art does what philosophy on its owncannot do: art presents the solution to the contracted world that philosophy isable only to think. (The mind, 'the most terrible force in the world', is also 'theonly force that defends us against terror', 'that can defend us against itself'. 'The



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poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself. Poetry is aresponse to the daily necessity of getting the world right.70)

So if this interpretation is correct, what is disclosed in the end as motivatingStevens romanticism, his concern to vindicate the transfigured world of art, isnot by any means a rejection or devaluation of the ordinary world or anaspiration to supplant it with an aestheticized reality, but rather a concern forthe integrity of the ordinary world itself. It turns out that in Stevens hands theromantics concern for transfiguration, which can easily appear extravagant andgratuitous, has a justification of a kind that is necessarily acceptable to aninhabitant of the ordinary world - in terms of the legitimate interest of theordinary world in not allowing its plain sense of things to cause the world tocontract. (The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.71)

Poetry can d o this even though it does not arrive at a categorical identification

of reality. The vindication of the transfigured world does not bring the cycle ofseasonal experience to a halt, since we remain prey to fluctuations in our senseof reality. But it affords a new perspective on the cycle as a whole, whichincorporates a new security in the ordinary world, and makes the existence ofthe metaphysical seasonal cycle as intelligible and acceptable as that of thecycle of natural seasons. Every imaginative transfiguration of reality willeventually fade - because it loses its freshness, and because we ourselves change- and the plain sense of things will return. The ensuing redescent into wintercan however be regarded as what is necessary in order for there to be a further,later transfiguration: one has to go back to winter, back to the first idea, inorder to be propelled into creating another summer. And what each summer

proves, says Stevens, is that everything possesses the power to transform itselfor else [. . .] the power to be tran~formed;~ and this knowledge can be takeninto winter. So the repetition of merely going round becomes, Stevens says, afinal good, and constitutes an amassing harmony.73

Stevens resolution is not therefore equivalent to a Pyrrhonist state of skepticalabstention from belief, since we do not escape the cognitive hold of themetaphysical seasons. No more is it an ironic resolution, since it does not requireus to rise above our interest in truth and reality. Instead, Stevens poetryfunctions as a sort of map.74 In our circumstance of radical metaphysicalinstability, what we need is a representation of the vicissitudes of metaphysicalbelief that can be carried across from one metaphysical season to another, suchthat from any one metaphysical perspective we may grasp concretely the orderand vector of the whole. This giving of meaning to the fact of our metaphysicalvacillation is what Stevens poetry aims to provide.

This interpretation shows how Stevens references to fictionality are mis-understood when taken as a cue for a Nietzschean or anti-realist interpretationof his poetry. Stevens use of the term fiction is qualified and elliptical. WhatStevens means is that, as said earlier, the transfigurative poem, as a work of art,does not have the right to refer to itself from the inside as a truth rather than afiction; and that it cannot be known not to be a fiction. But this is compatible withthere being another perspective, which we can conceive and occasionally



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occupy, although never inhabit permanently, from which the transfigurativepoem is not, or not just, a fiction. There is also of course a sense in which thetransfigurative poems reference to itself as a fiction is a way of recognizing the

perspective of t he contracted world, from which transfiguration is nothing but afiction - this act of recognition being at the same time an oblique way ofsubsuming the perspective of the contracted world in that of the transfiguredworld.

There is one strand in Stevens poetry that does I think amount to an attemptto introduce a genuine, pure fiction. This is Stevens attempt to build the factthat the ordinary world is open to transfiguration into the fabric of ordinaryexperience, through a process of poetic acclimatization. Poetry, he says,naturalizes the reader in its own imagination, eliminates the incredible andmakes of itself a credible thing, like a natural object: it must move constantlyin the direction of the credible and seeks to press away from m y ~ t i c i s m . ~ ~Stevens intention, I think, is to turn the fact that the ordinary world has accessto, and may double as the transfigured world, in to an ordinary fact about it, as ifart an d great acts of imagination were not necessary for transfiguration: a trickthat h e means to achieve by making us so at home in the artifice of poetry andimagination that we lose sight of the dependence of transfigurative experienceon the work of art; the point of this, genuine, fiction being to allow value to flowmore freely from the transfigured world into the ordinary world.

