Wallace Stevens’s Point of View

Abstract

This chapter describes Wallace Stevens's pursuit of value from his point of view—especially during the act of writing. It begins with an account of his attitude toward his metaphysical need and then examines how three poems fail to satisfy it: “Sunday Morning” (1915, 1923), “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1934), and “Credences of Summer” (1947). Each poem, the chapter argues, approaches the problem of value as a problem of community formation. Each poem is an experiment—an attempt to coordinate a collective solution to the fact/value dichotomy that avoids both nihilism and what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls the “supernatural.” Ultimately, the chapter details how a fourth poem, “The Auroras of Autumn” (1948), solves the problem of value (for Stevens) by abandoning the idea of community altogether. The poem's success hinges on its inaccessibility—how it prevents readers from sharing Stevens's point of view.