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Oppen and Stevens: Reflections on the Lyrical and the Philosophical

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In the following analysis of the poetry of Oppen and Wallace Stevens, Heller explores the boundaries between poetry and philosophy.
SOURCE: “Oppen and Stevens: Reflections on the Lyrical and the Philosophical,” in Sagetrieb, Vol. 12, No. 3, Winter, 1993, pp. 13-32.

“If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, stand still unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.

—Blake

It was on my way toward writing this paper that I encountered two essays in the Spring 1993 issue of the magazine Common Knowledge, one by Gary Morson entitled “Prosaic Bakhtin” and the other, “Toward An Avant-Garde Tractatus: Russell and Wittgenstein on War,” by Marjorie Perloff. I will come to the Perloff essay in a moment, but first, I want to note that, according to Morson, Bakhtin, throughout his long intellectual participation in the thought of this century, insisted, everywhere in his work, that we regard an individual as always unfinished, unfinishable, that the other person in the world (including oneself) be understood as a project always still on the way to completion. And it is from this perspective that I would like to address the topics of the lyrical and philosophical.

Naturally, one begs the usual indulgence, that whenever these two words, lyrical and philosophical, are mentioned they must be heard or seen as though surrounded by quotation marks; further, that these quotation marks do not imply, at least on my part, any disagreement with current usage or definitions; rather, that I think we ought to regard these terms as linguistic or rhetorical pressures, words not pointing at objects but vectored with desires, with one's hopes and fears. We know, looking at either poetry or philosophy, that labels have become insufficient. When, for example, Perloff writes in her essay that the “peculiar strength” of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is “its failure to articulate the inner connection of its propositions,” and that this is not a failure of philosophy but a show of “poetic power,” the conflations of the philosophical with the lyrical seem only too evident. Indeed, one agrees with Perloff, only noting carefully that the operative words “strength,” “failure,” and “power,” the vocabulary of her intention to find the “poetry” in the philosophy, are not necessarily those of Wittgenstein.

Taking for granted a certain rightness to Perloff's judgment, still, it is also possible for us to imagine Wittgenstein, that troubled and troubling figure who lies across so much of contemporary thought, almost hoping to “fail” at philosophizing in order that we may read what he has done as poetry. I am alluding here not only to Wittgenstein's scattered clues in letters and recorded statements, to his need for the writings of mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Kierkegaard, but to the constant testing and pressuring within the architecture of his “philosophical” thought as it tried to break through the barriers of logical positivism and, as well, the practice of German idealism. If we read Wittgenstein as a poet, it is not because of what he founds (because that is not poetry's business) but because of what he unfounds, what he demolishes as it stands in the way, not of further thought, but of a poetic or lyrical intrusion.

The “time of the chapels,” as Tzvetan Todorov has called it, that obsessive worshipping at the shrine of the monoliths of discourse, if such singular obeisances ever existed: that time, for the moment at least, is decidedly over. But let us remember that for many twentieth-century poets, the chapels of discourse have often been heavy-handedly operative. Nietzsche had been premature in declaring God dead; there was Eliot, among many others, to take up His cause again. And then there were Pound, the Fugitives, the pre-World War II Objectivists such as Zukofsky or Oppen or Rakosi, all of whom had submitted poetic power to one omniscient principle or another, a principle which defined the world and held sway with the equivalence of a theological force. Our histories of modern and contemporary poetry demonstrate, even if in the marginalia of our discussions of craft and technique, how one poet after another spent his or her time in a chapel and on bended knee. Such histories will also, I'm sure, provide illustrations both of the stiff-necked and of the curiously pliable such as Stevens and Williams, and of those, again like Oppen and Rakosi, who resurrected themselves as poets in open air, so to speak, only by leaving the entombments of the chapel.

As with our intuitions concerning Wittgenstein, the most powerful and important of these unhousings and refusals, these apostasies and demolitions, strike me as belonging to the domain of the lyric. Put bluntly, the lyric I am speaking of here occurs not as some effusion of the soul or the private song of interiority but rather as an attempt to go public with an utterance when the environing philosophy hardens by becoming its overbearing attendants: discourse, authority, objectivity. At such moments, philosophy as we know it no longer squares with our experience. Suddenly this lack of “fit” is precisely what gives rise to the poet's lyric and, subversively, amounts to poetry's endless propensity not only for creating worlds but for criticizing those which exist. Further, following Yeats's distinction between imagination and rhetoric, I would call lyric's domain one which is created not by the will alone but by an act of receptivity or recognition.

