The Transparent Lyric: Reading and Meaning in the Poetry of Stevens and Williams
226
The Transparent Lyric: Reading and Meaning in the Poetry of Stevens and Williams
226Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Originally published in 1984.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691612508 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #513 |
| Pages: | 226 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Transparent Lyric
Reading and Meaning in the Poetry of Stevens and Williams
By David Walker
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1984 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06606-6
CHAPTER 1
The Transparent Lyric
I seem'd about this period to have sight
Of a new world, a world too, that was fit
To be transmitted and made visible
To other eyes, as having for its base
That whence our dignity originates,
That which both gives it being and maintains
A balance, an ennobling interchange
Of action from within and from without,
The excellence, pure spirit, and best power
Both of the object seen, and eye that sees.
Wordsworth, The Prelude
... Description is
Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye.
It is an expectation, a desire,
A palm that rises up beyond the sea,
A little different from reality:
The difference that we make in what we see
And our memorials of that difference,
Sprinklings of bright particulars from the sky.
Stevens, "Description Without Place"
The inevitable flux of the seeing eye toward measuring itself by the world it inhabits can only result in ... crushing humiliation unless the individual rise to some appropriate coextension with the universe. This is possible by aid of the imagination.
Williams, Spring and All
It was not so much the lost terrestrial,
The snug hibernal from that sea and salt,
That century of wind in a single puff.
What counted was mythology of self,
Blotched out beyond unblotching....
Crispin was washed away by magnitude,
The whole of life that still remained in him
Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear,
Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh,
Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust.
Wallace Stevens' early mock-epic, "The Comedian as the Letter C" (CP, 27-46), is a parable of the modern self, tracing through the adventures of its "minuscule" hero a central fact of modern intellectual experience. Setting out from his comfortable eighteenth-century world "of simple salad-beds, / Of honest quilts" for an ocean voyage to Yucatan, Havana, and Carolina, Crispin is shocked into a crisis of identity by the sheer power and magnitude of the sea. His "eye of land" no longer suffices in this "inscrutable world," where all of nature is reduced to the mindless, uncontrollable "slap and sigh" of waves. The apparent hostility of the landscape shatters his complacent convictions:
The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,
The dead brine melted in him like a dew
Of winter, until nothing of himself
Remained, except some starker, barer self
In a starker, barer world....
... Crispin
Became an introspective voyager.
The history of modern thought and art may be read as a series of such introspective voyages — with widely divergent destinations, certainly, but originating in essentially the same disturbing confrontation between the self and an alien world.
This sense of disjuncture had its roots in the emphasis of such diverse thinkers as Augustine, Luther, and Descartes on the subjective freedom of the ego, and developed into the radical individualism of the Romantic period. The general world view that emerged among the important philosophers of mind and art at the beginning of the nineteenth century was potentially bleak and dangerous. According to the English empiricists, nature was mechanical and empty, all a priori knowledge was suspect, and man's understanding of the world was confined to the limited light he could cast on it. In his account of the sources and development of Romantic theory, M. H. Abrams emphasizes the powerful impact of the ethical system of Kant,
with its basic concept of man "as belonging to two worlds" — the noumenal and phenomenal worlds — and its consequent view that to be civilized involves a continuous tension, which can never be completely resolved, between the categorical demands of the noumenal ego, or moral will, which assumes absolute freedom, and the inescapable limitations of the phenomenal ego, or man as a part of nature, and therefore subject both to his instinctual and sensual drives and to the laws of strict causal necessity.
The naturalization of the universe, and the consciousness of man's ontological separation from it, helped to provoke the familiar Romantic appeal to the organic faculty of imagination. Through the power of imaginative vision, man could hope to bridge the gap between subject and object, to restore a vital, significant relationship between the self and nature, and to rediscover meaning in a fragmented universe. In an act of sympathetic intuition, the imagination could identify itself with its object, and in that moment of direct perception could effect a bond between the self and the external world.
