Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall 2001)
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 25 Number 2 Fall 2001 25th Anniversary Issue International Perspectives on Wallace Stevens Edited by Bart Eeckhout Ghent University, Belgium Contents Preface: (Re)Globalizing Stevens —Bart Eeckhout 107 “The Whole Habit of the Mind”: Stevens, Americanness, and the Use of Elsewhere —Stephen Matterson 111 Stevens and England: A Difficult Crossing —Carolyn Masel 122 Wallace Stevens and Canada, 1903 —Mervyn Nicholson 138 Stevens, Buddhism, and the Meditative Mind —William W. Bevis 148 Late Stevens, Nothingness, and the Orient —Zhaoming Qian 164 Teaching Stevens in China —Milton J. Bates 173 Wallace Stevens in Poland —Jacek Gutorow 183 The Sound of Wallace Stevens in France —Christian Calliyannis 193 “A Funny Foreigner of Meek Address”: Stevens and English as a Foreign Language —Natalie Gerber 211 Haunting the Corpus Delicti: Rafael Campo’s What the Body Told and Wallace Stevens’ (Modernist) Body —Lázaro Lima 220 Stevens and Croce: Varieties of Lyrical Intuition —T. J. Morris 233 “A New Girl in a New Season”: Stevens, Poggioli, and the Making of Mattino domenicale —Massimo Bacigalupo 254 Poems: Recent Translations 271 Reviews 289 News and Comments 294 Cover Art by Faye A. Serio International Perspective Digital image The Wallace Stevens Journal EDITOR John N. Serio POETRY EDITOR ART EDITOR BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Joseph Duemer Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS EDITORIAL BOARD Maureen Kravec Milton J. Bates A. Walton Litz Hope Steele Jacqueline V. Brogan James Longenbach Robert Buttel Glen MacLeod Eleanor Cook Marjorie Perloff TECHNICAL ASSISTANT Alan Filreis Joan Richardson Sue Campbell B. J. Leggett Melita Schaum George S. Lensing Lisa M. Steinman The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. PRESIDENT ADVISORY BOARD John N. Serio Milton J. Bates H. L. Hix Owen E. Brady Kathryn Jacobi Robert Buttel George S. Lensing David M. Craig A. Walton Litz The Wallace Stevens Journal is published biannually in the Spring and Fall by the Wal- lace Stevens Society, Inc. Administrative and editorial offices are located at Clarkson University, Box 5750, Potsdam, NY 13699. Phone: (315) 268-3987; Fax: (315) 268-3983; E-mail: [email protected]; Web site: www.wallacestevens.com. The subscription rate for individuals, both domestic and foreign, is $25 for one year or $45 for two years and includes membership in the Wallace Stevens Society. Rates for institutions are $34 per year domestic and $39 per year foreign. Back issues are available. Manuscripts, subscriptions, and advertising should be addressed to the editor. Manu- scripts should be submitted in duplicate and in Works Cited format. Word-processed manuscripts will not be returned. Authors of accepted manuscripts should furnish a nonreturnable disk copy as well as photocopies of all secondary quotations. The Wallace Stevens Journal is indexed or abstracted in Abstracts of English Studies, American Humanities Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents, IBR (In- ternational Bibliography of Book Reviews), IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Lit- erature), Literary Criticism Register, MHRA Annual Bibliography, MLA International Bibliography, and Year’s Work in English Studies. This journal is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. © 2001 The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 Preface: (Re)Globalizing Stevens BART EECKHOUT OOKING BACK ON FOUR decades’ worth of poems, the 74-year- old Wallace Stevens cast himself in the role of contented Ariel to tell Lus how It was not important that they survive. What mattered was that they should bear Some lineament or character, Some affluence, if only half-perceived, In the poverty of their words, Of the planet of which they were part. (CP 532–33) Poems were “parts of a world,” as Stevens already affirmed in the title of his 1942 collection, but his programmatic pluralism and defense of ab- straction in those years still inspired him to use only the indefinite and more general designation, “a world.” Toward the end of his life, by con- trast, in the lines quoted above, he modulated this phrase resolutely into “the planet” of which we are all part and that he sought to miniaturize in the form of “The Planet on the Table.” Typically, his affirmation at this later date came couched in a language oscillating between inflating and deflating gestures, mixing at very close range the search for “lineament,” “character,” and even the “affluence” of our entire “planet,” with the modi- fiers “some,” “if only half-perceived,” and “in the poverty of their words.” By the end of his life, Stevens was a planetary poet of the most humble ambition and the most ambitious humility. For reasons that can be summarized most succinctly as a paradigm shift toward historicist approaches in the humanities since the early 1980s, Stevens has nevertheless come to seem more and more an American poet speaking to an American audience. After the era of phenomenological, deconstructionist, and other principally philosophical readings, his work was reread especially from a biographical point of view and situated in various sociopolitical, artistic, and literary-sociological contexts. The of- ten revelatory and always useful contextualizations offered by critics like Alan Filreis, James Longenbach, Glen MacLeod, Milton Bates, Frank THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 25.2 (FALL 2001): 107–110. © 2001 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. 