I would like to conclude with some brief reflections on the metaphysical strategyemployed by Stevens (as I have interpreted him), which may help to give it

interest and authority.Suppose that Stevens is correct in thinking that the concept of reality is

primordial, and a t a stretch capable of being projected from the plain sense ofthings to the visionary productions of art; and that it is inescapable, in thatnothing issuing from the imagination has value if it cannot be regarded a s fallingunder the category of reality. This is already an interesting result. It encouragesus to ask what structure the concept of reality has, that allows it to behave in thatway. In answering this question we encounter difficulty, for there seems to beno obvious way of saying what it is about the notion of reality that gives it itsplasticity, or why reality should be a condition on value. But one thing at leastthat seems to be show n is that there are two dimensions to the concept of reality:one which is connected with the independence of things from us, and anotherwhich is connected with the significance of things for us. These appear to beindependen t and , indeed, to pull in opposite directions. What it would mean forthe two dimensions to come apart is unclear. Presumably we would then beforced to deny tha t the concept of reality has the integrity which we ordinarilysuppose. But in any case we seem to find it impossible to abandon eitherdimension of the concept of reality and, rather than allow the concept todisintegrate, somehow remain able to think that both dimensions may besatisfied, even though we do not understand truly how this can be.

Note then that the route taken by Stevens, although realist in the sense that it



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refuses to dilute the concept of reality and enforces an absolute distinctionbetween how things are and how they are represented (by means of which it canachieve what anti-realism, which lacks any similar means of stretching thebounds of the ordinary world, cannot) ends in an outlook quite remote fromrealism as usually understood. Stevens is far from the idea that the plain sense ofthings, our ordinary consciousness of an outer world, is transparent to itself andgrasps its own place in the order of things.

Now for this line of thought - to the effect that the concept of reality has astructure which, once made explicit, results in a philosophical picture that isremote from the plain realism of commonsense - there is one outstandingphilosophical model, namely transcendental idealism. For Kant, there is alegitimate, albeit highly complex sense in which reality is both how things areindependently from our experience, and necessarily congruent with o ur sense of

significance or value. Kant would concur with Stevens that we are prone toidentify reality with a world that is metaphysically incapable of containing value,and that in order to locate value it is necessary to go over the head of theempirical world. There is furthermore some sort of formal similarity between theintelligible world that Kant posits on the basis of practical reason and Stevenssupreme fiction of a transfigured world. Kant however attempts to say how valuemay be thought to have reality, and how the two dimensions of the concept ofreality may be reconciled. Anything of this sort is missing from Stevens, inwhom there is no trace of Kants key notion of the necessary interests of reason,or any equivalent transcendental ground of value. Stevens does not concernhimself with explaining, as opposed to presenting, the possibility of transfigur-

ation. Does this mean that Stevens is not an implicit Kantian but a metaphysicalrealist, i.e. that he leaves the reality of value to explain itself? Certainly that isone possible interpretation. But the right thing to say, surely, is that it is simplybeyond the scope of art a s such, even when raised to Stevens level of poetic self-consciousness, to express an explanation of its own possibility. Consequentlythe absence of a transcendental explanation of transfiguration in Stevens cannotbe taken as evidence for interpreting him as a metaphysical realist. The Kantianwill observe that transcendental idealism provides what is required to tip thescales and give Stevens what he most wants, a categorical affirmation that thetransfigured world is the real world; and will claim that, in view of theexperiential preponderance of the worlds contraction over its transfiguration,the metaphysical realists policy of allowing the reality of value to sustain itselfleaves it hanging by a thread. The question of which of transcendental idealismand metaphysical realism provides the best underpinning for Stevens meta-physical strategy therefore becomes the purely philosophical question of whichmetaphysic is more successful in accounting for the reality of value. It was nodoubt essential to Stevens identity as an artist that he would not have regardedthe existence of a level of metaphysical reflection lying outside the bounds of artas qualifying the supreme importance of p 0 e t 1 - y . ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Sebastian GardnerBirkbeck College, London



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NOTES

My understanding of Stevens is indebted to, and in this paper draws on, inparticular, Kermode (1989 and 1971) and Beckett (1977).In quoting from Stevens the following abbreviations will be used:

CP = The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.N A = The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination.S L = Selected Letters of Wallace Stevens.OP = Op us Posthumous.

