Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity

Charles Altieri, one of our foremost analysts of modernism, has in his recent work argued for the importance of the affects, which philosophy has too long subordinated to cognition and ethics. In Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, Altieri focuses his attention on modernist poetry, especially that of Wallace Stevens. He argues that critics have failed to appreciate the degree to which modernist poetry, like modernist art, breaks from the epistemology that arose from cultures of empiricism. If we recognize the limits of that authority we can also recognize the close positive affinities between how we feel and how we value.Nineteenth-century writing wanted to build values out of ways of looking at what could be established as fact. Early modernist poetry, particularly that of Stevens and Pound, labors to adapt Nietzschean attitudes toward poetry. Then Stevens embarked on an imaginative journey to find in linguistic activity itself a sufficient model for how we compose values. In both stages of his career facts must be respected, but they will not bear values simply by virtue of their connectedness to the world. We have to understand the constructive power taking place on intimate levels as we pursue that connectedness. Stevens matters, Altieri argues, because of the range and depth and intelligence by which he explores what such connectedness might involve. Stevens offers elaborate and moving experiments exploring how imaginative writing can help human beings grapple with questions about values that are at the very heart of our common experience.

Altieri provides the most authoritative treatment of Stevens in more than a decade.... He combines aesthetics and philosophy in a rigorous manner that is nonetheless resolutely literary. Wisely eschewing a commentary on all of Stevens's poems, Altieri extracts original interpretive insights from close reading, as seen in his discernment, in 'Farewell to Florida,' of a flight from the female that is as much wishful thinking as renunciation, and a reading of 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' in which he emphasizes how the different perspectives ‘fuse’ over the disjunction emphasized by critics such as Harold Bloom. Altieri's detailed explication... reveals him as a dazzling reader of this difficult poet. Summing Up: Highly recommended.

Charles Altieri is Stageberg Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects, also from Cornell, and Postmodernisms Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts.