Eliot regretted the failure of the belief that had permeated European and American culture, but he did not evidently share Stevens’ distaste for having “to think all these things over,” and persisted in a search for an unqualified belief. Like many converts, once baptized, Eliot led a much more pious and dutiful religious life than most of his fellow Anglicans. He apparently needed a degree of certainty that, as he told Montgomery Belgion,1 his study of Bradley had not provided.
Early in 1940 Belgion sent Eliot an article on the philosophy of the Harvard philosopher Harold Joachim that prompted Eliot to reminisce on his years as a philosophy student:
To read an essay which recalls to me the Bradleian terminology, in which I have not thought for so many years, is a reminiscence which, at this distance, becomes a curious experience of the past. I experience that baffling feeling which I always found so exhausting in the youthful days when I attempted to practise philosophy – which I can only describe as a kind of awareness of subtilities [sic] and refinements and qualifications hovering in the corner of my eye, which I could never quite focus: accompanied by the suspicion that if I could focus them, there would be a further area of qualification again, flickering on the periphery. A sort of infinite regress, which gave me a despair of philosophy for myself. (Letter of 16 February 1940. Herbert Read Collection. University of Victoria. My emphasis)
Whereas Stevens contrived to survive philosophically in a world of contingent belief, Eliot admitted to suffering from a kind of cognitive vertigo in the face of such a mise en abîme. It was, he says, this unwillingness to rest in passionate uncertainty that led him into the Anglican church – or at least into “theology”: “But the point that interested me, for myself, in reading the essay in question, was to find the ‘conations’[i.e., will & desire] of pursuit beginning to operate again automatically, with the same failure of energy and faith in ability to follow up the beginnings. There was perhaps at bottom an admission that following them up would require a sacrifice of other activities which I was not prepared to sacrifice. If I could have given myself up completely to this kind of speculation, I suppose I should have become a sort of minor Husserl or Heidegger. Theology, as setting some limits to the ventures of the mind, is, I feel, a more satisfactory avocation” (Same letter. My emphasis). Needing something that set “some limits to the ventures of the mind,” Eliot found it in “theology.” By “theology” he means belief, not the formal study of the divine, an enterprise he never attempted – unless one counts Four Quartets as theology.
Given the considerable body of literature postulating affinities between Stevens and both Heidegger and Husserl, it is worth pursuing Eliot’s casual remark that he might have become a minor Husserl or Heidegger to see if we can tease out just what he meant. I do not know how well informed Eliot was on Heidegger’s career, but it is difficult to imagine that he had in mind Heidegger’s role as an apologist for Nazism – one that led him to be banned from teaching by the French épuration committee. He more likely had him in mind as a student of Husserl, whose 1913 Ideen earned him the rank of the principal modern heir of Hegelian idealism, succeeding Bradley.
If Eliot had been cogitating on his career thirty years still later, he might well have compared himself to Hans Georg Gadamer or Jacques Derrida – either of whom could be described as “a minor Husserl or Heidegger.”2 Indeed in T.S. Eliot and American Philosophy, Manju Jain has argued for an affinity of the views of Eliot’s teacher Josiah Royce with Heidegger and his followers – especially Gadamer, and Derrida. Although I think it is an error to conflate the Eliot of Royce’s seminar with Heidegger and his followers,3 it is worth bearing in mind that the philosophical concerns of the young Eliot – in particular on the issue of belief or doubt – were very much those that exercised Husserl and Heidegger and their phenomenological or existential4 followers: Sartre, Ricoeur, Gadamer, and Derrida (different as they are from one another). Husserl placed empirical knowledge in doubt. Heidegger – more truly a disciple of Nietszche than of Husserl – called into question communicable knowledge of any sort, including Husserl’s knowledge of the sich selbst. And, like Eliot, Heidegger was famously hostile to Humanism.5 But, in contrast to these contemporary philosophers, neither of our poets challenged the validity of empirical, scientific knowledge. Instead, they sought to sidestep it – Eliot with the revealed religion of Christianity, and Stevens with the poetic imagination.
