RICE UNIVERSITY Genial Thinking: Frost, Stevens, Ashbery by Andrew A. Klein A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE: Cary Wolfe, Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor, Director, English HOUSTON, TEXAS APRIL 2013 ABSTRACT Genial Thinking: Frost, Stevens, Ashbery by Andrew A. Klein This dissertation explores how Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery have responded to the problem of philosophical skepticism that they inherit from Emerson: that while things do in fact exist, direct knowledge of them is beyond our ken. Traditionally read within the framework of an evolving Romanticism that finds them attempting to resolve this problem through some form of synthesis or transcendence, I argue instead that these poets accept the intractability of the problem so as to develop forms of thinking from within its conditions. Chapter One explains why poetry is particularly suited to this sort of thinking and what it can achieve that philosophy (or at least a certain understanding of it) cannot. Chapter Two focuses on the act of listening in Stevens’s poetry as a way to show how Stevens is not, as is typically thought, interested in “the thing itself,” but in "the less legible meaning of sounds," the slight, keen indecision that resonates in between sense and understanding. Chapter Three focuses on those moments in Frost’s poetry when, instead of attempting to comprehend, seize, grasp, and represent reality through the use of metaphor, he chooses to regard its inappropriability or otherness. And Chapter Four focuses on how Ashbery’s constant shifts of focus are not just the wanderings of his mind, but a technique for disrupting our absorption in a single plane of attention so as to achieve new economies of engagement. Overall, though, the goal of this project is to move the discussion about this line of poets out of the epistemological register within which they are usually read and into an ethical one. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS _____________________________________________________________ This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of many people, but I would especially like to thank: Cary Wolfe—for blowing my mind during my first two semesters of graduate school and sending me on an intellectual journey that, even after writing this dissertation, I have barely begun; his advice in person and in writing has been invaluable and has forever changed the way I see the world and “our” place in it. Terry Doody—for opening me to the joys and wonders of poetry during a directed reading in my second year of graduate school; for taking me under his wing as a teaching assistant; and, most of all, for his unfailing intellectual and emotional support and encouragement. Philip Wood—for guiding me through the difficult terrain of 20th-century French philosophy in a way that not only provided me with competence in this extra-disciplinary field, but also set me on a strange path of “self”-exploration; I will always remember an impromptu lecture that he gave our seminar about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain: for that hour the entire human drama made sense to me. Susan Lurie—for meeting with me during the Spring of 2006, when I was still wait-listed at Rice; for her seminar on race and ethnicity in American culture where I learned a critical vocabulary that I still make use of today; for teaching me how to write a seminar paper; and for the kind words she offers each time I see her. Santiago Colas—for two classes during my senior year at the University of Michigan that changed the way I read and write. Señor Mason—for teaching me how to study. v Ben Saxton and Amelia Scholtz—for their encouragement, support, and friendship throughout the last eight years. Lina Dib—for turning me on to new avenues of research on a daily basis, reading everything I write, and, most of all, for believing in me. Damian Manire—for the countless hours he has spent on Skype talking with me about the pleasures and pains of writing and the role of literature in society (and for doing it all with a great sense of humor). Lu Berry—for her practical guidance and emotional support. Dave Nasser—for being there. My friends—without whom my life would be so much less. Above all, though, I would like to thank my family; they are behind every word that I write, and this dissertation is dedicated to them. CONTENTS ________________________________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION…1 1. THE POETICS OF SINGULARITY…25 2. THE TIMBRE OF THOUGHT: WALLACE STEVENS AND THE LESS LEGIBLE MEANINGS OF SOUNDS…71 3. THE REST OF IT: ROBERT FROST AND THE LIMITS OF METAPHOR…113 4. FLOW CHART: JOHN ASHBERY’S ECONOMIES OF ATTENTION…161 CONCLUSION…189 BIBLIOGRAPHY…193 1 INTRODUCTION… GENIAL THINKING ________________________________________________________________________ The world is enigmatical, every thing said & every thing known & done, & must not be taken literally, but genially.1 —Ralph Waldo Emerson According to Simon Critchley, modern philosophy begins in disappointment; that is, it begins “not, as ancient tradition relates, in an experience of wonder at the fact that things (nature, the world, the universe) are, but rather with an indeterminate but palpable sense that something desired has not been fulfilled, that a fantastic effort has failed.”2 Now, I’m not so sure that this dissertation qualifies as a work of philosophy, but it, too, begins in disappointment—and philosophical disappointment at that. Namely, it begins in disappointment with Kant’s settlement with skepticism, which—to spare you (and, frankly, me) from having to suffer through a full explanation of the Critique of Pure Reason3—I’ll simply summarize by citing the following two paragraphs from the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: Since the oldest days of philosophy inquirers into pure reason have conceived, besides the things of sense, or appearances (phenomena), which make up the sensible world, certain creations of the understanding, called noumena, which should constitute an intelligible world. And as appearances and illusion were by those men identified (a thing which we may well excuse in an undeveloped epoch), actuality was only conceded to the creations of thought. And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 351. 2 Simon Critchley, Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), xvii. All further references will be given parenthetically. 3 More seriously, though, I summarize here because I am less interested in what Kant himself actually said than I am in the way in which he has been inherited and interpreted by a certain critical tradition. 2 thing in its internal constitution, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something. The understanding therefore, by assuming appearances, grants the existence of things in themselves also, and so far we may say, that the representation of such things as form the basis of phenomena, consequently of mere creations of the understanding, is not only admissible, but unavoidable.4 Or, to hopefully make it even more accessible, here’s Stanley Cavell’s five-point schematization: (1) Experience is constituted by appearances. (2) Appearances are of something else, which accordingly cannot itself appear. (3) All and only functions of experience can be known; these are our categories of the understanding. (4) It follows that the something else—that of which appearances are appearances, whose existence we must grant—cannot be known. In discovering this limitation of reason, reason proves its power to itself, over itself. (5) Moreover, since it is unavoidable for our reason to be drawn to think about this unknowable ground of appearance, reason reveals itself to itself in this necessity also.5 No matter how you put it, though, the disappointing fact here is that, as Cavell explains, “[t]o settle with skepticism…to assure us that we do know the existence of the world or, rather, that what we understand as knowledge is of the world, the price Kant asks us to pay is to cede any claim to know the thing in itself, to grant that human knowledge is not of things as they are in themselves” (63). Thus, “Thanks for nothing,” Cavell says, because, in effect, Kant has left us in two incommensurable worlds, “in one of them determined, in the other free, one of which is necessary to the satisfaction of human Understanding, the other to the satisfaction of human Reason” (64). Or, rather, to follow this thought out, as Cavell does, because we are not fully at home in either world, we are, ultimately, in neither world, or, “as it is said, between worlds” (64). 4 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, with Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Gary Hatfield (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 61-62. 5 Stanley Cavell, “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant (Terms as Conditions)” in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford University Press, 2003), 62. All further references will be given parenthetically. 3 In short, then, my disappointment stems from the fact that, for all intents and purposes, we are caught between worlds, knowing, on the one hand, that things do in fact exist, but, on the other, that direct knowledge of them is beyond our ken. But, more than this—which, once you get used to it, seems entirely reasonable and not at all worth being disappointed about—my disappointment stems from the fact that there have been so few viable suggestions as to how philosophical thought should proceed in the wake of Kant’s settlement.