In the unruly manners of my discussion here, I am lumping together discourse, logic, certain prose tendencies, rhetoric, as those families of tropes which inhabit the realm of the philosophical as they strive each in their own way toward positing a false self-sufficiency. One tendency of philosophical language, especially in its guise as syllogism, as theory or argument, is to mask itself as science, to have the last word, to exploit the psychology of its own literalism. In this desperate act, language's self-referentiality and non-referentiality both amount to the same thing: the armor of imperviousness. The philosophical trope, in this sense, is always coercive. It gives up the power of human speech, of dialogue, in order to acquire the absolutized speech of a god or deity. Plato's ban is only an instance.

Every turn away from this coercive philosophical trope, every tear in its logic, whether by choice, by luck or indirection, is governed by some sort of return to the world or to the body. I am thinking not only of Stevens's well known cri de coeur, that the “greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world,” but also of all of his and Oppen's registrations of the fact that the world and thought beat upon the body and make poetry's sound. This may also be part of the lesson of Wittgenstein's “failure.” “The lie in modernist imagery,” says W. R. Johnson in The Idea of the Lyric, “is that no one snaps the picture” (15). The Objectivists, Oppen in particular, sensed the bad faith in Imagism's idea of an uncritical, non-reflective, impersonal art. Perhaps they saw the Poundian (less so the Eliotic) notion of the “impersonal artist” as an overreaching or disguised falsity when it attempted to exclude rhetoric from the notion of lyric, when it posed as datum rather than voice. Oppen's difficulties with Williams's formulation of the poem as “a machine made of words” constitute another aspect of the critique of early imagist practice.

In thinking about early Oppen, one conjectures a problematic similar to Wittgenstein's relation to positivism—that the effect of the degraded Marxist thought under which he placed himself in the late 1920s and '30s was to let that thought impose itself as a totality, to make him mute. As I have written elsewhere (“Thirties Poetry and Poetics: Utopocalyptic Moments,” forthcoming in The Objectivist Nexus), the broken forms of Discrete Series strike me as a resultant of a mind dealing with the potentials of its own imprisonment, of a situation where, faced with the hegemonic totality of Thirties Marxism, Oppen, as he put it in a letter in 1959, felt “at the time [the Thirties] a tremendous difficulty of honesty, the whole weight of sincerity [seeming] to rest on one's shoulders” (The Selected Letters of George Oppen 82) [hereafter abbreviated as SL]. “The ‘Marxism’ of Discrete Series,” he tells the poet John Campbell in retrospect, “is, was felt as, the struggle against the loss of the commonplace.” Let me quote from the poetry:

Closed car—closed in glass—
At the curb,
Unapplied and empty:
A thing among others
Over which clouds pass and the
                              alteration of lighting,
An overstatement
Hardly an exterior.
Moving in traffic
This thing is less strange—
Tho the face, still within it,
Between glasses—place, over which
                    time passes—a false light.

[Collected Poems 6, hereafter abbreviated as CP]

As I read it, the minor increments of language of Discrete Series are not held together by a syntax of Marxist thought. They are, rather, an attempt under duress to adhere to Pound's imagist principles of a representable world of “natural” symbols and permanent metaphors. The isolated constellations, the word clusters of Oppen's poems, are the vestiges of a struggle to articulate this world against the negative repression of an ideology. The “commonplaces”—almost all of them the traces of sensory data awash in a matrix of questions and negative comments—are proffered as moments of difficult honesty, held out as almost bejewelled, pointillist—and lyrical—intelligences against the threats of ideological discursiveness. This is not a failure of poetic nerve but rather a refusal to place “perception” under the dominance of leftist “right thinking” or under a prescribed socialist realist poetics such as was employed in the pages of The New Masses and other Thirties journals of the Left.

Which brings us back to Perloff's instructive description. Wittgenstein's inability or reluctance to connect one proposition with another but rather to leave logical blanks in the spaces of his thought is deemed a “poetic power.” We know, if we may speak of inclinations and pressures, that the philosophical tends toward form, that it must ultimately rest, not on personality, but on the idea that the sessions of thought are also instances of no one “snapping a picture,” that at the closure of a philosophical argument, the rest is indeed silence. The author of a thought, by philosophy's law of generality, has been excluded. Certainly Wittgenstein seems to have held such an idea. He is reported to have lectured in Norman Malcolm's presence that

[d]oubt, belief, certainty—like feelings, emotions, pain, etc—have certain characteristic facial expressions. Knowledge does not have a characteristic facial expression. There is the tone of doubt, but no tone of knowledge.

(Malcolm 92)

In this view, it is only a weak and corrupt usage of philosophy to speak of Leibnitz's ideas or to say that “Kant proclaims.” Where philosophy is writ large, there can be no idolatry of the personal kind.

If we look more closely, we can speculate on what troubled Wittgenstein—that, like Oppen later, he could no longer accept the rest or surcease provided by the strictures of form under which he was required to write. To the extent that one attempts to separate tone from knowledge, to deny the rhetorical force of knowledge (or, in Oppen's case, to deny the rhetorical or tonal dimension of imagism), this is to go against one's own self-knowledge. What burdened Wittgenstein was his un-saying, the silences which were more important than his utterances. Indeed, what he could not say or write to fit into the marked off or tabooed boundaries of the logical positivists both mocked and, at the same time, made “poetic” the rhetorical engines of the Tractatus, and later even the bewitching nets of the Philosophical Investigations. Somewhere, the self-sufficiency, the propositional intertextuality of the philosophy no longer assuaged. Wittgenstein wanted a philosophy of “kindness,” he also told Norman Malcolm, not one of “truth,” of instrumental reason. “All that philosophy can do,” he was to write (and how much a poet's words these are), “is to destroy idols. And that means not making any new ones—say out of ‘the absence of idols’” (Monk 325).

We remember that both Wittgenstein and Oppen gave up their intellectual labors for a time to work among the dispossessed and the poor, Wittgenstein as a hospital orderly and Oppen as a workers' organizer. These parallel hegiras may not so much represent interregnums in the processes of the mind as moments where lyric, where poetry's “own lack” (the term is Yves Bonnefoy's) can speak, can only go public through silence and gesture. Wittgenstein's ambivalent turn and return to philosophy, his giving away of his fortune, like Oppen's leaving and coming back to poetry, may have some base in what I might dare to call a “lyrical” action, the doing of an open-ended physical “kindness,” a kind of gift act in another language outside the discursive practices of a world where most “speaking” has been materialized in power relations and imperialist philosophies. For Wittgenstein, as for Oppen—again, this is speculation—the return to intellectual labor may have been not a question of either/or, but an action taken within a deeper transmuted understanding of the power of language. And perhaps it is this new idea of language that lies behind such curious remarks in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations as: “It is our acting which is at the base of the language-game.”

What then of Oppen's reemergence from the shadows of Marxist philosophy and rhetoric? Thought and companionate lyric have a journey to make in Oppen, an odd trip from the fragmented utterances of the early Discrete Series through a twenty-year period of no utterance at all while Oppen worked as a labor organizer and then fled to Mexico with his wife during the McCarthy period of the early Fifties. Toward the end of the Fifties, while still in Mexico, and after a strange dream in which he imagined himself rusting, Oppen began to write poetry again. From this return to writing, came the poems of The Materials and This In Which. And then another, more internal, journey takes place toward a new kind of “fragmentation” found in the late books of Seascape: Needle's Eye and Primitive. It is this internal journey which concerns me here.

Oppen, as he begins to write poetry again, in a 1959 letter to his sister, June Oppen Degnan, establishes the grounds for his earlier abandonment of poetry: “Maybe I admire myself more however, for knowing what is one thing and what is the other and what are the levels of truth—that is to say, for simply not attempting to write communist verse. That is, any statement already determined before the verse.” It is out of this understanding that he can now proceed, claiming his new intention: “Poetry has to be protean, the meaning must begin there,” which is “to write one's perception, not argue one's belief.” Here, Oppen invokes a phenomenological poetics which evolves over the reminder of his career from these early questions of mind and world to the more subtle complexities of language-in-the-world, of the holds on thought of the philosophical and the rhetorical. Throughout, philosophy is perceived as an ambivalent nemesis. “I do not care for ‘systems,’” he writes in his journal; “what I read is the philosophy of the astonished” (POA 203). “Astonished” and not “astonishment”—as though to steer the world “philosophy” away from the notion of the conceptual and instead invoke something more intimate and personal, the singular body-as-witness to that “one moment of sincerity [that] threatens to disclose everything” (POA 208).

This is the drama of the staging of Oppen's poems in his reappropriation of poetic power as he begins to write again. Emblematic would be the imagery of return, the welcoming of contingencies in the charged vocabulary: “bequeathed,” “inherited,” “we were lucky,” and so on, in “Blood From The Stone,” which Oppen reported as the first poem he wrote after breaking silence (Dembo 189). But even more illustrative is such a poem as “Image of the Engine,” in which mechanistic life and thought, “the machine involved in itself,” is released into human and creative realms by recognition of powers and orders external to the self's solipsism: “also he has set the world / in their hearts,” Oppen writes, and “they will find / in flood, storm, ultimate mishap … the heart thundering / absolute desire.”

The world. As one takes up Oppen's later poetry, one sees that these words, “the world,” do not so much refer to a place but to a kind of lyric intentionality, a site of excess in potential, one that both generates and holds together the fragmented, elliptical, and syntactically disjunctive character of the late poems.

“It is true I speak of a Realist poetry!” Oppen tells the French critic Serge Faucherau: “Realist in that it is concerned with a fact which it did not create” (Faucherau 80). Oppen's poetics, as he describes it in the interview, is concerned with confronting and breaking through discursive entrapment, with realizing what I would call a realist obligation, as in this passage from “The Occurrences”: “[to] Move / with all one's force / Into the commonplace that pierces or erodes / / The mind's structure …” (Collected Poems 206) [hereafter abbreviated as CP]. “Prosody,” he writes, “sings / in the stones” (CP 221). “The middle voice,” of Myth of the Blaze, for example, takes place within the interstices of the “magic of the dark grain of sand and eternity” (CP 252). Things and self are the entangled enabling conditions for this later poetry. This is an imagist legacy which has come a long way, even through muteness, by keeping an almost affectionate and rigorous trust with a reality existing on its own terms, severed from our “use” of it, yet, paradoxically, brought into being only by an incarnated and fragmented speech.

In Oppen, then, astonishment, awe, the vocabulary of philosophical wonderment are entrained not to modalities of thought or to theories and syllogistic reasonings but to the phenomenological, to the meetings of signs and occurrences. “Belief also happens [space] conviction happens there is no free choice” (POA 206), he claims in the later notes, as though to define his own philosophizing as in no way related to the imperatives of logic and discourse. To remind us, as well, that not all fragmentariness is the same.

The boundary markers of this poetics are two-fold: on the one hand, a powerful belief in the generative power of language; on the other, the objectivist faith in the power of realism to rescue the sign from the arbitrariness of signification. Realism, for Oppen, occurs, as he writes earlier in “Of Being Numerous,” “where the known and the unknown touch” (CP 172). In one of his letters from 1967, Oppen refers to “the strange unbounded voice of a Wittgenstein” (SL 158). “We create order,” he writes to himself in his notes, “and it cannot contain us” (POA 216). And there are moments, in both the poetry and the notebooks, where he sounds peculiarly like Wittgenstein at the boundary or like the religious mystics and philosophers who fed the thought of both writers: “I speak only of my experience and of course therefore above all of my emotions but there appears again and again the word thing, the profound word, the impenetrable word, the final word” (POA 206).

Admittedly, there is no pure philosophy and no pure poetry. Oppen's “profound, impenetrable, final word,” as he formulates it in the passage above, would involve the appearance of a word beyond the will of our wording, an occurrence which neither philosophy nor poetics can predicate. I want to approach Oppen's poetics again, a bit circuitously by way of the writings of Paul Ricoeur. In his essay entitled “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Ricoeur claims that “what is to be interpreted in the text is a proposed world which I could inhabit and in which I could project my inmost possibilities” (HHS 112).

Ricoeur posits here the possibility of the intersubjective realm, not as a structure but as a place of structuring, an arena of mental or psychic activity which on the level of the text, and consequently of the poetic image, can be likened to the phenomenological field. The poem, the text or image-in-language, is now a place inhabited by consciousnesses and can no longer be reduced to a fixed sign or a scientific datum. There is already, in the acknowledgment of a speaker, an excess, a supplementarity, an “unboundedness.” The image no longer paints a pleasing picture on the page but is instead a place of tensions and resistances, of antipathies and sympathies.

In such a recognition, problems of referentiality and simple mimesis take a second place to the gestural powers of language, the as-if quality, the viability and possibility of the world proposed by the image. Certainly “representativeness” comes in by the back door, so to speak, because every image, while being a concretion of language and sight, is also a fulcrum for idealization and universalization. But, as we find in Oppen's later poetry, the very power of the image is in its ability to drive the wedge between our conceptions of the real and the ideal, to propose a structure in language that bridges these two realms (realms originally yoked by Blake, that most extraordinary necromancer of analogies) between the physicality of a word like “sand” and the impossible mentalizations aroused by a word like “eternity.”