Despite the lack of any evidence that either Eliot or Stevens read, or even mentioned in any substantive way, either Husserl or Heidegger, there is a considerable body of literature attributing phenomenological meaning to Stevens’ poetry. Most of it is motivated by a desire to co-opt Stevens as a precursor of deconstruction or postmodernism. Eliot does not seem to have attracted so much attention of this sort. Indeed the supposed phenomenological cast of Stevens’ poetry is deployed in the battle of reputations that has waged for some decades over who is the pre-eminent English language poet of the twentieth century (the usual candidates are Eliot, Stevens, and Pound, though Yeats has his devotees). The failure of Eliot’s poetry to yield to phenomenological readings is seen by some as a failing that gives the palm to Stevens.
While the critical attention that Heidegger has received from Stevens scholars is intended either to demonstrate an affinity of Stevens’ poetry with Heidegger’s philosophy or to discredit claims to such an affinity, my intent is different. I want to place Heidegger alongside Eliot and Stevens in hopes that by comparing the three of them we can come to a better understanding of the problem of belief that all three faced. As the principal philosophical influence on literary figures in the postwar world – both as the avatar of French existentialism, and then of its successors, deconstruction and postmodernism – Heidegger’s views merit some consideration in the context of those of the early Eliot and Stevens. This comparison will also provide a useful corrective to the common view that literary modernism is the very antitype of the “postmodern.”
The earliest allegation of affinities between Stevens and Heidegger that I have found is Marjorie Buhr’s article in the April 1970 number of The Wallace Stevens Newsletter. On the evidence of the letters discussed below, Buhr alleges that Stevens was “interested” in Heidegger and summarizes Heidegger’s celebration of esotericism (which Stevens allegedly shares) in his Hölderlin essay: “For Heidegger the poet has the more exalted position [than the philosopher] since he is the namer of gods and the essence of things. Because Being lives only in experience and cannot be driven into conceptual and scientific traps, we must turn to the language of poetic vision to find reality and Being” (11). While this is a reasonable summary of Heidegger’s belief, it is not easily accommodated to Stevens’ position. For Stevens, poetry is heuristic, not revelatory as it is for Heidegger; that is to say, poetry points the way toward some truth, but does not contain it. It is for that reason that Stevens speaks of “fiction” rather than “vision,” as so many of his poetic predecessors would have done.
Thomas Hines’ view in his 1976 book The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parallels with Husserl and Heidegger is that Husserl’s technique of “phenomenological reduction” is equivalent to Stevens’ notion of “decreation” (85–6), and that Stevens shares with Heidegger a focus on the disclosure of Being – though he denies any mystical tendencies in either man (121–2). Hines refers to Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art,” and the “Letter on Humanism,” but he does not give much emphasis in the book to Heidegger’s view that “language is the house of Being.” In the much briefer discussion in a 1977 article, Hines put greater emphasis on Heidegger’s theory of language: “When Stevens writes that ‘a poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words’ and continues this line of thought by concluding that ‘poetry is a revelation in words by means of the words’ [NA 32–3], he is expressing an idea of the function of poetic language and its relation to Being that is very similar to Heidegger’s concept of the essence of poetry” (WSJ 1 57). But Heidegger would have been scandalized by Stevens’ remark. In Heidegger’s view Being is not inserted into language by the poet but resides in language and is occasionally revealed in poetry. The “things that do not exist without words” cannot be aspects of Being, since for Heidegger Being is the ground of all existence.
J. Hillis Miller’s application of Heidegger to Stevens (also in 1976) is not only surreptitious, but is also entirely different from that of Hines. For him it is the undecidability of meaning and the presence of aporiae and mises en abîme in Stevens’ poetry (11–16) that is the mark of its phenomenological posture. Instead of attributing these views to Heidegger, Miller invokes Derrida and “deconstruction” (28). Clearly, Miller has his Heidegger second hand. Nonetheless, the presence of such terms as alethia and the opposition of Grund to Abgrund (20) are echt Heidegger. Despite its dubious argument, B.J. Leggett justly says of Miller’s article: “It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Miller’s reading in Stevens criticism. It is consistently cited in commentaries on ‘The Rock,’ almost always approvingly” (Leggett 1998 114 n2).
