Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens's Birds

Cary Wolfe

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226688022
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

The poems of Wallace Stevens teem with birds: grackles, warblers, doves, swans, nightingales, owls, peacocks, and one famous blackbird who summons thirteen ways of looking. What do Stevens's evocations of birds, and his poems more generally, tell us about the relationship between human and nonhuman? In this book, the noted theorist of posthumanism Cary Wolfe argues for a philosophical and theoretical reinvention of ecological poetics, using Stevens as a test case.Stevens, Wolfe argues, is an ecological poet in the sense that his places, worlds, and environments are co-created by the life forms that inhabit them. Wolfe argues for a "nonrepresentational" conception of ecopoetics, showing how Stevens's poems reward study alongside theories of system, environment, and observation derived from a multitude of sources, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Niklas Luhmann to Jacques Derrida and Stuart Kauffman. Ecological Poetics is an ambitious interdisciplinary undertaking involving literary criticism, contemporary philosophy, and theoretical biology.

Part I

Reading Stevens, Once More

Chapter 1

Poems (and Critics) of Our Climate

WALLACE STEVENS IS NOT TYPICALLY TAKEN to be an ecological poet, but were you to make that ascription, you would probably begin by drawing attention to what Stevens called his poetic “mundo,” which is structured by the seasons and their changes, motifs that, in turn, body forth the more abstract poetic commitments (often called “philosophical”) for which Stevens is famous. As Sebastian Gardner has noted, the world of winter in Stevens’s poetry is “not the everyday world, but the world stripped of all human, anthropocentric features,” and we typically arrive at it through “an operation of subtraction” of the everyday, creating a kind of “contraction” of the ordinary world, one that “involves exchanging the world, in the sense of something that a human subject can properly ‘be in,’ for mere reality” (to use one of Stevens’s favorite terms, whose problematic nature we will pinpoint later).1 Stevens’s world of winter answers to his ceaseless desire—announced throughout his poetry, beginning to end—to know the world as it is, in itself, without human mediation or transfiguration, but (or perhaps we should say “and”) it sets going a dialectical movement (though that is not the word we will want, eventually) that makes us long for a habitable world, a world full of life and light. Hence, we have Stevens’s world of summer, the world associated with his other great theme, the imagination, but, as Gardner points out, the world of summer also does not correspond “to the ordinary world, of which it is rather a transfiguration” and a kind of intensification. Rather, the world of summer “restores the character of worldhood to reality and intensifies its habitability.”2 In between these two seasons, these two worlds, Gardner writes, “hovers the ordinary world,” which Stevens associates with “a sense of reality that is provisional and uncertain,” a “place of transition between the great antitheses of winter and summer.” Stevens’s expression “the plain sense of things” captures “the uncertainty about reality that Stevens locates in the ordinary world,” sometimes denoting the everyday and the mundane, and sometimes tending toward the “hard sense of reality which characterizes the contracted world of winter.”3

Among Stevens’s critics, no one has written more about the seasonal motif than George Lensing, who observes that the seasons in Stevens are “more than pastoral backdrop or lyrical evocation”; they form “a larger mythos that lends a unity to what Stevens eventually came to call his cumulative ‘grand poem.’” But they also embody “a highly personal psychodrama, even a mode of survival, for a poet who found himself for the most part estranged from the supporting ties of family (parents, wife, siblings, daughter), friendships, and religious faith.”4 While Lensing, at least in part, indexes Stevens’s seasonal cycles to biographical facts, J. Hillis Miller has seen them as part of the larger cycle of “decreation” and “recreation” in Stevens’s “endlessly elaborating poem,” from the poetry of autumn, where the leaves fall and eventually, in winter, “man is left face to face with the bare rock of reality,” to the “reconstruction of a new imagination of the world” in spring.5 But this new world of spring obsolesces in its turn, and “in this rhythmic alternation lies our only hope to possess reality.”6 It’s as if Stevens realizes in his later poetry that the poem of winter, once written, rapidly ossifies and becomes “part of the dead past long before he has finished it,” and so, for Miller, the poet is forced to “make sterile vibrations back and forth between one spiritual season and the other, always a little behind the perpetual flowing of reality.”7 Stevens’s solution to this impasse, Miller writes, is to achieve in the late poetry an increasingly rapid “oscillation” between the two poles of decreation (autumn/winter) and re-creation (spring/summer) that “becomes a blur in which opposites are touched simultaneously, as alternating current produces a steady beam of light.”8

