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Place in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and Robert Bringhurst

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Place in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and Robert Bringhurst The “Cure of the Ground”: Place in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and Robert Bringhurst by Kirsten Hilde Alm B.Sc., University of Saskatchewan, 2001 M.A., Trinity Western University, 2011 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Department of English © Kirsten Hilde Alm, 2016 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopying or other means, without the permission of the author. ii The “Cure of the Ground”: Place in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and Robert Bringhurst by Kirsten Hilde Alm B.Sc., University of Saskatchewan, 2001 M.A., Trinity Western University, 2011 Supervisory Committee Dr. Nicholas Bradley, Supervisor Department of English Dr. Iain Macleod Higgins, Departmental Member Department of English Dr. Margaret Cameron, Outside Member Department of Philosophy iii Abstract This study analyzes the Canadian poet, typographer, and translator Robert Bringhurst’s (b. 1946) extensive engagement with the poetry, poetics and metaphysical concerns of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). It asserts that Bringhurst’s poetry responds to Stevens’ poetry and poetics to a degree that has not previously been recognized. Although Bringhurst’s mature poetry—his works from the mid-1970s and after—departs from the obvious imitation of the elder poet’s writing that is present in his early poems, it continues to engage some of Stevens’ central concerns, namely the fertility of the liminal moment and/or space and a meditative contemplation of the physical world that frequently challenges anthropocentric narcissism. The dissertation proposes that Bringhurst shares Stevens’ desire to inscribe an authentic encounter between person and place. The first chapters establish the literary basis for the comparison of the poets’ works. The following chapters show how both poets draw on the symbology and metaphors of the Christian concept of the Sacrament in order to describe poetically the nature of the personally renewing experience of place. They examine poems from throughout Stevens’ career, including those that express a more determinedly materialistic vision, and the pervasive use of sacramental terminology in Bringhurst’s polyphonic poetry; such language is integral to Bringhurst’s efforts to describe a transformative experience of encounter with the physical world. The final chapters contend that Stevens’ and Bringhurst’s divergent visions of the ethical responsibility of poetry are shaped by their differing perspectives on the relation between the poem and the sacramental experience inscribed within it. The dissertation makes original contributions to the study of the poetry of both Bringhurst and Stevens. It demonstrates the significance of the inheritances of the Protestant religious tradition to both poets’ bodies of work, and it casts Bringhurst as a profoundly Stevensian author. A study of iv poetic influence, it attests to the vitality of Stevens and Bringhurst as ecologically oriented writers concerned with the meaning of place in North America. v Table of Contents Supervisory Committee – ii Abstract – iii Table of Contents – v List of Abbreviations – vi Acknowledgements – vii Dedication – viii Chapter One – Introduction – 1 I. Sunday Mornings – 1 II. Stevens and Bringhurst in Critical Context – 9 III. Stevens and Bringhurst on the Margins – 22 IV. Chapter Outlines – 51 Chapter Two: “Together in different directions”: Stevens’ and Bringhurst’s Uncommon Kinship – 57 I. Early Imitations – 58 II. Bringhurst’s Connecticut Uncle – 70 III. Stevens’ Themes and Bringhurst’s Variations – 89 Chapter Three: “He knelt in the cathedral with the rest”– Stevens’ Sacramentalism –102 I. Stevens in the Empty Hall of Orthodoxy – 110 II. Beyond Naturalism: Reviving the Inheritance of Sacramentalism – 116 III. The Nadir of Belief – 125 IV. Sacramentalism in Stevens’ Later Poetry – 131 V. Poetry as Sacramental Language – 139 Chapter Four – “Time and space close over us, toad”: Poetry, Participation, and Ontology – 146 I. Bringhurst and the Christian Tradition – 149 II. Polyphonic Poetry and Ontology – 156 III. Poetry and Sacramental Attention – 161 Chapter Five – “The planet of which they were part”: Sacramental Poetry and Poetic Responsibility – 176 I. The Ethics of Stevens’ Sacramentalism – 181 II. Bringhurst’s Backward Glance – 200 Chapter Six – “In Remembrance Of”: Bringhurst’s Polyphonics and the Colonial Past – 208 I. The Work of Mourning and the Enactment of “Scriptural Sepulchre” in “New World Suite N˚3” – 211 II. Mourning and Remembering: Bringhurst’s “Ursa Minor” – 225 III. The Ethics of Mourning – 235 Conclusion – 240 Works Cited – 257 vi List of Abbreviations CPP – Stevens, Wallace. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. LWS – Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967. NA – Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951. OP – Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Random House, 1989. SP – Bringhurst, Robert. Selected Poems. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2009. vii Acknowledgements I owe a huge debt of thanks to my supervisor and committee chair, Nicholas Bradley, for introducing me to Bringhurst’s poetry in the first place, for generously sharing his expertise in poetry and poetics with me, and for offering unfailingly good advice on how to bring this project—and my studies—to successful completion. I also have the pleasure of thanking my committee members: Margaret Cameron, whose discernment and keen editorial eye have made me a better and much more careful writer; Iain Macleod Higgins, whose wide-ranging expertise as a scholar and open-handedness as an educator continue to inspire me; and Magdalena Kay, whose insight, probing questions, and research recommendations have sharpened this project. Likewise, I will be in debt to Lynn Szabo of Trinity Western University for the foreseeable future. Lynn’s enthusiastic willingness to discuss my ideas, her dependable encouragement, her insight into the writing process, and her friendship have been invaluable. A lifetime of thanks are due to my parents, Rod and Kathy Alm, for their whole-hearted support of all my academic pursuits. Every daughter should have parents as determined as mine to encourage their child’s pursuit of excellence and to foster her intelligence and ambition. I am also grateful to my friend Beth Fisher and my brother Justin Alm for their support, good humour, and willingness to act as sounding boards. Finally, an ocean of thanks goes to my partner and husband Daniel, a buoy and a steady source of everything good. viii Dedication For one of my first teachers Len Alm (1919-1995) And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again —Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” 1 Chapter One Introduction Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn --Wallace Stevens “Sunday Morning” (1915) --- To know means to hold no opinions: to know meaning thinks, thinking means. The mind is the place not already taken. The mind is not-yet-gathered beads of water in the teeth of certain leaves— Saxifraga punctata, close by the stream under the ridge leading south to Mount Hozameen, for example—and the changing answers of the moon. The loved is what stays in the mind; that is, it has meaning, and meaning keeps going. —Robert Bringhurst “Sunday Morning” (1986) I. Sunday Mornings Robert Bringhurst (b. 1946) published his poem “Sunday Morning” in the Summer-Fall issue of The Paris Review in 1986, almost thirty years after Wallace Stevens’ death in 1955 and nearly seventy years after Stevens’ famous poem of the same name appeared in Harriet Monroe’s 2 Poetry magazine in 1915 (Poetry 81-83). Bringhurst’s “Sunday Morning” prompted two essays several years after it was published. These essays, one written by Bringhurst and the other by the critic and scholar Laurie Ricou, took the form of fictional interviews between the two authors. In the dialogue about the poem as Bringhurst imagines it, a fictional Ricou is found posing the question, “Why the title ‘Sunday Morning’? Is this an allusion to a poem of the same name by Wallace Stevens? to the CBC radio program? to Christian worship?” (Bringhurst and Ricou 89). In response to these imagined questions, Bringhurst writes the following, rather chary, reply: “If those allusions seem significant to you, I’m willing to take the blame. In my opinion, the most important source of the name is simple fact. It was Sunday morning when I saw the pelican” (89- 90). While Bringhurst is “willing to take the blame” if the critic finds potential allusions to Stevens’ poem significant, that is not the same as acknowledging that his “Sunday Morning” does refer to Stevens’ poem, if indeed it does. The possible relationship between Bringhurst’s and Stevens’ poems also plays an important part of Ricou’s “dialogue.” Ricou’s portion of the imagined interview maintains the ambivalence of Bringhurst’s. In a noteworthy imaginative portrayal, the fictional Bringhurst in Ricou’s essay looks to Ricou himself to clarify the nature of the relationship between the two poems, asking Ricou to tell him if Stevens is relevant to his own poem. Ricou’s response suggests the critic is barely more certain than his fictional Bringhurst—yes, the two poems are related, in a way, because of their “rabbinical . explicat[ion of] a central core of thought,” but they are also related through their difference, so that Stevens provides, perhaps, a point of comparison for Bringhurst’s poem, “mostly .
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