See Kermode (1971), pp. 33-1, and Kermode (1989), pp . xv-xviii. Kermoderegards such criticism as bordering on the ridiculous and likely to lower Stevens' standingas a poet.

Blackmur (1986), pp. 80, 82 and 93.N A , pp. 121-2, 168.Bell (1914), pp. 69-70.Quoted in Kermode (1971), p. 332.'A collect of philosophy', OP, pp, 267-80. It was not accepted for publication.

N A , pp. 40-1.

N A , pp. 170-1.

' OP, p. 277; N A , p. 40.

l o See Jarraway (1993), Introduction, 'In-words'.

l 2 OP, p. 228.l 3 S L , p. 96.

l5 OP, p. 228; CP, p. 167; OP, p. 259.l 6 OP, p. 192.l7 OP, p. 192.I' See Jarraway (1993), p. 301 11.58.l9 Eliot (1970), pp. 98-9.2o N A , pp. 57-8.21 In the sense defined by Kermode (1976), which is similar to a Kantian intellectual

22 N A , p. 127; OP, p. 270.23 CP, pp. 380-2.24 CP, p. 503.25 N A , pp. 63, 31.

27 N A , pp. 26-7.28 N A , p. 95.

N A , p. 96.31 CP, p. 320.32 In addition to whatever references it may have to fictional worlds; see the discussion

of Stevens in McCormick (1993), ch. 7. That the world a s a whole can fall within the scopeof a work of a rt is a puzzling fact; it has perhaps something to do with that power of oursto take the world as an object, which, a s Heidegger says, our capacity for mood reveals usto possess.

SL, p. 378; CP, p. 524.14

intuition; Stevens never denies that our intellects are, in Kant's sense, discursive.

26 OP, p. 260.

29 CP, p. 10.



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33 OP, 265.34 It has been said that in Stevens last volume of poetry, The Rock, his metaphysics

change, but I do not think this is so. Stevens basic metaphor changes, the rock taking the

place of the winter world, so that what was an order expressed on one level - the seasons- is now recast as an order incorporating two different levels, symbolized by theunderlying rock and the organic world growing on top of it. But minimal reality,symbolized by bare rock, remains something that we can confront but not inhabit, ofwhich a cure is needed (we need to make meanings of the rock); and transfiguration,now symbolized by sunlit fruit and vegetation, remains a discovery of full reality, whichcomprehends the living world as much as the rock that supports it (its barrenessbecomes a thousand things / And so exists no more, CP, p. 527).

N A , p. 99; CP, p. 475.A state of perplexity that Stevens evokes in frequent semi-paradoxical formulations,

35

suggestive of uncertainty regarding the point of separation of reality and fiction.37 CP, p. 502.38 CP, p. 467.39 This is what Stevens means by the absence of imagination had /Itself to be

40 O P , p. 199.41 N A , pp . 140, 42, 114, 77, 54.42 Kermode (1971), p. 332.43 N A , p. 61.44 O P, p. 203; N A , p. 145.45 N A , p. 138. I t also leads him to distance himself from surrealism, whose fabulous

world of pure invention is set over and against reality: unlike the surrealist, Stevens doesnot mean to challenge reality by a bold gesture of invention. The essential fault of

surrealism is that it invents without discovering, OP, p. 203.

imagined, C P, p. 503.