Richard Macksey, for his part, combines elements of both Lensing’s and Miller’s interpretation in his own version of Stevens and the seasons, when he writes that “for Stevens, man lives in the weather as he lives in the changing light of his moods and new redactions of reality.”9 As he notes, this dynamic unity “is open to change from both quarters, the turning seasons and the spinning mind,” and one end of that spectrum, “rare in the tropics of Harmonium and dominant in the northern world of The Rock—is represented by the nothingness of winter, the ‘basic slate.’” Here we find the world increasingly privileged in Stevens’s later poetry, one of “immense clarity and intense poverty, an abandonment to pure content of consciousness unrefracted by convention or individuality,” a “moment of contraction” from which the poet returns “without baggage or clothing to the bare fact of the world, a winter world of unmediated perception.”10 Precisely here, however (though many such moments could be cited in many writings on Stevens), we run aground, as I have noted elsewhere,11 on a conundrum that has dogged Stevens criticism from the beginning to the present day, a conundrum one might associate with the terms “epistemology” and “phenomenology.”12 For here—to put it bluntly—one is forced to ask, “Well, which is it?” The “bare fact of the world” or rather “unmediated perception”? Here, it seems to me, we need another theoretical vocabulary to describe what Stevens is up to, and that vocabulary is not, I think, the vocabulary of phenomenology on which so many fine and nuanced engagements of Stevens’s work have foundered.

That vocabulary is mobilized by Macksey as the solution, you might say, to the various philosophical conundrums that animate Stevens’s poetry: “Enmeshed in the world, open to the future and the concreteness of experience, the phenomenologist chooses Husserl’s ‘third way’ between the dangers of absolute realism or idealism. His cry of ‘to the things themselves’ and his insistence that all consciousness is intentional, that every cogito is an act, reveal fundamental aspects of Stevens’s approach to writing poetry.”13 There is much to preserve here in Macksey’s observation—not least of all, his emphasis on the “act” of the cogito, which I will amplify a bit later—but not his emphasis on intentionality, convincingly dismantled just a few years later by Jacques Derrida’s patient unraveling of the chimera of intentionality in his engagements of Husserl, Saussure, and J. L. Austin (among others). Indeed, as we will see, Derrida’s critique of intentionality and consciousness finds poetic dramatization in Stevens’s handling of syntax, grammar, and vocabulary as analyzed by critics such as Helen Vendler, Roger Gilbert, Robert Lehmann, and others; and we can trace a direct line, I think, from Stanley Cavell’s penetrating engagement with Emerson’s thought (taken by Harold Bloom to be the central precursor to Stevens’s poetic orientation), in which intentionality is one of the very first casualties, to Stevens’s fundamental posture toward the relationship between mind and world.

The title of one of the most famous books on Stevens, Bloom’s Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, directs us toward a clue about how we might articulate the ecopoetics of Stevens’s work in light of the above reservations and considerations. For the title of Stevens’s “The Poems of Our Climate” seems to have little to do with the fact of “climate” in any literal sense, much less in the pitched sense of the word that animates our current obsession with the Anthropocene and global warming. Here, it’s useful to read the poem in light of Stevens’s well-known passage in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet”:

It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there—few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings.14

Stevens’s poem seems to suggest, as this passage suggests, that the “climate” in question is finally our own internal climate of what the poem calls “the never-resting mind.”15 And yet both poem and prose passage subtly but insistently determine that we complicate this seemingly straightforward declaration: not just by remembering the etymology of “geography” in the prose passage above (“earth” + “writing” in the Greek), and not just by noting Stevens’s insistence that a “non-geography” exists “there.”