One of the products of Miller’s hints is Douglas Aimet’s article of 1981 which glosses the aphorism from Adagio, “Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense,” by appealing to Heidegger’s belief that Dasein (the self) is embedded in Sein (Being) in such a way that Dasein can be faithful (“authentic”) to Sein or unfaithful (“inauthentic”). He admits that “Wallace Stevens did not know Heidegger in any way that can be construed as influence,” but nonetheless accepts the founding assumption adopted by Hines and Miller that “the mutual illumination of the two is striking” (71).
An article by Paul Naylor (WSJ 12 198]) challenges Hines’ argument that Stevens’ poetry “advances” from a Husserlian perspective toward a Heideggerean one. Like Hines he concedes that Stevens likely knew nothing of Husserl, but claims instead that “a ‘supreme fiction’ and a ‘pure phenomenology’ or that terms such as ‘fiction’ and ‘ambiguity’... fill an analogous role in each thinker’s search: they provide the method and the goal of that search.”
Despite Legget’s judicious “deconstruction” of Miller’s founding article in his 1998 WSJ article, scholars have continued to allude to the affinities between Stevens and Heidegger as being established and available for casual exploitation in commentaries whose focus is elsewhere. An instance is Gyorgi Voros’ 2001 WSJ article comparing Stevens and A.R. Ammons in which Stevens’ “outcry of stanza my stone” is interpreted in the light of “the Heideggerian notion of dwelling, and the poem as a chamber or a home” (165). Indeed, Rosa Anca, in another WSJ article of the previous year (2000), points to a theologian’s use of Stevens’ poetry as a help in understanding Heidegger’s difficult philosophy. It serves as an instance of the now embedded view that Stevens’ poetry expresses the same phenomenological or existential philosophy as Heidegger. She also cites Melita Schaum’s Wallace Stevens and the Critical Schools, which “shows that Stevens has been a favourite with just about every critical school or theoretical trend” (Anca 210).
Unlike Stevens, Eliot has not been much linked with Heidegger. There are certainly fewer grounds – even superficial grounds – for the attribution of affinity than there are with Stevens, even though, like Heidegger, Eliot became a prominent polemicist against Humanism. But while Christianity and phenomenology both oppose secular Humanism, the former is committed to a transcendent deity, while Heidegger is an unrepentant immanentist. And we remember that it was Bergson’s immanentist tendencies that Eliot found unacceptable.
Both Eliot and Heidegger confronted the dominant ideology of their day – and ours – scientific materialism, or what its opponents called “naturism.” “Naturism” seeks to explain human behaviour by natural laws – whether physical, biological, economic, or psychological. Heideggerean phenomenologists believe that human nature – and by extension history – cannot be explained by the merely human, but by something beyond the human, something immanent in nature. Jews and Christians, in contrast, believe that these phenomena cannot be explained without appeal to something transcendent – not just of the human, but of nature itself. Paul Elmer More adopts this latter position in his response to Humanism in America, a 1930 collection to which Eliot contributed the essay “Religion without Humanism.”6
Shortly after his baptism in June 1927, (in the 1928 essay “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt”) Eliot resoundingly dismisses the notion that Humanism can serve as a substitute for religion. One of the standard claims of Humanism is that the wisdom of the founders of religions (such as the Buddha, Lao Tze, Christ, and Mohammed) and of philosophers (such as Socrates, Plato, and Confucius) could be incorporated into Humanism (Selected Essays 474). Eliot rejected that claim, insisting that Humanism could claim no higher status than a watered-down, secular version of religious insight. For him – as for Irving Babbitt – “the humanistic point of view is auxiliary to and dependent upon the religious point of view” (Selected Essays 480).
A year later (1929), Eliot published “Second Thoughts about Humanism” in response to the criticism of the first essay by the Humanist Norman Foerster. Here Eliot adopts a more aggressive stance, warning that it is “Humanism’s positivistic tendencies that are alarming” (Selected Essays 482). He is quite savage, keying on Foerster’s rather careless appeal to the Comtean claim that scientific advances have rendered religion obsolete – the same claim Robertson made in Modern Humanists. Eliot’s ultimate put-down of the Humanist posture is his assertion that “Man is man because he can recognize supernatural realities, not because he can invent them” (485). This remark contrasts strongly with Eliot’s earlier hostile assessment of Collingwood and others who made similar claims for the necessity of Theism in the reviews he wrote while under the influence of Russell and Maurras, discussed in chapter two.
