The Pragmatic Challenge to Subjectivity in Frost and Stevens Christopher Findeisen

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2008 Tell Me Something I Don't Know (If You Can): The Pragmatic Challenge to Subjectivity in Frost and Stevens Christopher Findeisen

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

TELL ME SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW (IF YOU CAN): THE PRAGMATIC

CHALLENGE TO SUBJECTIVITY IN FROST AND STEVENS

CHRISTOPHER FINDEISEN

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2008

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Chris Findeisen defended on April 7, 2008.

______Andrew Epstein Professor Directing Thesis

______RM Berry Committee Member

______Tim Parrish Committee Member

Approved:

______Ralph Berry Chair, Department of English

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

For my grandparents, who have always believed in me. For my mother, who helped me believe in other worlds. And for Diane Lee, who kept me believing in this one.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Given the nature of this study, it’s fitting that I should clear a place to acknowledge the influence of other people. My thanks to Dr. RM Berry, Dr. Tim Parrish, and most of all to Dr. Andrew Epstein for all they’ve contributed toward the production of this document. Their insights have proven to be invaluable. I’d also like to thank Dr. Ann Mikkelsen for introducing me to this thing called “pragmatism,” and for her patience during the early days when I did not believe a word of it. I acknowledge my peers and colleagues — especially Toby McCall, Colin Lessig, Dustin Atkinson, and Fayaz Kabani. I hear their voices often, and consider myself to be a product of their encouragement. To that end, I also acknowledge Brianna Noll for her love and support, and for her willingness to harmonize her voice with my own. Special thanks to those to whom this work is dedicated. I would be nothing without them.

And you, dear reader. I acknowledge you for inviting these words and this voice into the corridors of your mind.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...... vi

INTRODUCTION...... 7

1. ‘NOW AM I FREE TO BE POETICAL?’: THE PRAGMATIC CHALLENGE TO ASSUMED SUBJECTIVITY...... 5

2. ‘THE READER BECAME THE BOOK’: WALLACE STEVENS AND THE EXPERIENCED VOICE OF THE WORLD...... 25

3. POETIC PEDAGOGY: ROBERT FROST’S PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO EDUCATION...... 39

CONCLUSION...... 57 APPENDIX...... 60 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………...... 61 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH...... 64

v ABSTRACT

Enlightenment institutions dominate our cultural landscape. Perhaps no idea is as problematic as the belief in “Cartesian dualism” — the separation between mind and body, interior and exterior, subject and object. Since Descartes, philosophers and literary critics have been trying to reconcile that dichotomous relationship in order to create strong epistemological models of subjectivity. This thesis explores the ways in which pragmatism allows modern poets like Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens to challenge the notion of Cartesian subjectivity. By encouraging their readers to dissolve the subject/object distinction, these poets attempt to bridge the subjectivity gap between independent minds. As these disembodied voices manifest themselves in our consciousness — appearing in the one place they don’t belong — they challenge our notion of epistemological independence and enable us to enact a more social-self.

vi INTRODUCTION

I. Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones: But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

II. We milk the cow of the world, and as we do We whisper in her ear, “You are not true.” --Richard Wilbur, “Epistemology”

I’ll start with an anecdote: The phrase “yin and yang” has long been understood as the linguistic symbol for a black and white circular mark dissected by an s-shaped line. We typically use the sign and its signifier as short-hand for the idea of harmonic balance achieved between two things. For example, one might say the poetry of Yankee sage Robert Frost and high-modern aesthete Wallace Stevens “are like yin and yang.” But this is a misnomer. Grammatically, it supposes the very thing that it attempts to deny. The word “and” creates a separation between two parts — yin in addition to yang; yang as distinct from yin. A concept like yin/yang is useful because it shows us that experience is in constant flux, unable to be separated without destroying the very unity that constitutes its identity. In short, yin/yang has never been something that needed to be conjoined. I begin my examination of pragmatic subjectivity with this anecdote because I find it to be helpful in two ways. First, my explication of the yin/yang misnomer is representative of how our most deeply engrained notions of subjectivity are similarly affected by the grammatical conventions of our language. Second, anecdotes, like modern poems, are meant to an inclusive public discourse, available to a broad audience. Both these ideas are central to the pragmatic reconception of subjectivity and this study. One of pragmatism’s primary concerns is with language and how its expression affects the way we understand the world. In his landmark collection Consequences of Pragmatism, Richard Rorty summarizes the significant contribution modern thinkers have made toward approaching Enlightenment problems. He recognizes “how hopeless the traditional problems are — how they are based on a terminology which is as if designed expressly for the purpose of making solution impossible, how the questions which generate the traditional problems cannot be posed except in this terminology, how pathetic it is to think that the old gaps will be closed by constructing new gimmicks” (34). One such “traditional problem” that plagued philosophers since Descartes is the subject/object divide: how is it possible for a subject (experiencer) and an object (experienced) to make meaningful contact with one another? How can a non-material entity (like a mind) interact with a material object except in a physical way? Questions such as these — though they form the foundation of academic philosophy — posed no threat to the pragmatist’s sense of self or experience, since pragmatists “did not attempt to provide better answers to traditional problems (the ‘enduring problems’ of so many introductory philosophy texts) as much as they sought to dissolve, dismiss, and undercut these problems altogether by denying the metaphysical assumptions” (Stuhr 3). By circumventing Cartesian dualism, pragmatist literature explored the realms of epistemology, subjectivity, and sociality with a exhilarating new energy. Their ideological shift generated linguistic formulations that challenged readers to create meaning using the complex web of social relations that comprise our self-conception. Along those lines, it should go without saying that modern poetic discourse should be viewed as an inclusive social practice rather than the commodity of an intellectual elite. Andrew Epstein reminds us that pragmatists think “human creativity, intellect, and discovery[…] are conceived of as fields of continuous, contentious dialogue rather than solitary activities that are accomplished in a vacuum and then considered complete” (69). These writers knew that poetic activity expressed a system of ongoing social relations, and that reading poems was akin to experiencing those relations. Frank Lentricchia draws such a parallel between literature and anecdotes as they relate to the cultural power of story-telling. He notes how the “anecdotalist is therefore necessarily a deliberately cryptic teacher; he knows that what he wants he can’t achieve alone; his largest hope is to engender an engaged readership whose cohesion will lie in a common commitment to a social project and the sustaining of the life therein” (Ariel 5). When Lentricchia stresses the “cohesion” between writer and audience, he’s also implicitly making a case for radical empiricism and pragmatic subjectivity. Modern poems are often rich constructions of cultural capital that elicit, with dizzying variation, the experience of overcoming

8 the very isolation that supposedly defines them. If we perceive these poems to be abstract and esoteric, that is only because we misunderstand them as autonomous objects independent of ourselves. And so it is with a sense pragmatic optimism that this analysis attempts to provoke its readers into experiencing a new relationship with the authors discussed. I make a number of assumptions along the way, and my first and most important is an identification of Frost and Stevens as pragmatists. Though one should not easily conflate poetry with philosophy, I agree with Richard Poirier when he says, “our language is full of essentially poetic associations, and anyone who uses it is therefore to some degree a poet. So that when I speak of ‘poetry and pragmatism’ I again mean not simply that some pragmatist philosophers have had an influence on poets; I mean that in their own uses of words they too are poets, just as the poets are also philosophers” (Poetry 103). Such a belief extends to this study’s readership, as well as its author. Chapter One explores the pragmatist challenge to the subject/object distinction. I attempt to show how writers like Emerson, Frost, and Stevens recognized that Cartesian dualism leads the Enlightenment subject to erect barriers against exterior voices as they appear in our minds. Rather than work to distance themselves from the unsettling voices, these writers welcomed them as catalysts by which they enacted a new, Emersonian subjectivity. Modern poetry thus exemplifies how the barrier between “I” and “you” dissolves only to be recast as a malleable, unstable construction capable of affecting the world around them with this altered perspective. Chapter Two picks up on pragmatic identity construction. I demonstrate Stevens’s firm commitment to disrupting the subject/object distinction to stress the social aspects of our subjectivity as essential to our epistemological framework. In doing so, I attempt to reclaim Stevens from a school of critics who place him within the Idealist tradition, arguing that such beliefs only support Descartes’s original fallacy. Instead of involving himself in a process of romantic world-creation, I read Stevens’s complex poetry as representing a Jamesean “world of pure experience.” In this world where subject and object are united, the “felt experience of relation” abolishes any notion that Stevens could be a disinterested aesthete, and instead pushes his readership to acknowledge their own relationships with the text, the author, and the social constructions which enacted their existence. Chapter Three is a turn outward. Here I show how Frost and Dewey embraced dual roles as both authoritarian figures and agents of social change. I find a direct correlation between their

9 power as teachers within the academy and their ability to master discourse as a cultural force. In order to transform the classroom into a cite where aesthetic experience could lead to progressive democratic change, Frost and Dewey pushed a pragmatic pedagogy that stressed the felt experience of metaphorical relationships over factual recitation. By teaching his students the use- value of metaphors, Frost attempted to make them more receptive to the subject/object collapse. His students could then exercise the force needed to momentarily escape their linguistically constructed relationships to the world and touch the minds of others.

10 CHAPTER 1

‘NOW AM I FREE TO BE POETICAL?’: THE PRAGMATIC CHALLENGE TO ASSUMED SUBJECTIVITY

But it is no easier to say who speaks for all men than it is to speak for all men. And why should that be easier than knowing whether a man speaks for me? It is no easier than knowing oneself, and no less subject to distortion and spiritlessness. If philosophy is esoteric, that is not because a few men guard its knowledge, but because most men guard themselves against it. — Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?

This examination begins by asking an unorthodox question. I know I risk violating some of the most deeply engrained conventions about academic discourse in order to pursue my inquiry, but in the spirit of pragmatism I feel such disturbances should be welcomed. So forgive me for the crime I’m about to commit, but what, dear reader, separates you from me? If invoking the horrific second-person pronoun curls your toes, perhaps you’re starting to experience the frustration that Frost and Stevens used as the impetus for the most fascinating aspects of their poetry. What is it about the idea of a “you” that repulses us so? Why have discursive conventions idealized a broad, faceless, nameless “audience,” precluding reference to other independent subjects? And what’s at stake in all of this? These broad questions are meant as starting points for a conversation about subjectivity and “other” minds. I chose Cavell’s insightful critique of philosophy as my epigraph because it engages the subject using language that intimately reflects the subject of this thesis — that the idea of “saying” and “speaking” is at the very heart of “knowing oneself” and knowing other people. That “men guard themselves against” this discourse should come as no surprise; philosophy’s value lies not in the answers it produces, but in the questions it asks. And who really wants another nagging little voice in their head, one that asks if this is all a dream, or one that challenges the morality of benign details? Cavell reminds us that most people spend their lives evading any voice that fills them with skeptical doubt, even if that voice happens to be their own.

