Nobility, Tautology, Identity: Form in Helen Vendler’s Stevens

Abstract

Nobility, Tautology, Identity:Form in Helen Vendler’s Stevens Siobhan Phillips WHEN CONSIDERING HELEN VENDLER’S Wallace Stevens, I would like to begin at the beginning. Or rather, at what was almost not a beginning. In a 2001 talk, Vendler remembered that time when she was thirty-four, in 1967. I was divorced, raising my son David, receiving minimal child-support ($90 per month), and working very hard teaching ten courses a year. . . . I’d begun a book on Stevens, but my energy was flagging, and I had no money for child care or household help. One night, exhausted, I tried to think how to make my life easier. I obviously had to continue teaching and keeping house and taking care of my young son. The only way I could make my life easier was to give up writing. “They can’t make me,” I said to myself in panic and fear and rage, “They can’t make me do that.” I suppose “They” were the Fates, or the Stars; but I knew that to stop writing would be a form of self-murder. (“Life”) Anyone who has read Stevens might feel a chime of echo at the “panic and fear and rage” in Vendler’s account. Stevens describes something similar in his own talk, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” “It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without,” he explains there, adding that “It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation” (CPP 665). Stevens’ insistence on self-preservation compares to Vendler’s resistance to “self-murder.” Both rely on intellectual activity as a matter of subjective life and death. The link reminds us that Vendler’s work in the 1980s helped Stevens’ readers to see the passion, even the violence, inherent in what seemed like dry philosophizing. “[T]he role of feeling in Stevens’ poems has not yet been clarified,” Vendler writes in Words Chosen Out of Desire (10). We might say the same thing, now, about Vendler’s criticism. The stakes of Stevens’ work, to Vendler, are never merely intellectual. They are personal. “Personal” is the right word, because—as Stephen Burt emphasizes in his [End Page 177] own contribution to this special issue—Vendler insists on the human person behind Stevens’ work. “An abstraction blooded,” Stevens describes it, “as a man by thought” (CPP 333). (With the productive confusions characteristic of Stevensian metaphor, Stevens compares the immateriality of “abstraction” to the physicality of “man” and the passionate “blood” to the seemingly dispassionate “thought.”) In Vendler’s account of Stevens, thinking is feeling. To miss the desire is to misunderstand the words. The emphasis on the personal, however, coexists with another and more recognized aspect of Vendler’s practice. This is her allegiance to formalism: attention to the way poems are put together. However celebrated or denigrated, formalist methods do not demand an insistence on human feeling; formalist methods, indeed, could seem to point away from it. We can explain the potential oddity of the combination with a long view of twentieth-century literary scholarship: Vendler’s intellectual heritage, through New Critical predecessors to I. A. Richards, has always been tendentiously humanist, promoting a practical mode of engagement (the set of scientifically rigorous techniques known as close reading) as a means to assimilating a specific set of values (the repurposed religiosity of Western cultural ideals) (Graff 148 ff.). This narrative could explain Stevens’ supremacy as a subject here is a poet whose difficult surfaces conceal questions of post-religious meaning as well as Vendler’s success as a critic—here is a reader of unmatched interpretive skill who was trained as a scientist and raised in a religious household. It could explain, in turn, why Vendler’s formalist readings of Stevensian feeling now feel definitive, a culmination of twentieth-century exegesis, rather than a departure, as the introduction to Words Chosen Out of Desire felt itself to be in 1984. My discussion so far seems to demand a demystification of the link between a focus on form and a focus on personhood, which is everywhere apparent: one of Vendler’s earliest considerations, “The Qualified...