Stevens would not, I think, have disagreed with Eliot’s remark, since his view was that poetic fictions are rather like scientific hypotheses; they are tentative formulations based on experience, but always subject to revision or rejection in the light of new experience. Such a view is an application to religious belief of pragmatist principles.7 Stevens’ assertion, “I am a native in this world / And think in it as a native thinks,” in poem XXVIII of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is based on such a faith. On these grounds there is a good chance that the poet’s fictions will reflect the fundamental nature of existence, and not just what Stevens calls “reality,” the quotidian experience of l’homme moyen sensuel. The poet’s fictions are shaped by the same forces that shape the world – forces that Stevens believes transcend the world. On this he is in agreement with Christians, and in disagreement with Heidegger, for whom the forces that shape the world are immanent in it.
Stevens largely avoids talk of the supernatural. The nearest he comes to it in his poetry is talk of heaven, and he is invariably dismissive of the notion of an afterworld where rewards can be collected. An exemplary instance is “Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb,” published in Poetry in 1921 as one of the group “Sur Ma Guzzla Gracile,” in which he mocks the notion that we enter a paradise after death:
What word have you, interpreters, of men
Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night,
The darkened ghosts of our old comedy?
Do they believe they range the gusty cold,
With lanterns borne aloft to light the way,
Freemen of death, about and still about
To find whatever it is they seek? Or does
That burial, pillared up each day as porte
And spiritous passage into nothingness,
Foretell each night the one abysmal night,
When the host shall no more wander, nor the light
Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark?
Make hue among the dark comedians,
Halloo them in the topmost distances
For answer from their icy Élysée.
Although Stevens did not share Eliot’s Christian faith in the reality of a supernatural realm, like Eliot he rejected psychoanalytic reductionism.8 He managed throughout his career to evade the “either/or” that Eliot offered Foerster: “There is no avoiding the dilemma: you must be either a naturalist or a supernaturalist.” Stevens’ avoidance of that stark choice is what makes his poetry so subtle – a subtlety that some perceive as confusion or muddle-headedness.
“Religion without Humanism,” Eliot’s contribution to the Foerster collection, attempts to restore relations between Christians and Humanists by conceding that religion needs Humanism to keep it from the excesses of ecclesiastical sclerosis on the one hand, and dogmatic sclerosis on the other. But he does not yield anything on belief, conceding only the need for the discipline of sceptics in the midst of believers – a residue, no doubt of his earlier Humanism. He closes the essay with the remark cited above, “poetry is poetry, and not science or religion,” and he adds the opinion that pure poetry may be “something less than poetry” (Foerster 109).
Because of his concern with religion and belief, it is not always recognized that, unlike Marxists and Postmodernists, Eliot accepted the validity and authority of the empirical sciences. That acceptance is clearly expressed in the January 1915 correspondence with the physicist Norbert Wiener discussed in chapter two. There Eliot conceded the validity of scientific knowledge, while at the same time suggesting a Stevens-like strategy of side-stepping science in art: “Now the world of natural science may be unsatisfying, but after all it is the most satisfactory that we know, so far as it goes. And it is the only one which we must all accept. One cannot, of course, hope to separate Reality from Value. Some philosophies are only a play upon this ambiguity of the word Reality. In a way the most valuable is the most real, and the beauty of a work of art is in this way more real to me than its ultimate (or relatively ultimate) physical constituents” (Letters 80). Essentially, then, Eliot adopts here the quasi-mystical Romantic view that the emotional cathexis of the work of art renders it valuable, and that its value is not simply a fleeting pleasure, but something “more real” than mere quotidian empirical experience. Such a view presents him with difficulties after his conversion – difficulties that he never entirely surmounts.
Foreshadowing his own career choice, Eliot tells Wiener “that the lesson of relativism is: to avoid philosophy and devote oneself to either real art or real science.” And in his continuation he anticipates Richard Rorty, a celebrated American follower of Heidegger (via Gadamer).9 Eliot attributes his Rortyan perception to Santayana: “For me, as for Santayana, philosophy is chiefly literary criticism and conversation about life.” But he admits that Wiener’s kind of philosophy is very different: “You have the logic, which seems to me of great value.” It is the kind of philosophy that Russell and Frege practised, which became dominant for much of the twentieth century, and a philosophy – as we have seen – that Eliot briefly tried to master.
