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Coming to Terms with the Disenchantment of the World: the Extent and Limit of Immanent Numinosity in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

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Coming to Terms with the Disenchantment of the World: the Extent and Limit of Immanent Numinosity in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens COURSE: ENGL 690 (MA) STUDENT: TAM JOHN ROWE (VOSPER) STUDENT NO#: 85699158 SUPERVISORS: DR NICHOLAS WRIGHT & PROFESSOR PAUL MILLAR COMING TO TERMS WITH THE DISENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD: THE EXTENT AND LIMIT OF IMMANENT NUMINOSITY IN THE POETRY OF WALLACE STEVENS 2016 ~ 4 ~ ~ 5 ~ LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS * Unless otherwise noted, all page references to Wallace Stevens’ poetry and prose will be to the following edition: Stevens, Wallace, (1997). Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, eds., New York: The Library of America. * Other abbreviations used: (L) – Stevens, Holly, sel. and ed., (1966). Letters of Wallace Stevens, London: Faber and Faber. (NA) – Stevens, Wallace, (1951). The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, New York: Alfred A Knopf. (OP) – Stevens, Wallace, (1957). Opus Posthumous, London: Faber and Faber. * ~ 6 ~ PRELIMINARIES * The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And, as imagination bodies forth The form of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. - A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V. Scene I. * We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows. - Robert Frost, ‘The Secret Sits’ * Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory will ever be found again. - E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born * …the limits of the imagination are the conceivable, not the real, and it extends over death as well as life. - Northrop Frye, ‘The Realistic Oriole: A Study of Wallace Stevens’ * High modernism is numinous through and through, as the work of art provides one of the last outposts of enchantment in a spiritually degenerate world. - Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God. * The poet is the priest of the invisible. - Wallace Stevens, Adagia * ~ 7 ~ INTRODUCTION: PRESIDING OVER THE INVISIBLE * (1) ‘BEGIN, EPHEBE, BY CONCEIVING THE IDEA…’ The following thesis does not pretend to arrive at a definitive conception of what literary modernism was, or for that matter is, in the rigorous sense required of a taxonomist. Attempts to define or classify modernism have been fraught with contradictions and counter-examples too numerous to be resolved within the limited scope of the present thesis. Suffice it to say, I am in agreement with Peter Nicholls, who insists that it is more sensible to speak pluralistically of ‘modernisms’.1 I would, indeed, prefer to avoid using the term altogether, were it not for the fact that the inspiration for this thesis stems, as will be shortly seen, from Gabriel Josipovici’s endearingly eccentric study Whatever Happened to Modernism?. My preference is for the term ‘modern’, which, as solid an arbitration as any, I would align with the period concurrent with the establishment of what we commonly refer to as the language of ‘modern English’, taking in as it does the rise of Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment, historical developments that are integral to the position my thesis wishes to advance. Nonetheless, I will seek recourse to the use of the term ‘modernist’, simply to distinguish, as per convention, a period in literary history spanning the close of the nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth, while reserving the right to bracket 1 See Nicholls, Peter, (1995), Modernisms: a literary guide, Berkeley: University of California Press. Following Nicholls’ lead is the compendious The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, (2010), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ~ 8 ~ out what does not immediately concern my thesis, namely a descriptive account of what exactly modernism qua modernism entails. Instead, the provenance of this thesis issues from the implications of Josipovici’s suggestion that modernism, which he dates from approximately 1850 to the mid-twentieth century, might be revealingly considered ‘a response…to that ‘disenchantment of the world’ to which cultural historians have long been drawing our attention’ (Josipovici, 2010, 11). This thesis will explore the implications of Josipovici’s suggestion specifically in relation to the work of the so-called ‘major’ modernist poet Wallace Stevens. My usage here of a circumspect qualifier is not to imply that I care to assail the canonical status that has been endowed upon Stevens by the academy, nor is it to suggest that I think it is necessarily wrong-headed to analyse his work in the context of modernism, howsoever this category—if that is what we can call it—has come to be revised and by whom. Rather, by situating Stevens in the broader historical narrative of disenchantment, the present thesis will throw into relief many