Let’s pause for a moment and ask, where is this “there”? Inside the organ called the “brain”? In that thing called “mind” that is coupled to (through language, through culture, through much else),16 but irreducible to, the physical organ itself? If so, then that means that the “world of their own thoughts and feelings” is both inside and outside the perceiving subject, at the same time, directing our attention to the dynamic coupling of organism and environment. And, more important, Stevens seems to suggest—in his evocation of a “physical poetry” of which “geography” and “non-geography” are, as it were, two sides—that an underlying formal dynamics, an underlying poetics, joins these domains: an “earth writing” in which form (the “non-geography” which is not a thing, not a substance) allows us to “tolerate” that geography that is a thing, a substance, a medium. Or consider, in the poem itself, the curious etymology of “climate,” from the Greek klima, meaning not just “region” or “zone” but more specifically “inclination” or “slope,” from the root klinein, meaning “to slope” or “to lean”: again, an invocation of form, not substance. And consider as well the curious persistence of this inhuman, even ahuman, formal principle—a leaning, a disposition—that dwells within the restless mind on which the poem focuses, and how that persistence is underscored by the utterly canonical contrast (utterly canonical if we believe perhaps the greatest essay ever written on English rhyme, W. K. Wimsatt’s “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason”) between “simplicity” and “I,” itself set against (and set up by) the dissolving similarity of the only other rhyme in the poem, “light” and “white.” The issue here, in this climate, is apparently not so much how the restless human mind, in its freedom from nature and the naturally given, is anything but simple (hence the canonical function of semantic contrast, if we believe Wimsatt’s thesis, in the rhyming of “simplicity” and “I”), but rather that it is “evilly compounded” and “vital,” with all its “torments.” But “vital” turns out to be as weird as “geography” and “climate,” because what makes the “I” what it is—and where its “torments” come from—is the opposite of the domain of vitality and vitalism: that is, the opposite of the domain of nature, of life. But where does this restlessness come from—the desire, “torments,” the “imperfect,” the “bitterness” “flawed” and “stubborn”? From a bad attitude? From a psychological complex of some kind? I don’t think so. It’s more infrastructural (indeed, more inhuman) than that, and we find a hint in the fact that we can’t help but hear—if we’ve read Bloom on Stevens—in this “compounded” “I” the echo of the compound eye that we find in flying insects, the omateum (to use the Latin scientific term) that A. R. Ammons—the central inheritor of the Emerson/Stevens line in contemporary American poetry, according to Bloom—chose as the title for his first book (trafficking, as all Emersonians do, in the fecundity of the “I”/”eye” topos). That “eye” takes the “I” in Stevens’s poem back to nature, perhaps (by means of the insect world), but it is a denaturalized naturalism at work here, because the eye that sees, and the I that says (as we know from Emerson) are riven by paradoxical self-reference (as in Emerson’s famous “transparent eye-ball” of Nature: “I am nothing. I see all”).17 The motor of specification, of differentiation, of individuation—what Derrida calls the “machinalité” of any semiotic code that is underneath any enunciation, any utterance—is what makes the “never-resting mind” inescapably, and infrastructurally, restless.18 Seeing is not seeing; the “eye” decomposes the “I” even as it composes it.

We find a similar co-implication of what we thought were opposites (the domain of nature over here, the domain of the mind and the emotions over there) in the echoes of both “carnal” (body) and “incarnation” (process) in the “pink and white carnations” themselves; in the folding of the “light” (natural givenness) of the second line into the “delight” (unpredictable emotion) of the last stanza; the punning echo of “sense” and “scents”; and the persistence of “-scape” (as in “landscape,” but also—and more on this later—“inscape” in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s strange terminology) in the “escape” one would want in the face of “what had been so long composed.” So maybe the “brilliant bowl,” which is also and at the same time “a cold porcelain, low and round”—the formal container, too simple—is really just the bottom half, as it were (a kind of spectral half, implying its other half) of the “orb” of Stevens’s late poem “A Primitive Like an Orb,” “the essential poem at the centre of things,” which focuses our attention not on the simple givenness of form (all too pretty), but rather on form as process: “the poem of the composition of the whole”: “composition” versus, in the earlier poem, “what had been so long composed.”19 And perhaps the bowl is a spectral half, too, of “The Planet on the Table” (one of Stevens’s very last poems), which begins, as “The Poems of Our Climate” seems to begin and end, with the speaker’s inclination—“Ariel was glad he had written his poems. / They were of a remembered time / Or of something seen that he liked”—but only to end with the very different kind of inclination (thinking back now to the etymology of “climate” as a slope or a leaning). For what matters about the poems written by the speaker of “The Planet on the Table” is that “they should bear / Some lineament or character” of “the planet of which they were a part.”20

And so, to sum up, when Stevens writes, “we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there—few people r...