Stevens’s Poetics of Atmosphere in “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”

Abstract

Stevens’s Poetics of Atmosphere in “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” Thomas Sorensen Bo Ya the qin [zither] player strummed, his thoughts on climbing tall mountains. Ziqi the woodcutter, happening nearby, said, “How splendidly you play! Soaring like the mountains!” Another day, Bo Ya’s thoughts turned to flowing waters, and Ziqi said, “Your qin! It roils and washes like a river!” The two became fast friends, and years later when Ziqi died, Bo Ya smashed his qin and cut its strings. Till the end of his days he never played again because nobody in the world could hear his tone.1 A PLACE, whether a mountain slope or a river side, evokes an im- pression characteristic of that place. A melody evokes an impres- sion characteristic of that melody. It is possible for these impressions to resemble one another. A hard-to-describe aesthetic quality unifies places and works of art alike, and watches over their correspondences. We sometimes call this quality “atmosphere,” a metaphor old enough to have achieved the consistency of a term. We are used to speaking of the serious atmosphere of a meeting room or the tense atmosphere of a family reunion. Even restaurant menus or hotel brochures showcase their venues’ cozy, relaxed, or professional atmospheres. When we speak of atmosphere in this way, we indicate the aesthetic impression of an environment as a whole.2 Unlike other aesthetic effects, atmosphere is not confined to a part or a subset of parts: everything in an environment tinges the atmosphere, no matter how minute. To paint the walls a different color, to change the music playing, to rearrange the furniture, necessarily alters the atmosphere of a given room. The work of the German philosopher Gernot Böhme has recently initiated a surge in the critical analysis of atmosphere. What distinguishes Böhme’s work from earlier investigations is that he theorizes not only the nature but also the production of atmospheres. It is now possible to consider not only what atmospheres are, but also how artists consciously [End Page 73] orchestrate them. The past twenty years have seen studies of atmosphere in fields as diverse as architecture, cognitive science, and anthropology.3 Although literary studies is somewhat late to the game, critics have already begun to develop the promise of atmosphere as an enabling term for such fields as ecocriticism, affect theory, post-Marxism, critical race theory, and new formalism.4 With the exception of Anna Jones Abramson’s 2018 article on Joseph Conrad, however, most of these studies treat atmosphere thematically, at the level of the text’s ideational content. We still lack the critical apparatus for analyzing the specific formal strategies that authors devise to generate a distinct, pervasive sense of atmosphere. Yet I can’t imagine any debate in literary studies that wouldn’t benefit from the development of this apparatus. Any stakes literary criticism pursues necessarily draw upon textual data, and these require attention to atmosphere. Thus, although my interest here will be mainly formalist, I want to undertake the following investigation with an eye to extending established approaches to atmosphere in the field of literary studies. Ever since the New Critics set the terms of the debate in academic poetry studies, atmosphere has been considered too nebulous for analysis. In Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson is blunt about the limits of its usefulness: “Criticism can only state that it is there” (qtd. in Stanley 121). In Understanding Poetry, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren admittedly read Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume” as a case study in atmospheric style, yet they approach atmosphere only implicitly, as a side effect of more definite formal variables such as rhythm and imagery (358–62). More recently, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature investigates how literary texts “soak up the atmosphere of their times” and then release it into the air of later generations, so that when we read Shakespeare’s sonnets we cannot help but experience the atmosphere of Shakespeare’s London (40). However, like the New Critics, Gumbrecht remains “skeptical about the power of ‘theories’ to explain atmospheres and moods,” and doubts the “viability of ‘methods...