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Proquest Dissertations UNIVERSITY OF LONDON THE POETIC OF GAIETY: WALLACE STEVENS’S THEORIES OF THE IMAGINATION A THESIS SUBMITTED IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY CHARTUREE TINGSABADH UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON LONDON: SEPTEMBER, 1994 ProQuest Number: 10017166 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10017166 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT This thesis examines Stevens’s evolving Modernist poetic: his thinking, both in poems and in explanatory prose, about the nature of poetic creativity, about the uses of language, and about the cultural function and value of poetry (what he called its ‘gaiety’). The method adopted is two-fold: 1) an examination of the ways in which Stevens transformed Romantic and Symbolist poetic tradition, incorporating (often in a significantly modified form) concepts developed by Valéry, Mauron, Focillon, Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Planck; 2) an assessment of the consequences of that incorporation for a critical understanding of poems written during each stage of his career. The thesis will trace the process by which concept becomes figure in the making of the poem, and is then reconceptualized in the act of reading. The thesis consists of four lengthy chapters, each divided into subsections. Chapter 1 considers Stevens’s critics, and their understanding of the philosophical basis of his poetic. Chapter 2 discusses Stevens’s conversion of the Romantic concept of joy from a privileged power of vision to the intensified power of abstraction and intensified play of language envisaged by Valéry. Chapter 3 assesses Stevens’s ‘scientism’ (his use of Mauron, Focillon and others) as an attempt to extend and strengthen the cultural claims of poetry, and compares it to that of contemporary poets like Eliot, Pound and Williams. Chapter 4 assesses Stevens’s interest in Nietzsche’s concept of gav science as an attempt to resolve the problem of belief in modem poetry. TART.R OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Introduction 6 Chapter I : The Compass and Curriculum of Stevens Criticism 12 Early Critical Reception to New Criticism 14 'As Part of Nature, as Part of Us' : The New Romanticisms 21 'A World of Words': Intertextuality, Deconstruction and Bloom 31 Description with/without Place: Text and Context 41 Chapter 11: New Realization of the Motive 6.6 '1 quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything': Pater, Santayana and Hyacinth's Music 67 To Make a New Intelligence Prevail: The Strain of Remembrance and Forgetfulness 89 New Romanticism and a Skeptical Music 95 The Central Man, the Man of Glass 106 Chapter 111: The Plain Sense of Things 120 Science, Modernity and Modernism 122 Mauron and the Noble Rider's Violence 126 The Virile Poet and the Fluent Mundo 147 Chapter IV: God and the Imagination are One 170 Santayana and 'Comforts of the Sun' 172 Nietzsche's Gay Science and the Gaiety of Poetry 179 The Impossible Possible Poet's Notes toward a Supreme Fiction' 195 The Old Philosopher in Rome 211 Conclusion Bibliography ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis could not have been completed without the generous assistance of so many people. I would like first to thank the Harvard-Yenching Foundation and above all my parents for the financial assistance I received. My colleagues at the Department of English Language and Literature, Thammasat University, have also been generous in granting leaves of study, first to pursue my research, then to complete the writing of the thesis. I would also like to express my heart-felt thanks for my friends - Kathy Le Fanu, Judy Holder, Tina Oldham and especially Professor PhiiUppa Tristram, whose sympathy and support have sustained me through the crucial stage of preparing the thesis for submission. Most of all my gratitude goes to Professor David Trotter, whose patience, encouragement, thoroughness, and criticisms are responsible for any merit this thesis may have. Its shortcomings are mine. Introduction In a letter (May 4, 1948) to Pauie Vidal, his art dealer in Paris, who helped Stevens resist the pressures of reality with ‘something exquisite but cheap’ {L 581) from abroad at his request, Stevens tentatively asked if she could find out about and perhaps procure for him a work by a still obscure painter called Tal Coat. He had apparently read about him in a review in Le Point, and was intrigued by the reviewer’s praise of his use of strong colours and by the promise of ‘a new reality’ in his works. Indeed, Stevens seemed particularly interested by the latter quality for he relaxed his usual reserve and ventured his own opinion on the matter: A painter finding his own way through a period of abstract painting is likely to pick up a certain amount of the metaphysical vision of the day. As a matter of fact, the physical never seems newer than when it is emerging from the metaphysical. I don’t object to painting that is modem in sense.... No-one is more interested in modem painting if it really is modem; that is to say, if it really is the work of a man of intelligence sincerely seeking to satisfy the needs of his sensibility. But the so-called metaphysical vision has been intolerably exploited by men without intelligence. In short, I should not object to a picture of Tal Coat exemplifying some theory of his own.(L 595) His fascination also seems to have increased, despite (or perhaps because of) Miss Vidal’s initial failure to obtain the painter’s interest, for another letter (May 9, 1949) saw him abandon his financial caution as he instmcted her to persist with the purchase. This time the attempt was successful, and soon Stevens was writing to Barbara Church, to whom he now spoke enthusiastically of his new still-life by Tal Coat, who ‘is not yet in categories that would interest you but he may be one of these days’ (L 642). Soon after its arrival, Tal Coat’s ‘new reality’ inspired ‘Angel Surrounded by 7 Paysans’ in which the painting’s centrepiece - the glass bowl with a sprig of green - was transformed into Stevens’s necessary angel through whose eye reality might again be seen afresh, cleared of stubborn clichés. Yet the painting’s ‘violence’ continued to fascinate Stevens. ‘This man puts up a great deal of resistance to penetrate him,’ wrote Stevens to Thomas McGreevy, and added, ‘Cogniat uses the word violence with reference to him. A violent still life sounds like a queer thing’ {L 652)} On the same day, he also wrote to Barbara Church, to whom he was more explicit: My Tal Coat occupies me as much as anything. It does not come to rest, but it fits in. R. Cogniat speaks of his violence: that of a Breton peasant from the end of the earth (Finisterre). It is a still life in which the objects are a reddish brown Venetian glass dish, containing a sprig of green, on a table on which there are various water bottles, a terrine of lettuce, a glass of dark red wine and a napkin. Note the absence of mandolins, oranges, apples, copies of Le Journal and similar fashionable commodities. All of the objects have solidity, burliness, aggressiveness. This is not a still life in the sense in which the chapters of de Maistre are bits of genre. It is not dix-huitieme. It contradicts all of one’s expectations of a still life... {L 654) A few days later, in another letter to Miss Vidal, he sought to bring the painting and his own impression to rest: ... I have reached what I think is my final feeling about it, although one never knows what prompts an artist to do what he does. It is obvious that this picture is the contrary of everything that one would expect in a still life. Thus, it is commonly said that a still life is a problem in the painting of solids. Tal Coat has not interested himself in that problem. Here all the objects are painted with a vigor of the artist. Here nothing is mediocre or merely correct. Tal Coat scorns the fastidious. Moreover, this is not just a manifestation of crude strength of a peasant,... It is a display of imaginative force: an effort to attain a certain reality purely by way of the artist’s own vitality... He is virile and he has the naturalness of a man who means to be something more than a follower. {L 655-656)’ \ The letter was dated October 29, 1949. Tkt Utter was daW October 3», 19H-3. 8 What does this anecdote tell us of this most elusive poet? If we were to name the subject of Stevens’s concern in one sentence, this sentence would have to be his own: ‘Natives of poverty, children of malheur,/The gaiety of language is our seigneur’ {CP 322). This ‘gaiety’ can be expanded into three major areas of interest: the creativity of thought, the creativity of language, and the value of poetic creativity in matters of cultural and spiritual concern. Their interrelationships become the object around which Stevens’s ‘never-ending meditation’ {CP 465) evolves: the affirmation of poetry as a vital activity which, by means of the ‘virile’ power of the imagination and the resources of language, creates forms of ‘nobility’ by which to enrich reality with interest and significance and thereby fulfil the poet’s need to find his own sense of the world, and help his readers to live their lives.
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