Although Eliot conceded the authority of empirical science – unlike Marxists, Heideggerean phenomenologists, and existentialists – after his break with Russell he tended to treat empirical science as the antagonist of art. For example, in his Criterion “Commentary” for 24 April 1924, he took issue with the following remark of Russell’s: “Until ‘culture’ has made its peace with science it will remain outside the main current of events, feeble and querulous, sighing for the past. The world that science has been making may be disgusting, but it is the world in which we have to live; and it condemns to futility all who are too fastidious to notice it” (II 232–3). Objecting to “the arrogance of the man of science,” Eliot contradicted Russell’s observation, complaining that “The man of letters or the man of ‘culture’ of the present time is far too easily impressed and overawed by scientific knowledge and ability; the aristocracy of culture has abdicated before the demagogy of science” (Criterion II 233). Throughout his later career Eliot was consistent on this point. He concedes the authority of science in its own realm, while at the same time insisting on the parallel authority of the arts within their realm. After his conversion he was obliged to place revealed religion above both, a necessity that rendered the Romantic view of art as revelatory no longer accessible to him.
Stevens was much less well informed about philosophical issues than Eliot, but like him, insisted on the incapacity of science to answer the questions that interested him as a human and an artist. An instance of his scepticism about science can be found in his gloss on canto XIV of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” in a letter to Hi Simons. The lines in question are:
First one beam, then another, then
A thousand are radiant in the sky.
Each is both star and orb; and day
Is the riches of their atmosphere.
The sea appends its tattery hues.
The shores are banks of muffling mist.
One says a German chandelier–
A candle is enough to light the world.
It makes it clear. Even at noon
It glistens in essential dark.
At night, it lights the fruit and wine,
The book and bread, things as they are,
In a chiaroscuro where
One sits and plays the blue guitar.
(XIV ll 134–66)
Stevens’ gloss: “I don’t know that one is ever going to get at the secret of the world through the sciences. One after another their discoveries irradiate us and create the view of life that we are now taking, but, after all, this may be just a bit of German laboriousness. It may be that the little candle of the imagination is all we need. In the brilliance of modern intelligence, one realizes that, for all that, the secret of the world is as great a secret as it ever was. And then too, the world has its own appearances in the light of the imagination. Imagination compared to reason. Rather a catholic view of it” (Letters 363. My emphasis). Stevens’ rejection of “German chandeliers” would seem to support a lack of interest in – or perhaps a distrust of – the intricacies of philosophical argument, here characterized as “German laboriousness.” By characterizing his own view as “catholic,” Stevens probably had in mind the Roman Catholic teaching about “mysteries” – that is, doctrines that offend rationality, such as the virgin birth, the Trinity, and transubstantiation.10 This letter puts into question Hines’ reading of “Blue Guitar” in The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens as an expression of a Husserlian phenomenological posture on the grounds that it evinces a distrust of sensory or empirical evidence (75–84).
In “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (read at Princeton in May 1941, just a year later than Eliot’s letter to Belgion), Stevens expressed the rather Heideggerian-sounding sentiment that “words are thoughts and not only our own thoughts but the thoughts of men and women ignorant of what it is that they are thinking ... A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words” (Kermode, ed. 663). As we have seen, Heidegger held a superficially similar view of language, which he expressed most uncompromisingly in the “Letter on Humanism.” There, Heidegger famously characterized language as “the house of Being”; and added, “in its home man dwells” (Heidegger 1977 193).
