Wallace Stevens: Poetry, Philosophy, and Figurative Language ed. by Kacper Bartczak and Jakub Mácha

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wallace Stevens: Poetry, Philosophy, and Figurative Language ed. by Kacper Bartczak and Jakub Mácha Krzysztof Ziarek Wallace Stevens: Poetry, Philosophy, and Figurative Language. Edited by Kacper Bartczak and Jakub Mácha. Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien: Peter Lang, 2018. As the title aptly conveys, this collection contains essays devoted to exploring the relation between poetry, philosophy, and language—in particular, the figure of metaphor—in Wallace Stevens’s poetry and essays. Most of the contributions were first presented as papers at the PhiLang conference at the University of Łódź, which took place on May 12–14, 2017. The introduction underscores the “amazingly contemporary and wide significance” of Stevens’s modernist poetry (11) and argues for the continuing interest in taking philosophical approaches to his work. It sketches briefly Stevens’s contribution to the aesthetic shifts in modernist poetry as well as the philosophical context (William James, George Santayana) in which his thinking about poetry developed. It also provides summaries of the essays and points to the growing scholarship that continues to read Stevens through the prism of philosophical approaches to knowledge and language, extending from Kant, Nietzsche, James, Husserl, and Heidegger to Derrida, Rorty, Murdoch, and Davidson. The eight essays are divided into two parts: the first four focus on the relation between poetry and philosophy while the second group addresses Stevens’s understanding of metaphor in the context of various philosophical and literary notions of metaphorical language. The essay opening the collection, “One Reason the Poetry of Wallace Stevens Matters Today,” by Charles Altieri, challenges the New Materialist approaches to aesthetic experience, which emphasize sensible, natural energy as influencing decisively the workings of the mind. Altieri invokes Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, in particular his notion of “inner sensuousness,” to stress the formative role of consciousness in shaping poetic sensibility. Wit Pietrzak’s “‘They Will Get It Straight One Day at the Sorbonne’: Wallace Stevens’ Intimidating Thesis,” critiques what he sees as reductive philosophical approaches to Stevens’s poetry, turning to the work of Simon Critchley, Richard Rorty, and American pragmatism to argue that the poetry resists any finality that philosophy (in Pietrzak’s and Stevens’s view) tries to impose upon it. Instead, poetry continues to develop new fictions, and this is what philosophers will get straight one day. The third essay, by Karl-Friedrich Kiesow, consists of two shorter texts, which explore the relationship between philosophy and poetry in Stevens and Paul Weiss. Its contribution lies in focusing on the role that Stevens’s work, especially the notion of “supreme fiction,” plays in Weiss’s understanding of human equality and dignity and in his theory of art. The essay closing the first part, Mácha’s “Reality Is Not a Solid: Poetic Transfigurations of Stevens’ Fluid Concept of Reality,” offers a very interesting conception of multiple layers or dimensions of reality in Stevens, outlined against the backdrop of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism. Part of his argument, contra Critchley, is that Stevens’s poetry can in fact help elucidate the obscurity of Schelling’s philosophical approach to the work of art. The most illuminating aspect of Mácha’s discussion is the fluid movement he traces in Stevens’s exploration of the changing relation between the mind and [End Page 292] the world through the various layers of “reality”—extending from what he terms initial reality through imagined reality to the final and then total reality. Crucial to his argument is the insistence on the essentially fluid character of reality in Stevens, which accounts for the fact that what Mácha calls the “agency” (more than human agency) moving and motivating reality in Stevens— sometimes called “Being”—cannot in fact be given any final or unique name. This Stevensian sense “of mere Being” can in turn help us understand how Schelling’s ground of all beings is no longer conceivable as a subject. Part Two of the collection offers essays devoted to language and metaphor in Stevens. Chris Genovesi’s “Au Pays de la Métaphore: Wallace Stevens and Interaction Theory” casts metaphor as a creative force that, though subjective, contributes to understanding and meaning on an objective level. Genovesi...