A corollary of the Romantic emphasis on the shaping spirit of the imagination is the view of nature as symbolic. Blake's conviction that the phenomenal world was corrupt and deceptive, and that the task of the visionary eye was to penetrate to the spiritual truth that natural objects concealed, is only an extreme version of a general Romantic tendency. "I always seek in what I see," Shelley said, "the likeness of something beyond the present and tangible object." The positions of both Wordsworth and Coleridge were considerably more divided, emphasizing the concrete, vital reality of phenomenal nature, and at the same time attempting to sustain a vision of transcendental order as revealed by the natural world. The role of the imagination, according to Coleridge's "Dynamic Philosophy," was to merge the worlds of objects and of forms, the real and the ideal, in a moment of resonant, generative perception. And the purpose of art was in turn to capture that moment of synthesis in a form which represented both fact and vision; as Coleridge said in his lecture, "On Poesy or Art,"
Art itself might be defined as of a middle quality between a thought and a thing, or ... the union and reconciliation of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human. It is the figured language of thought, and is distinguished from nature by the unity of all the parts in one thought or idea. ... To make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature, — this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts.
The goal of Romantic poetry as expressed by Coleridge, then, may be seen as a kind of unifying vision-, moving both sympathetically outward toward the object and self-consciously inward, in order to reveal the truth of subjective vision without distorting the evidence of the objective world.
But poetry so dependent on individual perception always runs the risk of some distortion, of swinging toward the pole of absolute subjectivity. Although the value of their art depended on the authenticity of personal vision, the Romantics persistently sought ways to escape the obsessive threat of solipsism. The tension that inevitably resulted is seen clearly in the case of Keats, the Romantic poet most deeply concerned with transcending the boundaries of individual consciousness. Keats believed his imagination capable of moving beyond himself to ecstatic union with nature through the empathic faculty of Negative Capability. Distinguishing himself from "the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime," he relished his "camelion" character:
A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity — he is continually in for — and filling some other Body — The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute — the poet has none; no identity.
This kind of imaginative projection may well have served in his own experience of reverie to liberate Keats from egotism; as he said, "if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existince and pick about the gravel." Indeed, this sensation of radical sympathy, or Einfühlung, is variously described by all the Romantics. But since writing is inevitably a self-conscious action, to write a poem about such an experience is paradoxical. The subject of the "Ode to a Nightingale," for example, is the urge to be liberated from the self, and to merge with the transcendental harmony and perfection that the nightingale represents. Given the extraordinary power of Keats' imagination, he may well have had the experience of momentarily merging with the bird on that sunny morning in 1819. But in writing a poem about the experience, no matter how immediate and transparent his description, he paradoxically affirms the ultimate separation from the world implicit in his act of consciousness. As Robert Pinsky notes, "the more actively he pursues the natural world he loves, the more alienated he is from it, for its attribute is not to enumerate. Above all, the more he knows it or tries to perfect that knowledge in his writing, the more he widens the gap between himself and it, because its essence is not to be conscious at all. In effect, it is this unconsciousness or 'pure' being which he loves, and the more he knows and articulates the object of his love, the less like it he is." The process of organizing his experience into poetic form divides Keats from nature's blissful ignorance, and tolls him back to his sole self as unrelentingly as the word "forlorn."
This separation is further compounded by the act of reading the poem. The "I" whose voice we hear is recognizably different from ourselves, and the experience he describes remains emphatically his rather than ours. The reader of the poem — we might say of Romantic poems in general — occupies the same position as the reader of "Lycidas," spying from behind a tree while the shepherd laments the loss of his friend. The meaning and movement of the poem are controlled by the meditation of the lyric speaker. And though we are always required to engage the experience that the poem describes with our imaginations, and may often sympathize deeply with it, we inevitably remain observers, perceptibly distanced from the visionary moment toward which the poem moves.
The reader of the Romantic meditative lyric, then, is distanced from the phenomenal world of the poem, from the nature its lyric speaker encounters, in two distinct ways: by the poet's own self-consciousness, necessary to write the poem, and by the recognition that the poem reflects the experience of an identifiable discrete personality. The nightingale is perceived not directly but indirectly, at two removes, and the medium of the text serves not to project an ecstatic moment but to record an experience already achieved. For the reader, I would argue, the rhetorical stance of the poem effectively prevents that ideal merger of self and nature, of mind and object, that Coleridge compellingly described.
This separation is even more clear in "Tintern Abbey." The power of Wordsworth's poem is in its meditative movement, its drama of a mind confronting experience and attempting to reconcile the inner and outer landscapes. Yet despite the essentially restless, exploratory character of the poem, the reader is fundamentally excluded from its action except as sympathetic listener. The poem's subject is the struggle to redeem and recreate an active bond with the world of external nature, but its dialectic operates entirely between the poet and nature and does not require the reader's presence. The reader occupies a position strikingly analogous to that of the implied auditor in the poem, Wordsworth's sister, who is as passive as the poet is active. Dorothy exists in the poem primarily as an audience whom William can address, and onto whom he can project his fears and aspirations. She may sympathize deeply with his experience, but she does not share it — nor is she yet capable of doing so, as the poet makes clear:
in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes.