“Letter on Humanism” is Heidegger’s public reply to a letter from Jean Beaufret asking him to articulate his response to Jean Paul Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism (Paris: Nagel, 1946). Although Sartre (and Beaufret) based their existential posture on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, Heidegger is not at all sympathetic to Sartre’s claim that his philosophy is compatible with Humanism. (A distressing sidebar to the “Letter on Humanism” is that Beaufret has since been revealed as an anti-Semite and holocaust denier.11) Heidegger’s opposition to Humanism takes an idiosyncratic form modulated by his phenomenology. He places it in a long historical perspective: “The first humanism, Roman humanism, and every kind that has emerged from that time to the present, has presupposed the most universal “essence” of man to be obvious. Man is considered to be an animal rationale ... This essential definition of man is not false. But it is conditioned by metaphysics” (Heidegger 1977 202). When Heidegger complains that Humanism is “conditioned by metaphysics,” Heidegger means that it is conditioned by all of Western philosophy and science since Socrates’ “humanistic” privileging of sophrosyne, that is, the injunction to “know thyself.” For Heidegger, “metaphysics” is a term of condemnation, not commendation. In this respect Heidegger is following Nietzsche, who held Socrates responsible for introducing “Apollonian” self-awareness into Western thought. For Heidegger, the emphasis on sophrosyne entails a misplaced trust in self-consciousness – what he and his followers call the cogito, in an allusion to the hated Cartesian a priori: “Cogito ergo sum.”12
Heidegger rejects Humanism for much the same reasons that Eliot and Stevens do: because it does not admit the mysterious, the ineffable, and the irrational. By “empty scepticism” he means the sceptic’s doubt of any experience that exceeds or escapes reason. Stevens calls this excess or surplus “the irrational” in his late talk “The Irrational Element in Poetry” (1957): “What I have in mind when I speak of the irrational element in poetry is the transaction between reality and the sensibility of the poet from which poetry springs” (Kermode, ed. 781). Stevens’ “irrational” is quite compatible with the notion of “embodiment” articulated in the late work of Merleau-Ponty (another phenomenologist). But for Stevens, the “sensibility of the poet” is not a mystical sensitivity to noumenal impulses as it is for Heidegger; it is simply his capacity to pay attention to the goings on of his body in a circumambient environment of which it is a part, and to which it is attuned – as Darwin explained – through millennia of random adaptations.
Nearly a decade earlier – in “The Noble Rider” – Stevens complained: “We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession” (Kermode, ed. 663). This, too, is a sentiment we can find in Heidegger, who inveighed tirelessly against what he regarded as the Western obsession with an expressible truth. Heidegger’s preference was a more Nietzschean “felt truth,” which he called alethia, a Greek term he translates as “unconcealment,” stressing the involuntary and revelatory nature of its manifestation. He finds the term in Parmenides in a phrase he translates (here translated from his German) as “the untrembling heart of unconcealment.” In a kind of catechism, Heidegger asks himself what that means, and answers: “It means unconcealment itself in what is most its own, means the place of stillness which gathers in itself what grants unconcealment to begin with” (“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in Basic Writing 387).
Similar accounts of passive knowledge are standard fare in mystical writing. Despite frequent denials by his admirers, there is little doubt that Heidegger’s thought licenses mysticism, even if he himself had no “experiences.” I think much the same could be said for Stevens, except that he focuses on the surface of things, leaving their depths to take care of themselves. For example in “Two or Three Ideas” (delivered at Mount Holyoke College on 28 April 1951) he asks: “Why should a poem not change in sense when there is a fluctuation of the whole of appearance? Or why should it not change when we realize that the indifferent experience of life is the unique experience, the item of ecstasy which we have been isolating and reserving for another time and place, loftier and more secluded?” He answers: “There is inherent in the words the revelation of reality a suggestion that there is a reality of or within or beneath the surface of reality. There are many such realities through which poets constantly pass to and fro, without noticing the imaginary lines that divide one from the other” (Opus Posthumous 265. Stevens’ emphasis).
Unlike Heidegger, Stevens does not claim any “truth,” or “unconcealedness,” to the glimpse “within or beneath the surface of reality.” Indeed, by his persistent use of the term “reality” for the surface, he stresses the primacy of the sensible world, while still expressing faith in the possibility of other “realities” showing through ordinary reality. Perhaps the most salient difference between Heidegger’s phenomenology and Stevens’ poetic creed is the plurality of the revealed world that he permits. For Heidegger, Being is single: Alethia is Being (Sein) revealing itself to Being-there (Dasein). As he puts it, “Unconcealment is, so to speak, the element in which being and thinking and their belonging together exist” (388).
