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 âmundo,â which is structured by the seasons and their changes, motifs that, in turn, body forth the more abstract poetic commitments (often called âphilosophicalâ) for which Stevens is famous. As Sebastian Gardner has noted, the world of winter in Stevensâs poetry is ânot the everyday world, but the world stripped of all human, anthropocentric features,â and we typically arrive at it through âan operation of subtractionâ of the everyday, creating a kind of âcontractionâ of the ordinary world, one that âinvolves exchanging the world, in the sense of something that a human subject can properly âbe in,â for mere realityâ (to use one of Stevensâs favorite terms, whose problematic nature we will pinpoint later).1 Stevensâs world of winter answers to his ceaseless desireâannounced throughout his poetry, beginning to endâto know the world as it is, in itself, without human mediation or transfiguration, but (or perhaps we should say âandâ) 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 Stevensâs 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 âto the ordinary world, of which it is rather a transfigurationâ and a kind of intensification. Rather, the world of summer ârestores the character of worldhood to reality and intensifies its habitability.â2 In between these two seasons, these two worlds, Gardner writes, âhovers the ordinary world,â which Stevens associates with âa sense of reality that is provisional and uncertain,â a âplace of transition between the great antitheses of winter and summer.â Stevensâs expression âthe plain sense of thingsâ captures âthe uncertainty about reality that Stevens locates in the ordinary world,â sometimes denoting the everyday and the mundane, and sometimes tending toward the âhard sense of reality which characterizes the contracted world of winter.â3
Among Stevensâs critics, no one has written more about the seasonal motif than George Lensing, who observes that the seasons in Stevens are âmore than pastoral backdrop or lyrical evocationâ; they form âa larger mythos that lends a unity to what Stevens eventually came to call his cumulative âgrand poem.ââ But they also embody âa 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.â4 While Lensing, at least in part, indexes Stevensâs seasonal cycles to biographical facts, J. Hillis Miller has seen them as part of the larger cycle of âdecreationâ and ârecreationâ in Stevensâs âendlessly elaborating poem,â from the poetry of autumn, where the leaves fall and eventually, in winter, âman is left face to face with the bare rock of reality,â to the âreconstruction of a new imagination of the worldâ in spring.5 But this new world of spring obsolesces in its turn, and âin this rhythmic alternation lies our only hope to possess reality.â6 Itâs as if Stevens realizes in his later poetry that the poem of winter, once written, rapidly ossifies and becomes âpart of the dead past long before he has finished it,â and so, for Miller, the poet is forced to âmake sterile vibrations back and forth between one spiritual season and the other, always a little behind the perpetual flowing of reality.â7 Stevensâs solution to this impasse, Miller writes, is to achieve in the late poetry an increasingly rapid âoscillationâ between the two poles of decreation (autumn/winter) and re-creation (spring/summer) that âbecomes a blur in which opposites are touched simultaneously, as alternating current produces a steady beam of light.â8
Richard Macksey, for his part, combines elements of both Lensingâs and Millerâs interpretation in his own version of Stevens and the seasons, when he writes that âfor Stevens, man lives in the weather as he lives in the changing light of his moods and new redactions of reality.â9 As he notes, this dynamic unity âis open to change from both quarters, the turning seasons and the spinning mind,â and one end of that spectrum, ârare in the tropics of Harmonium and dominant in the northern world of The Rockâis represented by the nothingness of winter, the âbasic slate.ââ Here we find the world increasingly privileged in Stevensâs later poetry, one of âimmense clarity and intense poverty, an abandonment to pure content of consciousness unrefracted by convention or individuality,â a âmoment of contractionâ from which the poet returns âwithout baggage or clothing to the bare fact of the world, a winter world of unmediated perception.â10 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 âepistemologyâ and âphenomenology.â12 For hereâto put it bluntlyâone is forced to ask, âWell, which is it?â The âbare fact of the worldâ or rather âunmediated perceptionâ? 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 Stevensâs work have foundered.
That vocabulary is mobilized by Macksey as the solution, you might say, to the various philosophical conundrums that animate Stevensâs poetry: âEnmeshed in the world, open to the future and the concreteness of experience, the phenomenologist chooses Husserlâs âthird wayâ between the dangers of absolute realism or idealism. His cry of âto the things themselvesâ and his insistence that all consciousness is intentional, that every cogito is an act, reveal fundamental aspects of Stevensâs approach to writing poetry.â13 There is much to preserve here in Mackseyâs observationânot least of all, his emphasis on the âactâ of the cogito, which I will amplify a bit laterâbut not his emphasis on intentionality, convincingly dismantled just a few years later by Jacques Derridaâs patient unraveling of the chimera of intentionality in his engagements of Husserl, Saussure, and J. L. Austin (among others). Indeed, as we will see, Derridaâs critique of intentionality and consciousness finds poetic dramatization in Stevensâs 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 Cavellâs penetrating engagement with Emersonâs thought (taken by Harold Bloom to be the central precursor to Stevensâs poetic orientation), in which intentionality is one of the very first casualties, to Stevensâs fundamental posture toward the relationship between mind and world.