This power is explored in Ricoeur's study of meaning, The Rule of Metaphor, in particular the two adjacent sections entitled respectively, “The Work of Resemblance” and “Metaphor and Reference.” Here, Ricoeur proceeds by radically inverting the usual direction of literary interpretation. Normative interpretation takes the image as a source of critical production. Since the image, although made of words, is mute or occasions a nearly infinite multiplicity of resonances (which amounts to the same thing), the interpreter must take the image in hand and generate explanations. Instead of moving (or ruling out moving) from the imaginary to the discursive, Ricoeur suggests that “the question remains whether one ought to or cannot attempt the reverse, and proclaim the image to be the final moment of a semantic theory” (ROM 207). Here, briefly, philosophy and poetry appear to be conjoined, only to be left behind in that final moment when all that can be said is the image itself.

Ricoeur carries the notion further in the section of The Rule of Metaphor entitled “Metaphor and Reference.” Joining the idea, derived from linguistic and semantic philosophy, of the text as work with his considerations of the image drawn above, he states:

My whole aim is to do away with [this] restriction of reference to scientific statements. … Just as the metaphorical statement captures its sense as metaphorical amidst the ruins of the literal sense, it also achieves its reference upon the ruins of what might be called (in symmetrical fashion) its literal reference.

(ROM 221)

“The real,” according to Oppen, “possesses an indestructible element, an irreducible element” (POA 218). In Ricoeur's words, poetic language has a similar unyielding quality; it is neither real nor unreal, neither literal nor metaphoric. It is as though Oppen's “profound word thing” were arrived at (were to “appear again,” in Oppen's words) as shining splendor beyond either thought or lyric.

Walter Benjamin, perhaps with Baudelaire in mind, writing years before Ricoeur, and here remaining on the socio-historical plane, echoes Ricoeur's proclamation of “the image” as the “final moment of a semantic theory.” He tells us that “when thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock by which it crystallizes into a monad.” This monad's power is “to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history … to redeem both past and present.” Oppen, in his notes, has his own version of this redemptive process: “In meaning the world stops but is illumined” (POA 212). The poet in his poem-making constitutes what he calls the “Archangel of the moment” (POA 218). And while it is not the subject of this paper to enter into the political sociology of Oppen's return to poetry, it is worth reminding ourselves that it is archangels who are empowered to perform earthly good deeds, to be unacknowledged legislators, to make a difference.

Necessarily, I have been associating the philosophical with the coercive, with ideology and the lock-step of rhetoric. And, if we think of Oppen or Wittgenstein, it would seem that the function of the poem, if it has any for its reader, would be to interrupt or rupture this conceptual reading of the world. But poetry, too, is an aggression; its syntax or diction, its imaginative lulling to sleep of reason (Yeats's point), comprise a design upon us. At any moment, the poetic, like the philosophical, can exist as malevolent sclerosis. And it is lyric's function, in its dream of unboundedness, to break these sclerotic holds on our mind. In this sense, what I name as lyric remains the privileged moment of both philosophy and poetry because it opens again on the unconditioned, the unplanned testimony of a body in history, time and space.

Wittgenstein's philosophical “failure,” which according to Perloff has led to an instance or show of poetic power, is an appearance of this dilemma in another form: the birth of a lyric moment in the exposure of the discontinuities of a thought process trying to complete itself. The discovery of a fictive dimensionality to the doing of philosophy reminds us that the recourse to definitions is often paved with bad or wrong-headed faith. And yet, something has happened here which is instructive: in watching a thinker come toward the boundary, the very brink of philosophical activity (this, in so many words, was Wittgenstein's project), it may be best to scrutinize, to witness, rather than label.

Jacques Derrida, in his essay “Force and Signification” in Writing and Difference, quotes Kant's useful formula for witnessing the imagination at work: “the freedom of the imagination consists precisely in the fact that it schematicizes without a concept” (Derrida 7). “Writing,” Derrida continues further on, “is inaugural … [M]eaning present[s] itself as such at the point at which the other is found. … Thus, the notion of an Idea or ‘interior design’ as simply anterior to a work … is a prejudice … of the traditional criticism called idealist” (Derrida 11). What does the word “inaugural” suggest but that the act of writing initiates a new phase of consciousness? Derrida relates this aspect of writing to a metaphysics of absence and presence, the key to which resides in the Saussurean play of differences. Thus, his analysis is primarily given in semantic terms.

Bonnefoy, one of the most prescient of commentators on the poetry of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, provides something of an addition or corrective to Derrida's thought when he writes that we too easily connect poetic activity with “the flow of intertextuality or the play of différence—and forget to examine the inscription of himself that the author tries to establish in the midst of the verbal turbulence” (Bonnefoy 163). A phenomenological consideration of poetic activity, such as Ricoeur's or Merleau-Ponty's, might well reflect the “inaugural” perspective of writing, less as a semantic function than as a description of the dynamics of encounter. Thinking of a host of lines and poetic compactions from Oppen's late poetry—for example these near-adjacent ones from Primitive [hereafter abbreviated as P]: “young workmen's loneliness on the structures has touched and touched the heavy tools” (P 22) or “I would go out past the axioms / of wandering” (P 23)—I find it hard to imagine how we could read him otherwise than as being so encountered, so inaugurated by his own thought. Which is why we cannot reduce the notion of the lyric in a poet like Oppen to a genre, to a text that can be compared to other “lyric” texts, but must instead see it as an instance of incarnated mind piercing through to what Oppen calls the “commonplace,” his world, his “realist” reality.

It is in this spirit that I want to approach Steven's poetry. Already, we have come by way of Oppen's profound word “thing,” by Ricoeur's reversal of interpretative momentum, to a phenomenology of signs that is impelled by thought, by culture, by the experience of the body.

Allen Grossman, in his remarkable study, Summa Lyrica, insists that “lyric begins with the rounding of linguistic man, with the ‘I’,” that “lyric … is the artistic form generated by the conditions and consequences of I-saying.” This is an idea he takes from Emile Benveniste's well-known maxim: “Language is so organized that it permits each speaker to appropriate to himself an entire language by designating himself as I.” Benveniste's thought here is especially intriguing, in a time when the “I” has been under attack in a number of guises ranging from the Foucauldian “death of the author” to the critical abuse (some of it surely justified) heaped on the so-called lyric voice, to the end of subjectivity and the recent preference in art (and its attendants in the academy) for surface rather than depth or interiority. Intriguing, because Benveniste suggests the positing of an “I” not as the ego-driven cipher of poststructuralist thought but rather as a figure of capaciousness, one that, because of language's ever-present availabilities, can see, via the individual's own receptivity, through and around the imprisoning engines of totalitarian and utopian thought. The office of the poet is, of course, to be seated as this linguistic man (or woman) that Grossman describes, to make “lyric … generated by the consequences and conditions of ‘I-saying.’” So yes, Plato's banishment of the poets is not so much a moment in the history of ideas as it is, indeed, the constant parable of the relationship between the lyrical and the philosophical.

In our time, the keeper of this parable, its oracle and progenitor, has been Wallace Stevens. “Begin, ephebe,” he writes in “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction,”

                    by perceiving the idea
Of this invention …
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

(CP 380)

Here, in two primary tercets of “Notes,” Stevens has unified the disparate ambitions of poetic willing so as not only to turn toward the world with the ignorant eye of the child, to recover it in the old discredited idea of the lyrical imagination as “childlike” and innocent, but to see as well how much this turn of the eye is itself an “idea.” Innocence is lost or displaced in Stevens's thinking not to a weary, jaded maturity, but to the far more pervasive effect—perhaps it is the same thing—of its transformation from desire into concept.

Such a trope is perhaps the central one of many of Stevens's “horde of destructions,” as he called them, repeated as both idea and poesis in the poetry and prose. For what the lines achieve is a peculiar doubling of innocence and knowledge; they remind us of poetry's inherent capaciousness and paradoxicality, its ability to contain both a thought and its other, or, in Stevens's words, to find in the poem that “the true imagination,” as he puts it in The Necessary Angel, “is the sum of our faculties” (61). Stevens's achievement has a dynamic not unlike the later Oppen's yoking of thought and world—though, looking at Oppen's remarks on Stevens in the letters one suspects that he was somewhat blind to Stevens's realizations of that dynamic.

If Stevens, who comes earlier, sometimes appears to be more our contemporary than Oppen, it may well be that he inaugurates (to use Derrida's term) a mode of writing which already sees the fictive nature of the philosophical, which takes this fiction for granted, which loves the jouissance of rubbing one philosophical idea against another, and is unrelentingly skeptical of philosophy's urge toward certainties. Stevens makes the relationship of language to the philosophical immediately critical and parodistic. His poem “Connoisseur of Chaos,” for example, begins with its initial mockery of the syllogism:

A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)

(CP 215)

But the poem is also a critique, directed at the mind's pressure toward totality, a rather more serious matter than mere satirization. This is something one hears in the poem's crisp sonorities: “opposite things partake of one, / At least that was the theory, when bishops' books / Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that” (215).

