A Forum on Stevens and Lyric Theory Introduction

Abstract

A Forum on Stevens and Lyric Theory Introduction Henry Weinfield “A MORE SEVERE, // More harassing master would extemporize / Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life,” wrote Wallace Stevens in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (CPP 415). Stevens is himself, of course, that more severe, more harassing master. There are other great twentieth-century poets who are also theorists of poetry, but what makes Stevens so distinctive is that his theory of poetry is not only contained and embodied in his poetry but articulated in it as well. T. S. Eliot (whom Stevens viewed as his main antagonist) was a great poet and a great theorist, but the two activities were separate for him, the one occurring in verse and the other in prose. William Carlos Williams (for whom Stevens had cordial feelings, but who is really his poetic antitype) made “No ideas but in things” his rallying cry (6–17), and one could even say that for him, by contrast, the theory of life is (or should be) the theory of poetry. Stevens, however, insisted that “It Must Be Abstract” (CPP 329). His imperative in both his poetry and his theory of poetry was to push the art of poetry as far as it could go, as far as he could make it go. Language—in its relation to both the heard and the seen—was his material; in this regard he was utterly concrete. He strove to arrive at “the still finer, more implacable chords” and to “make the visible a little hard // To see” (CPP 90, 275). For better or for worse, the theory of poetry was the theory of life for Stevens because what he says of his solitary singer in “The Idea of Order at Key West” was true for him as well: “there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made” (CPP 106). In recent years, after a hiatus in which the New Historicism held sway, there has been a good deal of renewed discussion of lyric theory, as manifested, for example, by the publication (only a year apart) of two anthologies and a work of theory: The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations, edited by Marion Thain (2013); The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (2014), which takes a critical stance against viewing the lyric as a stable genre; and Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015), which is at once a work of theory in its own right and an attempt to delineate both the genre of lyric poetry and the various [End Page 195] controversies pertaining to and surrounding it.1 However we understand the category of lyric poetry, even if we take the view that it is meaningless as a category and stands in the way of understanding, it is clear that Stevens, unlike other major twentieth-century poets—unlike Pound and Eliot, for instance—is a poet for whom the theory of poetry is essentially the theory of lyric poetry. For that reason, viewing Stevens in relation to the lyric can serve both to anchor the theoretical discussion and to shed light on Stevens’s work itself. That, in any event, was the idea out of which this forum emerged. It began life as a roundtable at the 2018 MLA Convention in Chicago. The idea for the roundtable came not from me but from one of the Associate Editors of this journal, Natalie Gerber, who, because I had recently published a review essay on Culler’s book (see Weinfield, “A/The”), suggested that I organize the session and in fact helped me to do so. Let me take this opportunity to express my gratitude to her as well as to the participants. The essays gathered here, as well as deepening our understanding of Stevens’s poetry, interact with lyric theory in a variety of ways. Two of the contributors, David Ben-Merre and Zachary Tavlin, focus on what Stevens called, in the poem of that title, “The Creations of Sound.” Ben-Merre’s essay, “Xs and Os: Chiasmus, Apostrophe, and the Lyric Subject in Stevens,” is interested in the...