The New Wallace Stevens Studies ed. by Bart Eeckhout and Gül Bilge Han

Abstract

Reviewed by: The New Wallace Stevens Studies ed. by Bart Eeckhout and Gül Bilge Han Ian Tan The New Wallace Stevens Studies. Ed. Bart Eeckhout and Gül Bilge Han. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 246. $99.99 (cloth); $80.00 (eBook). The New Wallace Stevens Studies seeks to extend the continuing importance of Stevens criticism into the present century by presenting “confluences of what used to be there, what happens to be here, and what is in the process of becoming” (1). The book opens up new possibilities of reading Stevens in the light of contemporary theoretical movements in the humanities, neurosciences, and environmental studies, while preserving the impression of the poet as responding to the intellectual and cultural currents of Anglo-American modernism in the locality of his sensibilities as a poet-businessman based his entire life in Hartford, Connecticut. Divided into three sections, this collection of essays presents curated critical perspectives of Stevens which consciously foreground emerging scholarly voices that engage with what the editors Bart Eeckhout and Gül Bilge Han term “new fields, cutting-edge theories, and untried methodologies” (3) in seeking innovative approaches through which to explicate Stevens’s often repetitious claims about imaginative vitality and its relationship to reality. Subtitled “Emerging Concepts in Stevens Criticism,” part I of the essay collection presents updated perspectives on the politics found in Stevens, a poet who has been criticized for his inability to imagine a politics of the “real” despite his advocacy of the existential importance of the poetic imagination. Lisa Siraganian’s chapter, “Imperialism and Colonialism,” locates sites of poetic complexity in the verse that speak to the complicated conditions underlying the poet’s comfortable surveyal of political movements from a distance. Siraganian posits an overarching dialectic at work in Stevens’s appropriation of world-events into the ambit of poetic consciousness, claiming that “Stevens was invested in the problem of imperialism—to the extent that he was—because imperialism entailed a belief system that so obviously produced very real and consequential world actions and events” (18). In turn, these events enhance a collective impression of “worldly effects” (18) that become fodder for the imagination. The abstractive force of this dialectic (as [End Page 441] it is played out at a distance) means that it is difficult to flesh out an emancipatory stance in Siraginian’s construction of Stevens’s politics—what emerges is a Stevens who is interested in the imaginative affordances which “a distant world” provides only to the extent that that world does not “produce a situation threatening the possibility of poetry” (20). The value of experience with respect to questions of utopia in Stevens is articulated in the next chapter, “The Politics of Utopia,” by Douglas Mao, whose reading of Stevens reveals a complicated investment in projects of utopianism because of the sheer idealizing tendencies behind Stevens’s poetic statements, which seem to offer a political vision of harmonic totality without the specificities of direction and reform. The problem of how to move from the solitary space of imaginative experience towards a communal understanding of the material conditions of togetherness is further extended in Christopher Spaide’s chapter, “Community and Audience,” where the conclusion that “Stevens’s truest subject is not community, not individuality, but the never-settled contest between the two” (54) returns the reader’s attention to the image of Stevens that part I of the book seems to create: a poet whose relationship to “reality,” as mediated by the profusions of the lyrical voice positioned as the “single artificer of the world / In which she sang,” is less of a coherent response than a complex dialectic between abstraction and appropriation.1 Part II of the essay collection collocates Stevens’s poetry with “a variety of [recent] methodological and theoretical advances” (6) that demonstrate the poet’s relevance to current debates about the intersectionality between language, ecology, the neurosciences, and urban phenomenology. Cary Wolfe’s chapter, “Ecological Poetics,” argues against the critical tradition which reads Stevens phenomenologically in order to advance a “nonrepresentational understanding of ecological poetics” (102). Although resolutely distancing itself from the language of high phenomenology à la Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger so as to...