The title of one of the most famous books on Stevens, Bloomâs Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, directs us toward a clue about how we might articulate the ecopoetics of Stevensâs work in light of the above reservations and considerations. For the title of Stevensâs âThe Poems of Our Climateâ seems to have little to do with the fact of âclimateâ 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, itâs useful to read the poem in light of Stevensâs well-known passage in âThe Figure of the Youth as Virile Poetâ:
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 thereâfew people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings.14
Stevensâs poem seems to suggest, as this passage suggests, that the âclimateâ in question is finally our own internal climate of what the poem calls âthe never-resting mind.â15 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 âgeographyâ in the prose passage above (âearthâ + âwritingâ in the Greek), and not just by noting Stevensâs insistence that a ânon-geographyâ exists âthere.â
Letâs pause for a moment and ask, where is this âthereâ? Inside the organ called the âbrainâ? In that thing called âmindâ 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 âworld of their own thoughts and feelingsâ 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 suggestâin his evocation of a âphysical poetryâ of which âgeographyâ and ânon-geographyâ are, as it were, two sidesâthat an underlying formal dynamics, an underlying poetics, joins these domains: an âearth writingâ in which form (the ânon-geographyâ which is not a thing, not a substance) allows us to âtolerateâ that geography that is a thing, a substance, a medium. Or consider, in the poem itself, the curious etymology of âclimate,â from the Greek klima, meaning not just âregionâ or âzoneâ but more specifically âinclinationâ or âslope,â from the root klinein, meaning âto slopeâ or âto leanâ: again, an invocation of form, not substance. And consider as well the curious persistence of this inhuman, even ahuman, formal principleâa leaning, a dispositionâthat 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. Wimsattâs âOne Relation of Rhyme to Reasonâ) between âsimplicityâ and âI,â itself set against (and set up by) the dissolving similarity of the only other rhyme in the poem, âlightâ and âwhite.â 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 Wimsattâs thesis, in the rhyming of âsimplicityâ and âIâ), but rather that it is âevilly compoundedâ and âvital,â with all its âtorments.â But âvitalâ turns out to be as weird as âgeographyâ and âclimate,â because what makes the âIâ what it isâand where its âtormentsâ come fromâis 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 fromâthe desire, âtorments,â the âimperfect,â the âbitternessâ âflawedâ and âstubbornâ? From a bad attitude? From a psychological complex of some kind? I donât think so. Itâs more infrastructural (indeed, more inhuman) than that, and we find a hint in the fact that we canât help but hearâif weâve read Bloom on Stevensâin this âcompoundedâ âIâ the echo of the compound eye that we find in flying insects, the omateum (to use the Latin scientific term) that A. R. Ammonsâthe central inheritor of the Emerson/Stevens line in contemporary American poetry, according to Bloomâchose as the title for his first book (trafficking, as all Emersonians do, in the fecundity of the âIâ/âeyeâ topos). That âeyeâ takes the âIâ in Stevensâs 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 Emersonâs famous âtransparent eye-ballâ of Nature: âI am nothing. I see allâ).17 The motor of specification, of differentiation, of individuationâwhat Derrida calls the âmachinalitĂŠâ of any semiotic code that is underneath any enunciation, any utteranceâis what makes the ânever-resting mindâ inescapably, and infrastructurally, restless.18 Seeing is not seeing; the âeyeâ decomposes the âIâ 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 âcarnalâ (body) and âincarnationâ (process) in the âpink and white carnationsâ themselves; in the folding of the âlightâ (natural givenness) of the second line into the âdelightâ (unpredictable emotion) of the last stanza; the punning echo of âsenseâ and âscentsâ; and the persistence of â-scapeâ (as in âlandscape,â but alsoâand more on this laterââinscapeâ in Gerard Manley Hopkinsâs strange terminology) in the âescapeâ one would want in the face of âwhat had been so long composed.â So maybe the âbrilliant bowl,â which is also and at the same time âa cold porcelain, low and roundââthe formal container, too simpleâis really just the bottom half, as it were (a kind of spectral half, implying its other half) of the âorbâ of Stevensâs late poem âA Primitive Like an Orb,â âthe essential poem at the centre of things,â which focuses our attention not on the simple givenness of form (all too pretty), but rather on form as process: âthe poem of the composition of the wholeâ: âcompositionâ versus, in the earlier poem, âwhat had been so long composed.â19 And perhaps the bowl is a spectral half, too, of âThe Planet on the Tableâ (one of Stevensâs very last poems), which begins, as âThe Poems of Our Climateâ seems to begin and end, with the speakerâs inclinationââAriel was glad he had written his poems. / They were of a remembered time / Or of something seen that he likedââbut only to end with the very different kind of inclination (thinking back now to the etymology of âclimateâ as a slope or a leaning). For what matters about the poems written by the speaker of âThe Planet on the Tableâ is that âthey should bear / Some lineament or characterâ of âthe planet of which they were a part.â20
And so, to sum up, when Stevens writes, âwe live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists thereâfew people r...