11 It’s true that while these voices sometimes disrupt our most basic assumptions about the world, they also literally challenge us to believe in ourselves. It is only through the skeptical doubt they provide that we can ever build working models of truth. In a pragmatic sense, the tension between these voices — those that plague us from the outside, and those that emerge from within — constitute a misunderstood thing called “subjectivity”. Although the history of this debate reaches across cultures, I trace our widely accepted Western notion of subjectivity to Cartesian dualism — the (in)famous belief in the split between mind and body, subject and object, you and me. I say “widely accepted” because, despite research that challenges that assumption, our institutions are built around deeply engrained Enlightenment models of subjective agency. This chapter explores how pragmatism’s response to the problematic notion of assumed subjectivity helped push modern poetry to be an inclusive social practice rather than a mark of the intellectual elite. I argue that because Frost and Stevens understood the categories of “self” and “community” as a singularity rather than as distinct entities, these writers demonstrate how the intimate voice of the “other” disturbs Cartesian subjectivity so that a new, Emersonian state of being can be reached; throughout the reading process the poet’s voice dissolves the boundary between audience and author, exercising poetry’s power to circumvent the subject/object distinction and bridge the epistemological divide. Other Minds One of the ways philosophers have conceptualized subjectivity is by asking questions about the existence of other minds. Can animals and computers think the way we do? What about infants? Philosophy insists these questions are significant because our social institutions only directly recognize independent subjects, or persons. And so they ask: what rights do the irreversibly comatose have? If we define subjectivity by a certain type of mental activity, are they still considered persons? Are they any different than slabs of beef? These are ethical questions, but ones based around an epistemological problem — how do we evaluate the mind of another being if we’re excluded from that being’s thoughts? Thinkers during the modernist period approached this problem by asking a different set of questions. In his essay “Stevens Without Epistemology”, Gerald Bruns summarizes the way philosophers have framed the questions of other minds as a way of converting epistemology into a question of language, and eventually (by way of the later Wittgenstein) into a question about social reality. For example, instead of asking

12 about the existence of the world, we ask about what is not empirically available but nevertheless there in ways we can’t account for. How can we know (for certain) that other minds exist, or that someone who says she is in pain is really in pain, or that the sign ‘S’ corresponds to the sensation ‘S’ when someone not ourselves cries out ‘S’?” (26) Although it seems impossible to logically prove the existence of other minds (for certain), social observations and conventions give us enough information to keep skeptical doubts at bay, so that we may continue to treat other people with some acceptable moral consideration. Since Wittgenstein, philosophy has held that these types of social considerations remain foundational to our knowledge-formations so that the perception of other people, and their power over us, becomes essential to understanding our own subjectivity. Wallace Stevens, then, seems like a natural lens through which we can examine the tension between social knowledge and the terror that follows from skepticism On a base level, Wallace Stevens is an independent mind, distinct from you and me, and what we know about him will only help us better understand ourselves. But Stevens’s poetry has also been described by as “the culmination of the Romantic tradition (Helen Vendler); or the most brilliant of the belated crisis-[poets] written in the tradition of Emerson and Whitman (Bloom)” (qtd in Perloff 42). So given what Wittgenstein has shown us about epistemological problems, we can see how these characterizations in fact reflect Stevens’s profound engagement with sociality and how it defines us. It’s fair to say, then, that Bruns more accurately summarizes Stevens’s philosophical engagements by framing the question in terms of other people: for Stevens the problem of others often takes the form of what to do about strange, unwanted, discordant, or uncontrollable voices[…] Naturally when we hear such a voice (sounding as if in a hallway or a corridor of our own heads) we want to be able to say where it comes from, because being able to identify its source will be a way of getting rid of it, and we want to be rid of it. We know what it is to hear such a voice and it’s always frightening, because the voice, after all, isn’t coming from anywhere: It’s just there where it doesn’t belong. It is our old nemesis, the disembodied voice, the voice out of nowhere, the voice of the other or the outsider that has now somehow got inside us, sounding where no voice ought to be (27). Bruns suggests this voice haunted Stevens because it wasn’t “coming from anywhere”; it was ungrounded, and Stevens could formulate no logical proof that what he heard was the intelligent

13 voice of another person or just his own mind playing tricks. That, at least, seems fairly intuitive. But what is most interesting about Stevens’s preoccupation with this voice is not that it disturbs him, but that he feels intimately connected to it. The presence of this voice suggests that the skeptical boundary that separates independent minds was somehow overcome, and so much of Stevens’s poetic activity strives to account for how something could bridge the subject/object gap, how something infinitely elusive like another mind got “inside us”, by definition to the very place “where it doesn’t belong.” Stevens was not the only one troubled by the presence of other minds. As a child, Frost also described perceiving a similar haunting: “Speaking of his early life, [Frost] talked about how he hand been frightened as a child by ‘voices’ which he heard in his imagination as clearly as he could have heard them if he had been listening to someone talking beside him” (qtd in Richardson 166). Again we see the same symptoms — an external voice elicits a fear-response because it has intruded into in a place that by definition is isolated and private. Mark Richardson takes a traditional stance toward interpreting Frost’s coping mechanism in regards to these other voices: “The motivation for poetry — its imperative voice, so to speak — is imagined as a force speaking from outside the poet himself. And yet the writing of the poem is what internalizes and therefore personalizes this initially disturbing, alien voice. The writing of poetry gives over to the poet possession of what had originally dispossessed and frightened him[...] Frost’s remarks suggest that the composition of poetry, an activity at times motivated by disturbing and alien voices, is actually a means to harness and to reassert control over those voices” (167). I say that Richardson’s interpretation of Frost’s response is “traditional” because it suggests that Frost appropriates the alien voice to reassert authority over his own independent subjectivity — that writing abolishes the voice of the “other” by possessing it, internalizing it, digesting it, and ultimately transforming it into a part of the self. In this way other voices reassert the sovereignty of our subjectivity by their intrinsic need to be either cast out or recast as a manageable force in our own minds. But I think Richardson here falls into the same seductive trap that so many others, including Derrida, could not avoid.1 It is their belief that writing can free us from the specter of other voices in order to affirm the models of subjectivity on which we build almost everything. This genealogy of thought proposes that “[w]riting represses, displaces, or demystifies the phenomenon of voice in order to emancipate us from bondage to divine or demonic presences,

14 and it is in accord with this emancipation, or as part of its ideology, that we obtain our Enlightenment norms of rationality — single-mindedness, univocity, agreement with reality[…], reflexivity, clarity of perception self-certainty, orderly progress, hierarchical construction, and so on” (Bruns 33). This belief is absolutely detrimental to understanding how the presence of other voices affects the subject. By that I am suggesting — as did the pragmatists, and Emerson before them — that it is precisely the reinforcement of Enlightenment models of rationality and subjectivity that defines the problem of other minds as a problem. The idea that eliminating “the metaphysics of presence” would free us from superstitious ideology not only assumes a distinction between “self” and “other” — it thereby creates the need to prove how it’s possible the two interact. Conversely, pragmatists believed that we should abolish the notion that other voices need silencing, and instead embrace their unsettling aspects as the best tools by which we can reshape our subjectivity to address the problems of a new century. Radical Empiricism and the (re)Formulation of the Subject In order to make philosophy a useful public service, American thinkers like Emerson, Dewey, Frost, Stevens, and Cavell2 rejected the idea of isolated subjectivity in favor of a more social self-conception. Broadly defined, pragmatists view “experience [as] an active, ongoing affair in which experiencing subject and experienced object constitute a primal, integral, relational unity. Experience is not an interaction of separate subject and object, a point of connection between a subjective realm of the experiencer and the objective order of nature. Instead, experience is existentially inclusive, continuous, unified: it is that interaction of subject and object which constitutes subject and object — as partial features of this active, yet unanalyzed, totality. Experience, then, is not an ‘interaction’ but a ‘transaction’ in which the whole constitutes its interrelated aspects” (Stuhr 4-5). They called this notion “radical empiricism”, and their commitment to interpreting experience in terms of relationships rather than independent (or one could say “metaphysical”) parts was an attempt to revolutionize the way individuals understood their place within the community. Individuals had for so long assumed the unbridgeable divide between independent minds that it left us feeling isolated and detached. In his essay “Experience” Emerson writes, “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but

15 death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us.” Taken out of context, this seems like an affirmation of humanity’s unbridgeable segregated state. But Emerson rarely allows such statements to rest and be understood as simple aphorisms; he goes on to say, “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.” Here Emerson tries to show that the old Cartesian paradigm promises certainty, in an epistemological sense, of a “reality that will not dodge us” — namely, the certainty of death. Not in the physical sense, but rather a self-death, a death that signals the individual’s isolation from nature. In other words, the belief in independent subjectivity allows us that one kernel of knowledge, and prevents us from making other epistemological claims because “[o]ur relations to each other [become] oblique and casual.” In his essay “Being Odd, Getting Even,” Stanley Cavell examines Emerson’s explicit response to Descartes’s presumed assertion of an independent subject: the cogito. Cavell argues that when interpreted as a literary object, Descartes’s cogito only establishes a skeptical idea of the self which relies on literary description and autobiography rather than argumentation and inference to produce a knowable subject. Emerson insightfully picks up on this skepticism, and uses it to create a new, and in my opinion pragmatic, subjectivity: Emerson’s incorporation of Descartes into “Self-Reliance” is anything but veiled. At the center of the essay is a paragraph that begins: “Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage.” It is my impression that readers of Emerson have not been impressed by this allusion […] because they remember or assume the cogito is always to be expressed in words that translate as “I think therefore I am.” But in Descartes’s Second Meditation, where I suppose it is most often actually encountered, the insight is expressed: “I am, I exist, is necessarily true every time that I pronounce it or conceive it in my mind.” Emerson’s emphasis on the saying of “I” is precisely faithful to this expression of Descartes’s insight. (84-85)

16 Cavell rightly identifies that the cogito, if understood as the epistemological basis on which we make inferences about our own existence, fails to establish an independent subject because, in context, the first-person pronoun’s “force is in apparent conflict with its sense” — namely, Descartes’s “I” cannot assert its independence because there are no others to distinguish itself from. Its performance establishes a transient subject that has no metaphysical boundaries or character — a self without a community of reference on which to construct an identity. We can see, then, how the cogito’s linguistic expression is essential to its meaning; unlike most logical syllogisms, the cogito relies on grammar (and performance) to assume the subject to which it refers. Emerson’s linguistic skepticism results from the diligent application of Descartes’s method. Rather than ignoring the subtle difficulties of the cogito, “Emerson goes the whole way with Descartes’s insight — that I exist only if I think — but thereupon denies that I (mostly) do think, that the ‘I’ mostly gets into my thinking, as it were. From this it follows that the skeptical possibility is realized — that I do not exist, that I, as it were, haunt the world, as a realization perhaps expressed by saying that the life I live is the life of skepticism. Just before the end of the Second Meditation, Descartes observes that ‘if I judge that [anything, say the external world] exists because I see it, certainly it follows much more evidently that I exist myself because I see it’” (86). It should come as no surprise that the quintessential proponent of the subject/object divide would make such an observation. Like Dewey after him, Descartes suggests that empirical observation leaves us with only momentary glimpses of knowledge — namely, the hint of one’s own existence. But rational inference can do no better, since the cogito’s “I” is still isolated in the world, unable to manifest itself the majority of our unthinking lives. So we see how the idea of an isolated, independent subject, rather than providing the basis for making reliable epistemological inference, only provokes skeptical worries. Rational self-assertion (“I am, I exist”) may grammatically necessitate a subject, but the subject’s individuation is meaningless when divorced from the knowledge of other people. Now we start to see how the linguistic turn helped modern thinkers to better understand why this Cartesian distinction had troubled us for so long. As I said before, philosophers and poets during the modern era approached subjectivity with a different set of questions in order to elicit different kinds of responses. Jonathan Levin considers this grammatical turn a, “if not the characteristic Deweyan move, pointing to processes of relation and cooperation without which

17 the self’s feeling of innerness and uniqueness could not even occur […] Language, like aesthetic and ritual experience, inscribes us in a social environment without which we would have no available sense of self, let alone of value or purpose” (99). Dewey picked up on Emerson’s linguistic observations and injected them back into his own brand of philosophical inquiry. Dewey’s own critique suggests that thinkers who attempt to reconcile the division between either the body and the mind, or the self and the community, presume an impossible task by creating the very problems they intend to solve. He writes, “[o]ne of the curiosities of orthodox empiricism is that its outstanding speculative problem is the existence of an ‘external world.’ For in accordance with the notion that experience is attached to a private subject as its exclusive possession, a world like the one in which we appear to live must be ‘external’ to experience instead of being its subject-matter. I call it a curiosity, for if anything seems adequately grounded empirically it is the existence of a world which resists the characteristic functions of the subject of experience” (Recovery 54). Here Dewey clearly identifies that classical empiricism contains circular flaws; presuming that the internal subject is the site of experience entails that one must use sensory data, observation, and experimentation to know things “out there” in the physical world. Due to its emphasis on contingency (first P happens, then N), traditional empiricism also assumes that a subject can, at any given point in time, isolate itself from its place within the “external world” and maintain an identity detached from the very experiences needed to define itself. But Dewey’s revolutionary notion of “experience” enables us to solve these problems by reconceiving the subject/object divide as a form of radical empiricism. Rather than saying “experience” is something that occurs after an independent subject contacts an independent object, Dewey suggests that experiencing the external world continually creates a subject as an ongoing event. In other words, pragmatism — and radical empiricism specifically — enables the external world to become the subject of experience. In that sense, we can do away with talk about “John and the table on which he sits”; instead of the table-object being something in addition to, and external to, the subject John, the John/table experience creates a new subject of inquiry. Radical empiricism, then, resists the presumption of independent subjectivity while placing us in direct contact with the objects of perception.3 Additionally, and what’s important to this study, is how radical empiricism is also a critique of self-knowledge and of other selves. “According to the most logically consistent editions of orthodox empiricism, all that can be experienced is the fleeting, the momentary,

18 mental state. That alone is absolutely and indubitably present; therefore, it alone is cognitively certain. It alone is knowledge. The existence of the past (and of the future), of a decently stable world and of other selves — indeed, of one’s own self — falls outside this datum of experience” (Recovery 54). Ironically, the pragmatist Dewey charges traditional empiricism with being unable to help us construct a “decently stable world” because the subject/object divide, like Zeno’s paradox, assumes mere singular instances of cognition rather than experience grounded in the fluid relationship of subject/object.4 Every moment then becomes an isolated product of the empirical assembly line — a preexisting subject-machine gets fed objective data and churns out an “experience.” But since, in this view, experience is narrowly defined as the product of the subject and object, experience is also temporally linked to the present, making all previous experience of the world amount to a vague and useless pile of consumed junk. ‘And So I Dream of Going Back to Be’ At this point, dear readers, I’d like to examine how the discordant voices in Frost’s poetry provoke a new self-conception by rejecting the subject/object divide. In the early poem “Birches” (1920), one of Frost’s most famous meditations about the subject’s place within the world, the poem’s narrator describes his reaction to seeing permanently bent birch trees in the woods; he would like to imagine their twisted form is the result of a child’s swinging on them, but he knows that the true cause is frozen rain. At a crucial point in the poem, the narrator parenthetically asks, “Now am I free to be poetical?” We can take this performative skepticism as symptomatic of Frost’s greater project to incorporate radical empiricism into his work. The poet’s “identification of what follows that question as the real ‘poetical’ amounts to a redefinition of lyric in the modernist period, with the boy birch-swinger standing as a figure for masculine freedom whose ‘poise’ points to the careful balance that the poet must strike between the romantic and the realistic” (Hoffman 71). The question of masculinity aside, Frost’s redefinition is not merely taxonomical — from the restored balance between the “romantic” self and the “realistic” objective world emerges a subjectivity that defines “poetical” as union between poet and reader, self and society. The poem begins by immediately establishing a contrast between the narrator’s imagination and his reality; but it also reaches out for a mysterious “other” in order to ground the narrator’s perceptions. When I see birches bend to left and right

19 Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.

Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. The narrator begins the poem by enacting the Cartesian fallacy. He confesses that material reality, at the moment of perception, triggers a thought: “When I see birches…I like to think”. This thought process is conditional (first P happens, then N), and also wrongly assumes a subject. The reader’s complete ignorance about the empirical status of this subjective “I” mirrors the narrator’s own isolation — we can infer from this poem that the speaker exists, but Frost is keen to blur the characteristics of his speaker’s existence. We get no physical description (indeed, I’m unrightfully assigning his sex, as the poem does not specify) or empirical data to support a belief that the speaker is anything more than a passing thought, the kind of unstable subject Dewey and Emerson criticized as incapable of sustaining meaningful agency. Exteriority is, therefore, essential to making the subject’s individuation (“I am, I exist”) a meaningful performance. Since the majority of the poem is conceived as a hypothetical, Frost interjects a shadowy “you” figure as the “other” which the speaker uses to understand his existence. Without the presence of other people, the speaker’s empirical observations become as ungrounded as his own identity. Thus we can see how the phrase “you must have seen” in line 5 is also meant to be understood as a conditional: “if I see these birches, then you, neighbor, must see them too”. This shared sensory experience is Frost’s first step in abolishing the Cartesian distinction. Thus the subjectivity assumed in the first conditional (When I see…I like to think) is pragmatically transformed by the second (When I see… you must have seen); appealing to the exterior “other” to help define his existence, Frost’s speaker begins to undertake the difficult process of reshaping his relationship to the world around him. What is significant about this poem, however, is the way in which it moves from that assumed Cartesian subject toward a more pragmatic one. Emerson’s view of subjectivity — namely that one must “claim it, stake it, enact it” — “does not prejudge what the I or self or mind or soul may turn out to be, but only specifies a condition that whatever it is must meet. [Also], the proof only works in the moment of its giving, for what I prove is the existence only of a

20 creature who can enact its existence, as exemplified in actually giving the proof, not one who at all times does in fact enact it” (Cavell 87). Frost’s speaker, as it turns out, self-actualizes by describing a farm boy who enacts his own existence despite also facing isolation. But I was going to say when Truth broke in With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm (Now am I free to be poetical?) I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows — Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, Whose only play was what he found himself, Summer or winter, and could play alone. One by one he subdued his father’s trees

By riding them down over and over again Until he took the stiffness out of them, And not one but hung limp, not one was left For him to conquer. At this point in the poem, the speaker’s open recognition of his dependence on the “other” leads him to mock the idea of a stable, “True” subject. Instead, the speaker demonstrates how self- actualization occurs when he is “free to be poetical”. The farm boy, like the speaker, is alone, seemingly unable to interact with other people. The boy never “learned” to conform to baseball and its abstract rules, and must instead organically “find” truth for himself. But despite his isolation — and the skeptical fear that arises from being unable to define himself against other people — the boy’s time is spent actively “subduing” exterior reality until the birches permanently reflect a human touch. To the speaker, the institution of nature thus becomes malleable, all the “stiffness” of metaphysical categories having been “conquered” by the boy’s subjective “play.” This playful manipulation of exterior reality in order to reflect one’s internal beliefs constitutes pragmatic subjectivity. Whereas the birches once triggered a Cartesian sensory-experience, the narrator prefers to see the trees’ bend as a union of subject (boy) and object (birch). This belief, regardless of what the Truth may say, enables him to poetically assert his subjectivity rather than have it dictated to him.

21 After demonstrating how the farm boy’s Emersonian subjectivity enables him to affect the world, the narrator’s perceptions are likewise momentarily altered. This leads the speaker to believe he is in some way changed — that his new self-conception will lead to progress in the reality he left behind in the poem’s first two lines. So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be. It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs Broken across it, and one eye is weeping From a twig’s having lashed across it open. I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. As it turns out, such a task is harder than it may seem. Although he thinks “Earth’s the right place for love”, the narrator never “come[s] back” to the empirical world of the poem’s beginning. In fact, the speaker’s new “considerations” blur his “open” eye, making reality seem “too much like a pathless wood” to ever make strong claims about the characteristics of his subjectivity. And so when he announces, “So was I once myself a swinger of birches” the reader rightfully asks — When? The only time the speaker could ever have been a swinger of birches is during the poetic act, for only during that moment does he cast off Cartesian subjectivity and enact his existence. Thus his declaration, “And so I dream of going back to be” does not refer to

22 a time in his past (how could it?). His “going back” is a paradoxical leap forward into a new poetry of being, one where he can “begin over” and affect the world with his subjectivity. It’s important to note, however, that pragmatic subjectivity doesn’t enable him to create reality with his thoughts; Cavell reminds us that “what is discredited in the romantic’s knowledge about self- authoring is only a partial picture of authoring and of creation, a picture of human creation as a literalized anthropomorphism of God’s creation — as if to create myself I were required to begin with the dust of the ground and magic breath, rather than with, say, an uncreated human being and the power of thinking” (89). Instead of supreme creative powers, the speaker moves “Toward” an Idealized “heaven” only to be “set…down again” when the imagination could “bear no more.” Pragmatism allows for an exchange between subject and object. We can see, then, that the “going and coming back” becomes a metaphor for radical empiricism. His experience is an unsettling transaction whereby experiencing subject and experienced object alter one another to become two sides of the same coin. By now I have shown Frost’s dedication to portraying a character that rejects Cartesian subjectivity in favor of a pragmatic, Emersonian paradigm. Now I’d like to take my reading one step further by considering the relationship between the poem and its audience. Thus far my reading has largely ignored the ontology of other people, except as fictional markers by which the narrator delineates the borders of his own existence. I have read the “you” in line 5 as a poetic character whose presence, though necessary, appears to be as fuzzy as the speaker’s own. But Joan Peters notes that “since Frost saw the purpose of a poem as conveying an idea, audience was more important to his conception of poetry than it was to the theory of other poets contemporary with him. As Frost suggests in his introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson’s King Jasper, the connection between a poet and his audience is, in fact, itself a metaphorical one, where two separate people unite as closely as possible in the shared experience of an idea” (32). Keeping Peters’s insightful observation in mind, we see how Frost has manipulated his readers into undergoing a pragmatic renewal of their own. We come to the poem assuming our independent subjectivity — that the printed page is a distinct object, something “other” than ourselves. But during the reading process, Frost’s colloquial diction and soothing blank verse echo in our heads. As we experience the voice of the “other” enacting its existence, the reader becomes free to ask, Who is this poetic ‘I’? Is he anything more than a voice? How does he know he exists? And for that matter, what is this ‘you’? Is it me? I thought I was an ‘I’? Once the

23 reader’s independent subjectivity is contested as no longer self-evident, Frost plays the pronoun game so that his readers can fluidly understand themselves as both the “I” and the “you” simultaneously. The reader becomes the speaker, enacting her existence; the reader also becomes the “other,” someone whose ontology and interpretive capacities are necessary for Frost’s language to be meaningful. Thus the Emersonian “rebirth” that collapsed the gap between subject and object during the poetic experience permits the reader to also become a “swinger of birches” — someone whose play with nature imprints a human touch. Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to show how pragmatist thinkers rejected the idea of a secure Cartesian subject in favor of an unstable Emersonian one. My reading emphasizes that the shift from the cogito’s certainty to Emerson’s skepticism is intimately tied up speech and self- expression. It is because Descartes’s I think, I am remains a cornerstone of our self-conception that we fear the voices of “other” people — voices that inexplicably cross the gap between subject and object, internal and external, you and me. Poets like Frost and Stevens understood that the presence of these voices frighten us because they challenge the very foundations of our subjectivity. But while the voice of the “other” erodes certainty, it also enables us construct a social-self — one that requires both an expression and an audience. My reading of “Birches” attempts to show how Frost uses both self-expression and an external “other” to formulate a new Emersonian identity. Although the poem seems to enact the Cartesian fallacy of assumed subjectivity by leading with speaker’s identity firmly established, Frost complicates this by dispersing the speaker’s identity so that he exists as nothing more than a disjointed voice. In order to overcome the skepticism of his own existence, the speaker enlists the help of an “other” — a poetic “you” — so that he can ground his knowledge in the experience of other people. By collapsing the subject/object divide, he is then free to enact his existence through poetic exploration. Equally significant, however, is how the reader’s experience mirrors that of the speaker. The reader, haunted by the voice of the speaker, internally replays the drama of the poem and uses this “other” to reformulate her subjectivity.

24 CHAPTER 2

‘THE READER BECAME THE BOOK’: WALLACE STEVENS AND THE EXPERIENCED VOICE OF THE WORLD

Over and over you have said, This great world, it divides itself in two, One part is man, the other god: Imagined man, the monkish mask, the face. — Wallace Stevens, “Dezembrum”

And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, But like a hawk encumber'd with his hood, -- Explaining metaphysics to the nation -- I wish he would explain his Explanation. — Lord Byron, Don Juan.

As I have shown in Chapter One, modern poets like Frost and Stevens were intimately affected by the presence of “other” minds — subjectivities revealed as voices capable of crossing the philosophical gap between subject and object, internal and external, you and me. Although these voices disrupt our most fundamental assumptions about subjectivity, they also challenge us to continuously renew our relationship to the “other” by recognizing their role in formulating consciousness. The pragmatist critique of Cartesian dualism (beginning with Emerson, and continuing through Dewey and Rorty) permits us to enact our existence in moments of skeptical doubt — in moments where “I am, I exist” is challenged by the necessity of other selves. This chapter continues the exploration of these “other” voices, and their ability to manipulate the cultural force inherent in them in order to help enact Emersonian subjectivity. In one of his later poems, Stevens presents “Continual Conversation With A Silent Man” (359) as an explicit reference to this idea: We dried our nets and mended sail And talked of never-ending things,

Of the never-ending storm of will, One will and many wills, and the wind, Of many meanings in the leaves, The “talking” that occurs between the speaker and his audience is the process by which — like Emerson — the speaker enacts his subjectivity. A “never-ending storm of will” manifests itself as a radical empirical exchange between the “One will” of the speaker and the “many wills” of his audience, their interaction creating a pluralism that allows for “many meanings.” And yet, the skeptical fear of dissolving one’s subjectivity provokes Stevens to simultaneously keep this “other” voice at bay: It is not a voice that is under the eaves. It is not speech, the sound we hear

In this conversation, but the sound Of things and their motion: the other man, A turquoise monster moving round. The same voice that appears to the speaker earlier in the poem comes to represent an inhumanness, and reveals itself as a “turquoise monster”. This voice “is not speech” and the speaker’s relationship to it is “[o]f things and their motion” rather than a vehicle by which he transfers meaning. Stevens’s highly ambivalent relationship to the voice of the “other” demonstrates his sophisticated understanding of language and its problems — it is both meaningless, abstract sound, and yet through the expression of these sounds we manifest a “storm of will”. But instead of examining the significance of radical empiricism in Stevens’s speech-act, in their own attempts to move past Descartes many critics read his verse as symptomatic of a romantic Idealism that emphasizes the primacy of imagination in the construction of a subject’s world-view. Their explanation, like Kant’s, attempts to show how the metaphysical relationship between a transcendent mind and physical reality dissolves the subject/object gap. However, given what we know about radical empiricism, I argue that Stevens rejects the division between imagination and reality as a non-rational, artificial creation. By collapsing the subject/object distinction, Stevens rejects Idealistic constructions in favor of what William James calls “a world

