How to Live, What to Do: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens by Joan Richardson

Abstract

Reviewed by: How to Live, What to Do: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens by Joan Richardson Richard Deming How to Live, What to Do: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens. By Joan Richardson. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. More than thirty years have passed since Joan Richardson published her magisterial two-volume biography of Wallace Stevens, which has come to be foundational reading for any serious study of the poet. For a philosophically inclined writer such as Stevens, who resisted the personal and kept his private life guarded even from his closest of friends, a biography might seem beside the point, and yet Richardson's work remains replete with so many generative insights that it continues to deepen our collective understanding of Stevens and the intellectual context of his literary practice. The strength of Richardson's biography lies in the fact that within the frame of her scholarship the events and details of Stevens's life do not simply offer solutions for spotting and decoding tricky private allusions or providing historical explanations to thorny and contentious aesthetic claims made within the texts, but rather they provide a fecund context for tracking Stevens's own thinking about poetry as manifesting a relationship to a whole wide world that ever exceeds our ken. Richardson has always taken seriously the sense that the stuff of Stevens's life was, after all, a "radiant and productive atmosphere" for his thinking, for his art (CPP 678). One sometimes wonders in the lapse of time after a biography appears—especially an extensive, even definitive critical biography—how the biographer's sense of the subject might continue to evolve and develop. It is then fascinating to see Richardson return once more to a sustained engagement with Stevens because, after all this time, she is not the same reader as she was in the 1980s, having produced admirable monographs on natural history, science, and American philosophy in Pragmatism and American Experience (Cambridge UP, 2014) and A Natural History of Pragmatism (Cambridge UP, 2007). Indeed, Richardson brings this whole range of intellectual histories and diverse methodologies to bear on her newest book, How to Live, What to Do: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens. Characteristically erudite and probing, Richardson offers a searching set of thirteen meditations or "transcendental etudes" that bring to light a constellation of sympathetically resonant yet disparate elements—from quantum physics to prayer, from cognitive science to photography—all provoked, that is to say, "called forth," by Stevens's poems and his Adagia. In order to read Stevens in ways that expand and enlarge the possibilities of a critical imagination, Richardson follows threads and pursues intuitions rather than narrowing to a single thesis. In short, the more frames of reference one brings to Stevens's poems and his prose, Richardson seems to argue, the more particles and particulars of potential meaning one finds there. The title How to Live, What to Do may borrow from Stevens's poem, but we see quickly that the stakes are in earnest, for Richardson employs the allusion [End Page 268] in order to situate the moral value of Stevens's "August Imagination" (CPP 471). Poetry, we might say, is a way of learning to live within language. Richardson twice cites Harold Bloom's recent insistence in The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime that "Stevens has helped me to live my life" (402), a claim with which she clearly identifies. In fact, Richardson's approach to the poems could be described as Midrashic, especially in light of her contention, "Reading [Stevens's] poems, we learn the same habit of close attention, intense concentration, demanded by prayer; his body of work a breviary, a primer in practicing a 'constant sacrament of praise' for mere being" (18–19). Lest this be seen as primarily a theological argument, Richardson also asks, "What is or how is it to be in spacetime, knowing that we are simultaneously suspended in, bombarded by, and penetrated through by fields of energy we can never see or feel?" (26). Stevens's aesthetics, she argues, offers "a response to this monumental shift in conceptualizing our cosmic situation" that came about with...