Stevens does not seem ever to have read Heidegger – though that awkwardness has not discouraged the production of a considerable literature articulating their resemblances. There is no mention of Heidegger in Stevens’ correspondence or published prose until very late in his life, and even then, there is no indication that he ever got around to reading him. The earliest mention I have found is in a letter of 19 July 1952 to Paule Vidal, the daughter of his Paris art dealer. He expressed a wish to learn more of Heidegger’s views on Hölderlin’s poetry: “Heidegger, the Swiss [sic] philosopher, has written a little work dealing with the poetry of the German poet, Hölderlin. I have no idea of the title and there is no place here in Hartford where I can find out. I am extremely eager to have a copy of this, particularly if there is a French translation. But I should rather have it even in German than not have it at all. Can you find it for me? Heidegger is a professor at the University of Fribourg and there may be some bookseller at Fribourg from whom you can inquire” (Letters 758). Stevens had no doubt completely forgotten that Mesures, Henry Church’s journal, to which he subscribed, had published a French translation of the Hölderlin essay (“Hölderlin et l’essence de la poésie”) on 15 July 1937 (119–44). His memory lapse would suggest that Stevens had no interest in either Hölderlin or Heidegger at that date. Nor was he well informed about Heidegger in 1952, for Heidegger was German, not Swiss, and he taught at the University of Freiburg in Bavaria, not Fribourg in Switzerland. Moreover, Heidegger was banned from teaching after 1945 because of his Nazi affiliations. Stevens seems to have known nothing of all this. Apparently no one corrected his misapprehensions, for more than two years later (29 September 1954), he asked Peter Lee, who had been travelling in Europe: “Are you returning to Fribourg or have you returned? Have you been able to see or hear Heidegger? Does he lecture in French or in German?” (Letters 846).13
It was probably Hölderlin rather than Heidegger that interested Stevens in the 1950s. He had told Thomas McGreevy in a letter of 6 May 1948 that he had read “a few pages of Groethuysen’s chapter on Hölderlin in his Mythes et Portraits” the night before (Letters 596), and noted that Groethuysen “speaks of the nostalgie du divin, (which obviously is epidemic in Dublin).” This nostalgia is certainly a feature of Hölderlin’s poetry, as well as of Groethuysen’s, but Heidegger is not needed to draw attention to such an attribute of Hölderlin’s poetry. Another indication of Stevens’ interest in Hölderlin is that he had ordered Victor Hammer’s limited collector’s edition of Hölderlin’s Poems 1796–1804 in January 1948. But when he received it, he wrote Hammer, praising the book rather than the poetry it contained (2 June 1950, Letters 681).
He could possibly have come across a paraphrase of Heidegger – also in French – in Thierry Maulnier’s Introduction to French Poetry, a book Stevens recommended to José Rodriguez Feo on 2 March 1945. Here is what Maulnier says: “Heidegger says that the further one strays from nature and from poetry, the more one seeks to define it as a reality shared by different poets, because by this route one is condemned to achieve no more that the commonality of poetry. The critic reaches in the poet, [and] the poet reaches in himself the essence of poetry only insofar as they know how to move forward in a realm where the essential does not coincide with the most general, but with the most interior”14 (My translation). Disregarding the accuracy of this summary of Heidegger’s view, the sentiment expressed might well have appealed to Stevens, but I have not found any evidence that he took special notice of the passage.
It is certainly not my intention to add to the literature claiming that Stevens anticipated postmodern postures – still less that Eliot did. It is nonetheless true that issues of belief, truth, and knowledge were as central for Stevens and Eliot as they were for Heidegger, and Sartre and their postmodern successors. Stevens and Eliot chose different routes than their near contemporary, Heidegger (1889–1976) to circumvent the scepticism that they inherited, and certainly a different route from the radical scepticism of postmodernism.15 Nonetheless, philosophical scepticism was a problem for all of them.
There also exists a considerable literature alleging an affinity between Stevens and Nietzschean-inspired deconstruction. In contrast to the case with Heidegger, there is good evidence that Stevens knew a little of Nietzsche. However, he uncompromisingly rejected Nietzsche’s cognitive scepticism. When Henry Church (who admired Nietzsche) suggested (in a letter of 19 April 1943) that Stevens would agree with the sentiment expressed in Nietzsche’s Aphorism 34,16 Stevens was quick to disabuse him of that opinion:
The Fiktion of Aphorism 34 is the commonplace idea that the world exists only in the mind. So considered it is an unreal thing, in which logic does not have a place. ...
