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

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Beyers, Chris

Part of Harrington's critique is that the New Critics exerted cultural hegemony, and thus understanding their convictions means understanding canon formation and what he calls the "social form" of poetry. His definition is wide-ranging:

The social form includes the historical meaning of the genre; the institutional production of the "poetic" (by publishers or critics, for instance); the interpretations, reception, judgments, and uses to which readers subject poems; the identity of the poetry audience (whether represented statistically or rhetorically); the text's physical context of physical presentation or publication; and the roles and meanings of different poems and types of poetry as points within larger social relationships. (Harrington 2002, 4)

This historicist approach offers one answer to the problem of how to choose among theories. Harrington does not read texts "himself"; he shows us how various groups at certain times understood those texts. Of course, the book more accurately is Harrington's reading of others' readings. Yes, the historicist's will is still at work, but that does not mean the thing itself cannot be shown to some degree. Careful historicism offers something that other approaches do not: a check to the pure exercise of critical will.

Chapter one revisits debates on Modernist poetry, distinguishing thinkers like Archibald MacLeish, who thought that a poem should just "be," from more socially minded, genteel critics who thought it should "mean" and have a cultural value beyond itself. Harrington reminds us that those who held the latter view were plentiful and not intellectually bankrupt, suggesting we pay more attention to poetry clubs, newspaper poetry, and other popular forums.

Chapters two and three address Alan Tate and Wallace Stevens. He shows that Tate's poems and essays, often assumed to be conservative, are actually "a classical liberal reaction against twentieth-century 'social' liberalism." The classical liberal is something like what we would call libertarian today, focusing on individual rights and the limits of government. The social liberal embraced the New Deal and "equality and social solidarity" (2002, 59). However, Tate's classically liberal ideals were constantly in tension with his "longing for subsumption in a communal union" (72) and a Burkean notion of an organic state.

Because Stevens s poetry can also be read to support classical liberalism, his works were canonized by Tate and other New Critics. Harrington focuses on the thirties, when Stevens began writing poems about the Depression and social unrest. At the chapter's end, he recasts Stevens's imagination/reality dichotomy as "a sort of compromise-formation between what the author represents as a world-historical reality principle on one hand and a desire for autonomy-a desire to 'hug the purely local'-on the other" (2002,103).

This is a reasonable reformulation, but parts of his thesis deserve a closer look. For instance, he claims that Stevens's penchant for abstraction provides "a perspective from which Depression, war, and totalitarianism become less personal, more distant, and therefore more amenable" (2002, 95). In saying this, Harrington ignores the political virtues of philosophical idealism-until the following chapter, when it turns out the abstractions of syndicalist, Arturo Giovannitti, have progressive political value. The poems were "disinterested" and thus more "public" (113) because they "do not directly engage the politics of the day" (114); since the contemporary audience knew Giovannitti was a labor organizer, it would "fill in the specifics" (115). It is hard to dispute that the public identity of an author matters (if Karl Rove published an abstract poem, I for one would search for political meaning), yet this does not force the conclusion that an insurance lawyer's abstractions are necessarily bourgeois. My sense is that Harrington's definition of "social form" is too broad to apply consistently, and here he seems to be simply choosing sides-sides already chosen for him by the New Critics, even if he reverses their judgments.