Things Merely Are

Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Simon Critchley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415356312
• eBook ISBN: 9781134251056
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This book is an invitation to read poetry. Simon Critchley argues that poetry enlarges life with a range of observation, power of expression and attention to language that eclipses any other medium. In a rich engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Critchley reveals that poetry also contains deep and important philosophical insight. Above all, he agues for a 'poetic epistemology' that enables us to think afresh the philosophical problem of the relation between mind and world, and ultimately to cast the problem away. Drawing astutely on Kant, the German and English Romantics and Heidegger, Critchley argues that through its descriptions of particular things and their stubborn plainness - whether water, guitars, trees, or cats - poetry evokes the 'mereness' of things. It is this experience, he shows, that provokes the mood of calm and releases the imaginative insight we need to press back against the pressure of reality. Critchley also argues that this calm defines the cinematic eye of Terrence Malick, whose work is discussed at the end of the book.

1 Or so we say – twenty-one propositions

1. Poetry is the description of a particular thing – a tin plate, the loaf of bread on it, the wine that I drink, clear water in a brilliant bowl, a small rock in the palm of my hand, the leafless stubby tree that I see from my kitchen window, the moon in a clear winter’s sky.

2. The poet describes those things in the radiant atmosphere produced by the imagination. Poetic acts are thus acts of the mind, which describe recognizable things, real things, really real things, but which vary the appearance of those things, changing the aspect under which they are seen. Poetry brings about felt variations in the appearance of things. What is most miraculous is that poetry does this simply by the sound of words,

This city now doth, like a garment,
wear The beauty of the morning, silent, bare . . .

3. Poetry imaginatively transfigures a common reality, Wordsworth taking a morning walk in London, for example. But that common reality can press in on the self, the city becomes oppressive and the self depressive. The world becomes a deafening, violent place dominated by an ever-enlarging incoherence of information and the constant presence of war. Such is arguably our present. This is a leaden time, a time of dearth, a world that cannot move for the weight of its own heaviness.

4. What, then, are poets for? In a time of dearth, they resist the pressure of reality, they press back against this oppressiveness with the power of imagination, producing felt variations in the appearance of things. Poetry enables us to feel differently, to see differently. It leavens a leaden time. This is poetry’s nobility, which is also a violence, an imaginative violence from within that protects us from the violence from without – violence against violence, then.

5. Poetry is life with the ray of imagination’s power passing through it.

6. The poetic act, the act of the mind, illumines the surface of things with imagination’s beam. This act is part of the thing and not about it. Through it, we detect what we might call the movement of the self in those things: plate, bread, wine, water, rock, tree, moon. In poetry, the makings of things are makings of the self. Poets are the chanting-hearted artificers of the world in which they sing and, singing, make.

7. Words of the world are the life of the world. Or so we say.

8. That which is, is for a self who declares it to be. Philosophically expressed, all poetry is idealistic, at least in ambition. But the materia poetica, the raw stuff out of which poetry makes its radiant atmospheres, is the real, real particulars, actual stuff, the incorrigible plurality of things. Poetry is the imagination touching reality.

9. Poetry allows us to see things as they are. It lets us see particulars being various. But, and this is its peculiarity, poetry lets us see things as they are anew, under a new aspect, transfigured, subject to a felt variation. The poet sings a song that is both beyond us yet ourselves. Things change when the poet sings them, but they are still our things: recognizable, common, near, low. We hear the poet sing and press back against the pressure of reality.

10. It is easily said that the poet makes the ordinary extraordinary. Yet, the extraordinary is only extraordinary if it refers back to the ordinary, otherwise it would be empty. This is another way of drawing the distinction between imagination and fancy: the poetic imagination imagines things as they are, but beyond us, turned about, whereas fancy fantasizes about things that are not: unicorns, gods, golden mountains.

11. We find an order in things. When I look at the boats at anchor in the harbour there, as night descends, their lights tilting in the air, they seem to master the night and portion out the sea, arranging the harbour and fixing the surrounding village. When I place a jar on a hill, the slovenly wilderness that surrounded that hill rises up to that jar and is no longer wild. We find an order in things. Poetry reorders the order we find in things. It gives us things as they are, but beyond us. Poetry, it might be said, gives us an idea of order.

12. Think of truth as troth, as an act of betrothal, of wedding, of pledging oneself to things. Dichtung und Wahrheit, poetry and truth, poetry is truthful as trothful. It speaks the truth of things, it speaks the truth out of things, a truth that is both something we recognize and something new, something beyond us yet ourselves.

13. Poetry describes life as it is, but in all the intricate evasions of as. It gives us the world as it is – common, near, low, recognizable – but imagined, illumined, turned about. It is a world both seen and unseen until seen with the poet’s eyes.

14. Poetry momentarily focuses the bewilderment to which we are attached and which passes for our inner life.

15. Poetry is an elevation, an enlargement of life. At its noblest, poetry helps people live their lives. At its feeblest, it does not.

16. What is essential is that poetry should produce this elevation, this enlargement, in words free from mysticism, that is, free from any purported intellectual intuition of a transcendent reality. There is no such intuition. I have no reason to believe that there is any such transcendent reality. Poetry might ennoble, but it is acutely mundane.

17. The climate of our world is not perfect. Ours is not the world of gods, monsters and heroes, of the wingèd soul taking flight into the silent aether, but that of the near, the low, the common, the imperfect. The imperfect is our only paradise. The difficulty is finding paradise in that imperfection.