of the tensions that would arise with the ascendancy of what Charles Taylor calls ‘exclusive humanism’ (Taylor, 2007, 19). Taylor characterises exclusive humanism as an extreme anthropocentrism entailing the moral and political dispensation of human society derived entirely from an immanent self-sufficiency no longer reliant on appeals to, or extrapolations from, anything perceived to transcend the mundane world.2 Arguably, exclusive humanism arrives at a watershed with the advent of Romanticism in the late 18th century. Romanticism, in large part, came about as a reaction against the Enlightenment’s mechanistic worldview, to its tendentious scientism, sovereignty of reason, and post-deist marginalisation of humankind’s spiritual interconnection with 2 For a thoroughgoing explication of ‘exclusive humanism’ see: Charles Taylor, (2007), A Secular Age, Cambridge MA & London: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, esp. 19-21, 26-28, 41, 88, 98-99, 130, 134, 221, 233-234, 242-269, 636-642, 656, 768-769. ~ 9 ~ the divine. This thesis will discern Stevens’ work, for the most part implicitly, as a later development—whether combative, cooperative or collusive—of Romanticism’s afore- summarised reaction to the disenchantment of the world. As this thesis presupposes, Stevens inherits the basic dialectical conflict that his Romantic forebears—and, in turn, the Romantics’ myriad 19th century successors (French Symbolists, Victorian aesthetes, fin de siècle decadents, et al.)—had rendered explicit: namely the reception of discontents perceived to be brought about by disenchantment, and the myriad responsive strategies that are counterposed to these perceived discontents. For Stevens, though, disenchantment is not exclusively a source of discontent. The frequently invoked ‘modernist crisis of faith’ would constitute an alarmist hyperbole when applied to the case of Stevens. Scott Freer, to cite a recent instance, correctly observes that: ‘Stevens is not a disillusioned modernist and the death of God is a positive condition for poetic liberation’ (Freer, 2015, 185). Stevens, as we will come to see, believes that the world has been disenchanted (although he does not phrase it in these terms), and that in consequence there is a desire, a necessity even, to undertake a comprehensive project of spiritual renovation. Leon Surette argues that Stevens is quite unique among his major contemporaries: ‘Eliot, returned to orthodox Christianity; others, such as Yeats, Robert Graves and Ezra Pound, turned to more esoteric forms of belief. Stevens alone among the major figures sought to articulate an alternative faith, one that made shift to do without transcendence, and without divinity, but without surrendering the emotional intensity of religious belief. In choosing that route, Stevens chose the more difficult course’ (Surette, Spring 2005, 144-45). Stevens’ choice to dispense with orthodox and esoteric belief systems, and yet still strongly defend what he considers art’s spiritually compensatory function in an age in which he would say ‘We believe without belief, beyond belief’ (295), is what makes him such an ~ 10 ~ interesting poet to study from the perspective of secular disenchantment. It is primarily for this reason that I have chosen a similarly difficult course in taking Stevens as the subject of this study. The following series of quotations collocate a number of Stevens’ most pertinent claims for art’s spiritually compensatory function. In a late essay entitled ‘The Relations Between Poetry and Painting’, Stevens remarks, ‘that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost’ (748). In ‘Two or Three Ideas’, another late essay, Stevens makes a closely worded claim for poetry in particular: ‘In an age of disbelief, or, what is the same thing, in a time that is largely humanistic, in one sense or another, it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief, in his measure and in his style’ (841). Poetry is, after all, Stevens’ vehicle for engaging in the compensatory activity of spiritual renovation: ‘After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence that takes its place as life’s redemption’ (901). This attitude finds its starkest expression in section V of the long aphoristic poetic sequence ‘The Man With the Blue Guitar’: ‘Poetry / Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns, // Ourselves in poetry must take their place’ (136-37). According to Stevens the art can provide an alternative means to religion to reveal and confirm value: ‘The relation of art to life is of the first importance especially in a skeptical age since, in the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support they give’ (916). The poet’s ‘role, in short, is to help people to live their lives’ (661). The rest of this introductory chapter will elaborate upon the aforementioned claims Stevens makes for art and particularly poetry. This investigation will be ~ 11 ~ conducted in relation to further and frequently inconsistent positions Stevens expresses on religion and belief over the course of his adult life.
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