Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity by Ian Tan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity by Ian Tan Krzysztof Ziarek Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity. By Ian Tan. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Ian Tan’s book is the first extended study of Wallace Stevens devoted almost entirely to the conversation of Stevens’s poetic oeuvre with Martin Heidegger’s ideas about poetry, dwelling, and the event (das Ereignis). What sets the study apart from other scholarly books or essays that explore the relation between Stevens and Heidegger is, first, the comprehensive nature of Tan’s treatment of Stevens, which begins with Harmonium and proceeds all the way to the last poems from 1954–55; and second, the focus on Heidegger’s notion of the Ereignis. It is indeed the Ereignis that constitutes not only the pivot of Tan’s presentation of Heidegger but also the prism for his extensive analysis of Stevens’s poetry. The linchpin of Tan’s argument finds its explicit articulation in the section title “The Appropriative ‘Force’ of Ereignis and Poetry” (15). While many critical texts highlight the proximity (of poetic interests) between Stevens’s late poetry and Heidegger’s thought, Tan argues for adopting the Heideggerian lens for both early and late poems by Stevens. Such a lens does not mean that Heidegger’s work provides a rigid interpretative framework but rather that the understanding of the event as an opening to being (beyond metaphysical ideas and figurations) can be traced throughout Stevens’s poems and his reflections on poetry. Chapter 1, which serves as the Introduction, locates Stevens, and more broadly the relation of poetry and philosophy, in the context of phenomenology [End Page 117] and post-phenomenological thought (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Nancy, among others), with the emphasis on the quasi-transcendental sense of presence elaborated there. The book patterns its approach after “the phenomenological significance of poetry in order to read Stevens’ poetic output as dramatisations of Heideggerian appropriations of Being” (16). This approach is developed in chapters 2 and 3, first by reexamining how Stevens and Heidegger can be read in conversation and then by outlining the significance of later Heidegger’s thought, especially about the event, for reading Stevens. Subsequent chapters trace the arc from Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium, through the relation between poetry and politics in the 1930s, to the idea of the Supreme Fiction, and the question of being in the late poetry. Some of the most interesting insights come in chapter 4, “Considering Presence and Place in Stevens’ Harmonium,” and in particular the discussion of poems like “Sunday Morning” and “The Comedian as the Letter C,” which are rarely studied in the context of scholarship inspired by phenomenological thought and which are presented by Tan in terms of “poetic appropriations” of being, anchored in Heidegger’s discussion of the event and poetic dwelling. What is novel, at least to my knowledge, is that the reading of those early poems focuses on tracing proximity to being in terms of a non-metaphysical sense of presence evoked in them. Tan’s claim is that these approximations of being eschew the subject-object divide and move away from the representational view of language. Perhaps the most characteristic reading for this chapter comes in the section entitled “‘Sunday Morning’ and the Post-Metaphysical Poem” (73–75), in which Tan characterizes the poem’s crucial theme in terms of freedom toward “an authentic attunement facing Being and our possibilities to be” (75). While I like the emphasis on the relation to being, a more developed analysis of Stevens’s language in the poem, tracing its “post-metaphysical” openings, would be important in this context. Chapter 5 examines the contentious interpretations of Stevens’s relation to politics, trying to nuance the approach to the political dimension of poetic writing, especially given Stevens’s predilection toward abstraction, which is often discounted as divorced from historical reality or uninterested in contemporaneous affairs. Tan’s position is that politics in Stevens does not manifest in terms of commitment, critique, or commentary but makes itself known through transforming our relation to the world by means of the imagination. In this manner, poetry “opens up...