18. A poet might write poems appropriate to our climate, to the variousness of things scattered around: to cities, towns and villages; to buildings and houses; to birds, plants and trees; to transport systems, the subtleties of trade and the speed of commerce; to weather, heavy weather and slight, to the movement that clouds make over a wet landscape on an afternoon in late November; to a time of war and what passes for peace; to wine, water and the sensation of eating oysters; to air, light and the joy of having a body; to your mother and your lovers, who should not be confused; to the sea: cold, salt, dark, clear, utterly free; to quail, sweet berries and casual flocks of pigeons; to the yellow moon over La Marsa; to your pet cat Jeoffrey who can detect electricity; to the whole voluptuousness of looking.

19. The poet finds words for these things which are not the revelations of religious belief, not the hymns singing of high heaven, but the more precious portents of our powers, of imagination’s beam reordering the order we find in the world.

20. If I bang my head on the door, I do not cry out ‘Oh God’ or ‘Sweet warm blood of Jesus’, but ‘door’, ‘head’ and, most probably, ‘ouch’. Poetry can teach this. It is truth, not edification.

21. God is dead, therefore I am. Such is poetry’s proposition. Yet, how is one? Such is poetry’s question.

2 Poetry, philosophy and life as it is

‘For we can unsuppose Heaven and
Earth and annihilate the world in our imagination, but
the place where they stood will remain
behind, and we cannot unsuppose or
annihilate that, do what we can.’

Thomas Traherne (1637–74),
Centuries of Meditation II

In my view, Wallace Stevens is the philosophically most interesting poet to have written in English in the twentieth century. It is arguable that there are poets as philosophically interesting writing in languages other than English during this period, and it is also arguable that there are better poets in English than Stevens. Still, this is a large claim to make and, in what follows, I would simply like to persuade you that this is not an entirely preposterous thing to say. As a philosopher, what it is about Stevens that interests me is the fact that he found a manner that is wholly poetic, of developing full thoughts: theses, hypotheses, conjectures, ruminations and aphorisms that one should call philosophical. As his work developed, Stevens created a unique meditative form, most often in the late verse, the blank verse triplet, often grouped into units of six or seven stanzas, as you can see below. Stevens was not prissy or precious about poetic form and what counted for him was freedom of expression, although, of course, this does not imply freedom from form. He wisely writes, ‘A free form does not assure freedom’ (OP 240).

A fine example of this meditative form can be seen in the important long, late poem, ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’. This shows Stevens poetically capable not just of stating a proposition, but of initiating a hypothesis – ‘if ’ is a very common word in Stevens’s lexicon, ‘as if ’ is even more common, and Stevens’s is a philosophy of the ‘as if ’, of what Helen Vendler calls his qualified assertions.¹ He will also suddenly change tack, introducing new personae and topoi, or simply let the poetry slide into comic bathos or very often into sheer sound, into what he variously calls ‘the micmac of mocking birds’ (PM 349) or ‘the mickey mockers and plated pairs’ (PM 114). Towards the end of the poem, Stevens writes,

If it should be true that reality exists
In the mind: the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it,
The long-bladed knife, the little to drink and her

Misericordia, it follows that
Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven
Before and after one arrives or, say,

Bergamo in a postcard, Rome after dark,
Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes
Or Paris in conversation at a café.

The endlessly elaborating poem
Displays the theory of poetry,
As the life of poetry. A more severe,

More harassing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
Of poetry is the theory of life,

As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,
In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,
The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.

(PM 349)

Stevens’s language moves from a hypothesis, ‘if it is true . . .’, to concrete particulars, ‘the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it . . .’, to syllogistic conclusions, ‘it follows that . . .’, to propositions of the most general import, ‘the theory of poetry is the theory of life’ – with a possible allusion to Coleridge’s Theory of Life. The proposition is then pursued in the most finely ambiguous manner, where it is a question of life ‘as it is, in the intricate evasions of as’. Poetry is ambiguous. This is what appals some philosophers and appeals to others. Poetic language is a matter of what he calls, also from ‘An Ordinary Evening’,

. . . the edgings and inchings of final form,
The swarming activities of the formulae
Of statement, directly and indirectly getting at . . .

(PM 351)

Yet, Stevens’s qualified assertions, his ‘ifs’ and ‘as ifs’, deploy ambiguity to get at the evasiveness of poetry’s matter, which is reality,

We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,

Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana
Included . . .

(PM 336)

The alchemy here refers, I think, to the transmutation of reality into mind or spirit through the work of thought. But that is not all. Going back to the above passage, we move instantly from grand propositions about the real and unreal into the almost comic, touristic particularity of ‘Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes . . .’, and from there into moments of visionary lyrical rapture, ‘the heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands’. The curious and distinctive thing about Stevens, it seems to me, is that all these aspects occur concurrently within the meditative form of the poem: metaphysics, a little casuistry, lyricism, bathos and pathos. It is this combination of normally distinct properties that gives the verse its movement and edge. We feel illuminated, deepened, amused and perplexed, turn and turn about.

Furthermore, what is enacted in the poem, for Stevens, is the very nature of poetry itself. The poem is the enactment of poetry’s essence, which is a thought with a strong romantic pedigree, as we will see presently. What this means is that this very poem

This endlessly elaborating poem
Displays the theory of poetry,
As the life of poetry.

In Stevens’s verse, the frontier between poetry and poetics is constantly being criss-crossed in and as the work of the poem itself. As he writes in ‘The M...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations of Works By Wallace Stevens
• Advice to the Reader
• 1: Or So We Say – Twenty-One Propositions
• 2: Poetry, Philosophy and Life As It Is
• 3: Sudden Rightnesses
• 4: Wallace Stevens’s Intimidating Thesis
• 5: The Twofold Task of Poetry
• 6: The Thing It Self and Its Seasons
• Conclusion
• Afterword Calm – On Terrence Malick
• Thanks
• Notes
• Bibliography