Earthly Angels and Winged Messengers: Experience and Expression in Hopkins, Stevens and Klee

Towards the end of the nineteenth century Nietzsche had already announced the death of God, implying a secularisation of a modern world in which the individual had to look for the god-like elsewhere. In the works of high modernist writers, the omniscient and ordered god-like view known from their romantic and realist predecessors gave way to a shifting and more disjointed picture of everyday lived experience. Divinity was now in the ‘pots of pans’ of daily life, ¹ in a simple dinner arranged by Mrs Ramsay in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; in the sweet taste of a small cake, ‘the little Madeleine’ in Proust’s Swann’s Way; in the ‘yes’ of Molly’s desire at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses or simply in the hustle and bustle of city life: ‘That is God . . . What? A shout in the street.’ ² But, if a certain primordial ‘faith is in things not seen,’ ³ as ‘a sort of commitment to the world and to others,’ one question remains, ⁴ as Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor put it: ‘can we find an order after the announcement that God is dead?’ ⁵ Two relevant poets to turn to here are Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), an ‘early modernist’ poet ahead of his Victorian time whose poetry is pervaded by a sense of religious doubt and alienation ⁶ ; and Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) who, as the self-confessed ‘priest of the invisible,’ ⁷ saw it as his task to fill the void the gods’ going had left with the ‘Supreme Fiction’ of poetry. In my discussion of the sacred secularity of the two poets’ work, I will briefly touch upon the angelology of modernist painter Paul Klee (1879–1940) whose many angels painted between 1938 and 1940 are trapped between heaven and earth, a ‘transitional realm’ where the angels themselves express the uncertainties of human beings. ⁸

The works I focus on here, Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ (1918) and Stevens’s ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’ (1950), which is explored via Stevens’s poetics, are concerned with retrieving a sense of the sacred in ordinary things, in a universe where the presence of God is uncertain in the case of Hopkins; and in a world estranged from God in the case of Stevens. Demonstrating how the world is ‘an experience which we live before it becomes an object which we know in some impersonal or detached fashion,’ ⁹ both call attention to processes of meaning-giving and the relationship between the experience of the ‘thing itself’ and the written word. Finally, both appraise the limits of language but refuse to accept those limits.

Catching Flight: Hopkins’s Windhover

In Hopkins’s epiphanic poetry there is a frequent breaking into ecstasy, representing Hopkins’s own creative energy, his own process of ‘catching’ the thing itself, the essence of embodied experience and translating this into poetry. Offering an audible counterpart to the ‘lived perspective’ in Cézanne’s paintings, Hopkins’s thick, colourful and sensual patchwork of language germinates with the plurality of visions and sounds from the natural world. In a linguistic explosion of sorts, ‘The Windhover,’ which traces the correlation between a bird’s physical flight and a poet’s creative flight, makes audible ‘how the world touches us’ ¹⁰ :

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dáwn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rólling level úndernéath him steady áir, and stríding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

¹¹ Hopkins’s Falcon is ‘riding’ the air like a medieval knight hovering over his horse, indicated by the ‘chevalier’ in line 11, that, according to Bernadette Waterman Ward and others, is a reference to Christ. ¹² Claiming that ‘allegorical readings in general have severe drawbacks,’ Peter Cosgrove has offered a radically different approach, arguing that Hopkins’s concerns in this poem anticipate those of the modernists Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams; ‘[t]he thing itself, as we have learned from the profound explorations in the work of Wallace Stevens,’ he suggests, ‘is always rendered inaccessible by the veil of language. Hopkins’s poetic practice does not pretend otherwise. Indeed, the sestet overtly presents “ideas about the thing” as the culminating moment of the poem.’ ¹³ I would agree with Cosgrove that Hopkins anticipates the modernist poets’ aesthetic concerns, but I want to flesh out the idea of the elusive ‘moment’ itself in the poem. Ironically, and despite many critics’ attempts to ‘catch’ the poem’s meaning, its beauty lies in the fact that it escapes being ‘caught,’ which is tied up with the poem’s reliving of the temporality of the creative act of catching—both the bird’s movement of catching its prey and the poet’s ‘catching’ of the bird’s flight—and thus the specific time of its unfolding. Unlike Cosgrove, who claims that Hopkins is ‘positing the bird as a “thing,”’ the ‘essence’ of which is brought out by ‘the human observer,’ ¹⁴ thus affirming a subject/object relation and, therefore, division, I want to call attention to an earlier moment of pre-relational intentionality that Husserl would call the ‘thing itself,’ that experiential in-each-other [Ineinander] that is neither a dualism nor a monism. ¹⁵

To explore this, let us return to Hopkins’s horse-back riding bird, recalling Plato’s ‘noble’ ‘winged horse and the charioteer of the gods’ referred to by Stevens in his essay ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ (1941). Here the latter states that the nature of poetry is ‘an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals.’ ¹⁶ The intertwining of reality and imagination, the visible and the invisible, the external hovering of the kestrel and the poet-watcher’s invisible ‘heart in hiding’ construct Hopkins’s ‘inscape,’ his much-discussed term for grasping the intrinsic names or essence of things as these appear to him through a moment of poetic achievement, an insight or epiphanic moment: ‘The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’ ¹⁷ Just as ‘seeking the essence of the world is not to seek what it is as an idea, after having reduced it to a theme or discourse; rather, it is to seek what it in fact is for us, prior to every thematization,’ ¹⁸ Hopkins’s poem relives a moment of intentionality, the poet’s unmediated experience of the bird’s flight prior to representation and relational meaning. In correlation with the past tense ‘caught’ of the poem’s opening line, the octave’s final line, which is placed after a dash and significantly reads as an afterthought (a second-order experience), implies that this lived experience has become the known object in a belated and thus detached way, both through the final ‘mastery’ of the bird catching its prey and of the poet ‘catching’ the ‘moment’ in poetry. The first-order (precognitive) experience, however, is that in-each-other [Ineinander] when seer and seen, the subjective and the objective—both the gazing poet watching the hovering bird and the bird watching its prey—are still primordially absorbed in each other. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasm in The Visible and the Invisible or ‘Verflechtung,’ as he refers to it in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, shed light on Hopkins’s braided quilt of words:

True Husserlian thought: man, world, language are interwoven, verflochten. What does that mean: man, language world (lived world, and objectified, idealized world) given in one package. ¹⁹

The assonance of Hopkins’s opening lines indicates that the kestrel spotted by the poet belongs to and is folded into the experience of morning (it is its ‘minion,’ its servant) and early morning light, drawn from the dappled patches of dawn. The morning and morning’s minion; and the dauphin or crown-prince of daylight and dappled dawn—all are interlaced in one experience mirrored by Hopkins’s own interlacing of words. As the Falcon is ‘riding’ the air ‘rolling’ beneath him, the poet rides language with a similar rolling movement—his words too are ‘hurl[ing] and gliding’ as if ‘[r]ebuff[ing] the big wind’—put into practice through the ‘sprung rhythm’ developed by Hopkins himself, compound words, alliteration and assonance. The double or triple compound words in the poem such as ‘dapple-dáwn-drawn’ and ‘bow-bend’ are meeting points, moments of ‘Verflechtung,’ inter-braiding man, language and the movements of nature. Similarly, Hopkins’s use of assonance and alliteration also promote connections or knots between usually disconnected sights and sounds: ‘Caught this morning morning’s minion,’ ‘dapple-dáwn-drawn,’ ‘stríding’—‘gliding’—‘hiding,’ ‘wimpling wing’—‘swing.’ Thus, like many of Hopkins’s poems, ‘The Windhover’ meditates on the connection of the distinct to the larger whole, the particular to the general, ‘the unit and the horizon within which it is viewed.’ ²⁰ The ‘inscape,’ the inherent ‘design’ of the experience of the Falcon’s adventure of flight in the early morning sky ‘caught’ through the mentioned compound words, assonance and alliteration, is what gives the composition its wholeness, its in-each-other. Hopkins’s naturally ‘rolling’ language in this poem and the sprung rhythm, in which there are no constraints on the number of syllables, regulating both stress and syllable length so that it captures what Hopkins thought of as ‘the native rhythm of the words used bodily imported into verse,’ thus approximating ‘the native and natural rhythm of speech,’ ²¹ briefly shock us back into that pre-relational lived experience itself. ²²

