Teaching Literature: The Force of Form Denis Donoghue (bio) I I begin with two occasions in the discourse of modern poetry. The first occurred on 8 December 1936 when Wallace Stevens gave a lecture at Harvard under the title “The Irrational Element in Poetry.” His theme was the pressure of the contemporaneous since the outbreak of the Great War. Before 1914, “the sea was full of yachts and the yachts were full of millionaires,” or so it seemed. It was a time when “only maniacs had disturbing things to say.” 1 But in December 1936 it already appeared to Stevens and to other sane people that “we look from an uncertain present toward a more uncertain future.” As a result: One feels the desire to collect oneself against all this in poetry as well as in politics. If politics is nearer to each of us because of the pressure of the contemporaneous, poetry, in its way, is no less so and for the same reason. . . . The trouble is that the greater the pressure of the contemporaneous, the greater the resistance. Resistance is the opposite of escape. The poet who wishes to contemplate the good in the midst of confusion is like the mystic who wishes to contemplate God in the midst of evil. There can be no thought of escape. Both the poet and the mystic may establish themselves on herrings and apples. The painter may establish himself on a guitar, a copy of Figaro and a dish of melons. These are fortifyings, although irrational ones. The only possible resistance to the pressure of the contemporaneous is a matter of herrings and apples or, to be less definite, the contemporaneous itself. In poetry, to that extent, the subject is not the contemporaneous, because that is only the nominal subject, but the poetry of the contemporaneous. Resistance to the pressure of ominous and destructive circumstance consists of its conversion, so far as possible, into a different, an explicable, an amenable circumstance. (229–30) The conversion entails, for the most part, “the transposition of an objective reality to a subjective reality.” The transaction between reality and the sensibility of the poet, according to Stevens, is precisely that (224). It may not be possible to change a brute fact to a more amenable fact—these are my words, not Stevens’s—but the imagination can transform the appearances and the seemings, such that a subjective reality appears to emerge, at least while the going is good. The [End Page 5] imagination, “the violence within,” as Stevens elsewhere called it, engages with reality, the “violence without,” 2 and allows the poet to feel that a new reality, subjective indeed, has been produced. Many of Stevens’s poems—not all of them—take this transformation as their motive. They begin with his conviction, expressed in “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” that: From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days. 3 Most of Stevens’s poems are the work of unblazoned days in which the mind, as in Marvell’s “The Garden,” proposes to annihilate “all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade.” Or to a green image in a green shade, if we accept Emmanuel Levinas’s insistence, in “Reality and its Shadow,” that “the most elementary procedure of art consists in substituting for the object its image. Its image, and not its concept. A concept is the object grasped, the intelligible object. Already by action we maintain a living relationship with a real object; we grasp it, we conceive it. The image neutralizes this real relationship, this primary conceiving through action.” 4 In a work of art there are no real objects—no bullfights, no bear hunts—there are only, as Susanne K. Langer says in Feeling and Form, 5 virtual objects, images and shadows, offered to us in the hope of being perceived. The motive of literature, according to Stevens, is to make the world appear to be our own, if not ourselves. The second episode occurred in March 1938 when Archibald MacLeish published an essay entitled...
Read full abstract
Oct 1, 2010
Wei Xiaoping 
Open Access