26 of experience” — one where experiencing our relationship to other subjectivities serves as the impetus by which we understand ourselves as social beings. A Continual Conversation with a Silent World Perhaps more than any other of his contemporaries, Stevens obsessed over his subjectivity and the discursive conventions that inhibited the appropriate exchange between subject/object. In a letter to Bernard Heringman, Stevens writes: “Sometimes I believe most in the imagination for a long time and then, without reasoning about it, turn to reality and believe in that and that alone. But both of these things project themselves endlessly and I want them to do just that” (qtd in Kestenbaum 222). By his own admission, the relationship between imagination and reality largely defines Stevens’s poetic activity, but is still greatly misunderstood by critics still working from Descartes’s model of subjectivity. Margaret Peterson suggests Stevens’s poetry responds to these Cartesian problems using romantic influences. She does not doubt that “Stevens’ poetry is unquestionably modernist. But with respect to his major subject, the theory of poetry which his poems and prose elaborate, he is just as unquestionably romantic” (9). In attempting to trace the genealogy of Stevens’s aesthetic theory, Peterson claims “[h]is prose and poetry alike show that the choice [to “accept the romantic predicament as the modern dilemma”] led to an increasingly narrow focus upon the core of the problem, the epistemology of the Kantian aesthetic as it was formulated primarily in Coleridge’s theory of the imagination. Ultimately, the problem is an inextricable part of the epistemological issues descending from Kant and his German successors to modern idealism” (10). Peterson concerns herself with Coleridge’s philosophical writings, but one can plainly see the centrality of both imagination and world-making in Coleridge’s own poetic musings; any reader of Stevens can recognize similarities in such Idealist-ic poems as “The Aeolian Harp” (601): And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversly fram’d That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? Or again, from “Dejection: An Ode” (664): Though I should gaze for ever

27 On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. Standard readings of these poems suggest a passive, physical body/reality that becomes animated by an active mind/imagination. When the body interacts with its environment, it sends sensory data to a mind that imaginatively transforms these messages into an experience unique to the subject/reader. Stevens’s work is rich with similar themes; his oscillation between imagination and reality — the tension between these “Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals” (CP 7) — may suggest Stevens was indeed wrestling with “the romantic predicament” regarding which is ultimately responsible for our sensory experiences — the physical reality which generates sense data, or the creative mind which transforms it. I won’t trouble myself, or my readers, with futile attempts to unscramble such a strange question. Although Peterson’s investigation does justice to Idealism’s rich tradition after Coleridge, she grossly misconstrues another major influence on Stevens, one which sheds new light on his theories of aesthetic experience. Peterson largely underestimates the influence of pragmatism on American thought and culture, particularly in her discussion of William James. She claims that both James and Henri Bergson “emphasized the necessity of a universe in which real change, metaphysical change, was possible. For James, this did not mean that change or becoming was the sole reality. Metaphysical change meant for him a justification of particularity, a refusal to deprive particulars of any functional efficacy in the universal scheme and hence to discount them as metaphysically irrelevant” (76). Clearly, something in this statement is amiss. Peterson not only conflates the two philosophers (who, although they were friends, had drastically different ideas), but completely ignores James’s aversion to metaphysical solutions to practical problems that demand “functional efficacy.” Additionally, Idealism’s model of an “idea” strikes the pragmatist as too remote to be made useful. James Livingston notes that pragmatists do not believe that thoughts and things inhabit different ontological orders: they do not acknowledge an external or natural realm of objects, of things-in-themselves, which is ultimately impervious to, or fundamentally different than, thought or mind or consciousness. Accordingly they escape the structure of meanings built around modern subjectivity, which presupposed the self’s separation or cognitive distance from this

28 reified realm of objects. More to the point, these theoreticians are not necessarily trapped between the epistemological extremes enabled by modern subjectivity — that is, between romanticism, which typically glorifies the ‘organic’ or ‘subjective’ inner self against the ‘mechanical’ or ‘objective’ circumstances that constitute outward existence; and positivism which typically celebrates the increasing density of that external, thing-like realm of objects as the evidence of progress toward the species’ mastery of nature. (214) Livingston notes how radical empiricism enables us to eschew metaphysical problems concerning the ontological order of ideas. In the same way that mind and body exist in a continuous reciprocity of being, so too do ideas and physical objects. Unfortunately, readings such as Peterson’s, which link Stevens to a romantic tradition, are all too common (Vendler, Bloom). Such critics tend to stress how his imaginative poems often exhibit “that activity or, better, power in the sense of the German Einbildungskraft, of forming concepts beyond those derived from external objects. Understood in this way, the imagination is a power over external objects, or the transformation of the external into the internal through the work of subjective creation, a creation that is given sensuous form and is therefore rendered external in the work of art, the poem” (Critchley 24). Given this conceptual framework, we might see how Stevens’s poems lend themselves to the metaphor of world- making, or world-creation. A brief yet diverse sample of critical discourse enables us to see how widely Stevens’s poetry is understood in just such terms: it is a “monologue of world-making” (Bruns 28); it “acquires originating powers and composes a new reality” (Rosu 142); Stevens is preoccupied with “the vistas of his own world” (Kermode 94); Stevens “wouldn’t have wanted to unmake and then remake his world” (Lentricchia 198). World-creation is a curious metaphor, yet one appropriate to Stevens. Though the terms “world” and “reality” should be understood as supremely inclusive, these critics tend to see the term as paradoxically localized to the subject. The words “monologue”, “originating”, and “own” suggest disinterested isolation rather than a need to encompass exteriority. So what should we make of the critical push to understand Stevens through this world- creating metaphor? As I argued in Chapter One, any belief which presumes an independent subject on which the physical world can subsequently act creates a Cartesian split between subject and object. Consequently, understanding Stevens’s imagination/reality paradox through transcendental Idealism does nothing to solve the subjectivity gap because it assumes the very

29 problem it seeks to overcome. Patricia Rae notes that once the philosopher, or critic, “has divided the world thus, it is impossible to see how the abyss can ever be bridged, how subject and object can ever become one in an act of knowing. Even if we feel that we have leapt over the abyss, after a burst of Kantian ‘Reason’ or Bergsonian ‘intuition,’ there is no way of confirming this feeling that does not itself involve the operation of the subjective consciousness; we are caught in our own subjectivity as in a web” (114). Here Rae invokes the fundamental problem with assumed subjectivity — though the cogito may give us momentary knowledge of existence, it fails to give us the apparatus by which we can confirm anything else. Even with Kant’s additions, if the mind remains separated from the objects of perception, empirical observations about the world prove nothing more than that a speaker exists. Pragmatism posits that these types of Idealist constructions are shallow attempts to crystallize the “metaphysics of experience” as something concrete and permanent. Rather than teasing out the transitory interactions between subject/object, an artificial world is one where the (Cartesian) subject’s mind romantically creates the laws and categories that govern reality — one where “What it seems/ It is and in such seeming all things are” (270). In an essay called “A World of Pure Experience”, William James implicitly critiques the Idealist “world-creating” metaphor by describing “a world where experience and reality come to the same thing.” In his phrasing, James restores reality to its inclusive sense, but also deepens the word by including in it the subjective element of experience. Rather than suggest that reality and experience (or imagination) operate in a causal chain, James uses radical empiricism to abolish the subject/object distinction. This new, pragmatic world “must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as 'real' as any thing else in the system” (534). Here James insists that “experienced relations” must be considered “real,” and not be abolished to realm of the ideal. Thus this “world of pure experience” is one that demonstrates a metaphysics of experience over a metaphysics of existence. In “The Idea or Order at Key West” (1936), Stevens presents us with one of his most explicit representations of “world-making” — a woman singing at the sea shore creates a fiction that brings forth a new reality. But rather than creating an Idealist world of the imagination,

30 Stevens subtly plays with subjectivity, invoking a pragmatic “world of pure experience.” I will first give a somewhat traditional reading of the poem, then return to see how radical empiricism complicates that reading. It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made. Here the woman, the “single artificer of the world,” walks along the beach “alone” in “solitude” as a singular entity of subjective authority. Her isolation recalls the Cartesian subject whose remoteness makes it impossible to know the outside world. In order to overcome this, her “voice” — as the traditional symbol of God’s creative power — “made” and “measured” the world around her in romantic fashion. What’s more, she alters the metaphysical identity of the sea, engulfing its essence and making it indistinguishable/identical to her music: “the sea,/ Whatever self it hand, became the self/ That was her song.” The woman wraps herself in this creation like a self-stitched blanket, knowing “that there never was a world for her/ Except the one she sang and, singing, made.” At first, this poem seems to be celebrating the mind’s supreme creative power —both in its ability to overcome Cartesian isolation, and in its power to absorb/alter the essence of physical reality in a metaphysical act of imagination. World-Experience as if a World-Creation Readings such as these, though they keenly identify the imagination’s role in Stevens’s world-creations, largely ignore how exteriority and the presence of other minds help define the poetic subject. I find Jacqueline Brogan’s discussion of the poet’s aversion toward the feminine voice to be a much more sophisticated interpretation of the way subjectivity operates in Stevens’s work. She sees how a “need for this control — the imperative to create and to control a world in words — can be explained, at least in part, historically and culturally. The Great War,

31 the Great Depression, and the felt menace of a second world war to come would easily give rise to the need to defend oneself against looming chaos” (103). Brogan identifies this chaos in Stevens’s poetry with the competing voices of other selves — the very same probing voices that lead, I have argued, to skeptical doubt. Given the uncomfortable effect these voices have on the Cartesian subject, it’s no wonder Brogan sees “this ‘woman’ [as] simply a figure (and thus a sign or empty cipher) for Stevens himself and the way he sings. The clearest sign of this fact is found in the very next line, where he abruptly breaks in with ‘Ramon Fernandez, tell me if you know’” (103). By this, Brogan suggests that Stevens silences the feminine voice in order to maintain a singular identity. Readers never actually hear the woman’s song at all — the poem has always been Stevens speaking through a poetic figure. In this way, Stevens reasserts his poetic mastery of, in Brogan’s words, “a world in words.” Although I find Brogan’s reading to be thought-provoking, she suffers from the same fallacy described in Chapter One — namely, she justifies Stevens’s obstruction of these “other voices” on the grounds that they disrupt the poet’s subjective authority. This leads her to ask, “what do we hear from this feminine voice that is simultaneously created, disclosed in the portals, and repressed, silenced by the ‘mastering’ and by the actual appropriation of the unheard feminine voice to Stevens’s own? From the opening stanza, that other voice remains literally ‘beyond’ us and ourselves” (103). As I have suggested before, instead of silencing these “other voices,” Stevens uses them as the impetus for disrupting Cartesian subjectivity in order to form a more Emersonian, or pragmatic, self-conception. The voices of the “other” do not function as the sensory material on which the poet builds an Idealist world, nor do they frighten him into reactionary, political appropriation; rather, they function as the “experienced relations” by which the poet creates a Jamesean “world of pure experience.” Allow me to clarify. In order to illustrate what he means by “a world of pure experience,” James skillfully uses the rhetoric of Idealism in an analogy: If you alter an object in your world, put out a candle, for example, when I am present, my candle ipso facto goes out. It is only as altering my objects that I guess you to exist. If your objects do not coalesce with my objects, if they be not identically where mine are, they must be proved to be positively somewhere else. But no other location can be assigned for them, so their place must be what it seems to be, the same[…] Practically,

32 then, our minds meet in a world of objects which they share in common, which would still be there, if one or several of the minds were destroyed (“Experience II” 565) In this example, James attempts to show how the “experienced relations” between objects within a system create a pragmatic subjectivity. Simply put, James is saying that when “an object in your world” changes, it alters my subjectivity. However, this relationship is not conditional — it’s not “first P happens, then N.” James suggests the only way to understand this phenomena is to emphasize the fluidity in the subject/object relationship. He stresses that we continually experience change — that we feel, know, and are identical with this change so long as we wade through the stream of experience. And in order to make us feel that change, James employs some clever rhetorical tricks — did you notice, dear reader, that he was talking to you? That he described “your world” as something set apart, and yet present in his own? This explicit attempt to bridge the subjectivity gap uses the language of Idealism to show how one’s “world” is always inclusive, always subject to revision and invasion by other selves. Likewise, we can see this “world of pure experience” being worked out in “The Idea of Order at Key West.” What Brogan sees as the exclusive appropriation of other voices in the penultimate stanza, I see as a social practice whereby the poet comes to know himself via the world of experience: Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, Why, when the singing ended and we turned Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, As the night descended, tilting in the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night. Stevens asks an excellent question: why, after the singing stops, do the lights carry on the same ordering function as the woman’s music? My reading suggests that, unlike those who consider Stevens part of the romantic/Idealist tradition, the creation of this “imagined world” was never provoked by an audible sensory experience. Such a belief would not only enforce Cartesian dualism on the basis of contingency (When I see… I like to think), it would also isolate the speaker from other minds. Thus, instead of glorifying the woman’s song as supremely creative,

