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

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Beyers, Chris

The succeeding chapters investigate the ways that Stevens's ideas "stand midwife to vaster theoretical structures" (2002, 47) as Eeckhout puts it.The poetry enacts a tension "between intelligible thoughts and a counterforce that is constantly in the process of undercutting or resisting intelligibility" (29); it "constantly questioned the unity of the speaking subject" (41); its philosophizing combines vagueness and suggestiveness in a way that is "impossible to synthesize" (141); it wavers between assertions of the integrity of the thing itself and the idealist proposition that the mind creates the world; it wavers between the idea that poetry is a mirror held up to nature and that poetry is the sound and play of words; it meditates variously on metaphor's meaning. Throughout, Eeckhout's discussion is well supported and thoughtful.

The book's most impressive chapter is its sixty pages on "The Snow Man" and what people have said about it. Eeckhout concludes that the different readings are "caught up" in their "proper historicity" (2002, 111) but resists the notion that "anything goes."Yet as he begins to delineate the limits of interpretation, he traverses ground I find uncertain. He contends that the variety of readings of "The Snow Man" is in part sponsored by an aesthetic that valued "the greatest possible denotative and connotative variety," that "part of Stevens's project" was "that his texts should be able to branch out as much as possible within the limits of an aesthetically effective economy" (112). I find it unlikely that Stevens intended this. In his extensive correspondence, he often explains what he had in mind for particular poems. He said that a few early poems were "pure poetry" with no denotative meaning. More generally, he paraphrased, rather dully, the doctrine of this or that poem. Although he sometimes prefaced his remarks by saying that explanations might ruin the poems in question, he never said that he was multiplying meanings. When given the chance to say he wanted his poems to branch out as Eeckhout claims, Stevens never said it. It is hard to imagine why he would keep that a secret. Of course many readers have found the poems branching out, but a significant portion of those readers are committed to interpretive styles and theories of language that assume such branching must occur. Thus, as much as I love the chapter on "The Snow Man," I cannot agree with its concluding thesis. It appears that Eeckhout has mistaken the criticism for the work. Probably Eeckhout's conclusion is due to cordial collegiality-he wants to agree with everybody, and the only way he can harmonize Helen Vendler and James Longenbach is to say the poem embodies plentitude.

In Why Americans Hate Politics, E. J. Dionne argues that American political debate is still shaped by Cold War tensions, and thus "liberalism and conservatism are framing political issues as a series of false choices" (1991,11). The literary-critical version of this is the Blame-Everything-on-the-New-Critics approach, which has given many a book and article a straw man. Thus, it is refreshing to read in Joseph Harrington's Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U. S. Poetics that "it has become passe to critique the New Critics" (2002, 2), yet disappointing to see that he does it anyway. To be fair, his comments are more thoughtful than is generally the case, and such a critique is not out of place in his study. Still, I look forward to that day when some iconoclast from a non-prestigious university will insist on reading the New Critics through their qualifications and more careful considerations (instead of their most extreme assertions), and conclude either that "New Criticism" did not really exist, or that the New Critics very rarely practiced it.