Ian Brinton reviews
by Edward Ragg
In this highly persuasive and readable account of the
later poetry of Wallace Stevens Edward Ragg examines the world of abstraction
and the practice of ‘the aesthetics of abstraction’ in the poet’s work. The
introduction, itself a model of clarity, looks at ‘how abstract reflections
conjure commonality, ordinariness and “the normal” without promulgating hollow
generalizations.’ One point of reference here is the attitude adopted by
Charles Tomlinson to Stevens’ early work. Looking at a 1964 interview with Ian
Hamilton it is easy to see why the young English poet and artist should feel
some disquiet about the American whose work he had first come across via his mentor
Donald Davie whilst studying at Cambridge:
It was a case of being
haunted by Stevens rather than of cold imitation. I was also a painter and this
meant that I had far more interest in the particulars of a landscape or an
object than Stevens. Stevens rarely makes one see anything in detail for all
his talk about a physical universe.
When he published his autobiographical sketches, Some Americans, in 1981 Tomlinson’s view
had become more generous. Not only did he recall how the early ‘Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird’ led him for a while to look from different angles at
separate instances of the meticulous but also how he had written an essay in
1951 on ‘The Comedian as Letter C’. Tomlinson sent the essay to Stevens and
received a courteous reply pointing out that the poem exploited sounds of the
letter c:
These sounds include all the
hard and soft variations and pass over into other sounds, or rather, the sound
of other letters…This grows tiresome if one is too conscious of it, but it is
easy to ameliorate the thing.
An odd way to write poems, reflected Tomlinson, ‘but a
regard for such minute particulars of language’ impressed him.
Ragg engages time and again with close textual
criticism taking the reader back to the words of the poems themselves and one
of his twenty-page tours de force is a close examination of the 1945 poem ‘The
Pure Good of Theory’ where he dwells upon Stevens’ obsession with time and
relates it to the allusions to Macbeth which haunt the piece. The poem, in four
sections, opens with ‘All the Preludes to Felicity’:
It is
time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the
mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is
destroyed by time.
Time is a horse that runs in
the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at
night.
The mind sits listening and
hears it pass.
It is someone walking
rapidly in the street.
The reader by the window has
finished his book
And tells the hour by the
lateness of the sounds.
As Ragg points out, because the mind, the intellect,
knows that it is destroyed by time the metaphorical use of horse ‘creates the
self-protective illusion that the mind can conquer, or at least be reconciled
to time.’ Metaphorical expression can have an ameliorating effect and the ‘mind
conceives time’s progress through metaphor because felicitous expressions are
palliative.’ However, pursuing his argument concerning the growth of
abstraction in Stevens’ poetry, Ragg suggests that this palliative metaphorical
world is abandoned ‘for abstract conception’:
Even
breathing is the beating of time, in kind:
A retardation of its
battering,
A horse grotesquely taut, a
walker like
A shadow in mid-earth…If we
propose
A large-sculptured, platonic
person, free from time,
And imagine for him the
speech he cannot speak,
A form, then, protected from
the battering, may
Mature: A capable being may
replace
Dark horse and walker
walking rapidly.
Here the metaphors are themselves ‘suspended in an
ellipsis which implies metaphor’s limitations’:
That is, the horse remains
‘taut’ and the walker as insubstantial as a ‘shadow’ because the mind realizes
metaphors cannot themselves ward off the ‘battering’ of time.
Ragg points to the abstract nature of a ‘platonic
person’ who is impossibly ‘free from time’, the preserve of the imaginative
mind:
Note how agency is given to
the ‘we’ who propose the figure, who must ‘imagine for him the speech he cannot
speak’. Rather than promulgate traditional metaphors for time, ‘The Pure Good
of Theory’ re-invests the mind with abstract creative power.
The poem’s third section, ‘Fire-Monsters in the Milky
Brain’, opens with a direct reference to Macbeth,
‘Man, that is not born of woman but of air’, alluding to one of the prophecies
made via the agency of the witches. Macbeth of course fails to understand the
double-truth and does not link the spirit’s words with the untimely ripping of
Macduff from his mother’s womb. A literal reading of a man born ‘of air’ leads
us to fantasy whereas reading the ‘man’ figuratively we are left to conclude
that ‘the abstraction requires further metaphor to come alive’. Referring to
the incorporeal nature of the witches Macbeth himself had suggested that they had
disappeared ‘Into the air, and what seemed corporal/Melted as breath into the
wind.’ What Macbeth fails of course to recognise is that the metaphor he uses
suggests that their presence is within himself and is only given shape by his
exhalations on a cold day.
The reality of Stevens is ‘like a sound in his mind’
as it occurs in one of the last of his published poems, ‘Not Ideas About the
Thing But the Thing Itself’:
At the
earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from
outside
Seemed like a sound in his
mind.
He knew he heard it……
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded
the choir.
It was part of the colossal
sun,
Surrounded by its choral
rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
Ragg’s totally engaging analysis of ‘The Pure Good of
Theory’ endorses his claims concerning abstraction as it testifies to the pragmatic
benefits of an abstract aesthetic which Stevens only fully realized in his
final decade. J. Hillis Miller’s comment on the back cover of this book says it
all: Anyone
interested in Stevens’ poetry should have this superb book.
Ian Brinton is an English critic and scholar who reviews regularly for Eyewear.
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