Chapter 1

THRESHOLD

Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath

“How does one stand / To behold the sublime?” asks Wallace Stevens’s speaker in “American Sublime.” To answer this question, the speaker looks up at a statue of Andrew Jackson. “When General Jackson / Posed for his statue,” he says, “he knew how one feels.” “But how does one feel?” he repeats open-endedly.1
“American Sublime” voices a concern that runs through many (though by no means all) of Stevens’s works. His speakers occasionally claim that their minds do not give them consistent clues about what causes their affects to emerge, and toward what objects these affects are directed. As they try to interpret their affects by attaching them to a variety of potential sources and aims, these speakers are haunted by their slow, incomplete self-cognizance. They eventually begin to fantasize that an experience of affective articulacy and certitude could somehow descend on them from the outside, in a way that would not require much conscious effort on their part. Sylvia Plath’s poetry revolves around similar fantasies, in a way that at times brings these poets together across their many formal and thematic differences.
My book begins with two poets in whose work concerns about our incapacity to become aware of our affects on our own are articulated with open-ended abstraction as well as great longing for outward input. Stevens (in my admittedly selective reading of him) and Plath (more consistently) tread the line between a continued insistence that something like a coherent speaker is present in their poems and an emphasis on the ways in which this air of subjective coherence dissolves within their chosen genre. They represent these speakers’ subjective dissolution as something that comes as an unwelcome surprise—disrupting the form of their poems midway through their utterance—and as a process that retroactively turns out to have always already been inscribed into their self-expression.2 What precipitates these subjective crises is not just the instability of language in general, but, more specifically, the speakers’ increasing desire and ever clearer inability to describe their affects in a way that they could stand behind for more than a moment, and that did not feel like merely a temporary, wishful solution. The poetry I read in this chapter places its speakers in almost total solitude: they rarely address an interlocutor who is actually present or actively listening. This sense of isolation soon becomes a burden on their introspective efforts. The speakers constantly, vainly search for some outward anchor in which the forms and the felt urgency of their affects could be reflected. They are confused both by the readiness with which their minds and bodies occasionally settle on such anchors, and by the equal ease with which these anchors suddenly cease to convince them.
These speakers’ solitude gives these confusions a speculative air in which public and private spaces frequently blur into each other surreally. They are overwhelmed by reminders of the world beyond them, but they also fear that they cannot describe their relations to this world very clearly. The image of the threshold—which the speakers often imagine themselves crossing—functions both as a model for their preoccupation with personal boundaries and as a fantasy of knowing where their selves, and the affects that move them, begin and end. It also signals these speakers’ inability to confidently look beyond, or express much concern with, anything but their own incomprehensible embodiment, in a way that lends their introspective meditations an increasingly, helplessly comic air.
Unlike many other poets from their respective periods—such as Stevens’s contemporaries H. D. (Hilda Dolittle) and Ezra Pound or Plath’s contemporary Adrienne Rich—Plath and Stevens frequently refuse to resolve the ambiguities these affects create and to posit their speakers as voices of larger historical or social transformations. Instead, they make the process of lingering in these affective uncertainties into its own object of aesthetic representation. Indeed, as these two poets’ speakers cannot decide what it is that they feel so strongly about, a more conventional process of lyric expression often cannot even get started. The poems recurrently search for their occasion and for the tone with which this occasion ought to be addressed, in a way that is usually depicted with mild bemusement or disappointment in Stevens’s work, and with frustration and despair in Plath’s. This double uncertainty contributes to the speakers’ subjective fragmentation. It also deprives the poems themselves of a center of gravity to which the stakes or even the names of the affects they convey could be tethered. The many potential valences that Plath’s and Stevens’s poems speculatively attach to affects offer these poets means of investigating the potential philosophical (for Stevens) or political (for Plath) significance of their inner lives, as well as the leaps of faith that an affectively driven, not fully self-cognizant, body must make in order to pronounce on an emergent affect’s significance and import.
I examine Stevens’s and Plath’s poetry in conversation with Charles Altieri’s writings about affect. Altieri praises affects for their resistance to our staid, conventional notions about ourselves. Affects reveal that our impulses and attachments are always more diverse and changeable than our stated values and beliefs make them seem. Following an affect allows the self “to feel itself able to make all the turns and twists necessary to stay connected with where thought and speech might lead it.”3 It helps a person recognize a wider range of possible positions she can adopt toward the world and incorporate more of these positions into her self-understanding. Stevens and Plath similarly explore the multitude of successive objects and goals onto which each surging affect can be imagined to latch. Their poems follow what Altieri calls “the turns and twists” of their speakers’ affective experiences, treating their changeability as an important object of representation.4
However, Altieri’s approach toward affect also presupposes a capacity for detachment from oneself, or what he calls “an ideal of generous irony.” “We need the irony,” he says, “because we are never entirely in control of our conative drives or our propensity to be moved by what we cannot rationalize. And we need irony even more desperately because expression is an inexact art, where what is symptomatic lies down with what agents manage to give a distinctive shape.”5 I argue that Plath and Stevens do not always take for granted our capacity for what Altieri calls irony, especially not with the self-evidence Altieri assumes here. Instead, occasionally in Stevens and frequently in Plath, affects serve as reminders about how little awareness we have of ourselves by our own lights, even when we accord much time and energy to efforts at introspection. As their speakers test out the various potential outward correlatives for their affects, they cannot always find a stable point beyond them from which they could gaze upon their affective confusions with self-mocking distance. They also begin to feel increasingly claustrophobic within their bodies and minds, which constantly require but do not quite repay their cognitive efforts.