33 the speaker stresses the “felt experience of relation” between the speaker, reader, and the objects along the shore. His language directs us, guides us, so that we “turn” our attention “[t]oward” these relationships in the hope that we may feel the characters “anchor[ing]” “tilting,” “fixing,” and “[a]rranging” their subjectivities around one another. We can see a similar drama occurring in “Description Without Place.” Stevens’s ability to collapse subject/object dualism depends on his ability to blur the distinction between materiality and the insubstantial cultural force of language. In the poem’s “postpolitical reversion to outmoded styles of a bygone era of social realism,” Alan Filreis sees Stevens “play[ing] the role of the poet as reliable commentator on events[…] though the role had radically changed since the thirties” (155). This role-reversal suggests that subjective experience can better describe the world than meticulous dictation, and therefore mirrors pragmatism’s own great irony — that a philosophical movement dedicated to pluralism, contingency, anti-essentialism, and subjectivity can produce a better model of truth than the continental tradition ever could. Stevens’s attempt to record truth, then, differs sharply from both realism and idealism because it is a subjective transaction with reality. And as with any subject/object relationship, the performative enactment of this transaction alters both self and community. Thus, in the poem’s final section, Stevens gives us a complex critique of world-creation as it relates to pragmatic subjectivity: Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those

For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

It is a world of words to the end of it, In which nothing solid is its solid self. Those who conflate discursive formations with an imaginative “making of the world” get a blurry, transitory “buzzing world and lisping firmament.” As I’ve said before, to believe in the mind’s power to construct worlds assumes a Cartesian subject. Such a belief gives us nothing but the cogito’s certainty and subsequent isolation, so that the “nothing solid [isolated subjectivity] is its solid self [cogito].” Along those same lines, Stevens levels a insightful criticism against

34 writers who believe their work will in some way crystallize a moment by forming definitive descriptions of reality: It matters, because everything we say Of the past is description without place, a cast

Of the imagination, made in sound; And because what we say of the future must portend,

Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening. It is here, in the dizzying variation of his grammar, that Stevens’s stakes his political claim. He charges his readers with the task of the historian — one must stake one’s position in history, enacting subjectivity by reaching out to the felt experience of relationships. Filreis notes, “If history is no less or more than history-writing, a ‘theory of description’ that ‘matters most,’ then a past of men made out of words is description without place. If we think we are referring our experiences to our sense of seeming, then we must also know that knowledge derived from such experience is but ‘a knowledge/ Incognito’ (343). Being, in short, is constantly subject to seeming” (Filreis 156). This is insightful, albeit somewhat pejorative towards Stevens’s pragmatic conception of knowledge. Filreis’s use of the word “but” diminishes Stevens’s monumental accomplishment — the knowledge of being is very much subject to “seeming,” and for the better. Voice as Object Thus far I have focused my attention on how Stevens overcomes the problem of Cartesian subjectivity in his poems by distancing himself from the Idealist tradition. Instead of romantic constructions that perpetuate a subject/object distinction, Stevens demonstrated how a firm belief in radical empiricism enables “thoughts” and “things” to dissolve into a system of experienced relations instead of existing in independent ontological realms. In emphasizing this “world of experience” over a “world of imagination,” Stevens acknowledges the disturbing voice of the “other” and its ability to bridge the subjectivity gap as a felt relationship. But the question still remains: why would Stevens dedicate so much of his time and energy into courting those voices? Part of the answer to that question, I think, has its roots in

35 radical empiricism. Due to their aversion to metaphysics, “[p]ragmatists cannot imagine a disembodied self, an Archimedean point undefiled by earthly relations of place, time, and cause; so they cannot imagine an extrasituational or unconditional moral imperative” (Livingston 223). And so these voices that bridge the subjectivity gap appear to exist in a double-register — on the one hand, we experience them as a haunting force within the dark recesses of our own minds; and yet, paradoxically, voices cannot be separated from the sounds and bodies that project them, bodies that are indistinguishable from the historical, cultural, and physical relationships that define their existence. Frank Lentricchia makes a similar point in his introduction to Ariel and the Police. Concerning Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar”, he says the “connection of jar and human subject is unavoidable in Stevens’s poem” (8). Lentricchia rightfully experiences the connection between human subjectivity and the objects of perception — that is, he sees how the two things interact to define each other’s existence as socially constructed entities. He therefore goes on to ask, Can the consequences of jars be conceived apart from the intentional human process which produces and manipulates them? Puts them, for example, on hills in Tennessee? How can any inert product of human labor ever be spoken of as having in itself consequences, as if the thing had intentions of its own? These questions are precisely questions the poem forces us to ask because the ‘I’ who does the initial act of placing gets lost after the first line. The human actor becomes a panoramic onlooker, a distant voice, an innocent bystander: the jar takes on, somehow, an intentional life of its own. (8) Here Lentricchia describes a process of Emersonian self-absolving that transforms an independent “human actor” into a socially constructed “distant voice” capable of endowing the jar with its own agency; that is to say, the journey from “human actor” to “jar-agent” is one of radical empiricism. The speaker no longer identifies himself as an independent subject and becomes instead an exchange between himself and the jar. The jar’s “intentional life of its own” is no mere personification. As one half of the human/jar subject of experience, the jar from Tennessee seems to affect the world as significantly as the speaker. So when we hear the speaker’s voice in our minds, we are simultaneously experiencing the cultural force of the jar and of the poetry that delivers it to us. Our subjectivity melts into the cultural forces which help enact them. As Lentricchia puts it, “the ‘I’ gets lost” as it becomes diffused into the art-object.

36 According to Richard Poirier, in this paradox of voice we see the pragmatist struggle with language as “both the gift of consciousness and its exacting price, and that because of it we live not in a natural state but in a conventional, and therefore artificial, relation to the world and to ourselves” (Renewal 96). Therefore any desire to “make art [or, in this case, a voice] ‘universally intelligible’ would require the disappearance of the media which give art its existence as a public event. It would yield to a transparency through which reader and writer, viewer and painter would share in the ‘executant power,’ as Wordsworth calls it, that still makes its ghostly transits through the work of art” (83). Poirier reminds us that a voice that bridges the subjectivity gap carries with it the “artificial” baggage of language because any experience with a poetic voice is a cultural, not metaphysical, union between two minds. What is significant about modern poetry, then, is its ability to dissolve our assumed subjectivity into the voice of the speaker, harmonizing the mind’s cognitive processes with an intimate and intense cultural force. I half-agree with Mark Halliday when he says Stevens “uses rhetoric and metaphor to build accounts of reading which are happily undisturbed by difference, accounts in which the gap between poet and reader is somehow healed” (101). The concentration required to read Stevens’s complex poems (in all their metaphorical density) forces the reader to adopt the poet’s voice as they experience their subjectivity dissolve into the poem. But this process does not leave the reader “happily undisturbed.” In order for the reader to recognize her experience to the poem, it must thoroughly disturb her. In fact, as I have argued in Chapter One, the disturbance caused by this artificial force is what invokes a “her” in the first place. In the last selection from his Collected Poems, Stevens presents “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself” as an example of how the poetic voice affects subjectivity: At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,

37 No longer a battered panache above snow... It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism Of sleep's faded papier-mache... The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry — It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality. Once we cast off the “Imagination vs. Reality” dichotomy as a Cartesian fallacy, the poem’s title no longer suggests a strong sense of realism — a “thing [in] itself” will always be a combination of cultural forces working together to form a union between subject/object. One of those forces is language, an artificial “cry from outside” that appears “like a sound in his mind.” The figure of the man “[a]t the earliest ending of winter” represents an empty vessel with no voice or language of his own (he only appears in the third and fourth lines). So when “[t]hat scrawny cry” threatens to enter the man’s mind, it challenges his undisturbed relationship to the world. The bird’s voice (or the poet’s) is like a “chorister whose c preceded the choir” — once you hear it, be ready, because it signals a “colossal” harmonizing of competing voices that constitute the cultural force of language. The “new knowledge of reality” appears as a voice, but it does not come from the ideal or imaginative realm — “from the vast ventriloquism/ Of sleep’s faded papier-mache.” No, it comes hard and fast and without remorse, an inescapable cultural force that isolates us from an unmediated experience with reality. Conclusion Wallace Stevens was not an Idealist. Although he frequently alluded to the power of imagination, Stevens was firmly committed to abolishing the notion of a Cartesian subject. He recognized that Kantian attempts to “explain-away” the subject/object distinction were doomed

38 to failure. Therefore readings which align him with world-creation are incorrect insofar as they assume a generative, romantic Mind operating on a static Reality. William James gives a much more accurate model when he describes, instead, a “world of pure experience.” By recognizing the “felt experience of relation” as a central aspect of existence, James could account for the intimate relationship between subjects and objects, as well as independent minds. Albert Gelpi echoes this idea when he explains how the Romantic synthesis “was an ideal unstable from the outset — precariously conceived and only sporadically achieved. Because everything depended upon the metamorphic, mutually completing encounter between subject and object, the Romantic ideology made the highest claims for, and put the highest demands upon, individual vision outside the traditional religious and social institutions” (5). Because pragmatism dismisses the idea of an “individual” that exists “outside social institutions,” they accept language’s dual role as both the gateway to consciousness and its greatest mediating force. In that way, the voice that haunts modern poems signifies the cultural force which prevents us from directly experiencing independent minds while simultaneously, by its very existence, showing us that we can.

39 CHAPTER 3

POETIC PEDAGOGY: ROBERT FROST’S PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO EDUCATION

The authorities that keep poetry in school may be divided in two kinds, those with a conscientious concern for it and those with a real weakness for it. They are easily told apart. — Robert Frost, “Poetry and School”

He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.” — Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

Chapters One and Two have largely focused on the presence of “other minds” and their ability to challenge Cartesian subjectivity. Through the collapse of the subject/object distinction readers of poetry experience these minds as voices that manifest in a paradoxical double register. On the one hand, they seem to haunt our consciousness, existing precisely where they ought not to be. On the other hand, the disembodied voice must also be the conduit of an artificial language, indistinguishable from the cultural forces that created it. I turn now to examining these voices as they exist in the public sphere, particularly in terms of educational practices. I have already briefly touched upon the pragmatist ambivalence to language as an organizing force of consciousness — it enables rational thought, and yet encloses us within its limits. Richard Poirier summarizes this difficulty as it appears in Emerson: “Language not as a transparency but as an obstruction, language not as inherently mobile but as static and resistant, unless made momentarily otherwise — these perceptions belong to the most appealing and energetic side of Emerson” (Renewal 30). Language’s tendency to be “an obstruction” and “static” prevents other minds from freely penetrating our consciousness; and yet during the poetic act the voice of the “other” is “momentarily otherwise” in its ability to be “transparent” and “mobile.” It is during these self-dissolving excursions that we experience the impossibility of the disembodied voice that haunts us.