Wordsworth's attitude toward his sister and his reader is largely patronizing; he is "a man speaking to men," but from the distant heights to which his "more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness" have led him. And indeed, it is difficult to see how poetry grounded in expressive theories of art could do other than gravitate toward the subjective pole. If nature is symbolic and requires interpretation, if it presents itself as a puzzle that, as Wordsworth says, "yields up" meaning, then the poet assumes a primary interpretive role that inherently assigns to readers a secondary one. Keats (in his letters), Wordsworth (in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads), and the other Romantics to a lesser extent all demonstrate that they are very much aware of the reader reading their poems. In The Prelude(V. 591-605) Wordsworth likens poetry to nature as material for the reader's imagination to work on. Nevertheless, "nature" in the poem remains essentially shaped and interpreted by the lyric speaker's meditation. The dramatic structure of the Romantic lyric thus mediates between the reader and the phenomenal world of the poem. In this sense, the ideal Romantic sensation of simultaneous sympathy and self-consciousness, of fusing noumenal and phenomenal worlds, is not one the rhetorical strategy of the Romantic poem invites the reader to share.
* * *
As such critics as Robert Langbaum, Frank Kermode, and Harold Bloom have demonstrated, modern poets are clearly the inheritors of the Romantics, in their concern with the situation and process of the individual consciousness, and the expression of consciousness in works of imagination. The New Critical insistence on a division between Romanticism and Modernism has been widely displaced by the assumption that twentieth-century poetry is an extension of the Romantic tradition. But recent attempts to demonstrate that inheritance have minimized some crucial distinctions. Though Stevens' Crispin shares the Romantic crisis of alienation from the landscape, his response is essentially anti-Romantic:
... Severance
Was clear. The last distortion of romance
Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea
Severs not only lands but also selves.
Here was no help before reality.
Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.
The imagination, here, could not evade,
In poems of plums, the strict austerity
Of one vast, subjugating, final tone.
(CP, 30)
The Romantics' attempt to see beyond the disordered particulars of experience into a transcendent realm of unity and wholeness is for modern poets in general an evasive and falsifying impulse. Nature is no longer symbolic, but an irrational and autonomous "other"; as Stevens says, we live "in the world of Darwin and not in the world of Plato" (OP, 246). Stripped of the sanctions of Romantic idealism, the poet can no longer assume any inherent reciprocity between imagination and nature. Thus the other tenet of Romantic criticism — confidence in the power of the imagination to create harmonious bonds between self and world — also becomes suspect. If reality is shifting and ephemeral, then any attempt to establish a systematic communion with it is simply an egotistical projection and doomed to failure.
It may, of course, be argued that the notion of Romantic idealism is intensely problematic even among the High Romantics, that skepticism about the possibility of achieving a harmonious bond with the world of nature is very much a part of the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats. It may also be claimed that the reaction I have called anti-Romantic is simply a "swerving" firmly within the Romantic tradition. I would suggest simply that transcendentalism remains a fundamental ideal for the High Romantics, however problematic, and that the science and the new philosophies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make the idealist solution considerably more difficult for most poets of this century to accept. Further, this shift in sensibility has profound consequences for the formal and rhetorical strategies of modern poetry. Despite the proliferation of studies of the relation of modernism to Romanticism, most have focused primarily on philosophical and thematic issues; by exploring structural and rhetorical considerations, I hope to demonstrate some important differences in the situation of the modern poets in terms of their complex relation to their world, their language, and their audience.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Transparent Lyric by David Walker. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Contents, pg. ix
- Acknowledgments, pg. xvii
- Abbreviations, pg. xix
- 1. The Transparent Lyric, pg. 1
- 2. The Theater and the Book, pg. 36
- 3. The Motive for Metaphor 4 The Nothing That Is, pg. 63
- 4. The Nothing That Is, pg. 93
- 5. Machines Made of Words, pg. 117
- 6. Only the Dance, pg. 157
- Postscript, pg. 178
- Notes, pg. 189
- Index, pg. 199