Admittedly, Stevens, by comparison with Oppen's always darkly dramatic and potentially inimical encounter with the agency of philosophy, indulges in a kind of shaking hands with buffoonery. On this basis, Stevens is the playful Socratic figure of the poem, a comedic parser—and debunker—of our thought systems. So much of Stevens—the con brio of his diction, the bright, clean spaciousness of the lines, which make them look like the most high-minded sky writing, this efflorescence, this overly strong sunlight—often hides the near ground and the close facticity of the poetry's deeper notes, the “intelligence of his despair,” as he calls it in “Esthétique du Mal.”

But we need to go only one more moment with the image of a mocking Socrates to see that Stevens's poetry throughout is, as in the Apology and Crito, also a re-annunciation of the figures of fate and tragedy. The sail of the vessel marking death is almost always on the horizon of its words. That is, foreshadowings of meaninglessness or dying have been preoccupations of Stevens's lyric/dialectic from the first. We find them, for example, in Peter Quince's arpeggios, where “in the muted night” Susannah “turned” to her dying, or in the “nothing”-ness of “The Snow Man.” One could, indeed, “give pages of illustrations.” The phenomenology of Stevens's poetics, the good-humored yet serious nature of the verbal play at the edge of thought, a dance on the rim of the logical abyss, is tinctured with mortality.

Fate, the truism goes, makes one “philosophical”; but do the deeper tonalities of Stevens, particularly in the late poetry, constitute the hold of a philosophy on his poetics, or are these tones already a more profound reach beyond the philosophical, as I've defined it here, into lyricism? For ultimately what strikes me as wedding all of Stevens's work into a unity is less a matter of stylistics or even its romantic preoccupations with death and non-meaning; rather, it is precisely the poem's engagement with the problematic which I have been addressing in this paper all along: that the poetry is occasioned by a break-down, in the margins, so to speak, of the means of philosophy. This is not the usual talk about the breakdowns of language, for Stevens's imagination has been, first to last, a transmigratory shuttle between the failed logic of the meditative mode and the uncapturable reality of common nouns such as “sky” and “moon” and “shadow” (what Oppen called, in his terms, a “taxonomy”). For Stevens, as he puts it in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” in The Necessary Angel, the poet “must get rid of the hieratic in everything that concerns him,” that is, the tendency of the machinery of philosophy to establish and impose hierarchies and subordinations. “He must move constantly,” Stevens continues, “in the direction of the credible. He must create his unreal out of what is real” (58).

What is generative of further and more complex poetry in Stevens comes to us as the disguise and the undoing of the disguise of the philosophical. Thus, he writes of the poet in the poem “Men Made Out of Words” as one whose fate is cast in “propositions torn by dreams,” by “incantations” which “go public” by the way of language and so are necessarily—as poetry cannot not be—“eccentric.” In “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” he names this forever interruptive eccentricity as “Desire, set deep in the eye, behind all actual seeing.” We keep “coming back and coming back to the real,” the poem insists (CP 471), to find in it all that is strangely liberating by the act of the poem: “The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints, / The pattern of the heavens and high, night air” (CP 472). Again, I find this geometry, in its admittance of incommensurable worlds, very much like Oppen's, as in this last section of “Ordinary Evening”:

The less legible meanings of sounds, the little reds
Not often realized, the lighter words
In the heavy drum of speech …
Flickings from finikin to fine finikin …
These are the edgings and inchings of final form,
The swarming activities of the formulae
Of statement, directly and indirectly getting at,
Like an evening evoking the spectrum of violet,
A philosopher practicing scales on his piano,
A woman writing a note and tearing it up.
It is not in the premise that reality
Is solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

(CP 488-89)

“Poetry,” Stevens has been warning us so often and in so many ways, “must resist the intelligence almost successfully.” We must pay attention to its finikins as opposed to its premises. The armatures of philosophy, the stepladders of tradition (like Wittgenstein's ladder of thought) have no other purpose, Stevens seems to say, than to enable us to climb above them, to break free. It is not surprising then, that we find in Stevens's late poem, “The Sail of Ulysses,” these lines which, as they run down the page, are entangled in the characteristics of both the philosophical and the lyric:

… We come
To knowledge when we come to life.
Yet always there is another life,
A life beyond this present knowing,
A life lighter than this present splendor,
Brighter, perfected and distant away,
Not to be reached but to be known,
Not an attainment of the will
But something illogically received,
A divination, a letting down
From loftiness, misgivings dazzlingly
Resolved in dazzling discovery.
There is no map of Paradise.

(OP 101-102)

Entangled, but finally released, for isn't the freedom sought here one that is “known” rather than “reached,” “illogically received” rather than calculated, “dazzlingly resolved” in “misgivings”? Pound complained of having “no Aquinas map” but Stevens, with a kind of sweetness rarely found in Pound, only wants to throw the discursive or philosophical maps away.

Oppen, too, distrusts the road map unless it accidentally leads into the country of the astonished: “Belief also happens conviction happens,” he reminds us. And so, possibly, where Stevens and Oppen come closest is in their sense, as Oppen put it, that “the entire Western philosophic tradition is also approach to mysteries” (POA 216). The only means to get out from under is poetry, glorious poetry, in the search for the mapless Paradise of mysteries.

I come back to Bakhtin, to his notion of unfinishability, by way of his late essay exploring the nature of the “dialogic,” “The Problem of the Text.” There, he reminds us that authorship is, in some way, the violation of the planes of discourse, and that such a transformation “always makes a departure beyond the boundaries of linguistics” (Bakhtin 119). “The given and the created in a speech utterance,” he reflects, “always create something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable, and, moreover, it always has some relation to value (the true, the good, the beautiful and so forth)” (Bakhtin 119-120). Stevens was acutely aware of this “departure”; for him, it occurred because, as he writes above, “there is always another life,” one that is beyond the “premises,” one that is mapless and suffused with desire. This sense of “another life” may be what Bakhtin meant when he refers in his writing to such words as “surplus” or “eventness.” Lyric, the occasion for “I-saying,” is here a gate, a means, an identity of an author and unbounded thought, thought which, as Oppen notes, “cannot contain us.”

I return again to Wittgenstein, not because I have something unique to say about him, but because, like Nietzsche, he represents well-known and serious philosophy on the cutting edge. Imagine then a fantasy, that while completing this paper, I came upon the following, written by a Romanian literary critic, Folrep Eyrojram, in a 1953 work, The Act of Radials: “Wittgenstein's book-length poem, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tends, occasionally, as though in a concession to our understanding, to resemble something like philosophy. Can it be that this seeming failure of poetic nerve is really an instance of philosophical strength?” (Eyrojram 83). All along, we have been thinking, like Ricoeur, that the text is “work,” that the lyrical is rounded on the final inarticulateness of a philosophical motion.

But perhaps it may not at all be a case of what a work says to us, but rather of our disposition toward it. Both Oppen and Stevens frame their poems in a space of uncertainty, of not knowing, and it is this unknowing which is generative. But Wittgenstein also operated in a space of uncertainty. At one point he wrote:

The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to—the one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question. … But then we will never come to the end of our job! Of course not, because it has no end.

(Monk 325)

Perhaps, whether we have mounted Wittgenstein's famous ladders or entered into the multivalent language of the poem, our one freedom occurs at the moment of closure, the one that gives either poetry or philosophy “peace.” Imagination's most potent dream is a silent one. Eyrojram, in this imagined essay, reminds us that the “silences,” the ones Wittgenstein claimed to be of the utmost importance, are, after all, not really that silent.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres & Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.

Bonnefoy, Yves. The Act and the Place of Poetry: Selected Essays. Ed. John T. Naughton. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Cuddihy, Michael, ed. George Oppen: A Special Issue. Ironwood 3.1 (1975).

Dembo, L. S. and Pondrom, Cyrena, eds. The Contemporary Writer: Interviews with Sixteen Writers and Poets. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1972.

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.

Eyrojram, Folrep. The Act of Radials. Trans. M. H. Elur. Brooklyn: Pulaski Street U P, 1955.

Faucherau, Serge. “Three Oppen Letters with a Note.” Ironwood 3.1 (1975): 78-85.

Grossman, Allen. “Summa Lyrica.” Western Humanities Review 44.1 (Spring 1990): 5-138.

Johnson, W. R. The Idea of the Lyric. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982.

Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. London: Oxford U P, 1962.

Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Morson, Gary Saul. “Prosaic Bakhtin: Landmarks, Anti-Intelligentsialism, and the Russian Counter-Tradition.” Common Knowledge 2.1 (Spring 1993): 35-74.

Oppen, George. Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1975.

———. “The Philosophy of the Astonished.” Sulfur 10.2 (Fall 1990): 202-20.

———. Primitive. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow P, 1978.

———. The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Durham; NC: Duke U P, 1990.

Perloff, Marjorie. “Toward an Avant-Garde Tractatus: Russell and Wittgenstein on War.” Common Knowledge 2.1 (Spring 1993): 15-34.

Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation. Trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981

———. The Rule of Metaphor. Trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and Job Costell, SJ: Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1977.

Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1973.

———. The Necessary Angel. New York: Vintage, 1965.

———. Opus Posthumous. New York: Knopf, 1989.

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