40 I find the same issues present in works of John Dewey and Robert Frost, two writers who cultivated their role as public intellectuals and who subsequently wrote for a broad audience. As pragmatists, these writers tried to overcome the cognitive boundaries of language through tropes and metaphors. Yet as educators, they were forced to work in classrooms that perpetuated the very institutional models that they despised. In order to reconcile these opposing beliefs, Frost and Dewey implemented a pragmatic pedagogy, one that stressed active experience over repetition and memorization. Emerson saw action as the “heroic attempt to make oneself conscious of things before they go public, as it were, before they can be known publicly by virtue of having passed into language. Once they do get into language, they immediately belong in the past” (Poetry and Pragmatism 25). And so it was with pragmatic pedagogy; rather than use language as the vehicle for cultural assimilation, Frost and Dewey provoked students into actively experiencing new relationships by encouraging them to dissolve the boundaries between subject and object, internal and external, you and me. In doing so, the pedagogical voice underwent a poetic transformation by escaping the linguistic barriers that form its structure, allowing it to pass into consciousness as an unmediated presence. In turning my discussion from private readings (and their effect on the reader) to public discourse (and their effects on students), I hope to more fully engage the political implications of the pragmatist “social self.” Educational institutions, insofar as they are constructed on Enlightenment models of knowledge and subjectivity, seem to be at odds with pragmatism’s radical social project. In Criticism and Social Change Lentricchia notes Dewey’s distinction “between ‘education as a function of society’ and ‘society as a function of education’” (1). In short, this theory states that those who “feel at home” in society wish educational institutions to perpetuate “society’s principles and directives,” while those who feel alienated wish education to “remake [society] accordingly” (1-2). And so the voice that echoes throughout the classroom must negotiate this dichotomy. Unlike Stevens, Frost was both a cultural icon and a life-long teacher. As a result, and through careful cultivation, his poetry inherits the moral weight of that profession. And while both poets attempted to escape the cultural baggage of language, only one of them did so by carefully manipulating his institutional authority. To that end, Frost skated a fine line. In the end, though, he embraced his role as the focal point for institutional authority as any good poet should. By that, I mean the Frost saw little difference between his poetry and his lectures. Both

41 indulgently employ cultural forces to further a cultural agenda, and yet, like Dewey, both Frost’s poetry and pedagogy sought to remake society. John Dewey and the Experienced Aesthetic of Cooking Lunch As Lentricchia suggested, Dewey believed the great American community, enlightened by a benevolent and informed citizenry, could only be approached by embracing democratic values. As such, Giles Gunn observes that democracy “played a crucial role in Dewey’s reflections about education…not because he took school to be the central democratic institution in society, but because he was convinced that education constitutes the foremost institutional responsibility in a democracy” (Gunn 73). Within those educational institutions, the community’s interest is best served by generating an informed, pro-active citizenry with the tools to maximize whatever freedoms our democracy may afford. But how? Robert Westbrook notes that the “union of social science, effective news gathering, and skillful literary presentation of the fruits of social inquiry was, Dewey admitted, not easy to achieve” (311, emphasis added). After pragmatism had cast away most of the irrelevant philosophical questions passed down as the discipline’s “great mysteries,” Dewey needed to formulate a method to recast experience in a new light. As a result, his later work took a distinctly aesthetic turn on the premise that if “modern critical inquiry originated in an act of metaphysical deconstruction, it could fulfill itself only through an act of aesthetic reconceptualization” (Gunn 74). Along those lines, Dewey saw the need to implement a literary aesthetic into his writing. Though we should not fault him for perfunctory execution (he was a philosopher more than a poet), Dewey’s philosophical writing often adopts a colloquial tone. He relied heavily on figurative language to highlight the importance of imagination in the educational process. His colloquial writings are rich with analogies that reflect the kind of creativity necessary to speak directly to the individual within a diverse audience of independent subjectivities. In his foundational work Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey describes a teaching style steeped in metaphor: The educator, like the farmer, has certain things to do, certain resources with which to do, and certain obstacles with which to contend. The conditions with which the farmer deals, whether as obstacles or resources, have their own structure and operation independently of any purpose of his. Seeds sprout, rain falls, the sun shines, insects devour, blight comes, the seasons change. His aim is simply to utilize these various conditions…

42 Foresight of possible consequences leads to more careful and extensive observation of the nature and performances of the things he had to do with, and to laying out a plan -- that is, of a certain order in the acts to be performed… It is the same with the educator, whether parent or teacher. It is as absurd for the latter to set up his “own” aims as the proper objects of the growth of the children as it would be for the farmer to set up an ideal of farming irrespective of conditions. Here the reader sees how Dewey stresses educational methods over the ideal products of education. The “conditions” under which teachers labor vary greatly, yet the educator’s goal is to “utilize” her natural surroundings in order to achieve what works best for the individual student at any given moment. The “devouring insects” and “blight” embody the naturally existing “obstacles” in language and semantic comprehension. In Dewey’s eyes, the teacher needs to work around these barriers if his audience is to understand his method. Since metaphors enable teachers to achieve the “foresight” necessary to anticipate these shortcomings and help them guide students to a fuller understanding of language’s relationship to reality, Dewey uses a metaphor of his own within the colloquial narrative of his philosophy. Ultimately, he demonstrates the power of education not through analytical rationalization, but by utilizing educational metaphors as a metadescription of his greater philosophical project. He knew readers may have a difficult time understanding him, so he created a metaphor that not only explains his ideas, but simultaneously demonstrates their effectiveness. Metaphors pop up in Dewey’s writing frequently. These poetic figurations are pragmatic attempts to reach another level of signification, but they also add to the work’s own aesthetic sense. Dewey believed that “art’s special function and value lie not in any specialized, particular end but in satisfying the live creature in a more global way, by serving a variety of ends, and above all by enhancing our immediate experience which invigorates and vitalizes us, thus aiding our achievement of whatever further ends we pursue. Art is thus at once instrumentally valuable and a satisfying end in itself” (Shusterman 9). But once art “invigorates” and “vitalizes” us, will it then lead to the kind of culture that takes full advantage of its democracy, as Dewey hoped it would? What will be the “further ends we pursue”? Dewey insightfully recognizes, as Richard Shusterman does, that “one of the positive features of genuine aesthetic pleasure is that, while it gratifies, it also stimulates the desire for more such pleasure. If your aesthetic pleasure in an object leaves you wanting no

43 more, you have probably not been pleased at all” (179). Within that process, education “play[s] an enormous but often forgotten role in determining the objects of our pleasure. To a large extent we enjoy what we are trained and conditioned to enjoy and what the options of our circumstances allow us to enjoy” (180). The institutional site of that conditioning, the school, has the potential to either perpetuate these social principles or radically change them. But aesthetic sense can only go so far. Crucial to our learned conditioning of aesthetic sense is its relationship to the language used to communicate those ideas. By emphasizing that those two forces must necessarily work in conjunction, Dewey dissolves the gap between language-as-expression and language-as-art. Because he believes that language alone fails to educate (this would include Dewey’s own philosophical texts as well), Dewey demonstrated in his Lab School how a community of influences is necessary to fully facilitate learning. As students made connections between independent aspects of experience, they were simultaneously creating the metaphors scientists and philosophers use to explain their theories. Louis Menand recounts that a curricular practice typical of Dewey’s Lab School was cooking: “the pedagogical challenge, crucial to the theory, was to make the chemistry indivisible from the lunch, the learning indivisible from the doing” (323). In this way students incorporated many aspects of traditional education (math, chemistry, biology/nutrition) with a social element which proved to be stimulating to the students’ imagination, and practical in application to the real world. Perhaps no aspect of the lesson was more important than the ability to make working metaphors between seemingly unrelated aspects of the whole. In this way students learned that their lunch symbolically represents a community of physical relationships, the way a poem represents a community of ideas. This particularly clever method of education begs to be taken a step further. After students become aware of those symbolic representations, the value of their lunch becomes more than the goal of consumption — it becomes the means by which the lunch came into being, both physically and imaginatively. In the Lab School’s early years, Dewey’s pedagogical techniques achieved great success with students. While framing education as a means to achieve critical thinking, he also encouraged his students to treat school subjects as ends in themselves with an almost aesthetic appreciation. While Dewey felt as though math was just one cog in the interconnected educational machine, he wanted students to understand its “own unique intrinsic contribution to the experience of life” (Democracy 282) so that its value can be understood separated from its

44 use: “It is as true of arithmetic as it is of poetry that in some place and at some time it ought to be a good to be appreciated on its own account — just as an enjoyable experience, in short. If it is not, then when the time and place come for it to be used as a means or instrumentality, it will be in just that much handicapped. Never having been realized or appreciated for itself, one will miss something of its capacity as a resource for other ends” (281). If one does not have an appreciation for rational methodology (like math) “one will miss something” about its capacities, potentials, and applicability “for other ends”; but one will also overlook the equation’s everyday being, its neglected existence as a thing-in-itself. In Art as Experience, Dewey attempts to bridge the divide between l'art pour l'art and its use-function. Here he solidifies his stance on art’s ability to reveal hidden connections in society, this time alluding to a somewhat romantic notion of “imaginative vision:” Matthew Arnold’s dictum that “poetry is criticism of life” is a case in point. It suggests to the reader a moral intent on the part of the poet and a moral judgment on the part of the reader. It fails to see or at all events to state how poetry is a criticism of life; namely, not directly, but by disclosure, through imaginative vision addressed to imaginative experience (not to sent judgment) of possibilities that contrast with actual conditions, the most penetrating “criticism” of the latter that can be made. It is by a sense of possibilities opening before us that we become aware of constrictions that hem us in and of burdens that oppress. (346) Dewey’s assessment is insightful. While his work at the Lab School centered on creating connections between empirical tasks in order to form a working social whole, here Dewey examines poetry’s ability to create imaginative material with which to construct metaphors that contrast with “real” life. Dewey rejects the didactic distinction between what “is” and what “ought to be,” noting that the “imaginative experience” poetry creates in us constitutes both the “is” and “ought” simultaneously. By collapsing the subject/object distinction, poetry enables us to contact the “contrast with actual conditions” as a “world of experience.” In essence, the contrast becomes the reality. Instead of showing us “possibilities” in a literal sense, poetry creates a real metaphorical association. In other words, the “constrictions that hem us in” are not the limits of our material world, but the limits of our will to experience metaphors as a union between art and experience. By rejecting didacticism, Dewey suggests that a poem is more than what it says — that its significance as an art-object exceeds our subjective interpretation. And yet

45 he also shows us that by collapsing the subject/object distinction, and by experiencing poetry through this “imaginative vision,” art’s use-value becomes its ability to place us in fleeting contact with other subjectivities and knowledges which we then contrast with our own. Robert Frost and the Figure a Teacher Makes Frost was 19 when he accepted his first teaching appointment. By 1909, at age 35, his success as an educator allowed him to lecture about his teaching methods and revise the English curriculum at the Pinkerton Academy. According to his superintendent, he was the “best teacher in New Hampshire.” According to John Zubizarreta the “compliment recognizes Frost’s gift not as an accomplished pedagogical technician with a dazzling array of instructional tricks but as an educator ‘by presence’, as he liked to call the most influential kind of teaching — education, that is, by the sheer power, example, and inspiration of the teacher’s immediate effect on individual learners” (69). It is from the perspective as a “teacher by presence” that he would write in the school catalog, “The general aim of the course in English is twofold: to bring our students under the influence of the great books, and to teach them the satisfactions of superior speech” (Prose 77). Early on, Frost had a clear understanding that his teaching style was invariably linked to spectrum of figurative language, though he tried to adhere to standard prosaic constructions. In one of his earliest known pedagogical records Frost speaks in “general” terms, allowing his philosophy to take on the “twofold” ambiguities of metaphor. Frost never suggests what these “great books” are, nor does he analytically define the metaphysical properties of greatness. Instead he leaves these categories open to revision and reevaluation, presumably at the instructor’s discretion. Indeed, the only standard Frost designates is one of “superior speech.” The process by which one evaluates superiority entails comparison, and the constructed hierarchies are themselves a kind of metaphor — a figurative contrast that privileges one thing by contextualizing the qualities of another. Though Frost attempts to marry the hegemonic “influence” of the school system with conditioned aesthetic “satisfaction,” he does so in order to underscore the value of imaginative vision. History lectures are not merely things in themselves; instead they can function as the imaginative material from which we construct working models of experience. By far, Frost’s clearest and most mature expression of this belief is found in his 1931 address, “Education by Poetry: A Meditative Monologue.” It is here that he enacts the cornerstone of what I call a “pragmatic pedagogy.” He writes, “I have wanted in late years to go

46 further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking” (104). This is a significant claim and a guiding principle for Frost as both writer and educator. As an example of how metaphors dominate our thinking, Frost offers the story of Pythagoras: Once on a time all the Greeks were busy telling each other what the All was — or was like unto. All was three elements, air, earth, and water (we once thought it was ninety elements; now we think it is only one). All was substance, said another. All was change, said a third. But best and most fruitful was Pythagoras’ comparison of the universe with number. Number of what? Number of feet, pounds, and seconds was the answer, and we had science and all that has followed in science. (104) Frost suggests that the relationship between the qualities of matter and the abstract system of mathematics is a metaphorical one. They combine to form an experienced unity whose expressive power saturates the world thousands of years later (at least in conversations not devoted to quantum physics). Frost thinks that to “say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter, to make the final unity. That is the greatest attempt that ever failed. We stop just short there. But it is the height of poetry, the height of all thinking, the height of all poetic thinking, that attempt to say matter in terms of spirit and spirit in terms of matter” (107). And so it is with the poetic voice. To express and experience a voice as something other than a cultural institution is “the height of poetry,” but it is also “the greatest attempt that ever failed.” That is why, unlike a university lecture, a poem can only be a “momentary stay against confusion”— the fragility of metaphor only holds for an instant before language, as the organizational force of consciousness, rejects it as nonsensical (“Figure” 132). Due in part to the aversion to his educator’s voice, Frost had a complicated relationship with the teaching profession, and always returned to the classroom apprehensively. He considered himself a poet first and foremost, and lectured as a means to pay his expenses. But that’s not to say that Frost did not enjoy being a teacher. Because of his belief in the primacy of metaphor and its ability to collapse arbitrary distinctions, one can see why Frost wished to teach by poetry alone. His great ambition was to “educate” a broad audience in metaphor and support himself solely as a writer. Frank Lentricchia recounts that when Frost “returned to America, he must have come to the realization that in this culture, in this time, to stand on your feet as a poet and nothing else is a hope of utopian order. If he wanted to reach those who buy books in their thousands, he would need to do more than toil away in his writers room” (Quartet 105). This

