Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction

263 Pages·2010·2.84 MB·English

by  Edward Ragg

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Wallace StevenS and
the aeStheticS of
abStraction
edward ragg’s study is the first to examine the role of abstraction
throughout the work of Wallace Stevens. by tracing the poet’s inter-
est in abstraction from Harmonium through to his later works, ragg
argues that Stevens only fully appreciated and refined this interest
within his later career. ragg’s detailed close-readings highlight the
poet’s absorption of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-
century painting, as well as the examples of philosophers and other
poets’ work. Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction will
appeal to those studying Stevens as well as anyone interested in the
relations between poetry and painting. This valuable study embraces
revealing philosophical and artistic perspectives, analysing Stevens’
place within and resistance to Modernist debates concerning litera-
ture, painting, representation and ‘the imagination’.
edward ragg is a poet and teaches at tsinghua University,
beijing. he is co-editor of Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (2008).

Wallace StevenS and
the aeStheticS of
abStr action
edWard r agg
Tsinghua University, Beijing
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Edward Ragg 2010
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may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2010
ISBN-13 978-0-511-78951-9 eBook (NetLibrary)
ISBN-13 978-0-521-19086-2 Hardback
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accurate or appropriate.
The poet striding among the cigar stores,
ryan’s lunch, hatters, insurance and medicines,
denies that abstraction is a vice except
to the fatuous. These are his infernal walls,
a space of stone, of inexplicable base
and peaks outsoaring possible adjectives.
one man, the idea of man, that is the space,
The true abstract in which he promenades.
from ‘a Thought revolved’ (1936), Wallace Stevens

Contents
Acknowledgements page ix
List of Abbreviations x
introduction: ‘Stevensian’ and the question of abstraction
1935–2009 1
1 The abstract impulse: from anecdote to ‘new romantic’ in
Harmonium (1923) and Ideas of Order (1935) 30
2 The turn to abstraction: Owl’s Clover (1936) and the ‘un-locatable’
speaker in The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937) 55
3 The ‘in-visible’ abstract: Stevens’ idealism from coleridge to
Merleau-Ponty 78
3.1 romantic adaptations: Wordsworth, coleridge, Stevens 78
3.2 abstract analogues: blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, Stevens 88
3.3 The touch of henri focillon 101
3.4 coda: the new criticism and abstraction 107
4 abstract figures: the curious case of the idealist ‘i’ 110
4.1 taming ‘the guerrilla i’: the early poems of Parts of a World (1942) 110
4.2 from ‘robust poet’ to idealist ‘i’: ‘The noble rider and the
Sound of Words’ (1942) and ‘The figure of the
Youth as virile Poet’ (1943) 119
4.3 The human abstract in ‘landscape with boat’ (1940) 129
5 abstract appetites: food, wine and the idealist ‘i’ 136
5.1 tasting ‘certain Phenomena of Sound’ (1942) 136
5.2 hartford bourguignon: ‘Montrachet-le-Jardin’ (1942) and
Cymbeline 143
vii
Contents
viii
6 The pure good of theory: a new abstract emphasis 166
6.1 ‘Major man’ revised: ‘Paisant chronicle’ (1945) and
‘description Without Place’ (1945) 166
6.2 Writing ‘beyond’: ‘repetitions of a Young captain’ (1944) and
‘Three academic Pieces’ (1947) 174
6.3 Pragmatic abstraction v. metaphor: ‘The Pure good of Theory’
(1945) and Macbeth 185
7 bourgeois abstraction: poetry, painting and the idea of mastery
in late Stevens 204
7.1 Mastery of life: at home with Wallace Stevens 204
7.2 conclusion 228
Bibliography 232
Index 244