Born of Blood and Emotion

When I wrote this post, I did not know that Poetry editor Christian Wiman participated in the 2004 conference, “Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecticut,” at the University of Connecticut. According to this account at electronic book review, here is what Wiman had to say:

. . .Throughout the entire proceedings, he had sat a bit pushed back from the table, looking sallow and brooding, else intent and reticent. When his turn came to speak, he cleared his throat and slowly, in carefully enunciated syllables, began with this proposition: if Wallace Stevens is influential in 50 years, then the break between American poetry and the world will be complete. Much of the crowd, a bit confused by this comment, leaned in attentively. Was Stevens a great poet? Yes of course. But, was he a companionable poet? No, not at all. In fact - Wiman continued in measured tones - he was almost inhuman, uprooted, impenetrable, unpenetrating, a self-indulgent effete, a hyper-cerebral poet with raw talent blazing but little sense of how to convey something a reader might enter into, something born of blood and emotion and the shared commonalities of lived life. He was a destructive influence on modern poetry. . .Stevens’ poetry has abjured the world, Wiman continued, he lived in a bubble of the mind so that he might not be infected by life. His poetry corrosively and obsessively studied itself and was utterly unconcerned with the specificity of things and with relationships to people. There was coldness or distance that Wiman sensed in Stevens’ poetry and it turned him off, way off, didn’t arrive at the root of him as a reader. The early poems thought in sounds, not in ideas, and throughout Stevens’ career, all he could see were busy associative surfaces with very little depth. . . .

What strikes me most about this passage (acknowledging that it is a paraphrase of Wiman's remarks, not direct quotation), is the dishonesty of allowing that Stevens might be a "great poet," even though his poems have the grave defects Wiman enumerates. Clearly Wiman doesn't believe Stevens is a great poet; how could someone who had "a destructive influence on modern poetry" be great? Wiman has high moral standards for poetry to meet--it mustn't be "inhuman" (that word again),"uprooted," "self-indulgent"--and manifestly Stevens's poetry doesn't measure up. (Although is is important to note that these standards are moral. There's nothing in this diatribe that actually touches on Stevens's facility as a poet, his ability to indeed think "in sounds.")

Although perhaps it is more important for a poet to be "companionable" than to dilly-dally around so much with words and stuff, more important to offer "something born of blood and emotion" (as if Stevens's poems don't contain emotion--has Wiman read "The Death of a Soldier"?) than to write skillful and provocative poems. Presumably Poetry will be publishing poems that manifest the opposite qualities Wiman describes here, and readers can decide for themselves whether they represent an advance in the art of poetry. But if I had to bet on what will be influential 50 years from now, the issues of Poetry editied by Christian Wiman or the poems of Wallace Stevens, my money is decidedly on the latter.

Thanks to John Palatella for alerting me to the ebr article.

Comments

[marlyat2]

On the "more people should write in meter" issue mentioned in your first installment, I find that one of the notable things about Stevens is his use of short blank verse--a thing that must have seemed counter-intuitive at the time.

[Nick]

And innovative writers such as Ron Sukenick have said that we are all 'posthuman' now. This perhaps relates to JK's point about collective language, whereby language speaks through us, overriding the individual ego. However, with Sukenick et al this is seen as a good thing, while the 'posthuman' condition is simply our reality (neither intrinsically good nor bad).

[JK]

Hey Dan,
This is sort of off topic, but about that "inhuman" thing... I've seen it used in two very different if not diametrically opposed contexts. The first by usually conservative commentators on art who see themselves as following in the Arnoldian tradition of art-as-high-culture that you pinpointed in your post on the New Criterion a week or so ago. A quick googling for "art" and "inhuman" brings up these:
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.15393/article_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.15401/article_detail.asp

Althought it remains more or less implicit in both articles, the idea, I gather, is that anything that deviates from the great tradition of the best known and thought (as defined by such commentators) also happens to deviate from the category of human. Now, to this end, I think (I hope) that these commentators are using "human" to refer to some brand of the idea of Humanism (like, say, Humanism vs. Scholasticism or Humanism vs. Marxism). If that's not the case, then I suppose they're denying the basic humanity of the guy who did "Piss Christ," which, given the heat of some of the rhetoric these people use, might not be so far from the truth. (Anybody remember an article where a conservative made some kind of parallel between "Piss Christ" and Abu Ghraib?)

But that brings us to the second context where I've seen "inhuman" used in discussions on art/literature: namely, in Heidegger-influenced, post-structuralist talk. It usually comes up when the commentator wants to allude to the idea of "Speech speaks us" (I forget the German... it sounds cooler in German). The idea here is that we don't have control over language, that language is a kind of machine that controls or speaks for us. Inhuman is called for in this context because it's as if the human element, or at least what we think of as the human element (warmth, freedom, abruptness), is suppressed by a language which weighs down upon us.

[Jonathan Mayhew]

"Chldren picking up our bones / Will never know that we were once / As quick as foxes on the hill..."

What a collosally simplisitic view of Stevens this Wiman has. One must have a mind of winter indeed.