47 “doing more” included mastering the profitable modern writers circuit and embracing the “industry-inaugurating moment” as writer-in-residence at the University of Michigan in 1921 (106). Although it seemed that he viewed classroom instruction as an inferior form of education, Frost could never be done with teaching. Both his poetry and his pedagogy were pragmatically linked to his material responsibilities and the hard work he undertook to satisfy those demands — a fact much alluded to by the themes and characters in his writing. But it's a fitting (and pragmatic) irony that the writer's project is perpetually unfinished — that financial burdens force the poet to create new material for consumption, just as language demands he reinvent his worn down metaphors in a movement toward understanding. From his time teaching secondary school in New Hampshire to the years following his enormous success, Frost's pedagogy relied heavily on untraditional teaching styles. “Education by Poetry” is less a pedagogical lecture than a meditation on art’s unique ability to marry distinct aspects of experience within the perceiver. Like Art as Experience, Frost contemplates the relationship of the art-object (poetry in particular) to the perceiver. He is quick to shy away from analytical explications, at the outset claiming, “I am going to urge nothing in my talk. I am not an advocate. I am going to consider a matter, and commit a description.” Frost is often credited with being egotistical (Andy Moore reminds us how in his own time Frost “was considered a ‘rebel,’ and habits in his academic practice would probably have been less kindly tolerated in a man of less reputation.” (43)), but he typically resisted philosophical pontification. Here he assures his audience that he lacks an argument and does not intend persuasion with his lecture. Instead his words are meant to linger, becoming the building blocks with which to assemble working metaphors. Rather than force his epistemological models onto the audience, he allows his mind, through the cultural force of language, to be dispersed and recast in the actions of his students. Frost goes on to say that he knows “whole colleges where, though they let in older poetry, they manage to bar all that is poetical in it by treating it as something other than poetry….That is the best general way of settling the problem; treat all poetry as if it were something else than poetry, as if it were syntax, language, science.” At this point the audience begins to see Frost at work. By describing colleges that treat poetry “as if it were something else” (emphasis added) Frost blasts those who try to reduce poetry to its base elements. Highlighting the primacy of metaphor in education, Frost links the analysis of poetry within colleges to static,

48 essentialist categories. While avoiding rational argumentation, his language reminds us that a poem’s value exceeds its use as an object of scientific inquiry not because of its institutional aesthetic value, but because a poem continually bridges the disciplinary and epistemological divide, defying the boundaries we erect to protect ourselves from them. Studying a poem’s etymology and historical context independent of one another yields useless information if separated from the stream of experience; rather, Frost suggests that students and scholars should mirror the poetic process itself by building on comparisons instead of picking poetry to the bone. A poem may be an art-object in time and space, subject to empirical analysis, yet its real significance lies in its aesthetic potential to resist those cultural forces that constitute its existence and arouse in us action that precedes thought. So as a teacher who felt his responsibility was to teach poetry “as poetry,” Frost was put into a difficult position. Although he could assign a thousand poems in a semester, his ability to verify their aesthetic appreciation was blocked by the subjectivity gap. He asks, How do I know whether a man has come close to Keats in reading Keats? It is hard for me to know. I have lived with some boys a whole year over some of the poets and have not felt sure whether they have come near what it was all about. One remark sometimes told me. One remark was their mark for the year; had to be — it was all I got that told me what I wanted to know. And that is enough, if it was the right remark, if it came close enough. (109) The “closeness” with which Frost describes the reading act is significant. It demonstrates that even in the classroom, language has its way of briefly transmitting intimate knowledge from one mind to another. “One remark” might sometimes do it, if it suggests the right kind of “closeness” in the right way. The collapse of distance between reader and poetry recalls radical empiricism and its subsequent ability to enact a new relationships within the subject. In Art as Experience, Dewey reminds us that “[w]henever anything is undergone in consequence of doing, the self is modified. The modification extends beyond acquisition of greater facility and skill. Attitudes and interests are built up which embody in themselves some deposit of the meaning of things done and undergone. These funded and retained meanings are part of the self” (264). Thus we see that creating and apprehending metaphorical relationships “deposits” in the subject a new relationship to the world around them. Through the “consequence of doing,” the mind assimilates and become intimately connected to the cultural forces on which it acts. One

49 such cultural force is language; and since language is the organizational vehicle where we enact our subjectivities, using another person’s language can be akin to momentarily absorbing their subjectivity. Tough, Tough!: A College Boy’s Education From the beginning of his poetic career Frost was keenly aware of the limits of institutionalized education — namely its potential to drive readers to settle on fixed, abstract meanings. As a teacher he attempted to elude this inevitability as best he could with a pragmatic pedagogy. We see a similar drama occurring in many of Frost’s poems. In “The Death of the Hired Man” Frost describes a old man named Silas who, shortly before he dies, returns to the farm where he once worked as a laborer. Mary and Warren recount Silas’s arguments with a fellow farmhand named Harold — a bookish and rational young man. Mary recounts how Silas had continually reevaluated the arguments between Harold and himself, demonstrating a strong commitment to pragmatic renewal. 'Well, those days trouble Silas like a dream. You wouldn't think they would. How some things linger! Harold's young college boy's assurance piqued him. After so many years he still keeps finding Good arguments he sees he might have used. I sympathize. I know just how it feels To think of the right thing to say too late. Initially Frost contrasts Silas’s regenerative mind with the “assurance” of Harold and his college education. Presumably his “arguments” are not Harold’s arguments — they are not rational syllogisms, immune to entropy. The truth-value of these elusive “right things” depends upon the usefulness and expressive power of the metaphors which link creativity to present experience. As Silas wades “so many years” through the stream of experience, he “finds” good arguments within the world by collapsing the past and the present, the ideal and the material; the arguments do not spring from his rational mind. Joan Peters notes that Frost shows how “the impulse of human beings is not only to experience feelings and events but simultaneously to interpret them as well, to try to get at the 'truth' of something so as to learn from it” (23). Silas’s education is ongoing because it is largely non-lingual, free from repression in its paradoxical obsession with making truths rather than learning them. He transforms his fear of Harold’s independent

50 epistemology into the pleasure of crafting good arguments. Though he can never achieve his desire, his commitment to discover new truths is an admirable pragmatic principle. Mary is right to sympathize with his fixation. Frost’s love affair with such ironies shows itself again, for although Silas’s greatest pragmatic strength comes from renewing his metaphors, he fails to recognize how this same commitment manifests itself in other people. Harold’s associated in his mind with Latin. He asked me what I thought of Harold’s saying He studied Latin like the violin Because he liked it — that an argument! He said he couldn't make the boy believe He could find water with a hazel prong-- Which showed how much good school had ever done Him. If Silas can make productive connections, he seems unwilling to admit that his arguments represent only a small number of competing metaphors, or models of truth. Silas’s stubbornness exposes “man’s tendency to take his metaphors too literally, to force reality to conform to them no matter how bad the fit” (Sullivan 315). His lengthy obsession suggests he wishes to somehow replace Harold’s scholastic narratives with his own, rather than learn how both function in harmony with one another as metaphors. Harold probably perceives the metaphor between the hazel prong and its movement toward water as a fallacy of false-cause. Silas refuses to understand that Harold makes his connections differently, using an institutionalized epistemological system that proves useful in certain contexts. At a base level, Harold’s study of Latin presents him with the opportunity of “teaching in his college” (line 63), a vocation with an abundant potential for the study of metaphor-making, and in turn self-absolving. This, perhaps, is the reason why Harold always won the arguments. His knowledge may have originated in a school, but it has since overflown into the stream of experience. Translating antiquated Latin into modern English gives him the ability to realize that the connection between the hazel prong and the water-finding phenomena is not wrong because it has no objective referent, but because the metaphor has limited expressive power.

51 Similarly, thinking metaphorically while recognizing “the other” enables the characters of Mary and Warren to create a working explanation for Silas’s homecoming. Like the “hound that came a stranger” (line 120) out of the woods, perhaps there is no reason for his return. Only by interpreting his actions through figurative analogy can the couple forgive Silas and turn their metaphor into socially useful reality. The characters, then, enact the ongoing drama that simultaneously occurs within the reader. Though Silas rightly uses the physical world to continually create figurative connections, he refuses to accept metaphors local to “the other’s” subjectivity. Acknowledging Harold’s college education implies the existence of another subjective world into which he will never gain access, and yet Silas, like the reader, obsessively returns again and again. As he tries to “trope his way in,” he is caught between aesthetic pleasure and epistemological anxiety, the two forces producing a pragmatic renewal that moves toward, but never reaches, a true understanding of “the other.” Frost remained bound to the social, material world through his profession and knew well the value of education both culturally and economically. Frost revisits education by metaphor in “The Ax-Helve” — a poem which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1917 while Frost was being paid $2,000 a semester for his teaching duties (a substantial sum for that day and age). On the surface this poem seems to argue against the position that the knowledge of artisans and laborers is somehow “less than” those of the educated elite, yet Frost again shies away from explication and didacticism. Needlessly soon he had his ax-helves out, A quiverful to choose from, since he wished me To have the best he had, or had to spare— Not for me to ask which, when what he took Had beauties he had to point me out at length To insure their not being wasted on me. He liked to have it slender as a whipstock, Free from the least knot, equal to the strain Of bending like a sword across the knee. He showed me that the lines of a good helve Were native to the grain before the knife

52 Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves Put on it from without. Parallels can be drawn between the craftsman and Frost himself — a poet of form who knows “the strain/ Of bending” language in order to “express” metaphors within the expectations of discourse both inside and outside the classroom. As Poirier notes, Frost “manages to make the forms and processes of actual work into a version of literary archeology. The implication…is that careful and intense ordinary labor, when applied to the things of this world, can gradually dissolve their commodity values into mythological ones.” These mythological values, since the realities they create “work” insofar as they provide for Baptiste’s family, subsequently give him the authority to keep his children from school. His craft becomes the working metaphor, or, in Dewey’s words, “the conditions with which the farmer deals.” As Baptiste points to the beauties of the ax-helve, the reader discovers that the “the growth of [Baptiste’s] children” depends not on their ability to reproduce their father’s craft, but on their ability to appreciate the nature of craft — something traditional schools often don’t provide. Similarly, the Frenchman educates the speaker, and reader, not through the “false” didactic decoding of the analogy’s parts, but by the art-experience created through metaphorically linking the imaginative reality with craft’s revelation. Frost’s behavior within the classroom replicates his anxieties about education’s ability to marry discourse with reality, even in less formal conversations between teachers and students. In the poem, the Frenchman's fear of being misunderstood, coupled with his disjunctive syntax, highlights the ultimate breakdown of linguistic communication between two willing parties. The speaker correctly guesses the Frenchman’s purpose (“Something to sell? That wasn’t how it sounded” [line 32]), but expresses doubts as to his sincerity. The speaker is “afraid,” and Baptiste is made “anxious” by his wife’s entry into this game of signification (56). And, after inviting him over, the Frenchman moves quickly to displaying the ax-helves so that the speaker doesn’t “suspect” him of trickery. Rather than be told, the speaker must be shown the intricate details of the Frenchman's craft — the wood's bend, grain, and natural shape. The reader hears very little of what Baptiste actually says, and when he does speak his words often disrupt Frost's masterfully constructed blank verse. “Made on machine,” he said, plowing the grain With a thick thumbnail to show how it ran

53 Across the handle’s long-drawn serpentine — Like the two strokes across a dollar sign. “You give her one good crack, she’s snap raght off. Den where’s your hax-ead flying t’rough de hair?” Admitted; and yet, what was that to him?

“Come on my house and I put you one in What’s las’ awhile — good hick’ry what’s grow crooked. De second growt’ I cut myself — tough, tough!”

