Critical Studies in a Post-Theoretical Age: Three Books Sort of about Wallace Stevens

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Beyers, Chris

Again, such a critique only asks the book to do what it has no intention of doing. It may be that, in a few decades time, nearly everyone will have reached the conclusions that Santilli has, and that a bright graduate student will unearth this essay and, patronizingly, point out how it is indicative of the previous age's absurd assumptions.

Bart Eeckhout's Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing responds to theoretical pluralism much differently. It is in my view the best book there is delineating the shape of Stevens's criticism. Eeckhout's procedure is to contextualize a critic, provide a quotation, and discuss it. Ideas are discussed as ideas, not great truths to admire. Charles Altieri once remarked at a conference that theoretical critics must resist the urge to be brilliant. He explained that, the more abstruse the theory and difficult the reasoning, the more the critic had to work to be clear and coherent. Santilli wrote a brilliant book; Eeckhout wrote one that we can all use.

Eeckhout, surveying the "full-blown critical industry that has sprung up in [Stevens's] wake" (2002, 13), asks, "Why is it that this poetry has lent itself so well to professionalized academic appropriation-and of such diversity to boot?" (17). He positions his study as a complement to John Timberman Newcomb's Wallace Stevens and Literary Canons, which inquires into how ideologies and institutions have shaped the reception of Stevens's poetry. Eeckhout's intent is to investigate how the poetry's "intrinsic" characteristics (19), the "qualities of the poetry itself (20), helped shape its criticism. He goes on to say, a little unguardedly, "If the poetry has prompted so many critics to produce such a spate of commentaries, this must automatically and to a large extent be a function of its artistic mastery" (20). The rest of the book explores the theoretical and aesthetic dimensions (Eeckhout calls them "limits") of Stevens's corpus. Two aspects of Eeckhout's premise speak to the problem of theoretical pluralism

The first is the notion that a work's "intrinsic" mastery causes it to be written about. As of this writing, there are 1,667 entries for books, articles, and dissertations catalogued in the MLA index for Stevens. Is this abundance necessarily a condition of Stevens'poetry? For William Carlos Williams, there are 1,262 entries. There are 1,733 entries for Alfred, Lord Tennyson and 1,814 for Alexander Pope. Do these numbers prove Stevens is a better artist than Williams but worse than Tennyson or Pope? It strikes me that very few of the 852 entries for James Fenimore Cooper-and virtually none in the past twenty years-are related to that novelist's aesthetic abilities. The canon and existing institutions seem to me more obvious causes for criticism to be written. Most readers only know about books that have been put before them. Moreover, the Stevens critical industry has been greatly bolstered by the Wallace Stevens Society, which sponsors prizes, conferences, sections in conferences, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. Somebody looking to put a line on a vita is more likely to expend critical energy in a direction that will be rewarded, so the easier path is another essay about Stevens instead of, say, something new on Adelaide Crapsey (7 entries) or MacKnight Black (2 entries).