Notably, Hopkins stressed that his poetry was a ‘living art . . . made for performance’ and for listening instead of reading ²³ ; thus, the listener’s experience would somehow be tantamount to the poet’s unique experience of the music, sounds, colours, and movements of the natural world, such as a falcon riding the wind or his observation of Kingfishers in the poem ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire.’ In this way, Hopkins presents us with a form of parole parlante, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, a generative language different from the objective meaning of spoken language, the thematised ‘language meaning’ that Merleau-Ponty in The Prose of the World refers to as the ‘[s]edimented language . . . the reader brings with him, the stock of accepted relations between signs and familiar significations without which he could never have begun to read.’ ²⁴ Such objective language labels the world by means of the kind of standard linguistic meanings we have at our disposal in everyday life. But, ‘beneath’ the kind of ‘ready-made significations’ of such ‘spoken language’ (parole parlée) lies a taken-for-granted ‘operant or speaking language’ (parole parlante), the words of which ‘have a silent life like the animals at the bottom of the ocean.’ ²⁵ The ‘speaking language’ is a ‘praxis’ or language ‘in the making,’ ²⁶ an ‘indirect’ language in that it is the expressive gesture that engenders ‘spoken language.’ ²⁷ Spoken language, the philosopher claims, has lost sight of its original ground of an expressive experience, the speaking language which is ‘an openness of the surrounding world.’ ²⁸ Hopkins’s poem, embodying the kestrel’s rolling flight and thus lived experience itself, is ‘sprung’ from the ready-made significations of objective language and is experienced on the page as such fertile language.

Hopkins’s writing was deeply affected by his Roman Catholic faith: God is always present in his poems, through the beauty of the nature described, and yet he constantly seems to return to and marvel at his own existence as a physical being in a world of beauty. ²⁹ There is a tension between ‘spiritual life and openness to the world, intellect and sensitivity’ ³⁰ that Dennis Sobolev calls a ‘split consciousness;’ ³¹ and between his belief in God, whose beauty does not change, and a sacred secularity, a theology of the earth celebrating the magnificence of the inevitable flux of ordinary things. Like the poet himself, the windhover is a winged messenger hovering in between heaven and the world’s natural beauty, in between Hopkins’s divine faith and human artistry. Hopkins himself explained this as ‘two strains of thought running together and like counterpointed.’ ³² In a similar fashion, ‘The Windhover’ makes us reflect on the limits of language, on the fact that the written word can never completely ‘catch’ the unspoken essence of things as they appear to the poet. In other words, the two strains of thought are out of joint in an instance that Derrida would call contretemps, the ‘contradictory force of naming’ ³³ in that the name itself, the ‘aphorism is exposure to contretemps. It exposes discourse—hands it over to contretemps. Literally—because it is abandoning a word [une parole] to its letter.’ ³⁴ Here Derrida’s differentiation between a word and the letter echoes the dehiscence between Merleau-Ponty’s ‘operant or speaking language’ and a ready-made ‘spoken language.’ Both philosophers are indebted to Husserl for whom meaning is already a latent part of the self-evident Life-world (Lebenswelt). ³⁵ Meaning, therefore, cannot be produced because it is already ‘an original, irreducible form of intentionality’ and an ‘original phenomenon,’ not a belated one that is only shaped via our written or spoken language. ³⁶ Yet, both Merleau-Ponty and Derrida call attention to the process of writing itself, which is not mere ‘codification’; rather, it is ‘necessary in order for an ideal object to be fully constituted.’ ³⁷ Writing itself, then, presupposes the structure of pre-reflective intentionality as meaning-giving but also accomplishes it.

Hopkins’s flying kestrel ‘rebuff[s] the big wind’ just as the poet seeks to triumph over his subject matter, the kestrel, through his generative poetry, which will, nevertheless, remain a buffer between the thing itself—the experience of the Windhover’s flight—and the poet’s words. This tension is at once grasped and lost in the second stanza:

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

³⁸ As Sobolev has it, while the octave is written in the past tense—I caught this morning morning’s minion—the final sestet, which addresses the kestrel as ‘chevalier,’ is a present tense ‘communication with Christ.’ ³⁹ Epitomizing what he sees as the ‘doubleness of Hopkins’s universe’ through the ‘double temporal structure’ of the poem, Sobolev stresses that ‘the emblematic meaning of the vision of the kestrel’s flight’—which, according to the author, has an allegorical function—is revealed only in retrospect, thus calling attention to ‘a temporal gap between the moment of experience and the moment of the articulation of its meaning.’ ⁴⁰ The transition from past to present, then, coincides with the transition from the octave to the sestet, simultaneously marking a transition from nature to divine presence, and from the actual experience to the written word. Although Sobolev’s study of Hopkins bears the subtitle ‘An Essay in Semiotic Phenomenology’—a ‘better option’ than simply ‘phenomenology,’ the author proposes, since it stresses ‘the textual aspect of analysis, as opposed to the more familiar phenomenological orientation toward the contents of consciousness’ ⁴¹ —it is odd that phenomenology is not drawn upon at any point throughout the book. Moreover, Sobolev misses the point that the question of textual analysis, particularly the dialogue between the data of consciousness and the written text, is always already integral to the work of Husserl, Fink, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and the later Derrida. In fact, phenomenology can help us shed light on the poet’s awareness of his ‘slippery hold on things’ ⁴² despite being in possession of the tool of language. The much-discussed ‘Buckle!’ in Hopkins’s sestet implies the catching of the thing itself—like the buckling or clasping of a belt—that is the bird’s catching of its prey as it swoops down, and the poet’s catching of the object of his eye in a moment of epiphany. But it also tells us something about the translation of experience to the written word, ‘the problem of the passage from the perceptual meaning to the language meaning,’ ⁴³ that is to say, the poet’s attempt to ‘catch’ the experience in words, which also, inevitably, means the disappearance of the immediacy of the experience, a necessary ‘buckling’ under or collapse of that experience. The ecstatic moment of ‘catching,’ then, is come and gone in the Kierkegaardian ‘øjeblik’—what Heidegger, borrowing from but also slightly altering Kierkegaard’s phenomenon of the moment, termed the Augenblick ⁴⁴ —the blink of an eye where ‘time’ and ‘eternity’ ‘touch’ each other and which is ‘Eternity’s … first attempt to … stop Time.’ ⁴⁵ Kierkegaard makes reference to Plato when stressing that the equivalent of the Danish ‘øjeblik’ would be ‘momentum’ in Latin, deriving from ‘movere’: to move, stir, agitate. As Kierkegaard notes, in this light, the moment always already indicates disappearance. ⁴⁶ Significantly, the speaker’s ‘heart in hiding’ in Hopkins’s poem ‘Stirred for a bird’ and also stirs for the ‘achieve of; the mastery of the thing!’ And yet, due to the inevitability of temporality, which ‘is the means offered to all that will be in order so that it can no longer be,’ ⁴⁷ Hopkins’s thick and rolling language, in ‘catching’ the kestrel catch its pray, simultaneously ‘catches’ but necessary fails to really possess the ‘thing itself,’ the stirring moment of creation, that moment of epiphany (‘the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!’) when the visible and the invisible dimensions of experience intertwine:

If the thing itself were attained, it would from then on be stretched out before us without any mystery. It would cease to exist as a thing at the very moment we believed we possessed it. What makes up the ‘reality’ of the thing is thus precisely what steals it from our possession. ⁴⁸

One of the doctrines of phenomenology is what we may call the fate of perception. Theorised reflection, such as writing, is grounded in an ‘unreflected life,’ ⁴⁹ but because of the temporal distance between experience and expression, it can never possess it as such. According to Merleau-Ponty, our ability to speak about the world is conditioned by an unspoken, bodily communication with it. This primary bodily communication is the foundation for all thought and expression: ‘Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure).’ ⁵⁰ Merleau-Ponty discovered this logic in the work of Paul Klee whose notebooks reflect upon invisibility:

Something has been made visible which could not have been perceived without the effort to make it visible. Yes, you might see something, but you would have no exact knowledge of it. But here we are entering the realm of art; here we must be very clear about the aim of ‘making-visible.’ Are we merely noting things seen in order to remember them or are we also trying to reveal what is not visible? Once we know and feel this distinction, we have come to the fundamental point of artistic creation. ⁵¹

Merleau-Ponty elaborates that just as visibility rests on an ‘invisible inner framework,’ so all speech gravitates around a bodily, ‘mute perception’ of the world. ⁵² In the philosopher’s late work, a constitutive difference between these invisible/mute and visible/spoken dimensions of experience bears the name of ‘écart,’ a principle of differentiation that is not an opposition existing within being. ⁵³ Reflection, Merleau-Ponty proposes, is aware of and cannot overcome this ‘écart,’ the unperceived temporal distance between the ‘perceptual meaning’ of pre-reflective experience and ‘language meaning.’ ⁵⁴ All our perceptions and clear expressions are grounded in this unperceived ‘pivot’ or ‘hinge’ between the invisible and the visible, the pre-reflective and the reflective, the experiential and the articulated: ‘[t]his separation (écart). . . forms meaning,’ ⁵⁵ but we are not aware of it as it is prior to our ability to reflect on and speak about the world.

At once separating and pulling together through its buckling movement, what ‘The Windhover’ does catch is the transition from experience to language, thus moving through Merleau-Ponty’s écart and highlighting such a process of meaning-giving itself. The word ‘Buckle,’ then, captures the ‘buckling’ nature of language and is an image for a double bind that is the inescapable fate of the poet, the fact that words both pull together and yet collapse pre-reflective experience in that they can never completely coincide with that experience. The ‘buckling’ moments of the bird’s and poet’s processes of physical and creative flight in ‘The Windhover,’ it follows, express the division of experience that phenomenology bring to light: ‘Not only are we dealing with what is given but also with what is pre-supposed for the giving to occur.’ ⁵⁶ Epiphany in ‘The Windhover’ is a moment of inspiration where there is union or in-each-other and then an inevitable parting with ‘the thing itself,’ come and gone, like the stirring of the Kierkegaardian moment, which always already implies disappearance—like the poet’s ‘stir[ring] for a bird.’ But the necessary moment of disappearance is exactly what makes it beautiful, and this should not be a surprise, as Hopkins stresses in the final stanza:

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plóugh down síllion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gáll themselves, and gásh góld-vermillion.

⁵⁷ Here the ploughs of the plodding farmers hit down the sillion, from the French sillon, that is to say, the furrow or trench in the ploughed soil, recalling the cleavage or splitting open—the écart—without which meaning-making would not be possible, and without which there would be no epiphanies of momentary illumination that ‘gásh góld-vermillion,’ no red-gold cuts into experience that reveal the simultaneous pain and beauty of meaning-making itself, no moments, therefore, that burn and also split open like blue-bleak embers in hot ovens.

Within the pattern of Hopkins’s inscape, then, his patchwork of compound words and sprung rhythm, we are made aware of how the unit and the larger whole are originally folded together in an in-each-other prior to subject/object divisions. ⁵⁸ The paradoxical logic of ‘The Windhover,’ highlighting our inability to quite catch the poet’s act of catching a bird catching, is that ‘I must be both passive and active, must simultaneously create and repeat, at once falling and ascending,’ ⁵⁹ thus necessitating a ‘descent,’ a falling back into a lived and open experience ‘prior to all presuppositions’ ⁶⁰ and an ‘ascent’ upward into objective humanity; both ‘impassioned [passionelle]’ and passive, ⁶¹ both in possession of my desires and interests and yet dispossessed—a form of ‘buckling’ in other words. ⁶²

Necessary Angels and Half-Way States: Wallace Stevens

In The Necessary Angel (1942), a collection of essays on reality and the imagination, Wallace Stevens introduced a poetics that shed light on the invisible in the visible, the sacred in ordinary, earthly things, claiming that ‘the great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to be written.’ ⁶³ He regarded the poet as ‘the priest of the invisible’ whose ‘Supreme Fiction’ ⁶⁴ was to impose new secular orders on the world and serve as a substitute for the breakdown of traditional faith, as his Adagia (1934–1940) explains:

The relation of art to life is of the first importance especially in a sceptical age since, in the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support that they give. ⁶⁵

Arguing that religion had become redundant in the interwar period and that some substitute had to be found, Stevens promoted poetry—‘supreme fiction’—itself as such ‘support’ by letting it piece the godless world together: ‘God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, as, for example, the form of high poetry.’ ⁶⁶ This ‘high poetry,’ however, should not be seen as a quest for a higher dimension of being, but as an attempt to step back into the immanent intentional structures of the mind—‘the poem of the act of the mind,’ ⁶⁷ as Stevens calls it—where the mind and the world are correlatives; a more basic reality, in other words, the essential structure of which is always, already there, but which has been obscured by the habits of daily life and conventional forms of expression.

As we have seen, Husserl thought of phenomenology as a ‘first philosophy’ or a philosophy of ‘a radical beginning.’ Throughout his writings, Stevens refers to first-order or unmediated experience as the ‘first idea’ ⁶⁸ : ‘If you take the varnish and dirt of generations off a picture, you see it in its first idea. If you think about the world without its varnish and dirt, you are a thinker of the first idea.’ ⁶⁹ His essay ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’ echoes this idea: ‘the poet must get rid of the hieratic in everything that concerns him.’ ⁷⁰ In other words, by putting out of play traditional ‘hieratic’ notions about the world, the poet can turn to ‘the poem of the act of the mind’ ⁷¹ —the creations of his own consciousness—and perceive the world in its original ‘first idea.’ In order to perceive this ‘first philosophy’ (within which philosophy is grounded) or to be a thinker of the ‘first idea’ (within which poetry is grounded), one must begin by shifting the direction of one’s attention from the reflective (second-order) to the pre-reflective (first-order) dimension of experience through an epochal parenthesizing of the world. We must step back into a world that we have lost sight of, as it were.

However, it seems to have become an ‘almost ritual gesture’ among certain Stevens critics drawing upon phenomenology that Stevens’s early work—Harmonium (1923), Ideas of Order (1935), and The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)—separates the subject from the object or the mind’s poetic constructions from the outside world, whereas the later Stevens of Parts of a World (1942), Transport to Summer (1947), The Auroras of Autumn (1950), and The Rock (1954) re-connects the mind and the world. ⁷² In these studies, the method of epoché (bracketing) that inaugurates reduction is read as a complete cancellation or rejection of the subject’s interaction with the world and is drawn upon to shed light on what is seen as a dichotomy of the mind and the world in the early Stevens. ⁷³ Thomas J. Hines, for instance, compares the poetics of the early Stevens to Husserl’s process of phenomenological reduction, a ‘process of destruction wherein the ancient orders are reduced to nothing’ or ‘thrown out.’ ⁷⁴ In an analysis of ‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’ Hines argues that ‘Stevens’s process of reduction is again at work as the speaker separates mind and world’—a separation which is rejected by the more Heideggerian late Stevens who realises that the ‘clear perceptions that were available through the processes of reduction’ are now ‘inadequate for his aesthetic purposes.’ ⁷⁵ Other critical studies of Stevens arguing for an ‘early’ Stevens separating the mind from the world misread Stevens’s gestures toward the implicit bond between subject and object-world constituting the intentional ‘act of the mind.’ ⁷⁶ In another attempt to clarify the relationship between mind and world in Stevens’s work, Alan Perlis also draws on the reduction. Once again, Perlis assumes that the reduction separates the mind and the world and yet his reading of Stevens is entirely different from Hines’s: ‘phenomenology . . . is the most outspoken in refusing to connect particulars and to contrive synthesis; it abdicates point of view or inclusive position, in favour of microscopic observation and exclusive vision. Yet Stevens continually argues that an object, to be properly perceived, must be held in relation to its environment.’ ⁷⁷ Thus, like Hines, Perlis reads the phenomenological concept of reduction as a method that cancels rather than suspends our fact-world, isolating the ‘microscopic’ mind from any relation with the outside world, while he, unlike Hines, stresses Stevens’s continual promotion of the necessary bond between subject and object-world. Due to his unfortunate description of phenomenology’s central theme, Perlis fails to see the connection between phenomenology and the poet’s work, leading him to emphasise ‘the dangers inherent in trying either to connect Stevens’s poems to a philosophy or to call Stevens himself a philosopher.’ ⁷⁸ Such ‘danger’ is also sensed by James S. Leonard and Christine E. Wharton; comparisons between Stevens and Husserl or Heidegger, they argue, ‘tend to distort both the philosophical and the poetic material (characterizing Stevens’s view as nonaesthetic, or even antiaesthetic).’ Rather, Stevens’s ‘view of art—or imaginative acts in general—as enhancement of reality is well beyond the sphere of Husserlian phenomenology,’ which they—incorrectly—describe as ‘antiaesthetic.’ ⁷⁹ Finally, in The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens (1997), Patricia Rae uses the Husserlian epoché to read Stevens as a poet of hypothesis. Stevens’s ‘epochal spaces’—‘vatic figures within ironically circumscribed spaces—jars, crystals, and mirrors, and huts and houses’—or in spaces midway between the earth and the sky, she points out, ‘stress the lack of interaction between phenomenologically reduced experience and the outer world.’ Taking her bearings from Hans Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of ‘As If,’ according to Rae, Stevens is a poet of hypothesis because the poet’s enclosed ‘epochal spaces,’ ‘shelters’ of ‘peace’ and retreat, fall apart when the forces of reality ‘enter the poetry,’ thus ‘profoundly disturbing the carefully balanced epoché Stevens otherwise works so hard to preserve.’ ⁸⁰ Once again, the critic fails to note that the phenomenological act of ‘bracketing’ is not an act of preservation or ‘retreat,’ protecting the poetic mind and denying enhancement of the real; rather, it provides access to the intentionality of consciousness, which, as we have seen, means that the imagination is always, already, in an implicit relation to the real. Distinguishing the poetic inquiries of the early Stevens from those of the late Stevens, Rae’s Stevens also gradually comes to realise ‘that one is part of everything’; hence his ‘will to sustain the epoche weakens,’ and the poet can re-unite with the world. ⁸¹

All in all, in claiming that the Husserlian method of reduction is an ‘inadequate’ tool for examining the correlation of self and world in the aesthetics of the later Stevens, the critics mentioned miss the point that epoché brings into clarity exactly this correlation, which, in the worlds of Husserl, is ‘the essence of consciousness in general.’ ⁸² When insisting on the epoché as a means to return to a ‘first philosophy,’ Husserl never suggests an elimination of the existing world; on the contrary, he argues: ‘Our phenomenological idealism does not deny the positive existence of the real (realen) world and of Nature. . . . Its sole task and service is to clarify the meaning of this world.’ ⁸³ To recapitulate, in epoché our preconceived, theoretical ideas and practical considerations about the world are never denied, but simply pushed off centre. A ‘mere change of standpoint,’ the epoché does not change or reject anything; rather, Husserl writes that after the operation of bracketing, ‘[w]e have literally lost nothing.’ ⁸⁴ It is ironic, then, that the phenomenological method of ‘bracketing’ is charged with a denial of previous representations of the real, leading to a mind/world split, whereas nothing is forgotten in epoché and nothing is denied. The epoché occasions not the division between consciousness and world, leading to narcissistic self-enclosure, but their prepredicative in-each-other, prior to representation and subject/object divisions; hence it cannot possibly demonstrate the ‘opposition’ between, or independence of, consciousness and world. ⁸⁵ Moreover, in contrast to the critics mentioned, it is my conviction that Stevens maintains a shift of attitude similar to epoché throughout his oeuvre. It is exactly the epoché that lays bare first-order experience where consciousness is always consciousness of and always already part of the world: ‘The epoché takes the phenomenologist not out of the world but, in a sense, more deeply into it.’ ⁸⁶ Highlighting that one is ‘[p]art of the res and not about it,’ ⁸⁷ Stevens never ceases to promote that the world is constituted not through second-order representations about the world but through first-order experience. ⁸⁸

A certain leading back to the ‘first idea,’ then, is the poet’s term for entering into poetry, for, as Stevens puts it in Opus Posthumous: ‘the essence in art is insight of a special kind into reality.’ ⁸⁹ This insight reveals ‘that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination,’ ⁹⁰ calling attention to an a priori referred to in ‘A Collect of Philosophy,’ which contains the oft-mentioned and only reference to Husserl in Stevens’s writings ⁹¹ :

Jean Wahl wrote to me, saying ‘I am just now reading the Méditations cartésiennes by Husserl. Very dry. But he affirms that there is an enormous (ungeheueres) a priori in our minds, an inexhaustible infinity of a priori. He speaks of the approach of the unapproachable.’ This enormous a priori is potentially as poetic a concept as the idea of infinity of the world. ⁹²

The passage echoes Husserl’s observation that concrete objects are surrounded by a ‘distinct or indistinct co-present margin, which forms a continuous ring around the actual field of perception’: ‘What is actually perceived, and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate . . . is partly pervaded, partly girt about with a dimly apprehended depth or fringe of indeterminate reality.’ The flow of consciousness, according to Husserl, is immersed in an infinite ‘misty horizon,’ ⁹³ figuring the infinity and continuity of the world, which exists before reflection but can never be fully expressed, and yet it is the horizon, that is to say, the very background against which all acts and expressions stand out. The task of the phenomenologist is ‘to penetrate to th[is] primal ground,’ ⁹⁴ which is ‘always already there, existing in advance for us, the “ground” of all praxis.’ ⁹⁵ It is in this fundamental ground of experience that ‘the immediate a priori phenomenology, the first philosophy’ takes root. Similarly Stevens’s ‘first idea’ belongs to what ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’ calls ‘the giant’: ‘It feels good as it is without the giant, / A thinker of the first idea.’ ⁹⁶ So what, then, does Stevens mean by this ‘giant?’ In ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’ the poet’s ‘few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet –’ will always be ‘part of the never-ending meditation, / Part of the question that is the giant himself’ and ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’ speaks of ‘[a] giant, on the horizon, glistening.’ ‘The truth must be,’ Stevens writes in ‘Poem Written at Morning,’ ‘That you do not see, you experience, you feel, / That the buxom eye brings merely its element / To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced / Upward.’ ⁹⁷ The ‘shapeless giant’ and the ‘giant on the horizon, glistening’ are figures for the insubstantial shapes of pre-semantic experience, which the ‘buxom eye’ fixes in poetic trope. Like the Husserlian ‘misty horizon,’ Stevens’s idea of the ‘giant’ is ‘gigantic’ as well as unapproachable (to borrow from Wahl): it can never be fully possessed in words and yet remains the foundation of all reasoning and expression.

Working back from this, ‘Supreme Fiction’ should not detach the subject from the world in a spiritual moment of elevation; rather, like reduction, it brings to light the subject’s pre-conceptual bond with the world prior to all polarities, as expressed in ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’:

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place

That is not our own, and, much more, not ourselves

And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

⁹⁸ We describe the world to make it our own, but as we ‘live in a place / That is not our own,’ this is merely ‘description without place. It is a sense // To which we refer experience.’ ⁹⁹ For, ‘before we breathed,’ before we could even think and sing of the world, ‘[t]here was a muddy centre.’ Our ability to perceive, differentiate objects, and impose order upon the world rests on a non-differentiated core of primary meaning, a pre-theoretic ‘muddy centre’ where things are in-each-other, stand in a primitive dimension and where they, according to Husserl, are pre-predicatively given, that is to say, when we still have a ‘precognitive experience’ of them before self-consciously ‘theorising’ them as objects. ¹⁰⁰ Merleau-Ponty builds upon a similar idea when stressing that our ability to speak about the world is conditioned by an unspoken communication with it. Just as the visible is made up of an ‘exterior’ and an ‘interior horizon,’ ¹⁰¹ language too has a silent centre, ‘the core of primary signification around which acts of naming and expression are organized.’ ¹⁰² Like Husserl, Merleau-Ponty sought a philosophical beginning free from preconceived views about reality, restoring a wild meaning ¹⁰³ or ‘Ur-Sprung of language’ that is already given but remains latent within the world of daily life. ¹⁰⁴

Our ability to perceive, differentiate objects, and impose order upon the world, then, rests on a not yet differentiated core of wild meaning, a ‘muddiness’ within being itself. It is through a perpetual blessing of the muddy passage between the invisible/unreflected dimensions of experience and the visible/spoken things in the world—a ‘muddiness’ that our world of objectification has lost sight of—that Stevens’s ‘Supreme Fiction’ comes into being. This blessing never stops, for, as Stevens writes in agreement with Hopkins, ‘Poetry is a finikin thing of air / That lives uncertainly and not for long’; it ‘has to be living’ and reflect the living experience of a world in perpetual flux. ¹⁰⁵ In ‘A Primitive Like an Orb,’ Stevens too gestures towards the inability of language to completely possess experience: ‘the essential poem at the centre of things . . . is and it / Is not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech, / The breadth of an accelerando moves, / Captives the being, widens—and was there.’ Thus ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ confirms that the poem can only ever be ‘the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res and not about it.’ ¹⁰⁶ Being ‘part of the res’—in the middle of things—and at once detached from and defined by their horizon, Stevens’s poems highlight their own process of meaning-giving in a world which is always becoming. Hence the emphasis throughout his work on passing states and therefore only half-caught and half-perceived notions. It is from these half-way states, moving through that ‘in-between’ that is neither subjective nor objective, that the poet’s ‘necessary angel’ emerges:

Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,

Since in my sight you see the earth again,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,

Myself, only half a figure of sort,

A figure half-seen, or seen for a moment, a man

Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in

Apparels of such lightest look that a turn

Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

¹⁰⁷ Stevens’s angel is a ‘necessary angel of earth’ who ‘neither has ashen wing nor wear of ore / And live[s] without a tepid aureole.’ ¹⁰⁸ As noted by other critics, this poem was the product of a meditation upon a painting by Tal Coat that Stevens bought in 1949 and gave the title ‘Angel Surrounded by Peasants,’ ¹⁰⁹ as explained in a 1949 letter to Victor Hammer:

The question is of how to represent the angel of reality is not an easy question. I suppose that what I had in mind when I said that he had no wear of ore was that he had no crown or other symbol. I was definitely trying to think of an earthly figure, not a heavenly figure. The point of the poem is that there must be in the world about us things that solace us quite as fully as any heavenly visitation would. ¹¹⁰

Upon receipt of Stevens’s book of essays significantly entitled The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination in 1951, Marianne Moore, wrote the following in a letter to Stevens: ‘I have received the NECESSARY ANGEL and thank you. In thinking of angels as strengtheners, I see that I have not been amiss.’ ¹¹¹ Moore was not amiss. The angel’s strengthening quality in ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’ lies in its human quality. Surrounded by ‘paysans,’ this angel stresses the commonplace, only has angelic qualities because it is imperfect, representing a world of perpetual change, which can only ever be ‘half-caught’ before it is gone, in the Kierkegaardian ‘øjeblik,’ the epiphanic moment—or ‘crystallizations of freshness,’ ¹¹² as Stevens himself called them—when ‘time’ and ‘Eternity’ ‘touch’ only to miss each other. Only ‘half a figure of a sort, / A figure half seen for a moment,’ ¹¹³ this angelic border-dweller is only ever half-caught before ‘quickly, too quickly’ it is gone. Bringing us one step closer to that prepredicative in-each-other, a mutual crossing over or ‘muddy centre’ prior to all subject/object divisiveness and relational meaning, Steven’s half-seen angel is thus neither wholly thing nor wholly idea, half fact and half essence; rather, it expresses what Galen Johnson terms ‘the beautiful,’ laying bare ‘a peculiar, remarkable openness that is not found in theoretical understanding,’ an epiphanic moment, in other words: ‘the experience of the beautiful transcends the subject-object dichotomy, and in it both union and difference are philosophically integrated.’ ¹¹⁴ Like the woman in ‘So-And-So Reclining on her Couch,’ Stevens’s ‘angel’ ‘floats in the contention, the flux / Between the thing as idea and / the idea as thing,’ ¹¹⁵ anticipating the later poem ‘A Lot of People Bathing in a Stream’ in which bathing figures reminiscent of Cézanne’s Large Bathers are mere ‘addicts / To blotches, angular anonymids / Gulping for shape among the reeds . . . / less than creatures, of the sky between the banks.’ ¹¹⁶ Neither subjective nor objective, Stevens’s half-imagery is ‘passing a boundary,’ ¹¹⁷ opening onto what Stevens in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ calls ‘The madness of Space’ ¹¹⁸ and laying bare the original and non-representational space of meaning-giving poised between the primacy of perception and expression.

‘Still Imperfect’: Paul Klee’s Angelology

The momentary half-way states in Stevens’s poetry recall what Paul Klee, in his Notebooks, thought of as ‘the tragedy of spirituality’ derived from ‘the simultaneous helplessness of the body and mobility of the spirit’: ‘Man is half a prisoner, half borne on wings. Each of the two halves perceived the tragedy of its halfness by awareness of its counterpart.’ ¹¹⁹ As Christine Hopfengart puts it in a commentary upon the painter’s angel series produced between 1879 and 1940, the ‘idea of transition and of a “transitional realm” is foundational for Klee’s intellectual approach and artistic imagination.’ As for Hopkins and Stevens, for Klee, ‘the right thing was never unequivocal but always “in between,”’ ¹²⁰ placing ‘emphasis on the unfinished’ through the sketchiness and uncertainty of his drawings. ¹²¹ Hovering in mid-air, in between Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ and Stevens’s poetics, we find Klee’s ‘angelology,’ which is as much a poetics as a philosophy of painting; ‘the recognition that at bottom I am a poet, after all,’ Klee claimed, ‘should be no hindrance in the plastic arts!’ ¹²² What lies at the heart of Klee’s poetics is an awareness of ‘the gradual process of formation and transformation in every living thing, even of those that are beyond our ken.’ ¹²³ This emphasis on process and lack of fixity in his art was also highlighted by Heidegger for whom the works ‘are not paintings, but feeling. Klee was capable of making moods “visible” in pictures . . . The less we think of Klee’s paintings as presenting objects, the more they “appear” (in the sense of the Greek phainestai).’ ¹²⁴ The German Jew Walter Benjamin must have been taken aback exactly by such ‘feelings’ when in 1921 he purchased Klee’s watercolour Angelus Novus (1920), one of Klee’s first angel pictures, which to Benjamin represented ‘the angel of history,’ anticipating the catastrophe of World War II and the unfathomable horrors of Nazi Germany. The angel, Benjamin claimed, is looking at something he ‘seems about to move away from,’ wanting to put together the ‘wreckage upon wreckage’ piled in front of him and ‘make whole’ what has been ruptured:

But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. ¹²⁵

Offering a rewriting of the Fall of Man, Benjamin suggests there is no way back in a world in crisis, not even for angels. There is an uncanny parallel between Benjamin’s own exilic existence and the ‘composite literary icon’ ¹²⁶ that Angelus Novus has become; at the time of writing ‘On the Concept of History’ in 1940, Benjamin himself was trying to escape the Nazis and desperately attempting to get to the United States via Paris, Spain and Portugal. But, when the idea to cross the French-Spanish border turned out to be fractured, Benjamin took his own life. Klee’s Angelus Novus is also attempting, but not quite succeeding, to cross a border; rather, the Angel seems to hover over the border itself: that between heaven and earth, the spiritual and the physical, origin and representation. Klee too, in his Notebooks, kept returning to questions of origin: ‘What was in the beginning? Things moved so to speak freely, neither in straight nor crooked lines. They may be thought of as simply moving, going where they wanted to go, for the sake of going, without aim, without obedience, moving self-evidently, in a state of primal motion.’ ¹²⁷ Notably, Klee was terminally ill with progressive scleroderma when he created his doubtful and often unfinished angels that hover on the threshold between the living and the dead. The small wings of Angelus Novus are too short and fragile and his head is too large for comfortable lift off, thus presenting us with the very embodiment of human fragility and doubt. ¹²⁸ Will Grohmann has called attention to other ‘still imperfect’ angels, the less discussed brothers and sisters of Angelus Novus, such as Angel Still Female (1939), Angel Still Groping (1939) and Angel Still Ugly (1940); or angels indicating permanent change, such as Soon Fledged (1939), Last Step on Earth (1939) and the humorous Not Yet Trained in Walking (1940); or titles containing verbs in the present participle stressing process and growth, such as Kneeling Angel (1939), Doubting Angel (1940), or simply Unfinished Angel (1939) and Angel in the Making (1934). Indicating unfinishedness, all of these titles stress the fact that Klee’s work is always in the making and ‘without obedience,’ focusing less on result than the ‘primal motion’ of aesthetic production—as David Sylvester puts it: ‘In journeying through a Klee you cultivate it. It grows because it is an organism, not a constructed form.’ ¹²⁹ Like Hopkins and Stevens, then, Klee too is interested in how things are lived through before known, before they are illuminated by cognition and before representation or relational meaning takes over. Whereas Cézanne had started the process of liberating the line itself from the imitation function, for Klee the never-ending movement captured in his paintings was already free, always ‘going where [it] wanted to go, for the sake of going.’

To return to Angelus Novus, despite its beating wings and dilated pupils, this winged messenger’s small feet pull it downwards, making it impossible to get any further than a perpetual ‘hovering’ in an in-between space. ‘Barely mak[ing] it into the life of aesthetic form,’ ¹³⁰ Klee’s angel traverses that intangible passage between ‘no body and embodiment,’ ¹³¹ a symbol of the self-reflexive artist who goes through a ‘transubstantiation,’ according to Merleau-Ponty: by ‘lending his body to the world’—a ‘body which is an intertwining of vision and movement’—the artist ‘changes the world into paintings.’ ¹³² Yet, although blown away and detached from its original Paradise, this is a necessary angel, an angelus ‘novus,’ a new kind angel who is ‘hopeful yet filled with uncertainty’ ¹³³ in that it blesses a transitional state between the visible and the invisible that should not just be read as futility, as Klee himself suggests in a notebook entry from 1939: ‘Naturally a form defined in full is more conspicuous than one that is less definite. In this realm we cross a boundary line of reality. There is no copying or reproduction, but rather transformation and new creation. If we surrender to it, a metamorphosis occurs, something which, if healthy, is always new.’ ¹³⁴

Intuitive Appropriation

‘Life is always new; it is always beginning. The fiction is part of this beginning,’ ¹³⁵ echoed Stevens in a letter to his friend Hi Simons only four years later. Intrinsically Heraclitean, the awareness of a ‘fate of perception’—the inability to fully possess unreflected life—at the heart of Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ and Stevens’s poetics characterises a modernist pattern of re-beginning that is ‘part of the never-ending meditation, / Part of the question that is the giant himself.’ ¹³⁶ After all, ‘Creation,’ as Klee writes in his Notebooks, ‘lives as genesis under the visible surface of the work. All those touched by the spirit see this in retrospect, but only the creative see it looking forward (into the future).’ ¹³⁷ Merleau-Ponty undoubtedly draws upon this idea in ‘Eye and Mind’ when claiming that the conception of the ‘line’ in the work of Klee and Matisse ‘no longer imitates the visible; it “renders visible”; it is the blueprint of a genesis of things.’ ¹³⁸ This ‘line,’ as Rajiv Kaushik remarks, is not merely representational; rather, it ‘confers onto the canvas what Merleau-Ponty calls the “fragile act of the look [regardant],”’ which Kaushik explains as ‘the hidden point at which the incarnated vision of his two eyes is laid open to the world in which it is inscribed,’ so that the figurative line is of what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘floating pre-things.’ ¹³⁹ The philosopher’s discussion, in ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,’ of the celebrated 1946 slow motion film of Matisse at work entitled Henri Matisse sheds light on the interdependence of experience and expression in artistic creation. While Jacques Lacan has read the slow motion movement of Matisse’s drawing hand as a gesture with a specific goal, enabling us to ‘distinguish between gesture and act’—‘Let us not forget,’ writes Lacan, ‘that the painter’s brushstroke is something in which a movement is terminated’ ¹⁴⁰ —for Merleau-Ponty, Matisse’s film helps us understand that expression happens ‘not on the basis of any subjective decision but rather from out of the space that is opened up by the free movement of the painter’s handwork.’ ¹⁴¹ Just as Cézanne was ‘not omnipotent . . . and wanted . . . to make visible how the world touches us,’ Merleau-Ponty stresses that

Matisse would be wrong if, putting his faith in the film he believed that he really chose between all the possible lines that day and, like the God of Leibniz, solved an immense problem of maximum and minimum. He was not a demiurge; he was a man … Matisse, set within a man’s time and vision, looked at the still open whole of his work in progress and brought his brush toward the line which called for it in order that the painting might finally be that which it was in the process of becoming.

Similarly, the philosopher explains, ‘[e]xpressive speech . . . gropes around a significative intention which is not guided by any text, and which is precisely in the process of writing the text.’ ¹⁴² Like the process of drawing or painting, the writer’s process happens by way of what Cézanne called ‘germination.’ ¹⁴³

Working back from this, what Hopkins, Stevens and Klee have in common is that the emphasis in their works falls less on a final goal—on ‘a form defined in full,’ as Klee puts it—than on a shift of perspective reminiscent of epoché, calling attention to the genesis and process of art making itself. Much like ‘poiesis,’ this process is ‘an undercurrent striving towards the light of day,’ the unveiling or un-concealing into appearance of which is unthought according to Heidegger’s ‘aletheia.’ ¹⁴⁴ In other words, the epoché that plays part in artistic creation is intuitive rather than voluntary, recalling Husserl’s 1907 letter to Hugo von Hoffmansthal:

Phenomenological intuiting is thus closely related to the aesthetic intuiting in ‘pure’ art; obviously it is not an intuiting that serves the purpose of aesthetic pleasure, but rather the purpose of continued investigations and cognition, and of constituting scientific insights in a new sphere (the philosophical sphere). Another thing. The artist, who ‘observes’ the world in order to gain ‘knowledge’ of nature and man for his own purposes, relates to it in a similar way as the phenomenologist. Thus: not as an observing natural scientist and psychologist, not as a practical observer of man, as if it were an issue of knowledge of man and nature. When he observes the world, it becomes a phenomenon for him, its existence is indifferent, just as it is to the philosopher (in the critique of reason). The difference is that the artist, unlike the philosopher, does not attempt to found the ‘meaning’ of the world-phenomenon and grasp it in concepts, but appropriates it intuitively, in order to gather, out if its plenitude, materials for the creation of aesthetic forms. ¹⁴⁵

It is in this way that Hopkins, Stevens and Klee break ‘the skin of things’ and bring a second sight to bear on the invisible and often neglected ground from which our expressions emerge. Like Klee’s threshold angels, the poems of Hopkins and Stevens call attention to that muddy and unthought ‘passage’ of meaning-giving from the experience of the world to the word, from the single unit to the horizon and from feeling to understanding. ¹⁴⁶ If the three modernists found an order after the announcement that God was dead, this was not an order of complete entities but a new cry for origin, one that promoted a lived poetics ‘penetrat[ing] right to the root of things beneath the imposed order of humanity.’ ¹⁴⁷

Notes

1.
Kearney, Anatheism, 5. According to Kearney, Merleau-Ponty provides us with a ‘philosophically agnostic viewpoint … offering an intriguing phenomenological interpretation of eucharistic embodiment as recovery of the divine within the flesh, a kenotic emptying out of transcendence into the heart of the world’s body, becoming a God beneath us rather than a God above us’ (Ibid., 91).
2.
Joyce, Ulysses, 42.
3.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty as cited in Darian Meacham, ‘“Faith is in things not seen”: Merleau-Ponty on Faith, Virtù, and the Perception of Style,’ in Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception, 185. Note that Merleau-Ponty speaks of a similar ‘primordial faith’ as the ‘ground’ of ‘all our certainties’ in Phenomenology of Perception, 431.
4.
Meacham, ‘“Faith is in things not seen,”’ 185.
5.
Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, ‘The Value of Flesh: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and the Modernism/Postmodernism Debate,’ in Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, eds., Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 1.
6.
As Richard Kearney puts it, ‘Hopkins felt his alienation from God in his very bones, of course. It was a personal, spiritual matter, not just philosophical or social,’ in Anatheism, 11.
7.
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 195.
8.
Hopkins’s poetry has been published in Modernist anthologies, partly because his work was not published until 1918, almost 20 years after his death, but also because Hopkins’s particular way of challenging both ideas of representation and language anticipates inquiries central to Modernism.
9.
Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy, 13.
10.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 19.
11.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, ed. Catherine Philips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 132. Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ is quoted in full by permission of Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Province of the Society of Jesus.
12.
Bernadette Waterman Ward, World as Word: Philosophical Theology in Gerard Manley Hopkins (Washington D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 97. See also Dennis Sobolev, The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins: An Essay in Semiotic Phenomenology (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 98 and 210.
13.
Peter Cosgrove, ‘Hopkins’s “Windhover”: Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,’ in Poetics Today 25.3 (Fall 2004): 438 and 456. Cosgrove argues that ‘the “ungrammaticality” of “The Windhover’s tropes and the importance of the notion of “thing” puts Hopkins in proximity to the problems of the later modernist poets, such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, who struggle with the paradoxical ability of the conceptualizing power of mind to simultaneously apprehend an external object and to distance us further from it’ (ibid., 437).
14.
Ibid., p. 456.
15.
For more on Hopkins in relation to Husserl’s phenomenology via the philosophy of Duns Scotus, see Eoghan Walls, ‘A Flaw in the Science on Transcendence: Hopkins and Husserl on “Thisness,”’ in Bourne-Taylor and Mildenberg, eds., Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond, 167–188.
16.
Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 27.
17.
Hopkins wrote in a journal entry: ‘Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is,’ in Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, eds. Humphrey House and Graham Storey, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 205. And in a letter written on 15 February, 1879, to Robert Bridges he wrote: ‘No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness … But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling “inscape” is what I above all aim at in poetry,’ in Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Collier Abbott (London: Oxford University Press), 66.
18.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxix.
19.
Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, 38 and 41–42.
20.
Similarly, phenomenology ascribes equal value to the part and the whole, as Maurice Natanson remarks: ‘At every point … phenomenology honors the integrity of the aspect and the whole, the unit and the horizon in which it is viewed, the concrete and the universe in which it comes into clarity.’ See Natanson, Edmund Husserl, 205.
21.
Hopkins, The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, 46.
22.
For more on the technicalities of Hopkins’s ‘sprung rhythm’ see Paul Kiparski, ‘Sprung Rhythm,’ in Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans, eds., Rhythm and Meter: Phonetics and Phonology, Volume 1: Rhythm and Meter (San Diego: Academic Press Inc, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 337.
23.
Hopkins, Letters to Robert Bridges, 246, 46; my italics.
24.
Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 13. Merleau-Ponty, in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, calls this sedimented language ‘ready-made, instituted language, language as a given dimension’ (44).
25.
Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 87.
26.
Lawlor, ‘Verflechtung,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, xxviii.
27.
Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 87.
28.
Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, 16.
29.
As Dennis Sobolev puts it, ‘In Hopkins’s poetic world, the possibility of meaning is warranted by the double semantics of divine presence in nature and in the human soul,’ in Dennis Sobolev, ‘Semantic Counterpoint, Hopkins and The Wreck of Deutschland,’ SEL 44.4 (Autumn 2004): 842.
30.
Ibid.
31.
Sobolev, The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 302.
32.
Hopkins to Alexander William Mowbray Baillie, 14 January 1883, in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Including His Correspondence with Coventry Patmore, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, 2nd Edition (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), 250–253, 252. For more on Hopkins and counterpoint, see Dennis Sobolev, The Split Word of Gerard Manley Hopkins: An Essay in Semiotic Phenomenology (The Catholic University of America Press, 2011).
33.
Derek Attridge, ‘Introduction: Derrida and the Questioning of Literature,’ in Acts of Literature, 414.
34.
Derrida, Acts of Literature, 416.
35.
Moran and Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary, 189–193. Note that Husserl also termed the Life-world the ‘prescientific,’ the ‘pregiven’ world and ‘the ground of all praxis’ (Ibid., 190–191).
36.
Mattens, Meaning and Language, 224, 223.
37.
Lawlor, ‘Verflechtung,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, xxii.
38.
Hopkins, The Major Works, 132.
39.
Sobolev, The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 98, 293, 98.
40.
Ibid., 294.
41.
Ibid., 3.
42.
Evans and Lawlor, ‘Introduction: The Value of Flesh,’ in Chiasms, 9.
43.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 176.
44.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 311 and 311n3. Heidegger writes that ‘Kierkegaard saw the existentiell phenomenon of the Moment in the most penetrating way’ but that he, at the same time, ‘gets stuck in the vulgar concept of time and defines the Moment with the help of the now and eternity’ (ibid., 311n3).
45.
‘Skal derimod Tiden og Evigheden berøre hinanden, da maa det vaere i Tiden, og nu er vi ved Øeieblikket … Det er Evighedens første Reflex i Tiden, dens første Forsøg paa ligesom at standse Tiden.’ See Søren Kierkegaard, Begrebet Angest (Koebenhavn: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk forlag, 1943), 107, 109. All translations of this work are the author’s own.
46.
‘Det vi kalder Øeieblikket … Paa Latin hedder det momentum, hvis Derivation (af movere) kun udtrykker den blotte Forsvinden.’ See Søren Kierkegaard, Begrebet Angest (Koebenhavn: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk forlag, 1943), 108.
47.
Paul Claudel as cited in Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 442.
48.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 242.
49.
Ibid., Ixxviii.
50.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 215–216.
51.
Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye (London: Lund Humphries, 1961), 454.
52.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 155.
53.
Ibid., 197, 198, 201, 216.
54.
Ibid., 176.
55.
Ibid., 216.
56.
Kevin Hart, ‘The Experience of Poetry,’ Boxkite 2 (1998): 285–286, 288.
57.
Hopkins, The Major Works, 132.
58.
Merleau-Ponty also speaks of a ‘pre-Being,’ ‘prior to the division between self and others … the “flesh of the world.”’ See Galen A. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 154.
59.
Lawlor, ‘Verflechtung,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, xx.
60.
Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, xiii.
61.
Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘true philosophical radicalism inevitably has an impassioned [passionelle] atmosphere.’ Merleau-Ponty as cited in Lawlor, ‘Verflechtung,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, xiii.
62.
As Lawlor writes: ‘I fall down into passions of humanity (really into nature) and simultaneously upward into the idea of humanity’ (Ibid., xx).
63.
Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 142.
64.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 380.
65.
Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 159.
66.
Ibid., 193.
67.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 240.
68.
Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 426–427.
69.
Ibid.
70.
Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 58.
71.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 240.
72.
As Anca Rosu writes: ‘It has become an almost ritual gesture to recall such a dichotomy in any discussion of Stevens’s poetry,’ in The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1995), 52.
73.
Thomas J. Hines, The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parallels with Husserl and Heidegger (London: Associated University Presses, 1976); Patricia Rae, The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound and Stevens (London: Associated University Presses, 1997).
74.
Hines, The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens, 31, 46, 47, 48. Hines’s view recalls Glauco Cambon’s statement in one of the first studies on phenomenology in Stevens that ‘both Husserl and Stevens aim at a focused apprehension of the essence of things … by a process of “stripping” or “unhusking” … which Stevens calls “abstraction” and which appears in so many of his poems as a kind of preliminary negation of the given object, or of our construed interpretations.’ See Cambon, The Inclusive Flame: Studies in American Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 237.
75.
Hines, The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens, 26–27. Similarly, Anca Rosa also suggests that the method of phenomenological reduction, which is often used to shed light on this dichotomy, ‘cancel[s] previous representations of the real,’ thus separating mind and world, in The Metaphysics of Sound, 53.
76.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 240.
77.
Alan Perlis, Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes (London: Associated University Presses, 1976), 78.
78.
Ibid.
79.
Leonard and Wharton, ‘Wallace Stevens as Phenomenologist,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 26 (1984): 331, 334, and 340.
80.
Patricia Rae, The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens (London: Associated University Presses, 1997), 15, 150, 165, 164, 154.
81.
Ibid., 165.
82.
Husserl, Ideas, 117.
83.
Ibid., 21; my italics.
84.
Ibid., 15, 154.
85.
According to Merleau-Ponty intentionality is ‘too often cited as the principal discovery of phenomenology, even though intentionality can only through the reduction.’ See Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxxi.
86.
Kingwell, ‘Husserl’s Sense of Wonder,’ 102.
87.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 473.
88.
For a more elaborate version of this argument and more on the re-evaluation of phenomenology in Stevens, see my article ‘“A Total Double-Thing”: A Re-evaluation of Phenomenology in Wallace Stevens,’ in Textual Practice 29.1 (2015): 133–154.
89.
Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 238.
90.
Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 154; my italics.
91.
Hines also calls attention to this paragraph in The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens, 23. Commenting on the same passage, Natanson points out: ‘Wahl was a careful and knowledgeable reader of Husserl,’ and as ‘Stevens read French with ease, he should have had the time to discover phenomenology.’ But whether or not the poet was familiar with phenomenological thought, Natanson stresses that his work always ‘hovered at its edges,’ in The Erotic Bird, 8.
92.
Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 275.
93.
Husserl, Ideas, 11, 102.
94.
Husserl, Shorter Works, 10.
95.
Husserl as cited in Natanson, The Erotic Bird, 44.
96.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 386.
97.
Ibid., 465, 442 and 219.
98.
Ibid., 383.
99.
Ibid., 343.
100.
Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 72.
101.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 152.
102.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxix.
103.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 155.
104.
Merleau-Ponty as cited in Lawlor, ‘Verflechttung,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, xxvi.
105.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 155, 240.
106.
Ibid., 440; my italics and 473.
107.
Ibid., 496–497.
108.
Ibid., 496.
109.
Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, 649–50.
110.
Ibid., 661.
111.
Handwritten letter from Marianne Moore to Stevens, dated November 22, 1951, Wallace Stevens Box 25, WAS 57, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
112.
Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 66.
113.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 497.
114.
Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 6, 5.
115.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 295.
116.
Ibid., 371. For more on Cézanne’s Large Bathers, see Chapter 4 of this book.
117.
Ibid.; my italics.
118.
Ibid., 183.
119.
Klee as cited in Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 127.
120.
Christine Hopfengart, ‘Hovering: Klee’s Angels as Personifications of Transition,’ in Zentrum Paul Klee, ed., Paul Klee: The Angels, (Hatje Cantz, 2012), p. 13.
121.
Ibid., 12, 14.
122.
Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), 42.
123.
Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (London: Lund Humphries, 1954), 357.
124.
Heidegger as quoted in Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 126.
125.
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History,’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 249.
126.
O.K. Werckmeister, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian,’ Critical Inquiry 22.2 (Winter 1996): 242.
127.
Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, 19.
128.
See Fawkner, ‘Self-Evidencing Life: Paradoxes of Reduction in Modernism, Phenomenology and Christianity,’ in Bourne-Taylor and Mildenberg, eds., Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond, 79; and Ingrid Riedel, Engel der Wandlung: Paul Klees Engelbilder (Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 2001). Galen A. Johnson has also noted that Klee’s angels ‘retain the traits, weaknesses and feelings of being human,’ in The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 127.
129.
David Sylvester, About Modern Art (London: Pimlico, 1996), 36.
130.
Harald Fawkner, ‘Self-Evidencing Life: Paradoxes of Reduction in Modernism, Phenomenology and Christianity,’ 78–79.
131.
Maria Damon, ‘Angelology,’ in Peter Gibian, ed., Mass Culture and Everyday Life (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 210.
132.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind,’ in The Primacy of Perception, 162.
133.
Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 129.
134.
Klee, Notebooks, Volume I: The Thinking Eye, 4.
135.
Stevens, The Letters of Wallace Stevens, 434.
136.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 465.
137.
Klee, Notebooks, Volume I: The Thinking Eye, 463.
138.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind,’ in The Primacy of Perception, 183. In the words of Rajiv Kaushik, ‘In describing the objects of a Matisse drawing, for example, Merleau-Ponty refers to the lines and contours of these objects as in becoming from out of a previous emptiness.’ See Kaushik, Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty: Excursions in Hyper-Dialectic (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 56 as well as the chapter entitled ‘Klee and Hand: Colour, Line, Word, Writing, Discourse’ (Ibid., 97–121).
139.
Rajiv Kaushik, Art and Institution: Aesthetics in the Late Works of Merleau-Ponty (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), 112–113.
140.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 114.
141.
Kaushik, Art and Institution, 30.
142.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,’ in Signs, 45, 46; my italics.
143.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 17.
144.
Derek H. Whitehead, ‘Poiesis and Art-Making: A Way of Letting-Be,’ Contemporary Aesthetics 1 (2003), accessed 5 July 2016, http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=216&searchstr=whitehead. See also Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 15–79.
145.
Edmund Husserl, ‘Letter to Hoffmansthal,’ trans. Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Site 26/27 (2009): 2; originally in Husserliana Dokumente, Briefwechsel, Band 7: Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 133–136.
146.
The word ‘passage’ is Merleau-Ponty’s: ‘the passage from the brute being to the acknowledged being,’ in The Visible and the Invisible, 57.
147.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 16.

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3. Earthly Angels and Winged Messengers: Experience and Expression in Hopkins, Stevens and Klee

Catching Flight: Hopkins’s Windhover

Necessary Angels and Half-Way States: Wallace Stevens

‘Still Imperfect’: Paul Klee’s Angelology

Intuitive Appropriation

Notes