Something to sell? That wasn’t how it sounded. “Den when you say you come? It’s cost you nothing. Tonaght? The spondaic ending “tough, tough!” shows the difficulty with which Baptiste tries to achieve his double purpose — by demonstrating his knowledge he hopes the speaker will create a metaphorical connection between his craft and its use-function. And he largely succeeds — as the Frenchman follows the ax-helve’s grain “[l]ike the two strokes across a dollar sign” the speaker makes the metaphorical connection between the craft and its figurative, mythological value, while simultaneously recognizing its commodity value as well. Although their communication is uneasy and riddled with uncertainty, Frost recognizes that the product of Baptiste’s individual knowledge — the supposed subject of poetic praise — if communicated only through logic, implicitly contains an “evil” (line 98) all its own. Syllogisms and analytical discourse often lead to circular reasoning, symbolized by entrapment within the unending pattern of his wife's rocking chair: Mrs. Baptiste came in and rocked a chair That had as many motions as the world: One back and forward, in and out of shadow, That got her nowhere; one more gradual, Sideways, that would have run her on the stove In time, had she not realized her danger And caught herself up bodily, chair and all, And set herself back where she started from.

54 Here Frost uses Mrs Baptiste as a symbol for the game his characters play with language. Her endless “rocking” positions her “in and out of shadow[s]” of the elusive discourse yearned for by her husband. Her perpetual movement “back and forward,” indicative of the entire “world,” mimics the provisional and pragmatic search for truth through metaphorical expression. However, while she continues to teeter on comprehension, she drifts in “gradual” degrees until the metaphor breaks down and she sets “herself back where she started from.” Like the lessons he espoused in class, nothing in Frost's poetry is definitive. Skepticism about “whether the right to hold/ Such doubts of education should depend/ Upon the education of those who held them” (lines 92-94 ) poetically engages Dewey's great social project. How does one implement educational reforms when those in power need first be educated? And conversely in Frost's own system, how does one come to enjoy poetry when aesthetic pleasure often depends on prior knowledge of verse? Again we see a loop, or a renewed connection, symbolized both by Mrs. Baptiste’s rocking chair and Baptiste’s own poetic logic. Frost suggests that although these “chicken-or-the-egg” social problems seem tedious, our minds must constantly reevaluate this process from within while searching for new ways to progress. Baptiste comes close, but ultimately cannot show his children the true value of an artisan’s work because he fails to realize that his most important craft lies in making metaphors. His woodworking is useful insofar as it is functioning metaphor for the value of aesthetic appreciation which, as Dewey has suggested and Frost has shown, is the best way of bringing radical empiricism to light. In one of his later poems “Lucretius Versus the Lake Poets” Frost uses an interesting rhetorical strategy to youthfully (and pragmatically) “teach” the assured Dean something about poetry. Rather than utilizing a rural figure to speak in deceptive country wisdom, here Frost attacks institutionalized education directly, showing his readers that erudite knowledge of philosophy also has value. For I thought Epicurus and Lucretius By Nature meant the Whole Goddam Machinery. But you say that in college nomenclature The only meaning possible for Nature In Landor’s quatrain would be Pretty Scenery. Which makes opposing it to Art absurd I grant you — if you’re sure about the word.

55 God bless the Dean and make his deanship plenary. Here the speaker’s ability to understand philosophy depends on his ability to utilize metaphor. The entire crux of the Dean's argument rests on the meaning of a single word — Nature. Since Frost has already shown that the meanings of “superior speech” are transitory, Frost's capitalization challenges the objective quality of the Dean's statements. The speaker, having experienced both Lucretius and the Lake Poets, becomes somewhat outraged that secondary scholarship could highjack the meaning of the primary material. The use of “Goddam Machinery” is intentional — a nod to Lucretius who himself denied that the gods had any interest in the mechanisms of man. The reference, paradoxically, also points to the enduring power of certain metaphors. Richard Rorty’s support of coherence reminds us how “a very small proportion of our beliefs are changed when our paradigms of physics, or poetry, or morals, change — and makes us realize how few of them could change. It makes us realize that the number of beliefs that changed among the educated classes of Europe between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries is ridiculously small compared to the number that survived intact” (13). Though revisionists will attempt to re-write intellectual history, here Frost shows us that some things endure, that some metaphors bond ideas so powerfully that they cannot easily be unbelieved. The Dean's drastically reductive conception of both philosophy and Nature — subjects ubiquitous throughout Frost's own work — only heightens the irony. Creating a false binary between Art and Nature is what’s really “absurd,” as Dewey’s Art as Experience has shown. In short, the “college nomenclature” used in the Dean’s analytical discourse fails to see past these dualisms, while Frost’s pragmatic shift toward a more functional mode of expression marries Art and Nature, thus encompassing “the whole Goddam Machinery” of our coherent metaphors. Conclusion In Art as Experience, Dewey reminds us that “[m]ind is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously and expressly with the situations in which we find ourselves. Unfortunately, an influential manner of thinking has changed modes of action into an underlying substance that performs the activities in question” (263). He alludes to Cartesian dualism, or the identification of the human mind as something that independently exists in moments of stasis. As a pragmatist, Dewey believed that thoughts and action exist in the same ontological realm as everything else, including human subjectivity.

56 Along those lines, Frost says, “Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, ‘Why don’t you say what you mean?’ We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct” (“Education” 104). In this chapter I have identified the poetic instinct as one which attempts to bridge the gap between minds by collapsing the subject/object distinction. By causing his students to become at home in metaphor, Frost trained them to make use of their aesthetic and interpretive capacities so that they might come into more intimate contact with cultural forces that make up experience.

57 CONCLUSION

He would cry out on life, that what it wants Is not its own love back in copy speech, But counter-love, original response. And nothing ever came of what he cried — Robert Frost, “The Most of It”

Another anecdote: One semester while teaching at Amherst, Robert Frost issued a bold final examination — one that married his pedagogical and poetic projects. Believing that students locked in educational institutions can learn nothing of poetry, Frost wrote, “Do something” on the blackboard. Such pedagogical practices may not cut mustard in today’s educational institutions, but there is something admirable about Frost's unusual final examination. Just like his Pinkerton Academy address and his “Education by Poetry” lecture, it, too, is both pragmatic and poetic. His assignment demands his students step outside classroom into the material world where they can then integrate experiences and pragmatically make metaphorical connections in the tradition of Dewey’s Lab School. Frost facilitates these connections using the simple phrase “Do something.” The word “something” holds particular significance in Frost’s poetry, referring “to the tangible or to the intangible; more often it refers to both” (McGiffert). The elusive quality of the word requires that students first create the experience for which the word signifies, then use metaphor to relate how that experience is transformed from some - thing into the “something” of felt relationships. Without these metaphorical transformations, the subject matter in Frost’s poems — often dealing with death, isolation, uncertainty, and skepticism — becomes lost to readers. First students must learn how to make metaphorical connections among the objects in the real world; only then can they understand how metaphor enables them to properly experience relationships. This is all a fancy way of saying that Frost believed the relationship between metaphorical figuration and experienced reality was malleable and subject to human will. As a poet and educator, he utilized the metaphor’s ability to join the abstract with the material during

58 “momentary stays against confusion,” and wished his students would do the same. In these ephemeral moments of collapse, the poetic voice can transform the experienced relationship between subject and object, internal and external, you and me. We see this new relationship manifest, not as abstract knowledge divorced from experience, but through the subject’s identification with a more social self. Paradoxically, it is through language (and its metaphorical figurations) that we become proficient in radical empiricism. And yet language is also the primary mediating force that mediates our consciousness. Richard Poirier reminds us that along with language, One such limitation is subjectiveness or subjectivity, though it is often thought to be the area of inner freedom. In Emerson there is no such ‘inner’ place to begin with. You are free only when you are getting out of whatever closet you are in, including your idea of yourself. The whole of the essay “Experience” is an effort to get away from or out of the subjectivity it generates, a subjectivity supposed by most readers to be the very source of the essay’s and of our own imaginative richness and superfluity. Instead, he asks you to submit to the poverty of subjectivity, the poverty of the self. (Poetry 73) In doing so, Emerson asks his readers to engage in a continual process of renewal whereby the mind exists only to discover new ways to vanish. This manifestation and absolving of subjectivity constitutes the social-self. We are inevitably products of cultural forces (the greatest of which is language), and yet we search for ways to individuate ourselves by acting out a resistance to the conventions of that language. Chapter One shows how Frost and Stevens felt haunted by the presence of the “other” as it appeared as a disembodied voice in their consciousness. By revealing itself as a voice, the independent mind shows that capable of the same manifesting/vanishing process of the Emersonian subject. But rather than rejecting the presence of these haunting disembodied voices, Frost and Stevens used them as the catalyst to enact a more social self, one that existed as a social action rather than a fixed category of individuation. Chapter Two negotiates the paradox of the disambiguated voice through the lense of romantic Idealism. Although Stevens has been misconceived as a writer of the “imagination,” his work expresses a more pragmatic sense of the “felt experience of relation.” Given that pragmatists do not believe that ideas exist on a separate plane of existence, the voices that penetrate our consciousness must be identified with the cultural forces that spawned them. In this

59 way, the voice of the “other” can penetrate our minds and yet remain forever mediated by the impassable boundaries of language. Chapter Three draws a parallel between language and education as organizational and normalizing forces. As writers and educators, Frost and Dewey were constantly skating a fine line between intellectual imperialism and literary inspiration. In order to mitigate their authority as educators, Frost and Dewey pushed their students to continually dissolve distinctions through embracing metaphor as the primary cognitive organizational tool. In doing so, they hoped their students could briefly experience the benefits that other voices have on our minds. My reading of radical empiricism’s effect on modern poetry suggests a number of important advances in the way we think about the relationship between modern literature and pragmatism. First, my project largely avoids the arguments about linguistic skepticism so often advocated by Richard Poirier, Jonathan Levin, and others. Although their work has proven to be foundational to my understanding of pragmatist literary criticism, they tend to skip over the issue of radical empiricism and its effects on modern subjectivity. Along those lines, I utilize the subject/object collapse to examine the effects of “other voices” on modern poetic speakers. Unlike some critics who claim that strange external voices are a product of modernity and therefore a negative source of anxiety, I argue that their presence in fact pushes these writers to create inclusive public discourse. My study takes seriously the claim that pragmatism can solve many of the “old problems” not by demonstrating how Emerson rehashed the doubts of Socrates, but by directly addressing its ability to abolish Cartesian dualism in favor of a new, socially useful self-conception.

60 NOTES

1 I mention Derrida here because of his great aversion for the “metaphysics of presence”. For more information on the metaphysics of presence, see his landmark work On Grammatology.

2 I am including Stanley Cavell in the category of “pragmatists thinkers” insofar as some of his observations show that philosophy often literary. I see the same mode of thinking in Emerson, Dewey, Rorty, Frost, and other thinkers associated with the pragmatist tradition.

3 I recognize that this in itself is problematic. The sentence “Radical empiricism places us in direct contact with the objects of perception”, grammatically, assumes both an “us” and “objects” as individual entities. It would be strange to say however, as I did before revising my sentence, that “Radical empiricism unites us/objects together in a constant stream of experience.” This is an example of how our grammar makes it difficult to express some philosophical concepts accurately, and why poetry is an excellent means of circumventing that problem.

4 To summarize the paradox: consider an arrow in flight during any given moment — upon reflection, the arrow has an exact position, meaning it is at rest in space, therefore making movement impossible. My analogy here is that traditional empirical propositions, because they divide subject and object, also assume an infinite series of “nows” (moments of reflection contingent on the interaction between perceiver and perceived) which subsequently deny the motion or “connectedness” of objects within the world.

61 REFERENCES

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62 Peters, Joan D. “Education by Poetry: Robert Frost's Departure from the Modern Critical Tradition.” South Carolina Review 21.1 (Fall 1988): 27-37. Peterson, Margaret: Wallace Stevens and the Idealist Tradition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1983. Poirier, Richard. Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992. — The Renewal of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Rae, Patricia. The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens. London: Bucknell University Press, 1997. Richardson, Mark. The Ordeal of Robert Frost. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Rosu, Anca. The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens. London: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Sheehy, Donald G. “'To Otto as of Old': The Letters of Robert Frost and Otto Manthey-Zorn, Part 1.” The New England Quarterly 67.3 (Sep.1994): 355-402. Shusterman, Richard. Pragmatist Aesthetic: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Stuhr, John. Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy. 2nd Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Sullivan, D. Bradley. “‘Education by Poetry’ in Robert Frost’s Masques.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature. 22.3 (Summer 1986): 312-321. Szalay, Michael. New Deal Modernism. Duke University Press, 2000. Vendler, Helen. “The Supreme Fiction and the Impasse of the Modernist Lyric.” Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism. Ed. Albert Gelpi. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Zubizarreta, John. “Teaching Robert Frost.” Robert Frost Review (Fall 2000): 69-74.

63 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Chris Findeisen was born in Hawai’i, the youngest of three children. In 2005 he earned his B.A. from Washington State University, where he studied both literature and philosophy. He graduated from Florida State University in 2008. His research interests include 20th century American literature, pragmatism, and literary theory.