Mythologies of Miswriting: Emerson, Stevens, and Blanchot

Abstract

Mythologies of Miswriting:Emerson, Stevens, and Blanchot Paul Kane I I WANT TO BEGIN by noting something George Santayana, the renowned philosopher and poet whom Wallace Stevens knew at Harvard, said of Ralph Waldo Emerson (who, famously, was banned from Harvard for thirty years): He was like a young god making experiments in creation: he blotched the work, and always began again on a new and better plan. Every day he said, "Let there be light," and every day the light was new. His sun, like that of Heraclitus, was different every morning. (219) I'm interested in Santayana's use of the unusual word "blotch," which, in this context, looks like a portmanteau word combining "botch" with "blot," wherein the failure referred to is not quite a botch but a bit more than a blot. Marie Borroff, in her essay "Wallace Stevens's World of Words," addresses such "blotches" because they also show up in Stevens's poem "A Lot of People Bathing in a Stream" (CPP 321). She suggests that the term owes something "to an obsolete word plotch" (44), which the OED defines as a "spot" or—indulging its own pleasures of merely circulating—a "blotch." I find Santayana's use of the word intriguing because it echoes Emerson's own sense of the way all creations, all poems, are blotches, or, as he says in "The Poet," "miswritings": For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. (Essays 449) [End Page 41] To me, this notion of miswriting (blotching the work) is central to Emerson's poetics and poetry, and I think it has bearing on Stevens's work as well. The movement from Emerson to Stevens is by now a well-worn track, but I'm going to take a more circuitous path by way of interpretation. And while I'm not sure this is a "new and better plan," or that I'll be able to say "Let there be light" (I'm hardly a "young god"), it is nonetheless intended to be in the spirit of Emersonian experiment. To continue with Emerson: in his essay "The Poet" (one of his longest1), the transvaluation of poetry is so extreme that it becomes clear Emerson's ideal poet does not exist and never has, except as an idealized or mythologized being, such as Uriel or Seyd (Saadi) in the poem "Uriel" (the "greatest Western poem yet," according to Robert Frost—another trans-valuation2). In that poem, the archangel poet gives his "sentiment divine" as follows (Essays 1065): "Line in nature is not found;Unit and universe are round;In vain produced, all rays return;Evil will bless, and ice will burn." (1065–66) This apostasy leads to a chaos of confusion and the cosmic poet forever withdraws, though on certain occasions "Uriel's voice of cherub scorn" can be heard, shaking the gods, they know not why (1066). This veiling of divine poetry leaves us bereft of its highest manifestations. It's akin to saying, in response to the complaint that there's no justice in the world, that of course there isn't, Astraea left in dismay a long time ago. But Emerson is nonetheless keen to detail in "The Poet" the process of making poems, and I think we can hear something of his own practice adhering in his remarks. In particular, there is this well-known assertion: For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. (Essays 450) I want to linger over this passage because I find it...