Stevens’s poetry edges toward occasionally articulating this perspective from a position that is, at first, much more ambitiously open-ended. Many of Stevens’s early poems represent a sensitivity caught midway in its effort to express its values and interests, as yet unable to fully define the objects of its attention but trusting in its eventual success. “Earthy Anecdote,” Harmonium’s first poem, thus creates a tension between its confident acuity on the level of sounds and particular words, and its almost childlike vagueness on the semantic level. The poem conveys the experience of being buoyed by a confident enthusiasm about one’s bodily and mental faculties. Its lines flow with a beautiful, melodious rhythm that the small number of words Stevens recycles stanza by stanza highlights prominently. But the propositions these words string together do not hold up to the kind of intense attention this poem’s finer particles invite. These propositions are not yet pieces of new knowledge, or even visualizable images, but mere suggestions of what the objects of these pieces of knowledge might be. Reflecting this outward ambiguity, the speaker of the poem himself remains difficult to articulate. He hovers somewhere between a third-person observer and a voice telling a parable about itself. The animal with which this speaker half-identifies is an imaginary, unvisualizable “firecat.”
Stevens begins with a grand generalization:
Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way. (3)
This stanza’s assonances and alliterations make it seem tight and controlled, aware both of its intent and of its joyous power. The second and third stanzas then unpack the bucks’ and firecat’s movements through parallel syntactic structures and expanding repetitions. They savor the poem’s central image and thought in ever new semantic and syntactic constellations:
Wherever they went
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.
Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat. (3)
Stevens’s speaker expresses himself with crisp, geometric precision. His repetitions, over which he lingers ever longer, make the poem seem precise and formal, concerned with nothing but small sharp-edged sounds and shapes. But at the same time, the propositions these melodies and geometries compose are hard to take in as bits of insight: the mimetic work they begin to announce is incomplete. The first stanza could not conceivably sum up what goes on in an entire state. And even though the second stanza’s grammar is geometrically precise, the physical movement “to the right … or to the left” that it traces remains vague. Instead of representing this firecat’s movement, these stanzas merely sketch out the initial verbal and auditory components and prospective aims of such a representation and slowly test the skills the speaker will put toward it. Rather than show the speaker’s knowledge of firecats, bucks, and Oklahoma, they gesture toward such knowledge as a point somewhere on the horizon, an objective that this poem chases much like the firecat chases his bucks.
In the fourth stanza, Stevens recompresses this represented world into a burst of melodious sounds and rapidly accumulating lines:
The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping.
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way. (3)
This is the third time the speaker returns to the same scene. He has framed it as an assertion and as a pair of alternatives. Now he articulates its few components in a long list. One might interpret this speaker’s voice as forcefully confident. As Altieri puts it, “it is as if the language were miming the force of the firecat, even to the extent of not having to reveal anything about itself or about the allegorical situation except what manifests itself as quiet confidence in how it can produce effects on other beings.”6 And yet this list again reveals very little about these animals’ movements toward each other. The speaker does not even say exactly where, respective to the bucks, the firecat bristles. Stevens draws attention both to the clarity his speaker achieves in defining his poem’s smallest components and to the large-scale discoveries toward which his sensitivity has not yet worked its way. As if to emphasize this tension, the poem ends in an image of exhaustion, as the firecat eventually falls asleep: “Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes / And slept” (3). The firecat has not hunted anything down. He seems to be resting so that the hunt may resume sometime else. If one takes this firecat—as critics often do—for a figure of the poem’s lyric speaker, the world it sets out to explore is both vast and only partly imaginable even to the voice that strings together its descriptions. To say this is not to imply that the environment and experience this lyric voice conjures up should dissatisfy the reader. But it is to suggest that this poem enacts and describes a mental effort whose strenuousness has, pointedly, not yet been rewarded.
Stevens’s later poetry delves deeper into this combination of yearning for, and uncertainty about, the objects and contexts of his speakers’ affects. These later poems represent affects through ever more rapid changes in the scope and stakes of what their speakers consciously attribute or attach them to. Stevens himself describes his speakers’ vacillating interpretations of their inner states as a capacity “to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.”7 Simon Critchley speaks of them as “intuitions overflowing concepts without the source of the intuition.”8 For Altieri they are experiences of “breaking through to [a] sense of force or necessity and finding it gorgeously intricate.”9 For both Critchley and Altieri, such experiences arise as one falls in and out of different kinds and directions of potential affective expression, living them out in what is at once an earnest and a hypothetical mode. I propose that the unsettled quality of these speakers’ self-expression at times also leads Stevens’s poetry to speculate about what these affective vacillations reveal about the speakers’ capacity for self-awareness. They draw attention to affects as experiences that originate in a particular human body: a body that they surprise, exhaust, and confuse in a way that Stevens represents as disjointed from, and not necessarily predictable through the outward triggers and resonances of such unsettled inward states.
In poems written in the 1940s, Stevens often defends these issueless acts of mental self-scrutiny. The difficulty with which we take stock of our affects, these poems suggest, enriches our experience more than the sense of clarity to which we aspire would do on its own. “The Poems of Our Climate” constructs and then rejects a vision of unquestioned and unperturbed self-transparency. The poem conveys a sense of longing or malaise for which the speaker tries to imagine a peaceful, definitive resolution. “Clear water in a brilliant bowl,” this speaker begins. Within this water float “Pink and white carnations.” The room shimmers with light caught in reflective surfaces. This image (whether actually seen or merely imagined) leads him to formulate a more abstract hope for an effortlessly lucid and tranquil existence. “Pink and white carnations,” the poem repeats wonderingly. And then, across the following line break, the tone changes without warning: “one desires / so much more than that.” The speaker recoils from this setting; he experiences it as “cold,” “simplified,” and merely empty “with nothing more than the carnations there” (193).
Marie Borroff claims that Stevens’s poems contain clima...