©2007 Benjamin Johnson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE VARIETIES OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN AMERICAN MODERNIST LITERATURE by BENJAMIN JOHNSON A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English written under the direction of Marcia Ian and approved by ____________________ ____________________ ____________________ ____________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2007 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Varieties of Aesthetic Experience in American Modernist Literature By BENJAMIN JOHNSON Dissertation Director: Marcia Ian My dissertation focuses on three American Modernists—Henry James, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens—whose major works portray the sacralization of art as a problematic aspiration. All three are known for essays, journals, or letters which argue that literature can be seen either as a secular replacement for religion (James, Stevens), or a secular conduit for rumination on divine grace (Moore). However, the dominant tendency in their literary writing is to depict these projects as unaccomplished and perhaps unaccomplishable. In their fiction and poetry, James, Moore, and Stevens suggest that when aesthetic experience is spiritualized, the writing that results will be solipsistic, imprecise, and ontologically implausible. I examine these writers’ descriptions of the limitations and inconsistencies of imagining literature as a source of spiritual experience, and I demonstrate that the sacralization of art in American Modernism was not a dead metaphor but an ongoing problem. James, Moore, and Stevens conceived the parameters of this problem with language drawn from contemporary debates about religious experience. My methodology therefore seeks to contextualize these writers by examining their responses to particular aesthetic and theological issues—James on the afterlife, Moore on Neo-Orthodox doctrines of original sin, Stevens on mystic conceptions of “pure poetry.” I suggest a more general context in my introductory chapter, where I argue that all three of these writers define the spiritual dimensions of art in ways that are closely tied to the ii intellectual legacy of American Protestantism. Unlike Matthew Arnold, who envisioned a civic religion of art with a redemptive, public mission, the writers I examine imagine that the spiritual work of literature is conducted in isolation, and does not allow the writer to heal the world but to escape it. James, Moore, and Stevens follow writers like Emerson, William James, and Reinhold Niebuhr in imagining individualism to be essential to spirituality, but they also criticize this individualist model, as can be seen when they worry that devotion to art leads to loneliness, greed, and withdrawal from life. This uneasy continuity between Protestantism and Modernism exemplifies the complex and incomplete ways that secularization occurred in American intellectual culture. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not exist without the support and encouragement of a number of people. First and foremost, the advice and guidance of Marcia Ian has been vital at every phase of this project. She has been generous with her time and clear-eyed in her criticism, and whatever is of value in the pages to follow owes directly to her insight, dedication, and good humor. I would also like to thank my other committee members, Marc Manganaro and Michael Warner, whose careful readings of early drafts of these chapters were essential to my efforts to clarify and refine my ideas. Myra Jehlen and Meredith McGill skillfully guided several sections of the dissertation through early growing pains in Spring and Summer dissertation workshops. My life at Rutgers has been made immeasurably easier by the administrative staff in the English Graduate Program. Cheryl Robinson, Eileen Faherty, Courtney Borack, and Nancy Miller were always happy to help and support my work, and they have my thanks. Cheryl especially earned my eternal gratitude earlier this spring when she spent the better part of a day berating people on the phone in a quest to restore my health benefits. I would also like to thank the staffs of the Rosenbach Manuscript Library, Alexander Library at Rutgers University, Firestone Library at Princeton University, and Meyer Library at Missouri State University. My friends and colleagues in the Rutgers Graduate community have been essential to my intellectual growth and emotional well-being over the past eight years. Sunny Stalter, especially, has engaged me in a conversation about American literature that I hope will last for years to come, especially if she continues not to hold it over my head that her ideas are much better than mine. Michael Masiello contributed greatly to certain passages by answering my questions about Classical and Renaissance texts, and he also knows where to find the good restaurants. I have received input from many peers in dissertation review groups, but I recall with particular gratitude the insights of Regina iv Masiello, Megan Ward, John Rogers, Richard Squibbs, Virginia Gilmartin, Alexandra Socarides, Ellorashree Maitra, Kristie Allen, and Alison Shonkwiler. Finally, for helping to keep my head above water, I would like to thank Angela Florschuetz, Reuben Kaller, Vince Vatter, Jean Parry, Alia Habib, and Kelly Enright. I would like to close by thanking my family. My brother Nick and sister-in-law Jane are true scholars, and their commitment to ideas is an inspiration. And I could not have asked for better parents. George and Marcia Johnson had the courage to raise two sons whose intelligence and ambition would likely take them a long way from home, and I would never have written the following pages without their love, wisdom, and support. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents vi Introduction 1 Chapter One 19 Henry James and the “Luminous Paradise of Art” Chapter Two 82 Marianne Moore’s Poetics of the Fall Chapter Three 148 Wallace Stevens and the Unfinished Project of a Secular Poetics Bibliography 210 Curriculum Vita 222 vi 1 Introduction In 1900, George Santayana argued in the preface to his Interpretations of Poetry and Religion “that religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely in the way in which they are attached to practical affairs. Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry” (v). It becomes clear as the book unfolds that Santayana feels that the plausibility of religion has been undermined by this revelation that “religion is the poetry in which we believe” (26). In his chapter on the Homeric Hymns, Santayana begins: We of this generation look back upon a variety of religious conceptions and forms of worship, and a certain unsatisfied hunger in our own souls attaches our attention to the spectacle. We observe how literally fables and other mysteries were once accepted which can have for us now only a thin and symbolic meaning. Judging other minds and other ages by our own, we are tempted to ask if there ever was any fundamental difference between religion and poetry. Both seem to consist in what the imagination adds to science, to history, to morals. Men looked attentively on the face of Nature: their close struggle with her compelled them to do so: but before making statistics of her movements they made dramatizations of her life. The imagination enveloped the material world, as yet imperfectly studied, and produced the cosmos and mythology. Thus the religion of the Greeks was, we might say, nothing but poetry. (24) Santayana’s identification of poetry with religion thus becomes the linchpin for a secularization narrative. In his account, once a religious mythology is defined as literary, or, to put it differently, once it is defined as a product of the imagination, it loses its power to move us as a factual explanation of the world. If the identification of poetry with religion has dire consequences for religious beliefs, however, it has more beneficent consequences for the status of poetry. Religion, as Santayana points out throughout his book, has been a powerful force for both good and ill: “faith brings us not only peace, not only the contemplation of ideal harmonies, but labour and the sword” (26). Religions 2 provide codes of conduct, ritual prescriptions, epiphanic experiences, and explanations of natural phenomena, and if, in the modern age, religion has become less plausible, the idea that religion was actually just literature all along suggests that the literary imagination now has the opportunity to take center stage and receive full credit for its ability to mold our perceptions and actions. The argument that poets and novelists are uniquely positioned to fill the void left by religion as it recedes from modern life was vital to justifications of the value of literature from Romanticism to Modernism. When Santayana wrote in 1900, he was following powerful Nineteenth Century forebears, from Shelley to Whitman to Arnold, who had sought to justify the ways of literature to man. Moreover, he was surrounded by contemporaries, including William and Henry James, who shared his interest in the sacralization of art, and his ideas would soon influence a generation of Modernist writers, most notably his friend and student Wallace Stevens.1 American Modernism was beginning to take shape at the moment Santayana was writing, and he provides a useful jumping-off point because he shares with all three of the writers in my dissertation a belief that, in a modern, secularizing world, literature has a key spiritual role to play. More significantly, Santayana is similar to these three writers because his aesthetic sensibility is born of a pragmatist’s belief in the ability of consciousness to mold reality, a conception of true spiritual experience as inherently subjective, and a Modernist impatience with sentimentality and received forms. Henry James, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens are in many ways a disparate set of artists.