107 Lentricchia, Robin Schulze, Angus Cleghorn, or John Timberman New- comb have taught us a lot about the specific American locale and cultural environment within which Stevens lived, wrote, and came to be canon- ized. In addition, some of the older celebrity critics whose interest remained with more formal, psychological, or intertextual readings (like Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, or Richard Poirier) have proven no less zealous in reinforcing our sense of the intrinsic Americanness of Stevens. The overall quality of the body of criticism that was thus produced over the past twenty to twenty-five years has been extraordinary, but as Stephen Matterson ar- gues in the intentionally provocative and sweeping essay with which this special issue opens, it may be time again to restore some of that other Stevens: Stevens the international poet who struggled with his own Americanness; the glocalist avant la lettre, who pondered the fate of “Lions in Sweden” and delighted in “compound[ing] the imagination’s Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima” (CP 397). At a moment in history when globalization and its (dis)contents are quickly becoming the hot topic of the day, even within the humanities, the time may be ripe to branch out again and conclude this twenty-fifth anni- versary year of The Wallace Stevens Journal by proposing a number of “In- ternational Perspectives on Wallace Stevens.” A special issue of PMLA published earlier this year, in January 2001, and devoted to the topic of “Globalizing Literary Studies,” marks the timeliness of this interest. In- deed, if one of the leading contributors to that special issue, Edward W. Said, is right in claiming that today “The notion neither of author, nor of work, nor of nation is as dependable as it once was, and for that matter the role of imagination, which used to be a central one, along with that of identity has undergone a Copernican transformation in the common un- derstanding of it” (Said 64–65), then Wallace Stevens may not altogether be the most unrewarding poet to come up for reconsideration. After all, his work always revolved around questions of “imagination” and “trans- formation,” and his critics have sufficiently demonstrated its interest in matters of “identity” (whether American, New England, or Pennsylvania Dutch) to promise us new vistas and insights also from a less national, regional, or local perspective. Still according to Said, the “aggressive subspecialties” that have emerged in the study of literature at North Ameri- can universities have made “one major casualty, which is the sense of a collective human history” (68). It may be time, then, to readdress the fol- lowing question, so Stevensian in its resonance: “Can one formulate a theory of connection between part and whole that denies neither the speci- ficity of the individual experience nor the validity of a projected, putative, or imputed whole?” (68). To Said, this is an open question, and Giles Gunn, elsewhere in the same issue of PMLA, proposes to tackle it in a spirit of “mutual interrogation” (Gunn 18). This is the spirit also in which the current issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal has been compiled: not so much with the self-congratula- 108 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL tory purpose of uncovering counter-neocolonial reflexes in Stevens or with the surreptitious aim of restoring the hegemony of a white male Eurocentric tradition to which he at least partly belongs, but with the intention of ques- tioning his and our representations of various national and cultural iden- tities. This implies a constant two-way traffic in which our conceptions of both the indigenous and the foreign, both self and other, are reassessed. What might it mean, for instance, as an American professor to teach Stevens’ poetry in China to Chinese students? (One answer, which might sound surprising, is that these students are in some sense better equipped to read Stevens than their fellow Americans.) Conversely, how does one go about arguing for a Buddhist sensibility in this poet’s work without either courting Western incomprehension or lapsing into an idealized form of Orientalism?