46 OP, pp . 191, 188.47 OP, p. 189.48 OP, p. 190.49 CP, pp . 442, 325, 471, 372.5o OP, p. 256.51 O P, p. 262; N A , p. 150.52 CP, pp . 403-4.53 N A , pp . 99, 78.54 CP, p. 398; OP, p. 194; N A , p. 50; OP, p. 200.55 N A , p. 116.56 This view differs from the Neo-Nietzschean, deconstructionist view discussed

57 See Jarraway (1993), p. 258.58 Bloom (1980) describes Stevens at one point a s the supreme lyrist of the pragmatic

test: Stevens never stays philosophic for very long: he is himself only when mostevasive. (pp . 216-17).

59 Stevens requires the sophisticated consciousness of poetry to agree with the naiveconsciousness of ordinary life. The global ironist of deconstruction regards the latter assunk irremediably in illusion. Nor therefore can Stevens be interpreted as a RomanticIronist in the tradition of Friedrich Schlegel and Solger.

6o This excludes, it should be noted, transcendental idealism, which for the momentmay be bracketed out of the discussion.

below, according to which Stevens poetry replaces will to belief with will to power.



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Even Kermode (1989) says at one point that Stevens vindication of transfigurationworks because reality exists in the mind (p. 101), although this is actually inconsistentwith other things that Kermode says about Stevens - which alerts one to the fact that

most critics, other than deconstructionists, see little reason to care whether Stevenspoetic successes are achieved on the basis of realism or anti-realism.

* N A , p. 175; OP, p. 185.

6.1 Lack of this sense of reality is in fact the nub of Stevens complaint against Imagism:Not all images are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this, OP, p.187.

OP, p. 194.

65 N A , pp. 5940.66 N A , p. 171; OP, p. 192; NA, p. 61.67 OP, p. 195.

OP, pp. 204, 195; N A , pp. 60-61.69 OP, p. 256.70 OP, pp. 199, 201.71 OP, p. 188.72 C P , p. 514.73 C P , pp. 405, 403.74 I owe this suggestion to Stephen Mulhall.75 N A , pp. 50, 53; OP, p. 205; N A , pp. 58, 116.76 A comparison with Coleridge is illuminating. Steeping himself in German idealism,

whose unique value for aesthetic consciousness he grasped, Coleridge could not set asidethe question of the philosophical explanation of arts visionary potential. Eliot (1970)regards Coleridges double-consciousness-as did Coleridge himself on occasion-as havingworked to his artistic detriment ( p. 99). Be this as it may, my exploration of Stevens hopes

to have shown that the line between poetry and philosophy does not fall where Eliotlocates it: Eliot is right that poetry cannot match the full extent of philosophical reflection,but wrong to think that it cannot incorporate any intrinsically philosophical intentionswithout prejudicing its artistic identity.

77 I am grateful to those w ho responded to this paper at the conference PhilosophicalTransfigurations of Everyday Life at the University of Essex, 26 February 1994, forcomments and suggestions.

REFERENCES

Beckett, L. (1977), Wallace Stevens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Bell, C. (1914), A r t . London: Chatto and Windus.Blackmur, R. P. (1986), Selected Essays, ed. David Donoghue. New York: Echo Press.Bloom, H. (1980), Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca: Cornell University

Eliot, T. S. (1970), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. London: Faber and Faber.Jarraway, D. (1993), Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark.

Kermode, F. (1971), Afterthoughts on Wallace Stevens, in Modern Essays. London:

Kermode, F. (1976), Romantic Image. London: Fontana.

Press.

Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press.

Fontana.



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Kermode, F. (1989), Wallace Steven s. London: Faber and Faber.McCormick, P. (1993), Fictions, Philosophies, and the Problems of Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell

University Press.

WORKS BY WALLACE STEVENS:The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens . London: Faber and Faber, 1959.The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination.New York: Vintage, 1959.Selected Letters of Wallace Stevens , ed . Holly Stevens. N ew York: Knopf, 1966.Opus Posthumous, ed. M. J. Bates. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.


gardner wallace stevens ejp

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