This is quite a different fiction from that of the NOTES, even though it is present in the NOTES. (April 21 1943 Huntington, WAS 3512)
We shall return to this important unpublished letter in the discussion of Ramon Fernandez in the next chapter.
The only feature that the “philosophy” of Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Stevens, and Eliot shares is hostility to the dominant creed of monistic materialism – whether in the belligerent form of Marxist dialectic or as found in the physical sciences. This antipathy is shared by Modernism and postmodernism, but for diametrically opposed reasons. Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and Stevens all took exception to science’s rejection of anything spiritual, anything transcendent of the physical. In addition, they all resisted the bifurcation of human experience into two independent realms – rational and emotional – the strategy adopted by I.A. Richards, and the new criticism that followed his lead.17 Postmodernism, in contrast, embraces the scepticism of empirical science, but takes exception to its positivism, that is, the claim that – in Richard Rorty’s term – “incorrigible” knowledge is possible. In a nutshell, modernism confronted scientific certainty with the shield of belief, whereas the postmodern attacks it with the sword of uncertainty.
Men such as Stevens, Eliot, and Heidegger were anxious to preserve belief in something beyond the empirical evidence of our five senses. They thought humanity needed to aspire to some end greater than physical comfort and pleasure. They were not content to swim in the dominant current of belief in which they found themselves – an unreflective hedonism characterized by contentment with the possession of good health, satisfying work and companionship, the latest gadgets, a comfortable house, a fashionable car, and so forth. All three of these men led quite comfortable lives from this perspective – though Eliot and Heidegger both suffered serious personal disruptions. They all needed a belief in something “beyond ourselves,” but each followed his own distinct route, largely in ignorance – or disregard – of the solutions chosen by the others. And all three regarded Humanism’s accommodation with scientific positivism as an inadequate solution to the crisis of belief.18
Eliot’s dissertation (finished in April 1916) was directly concerned with the issue of knowledge of the world – as its title, Knowledge and Experience, indicates. It contains no mention of either Nietzsche – the godfather of the postmodern – or Husserl. (Of course there is no mention of Heidegger, who – a year younger than Eliot – had completed his own dissertation only three years earlier, in 1913.) What I want to demonstrate in the following pages is that the epistemological posture that Eliot adopted in his dissertation is quite similar to that which animates Stevens’ entire canon. The fundamental component of Stevens’ view is that we make the world we know out of our pre-cognitive experience of a world we do not comprehend. To put it another way, Stevens’ whole project is based on the axiom that the “world” presented to the mind is not a ready-made datum, but a construct based on a reality independent of us.
Since the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, academic philosophy had been preoccupied with epistemology, whose task is to determine the exact nature of the relationship that holds between human knowledge and reality, the Kantian ding an sich. It was this epistemological bias of philosophy that Heidegger set himself to overturn with his focus on ontology – that is, the determination of the nature of being, as opposed to determination of the nature of knowing.
Eliot’s dissertation is well within the epistemological orbit: “The process of development of a real world, as we are apt to forget in our theories, works in two directions; we have not first a real world to which we add our imaginings, nor have we a real world out of which we select our ‘real’ world, but the real and the unreal develop side by side. If we think of the world not as ready made – the world, that is, of meaning for us – but as constructed or constructing itself ... at every moment, and never more than an approximate construction, a construction essentially practical in its nature: then the difficulties of real and unreal disappear” (Knowledge and Experience 136. My emphasis). Following Bradley (and Kant) Eliot argues that the “world” is a construct generated out of a reciprocal relation between mind – or “soul,” as Eliot prefers to say – and an external reality. In this remark, Eliot rejects Kant’s dualism of knower and known in favour of Bradley’s monism in which the knower and the known are part of an embracing whole. As we have seen, Bradley preferred to speak of the knower as a “finite centre,” thereby drawing attention to its status as a part of a greater whole, the Absolute.
Eliot’s view in the dissertation that the distinction between real and imaginary cannot be strictly maintained – though he doesn’t deny that they are distinct – is compatible the opening lines of “The Idea of Order at Key West”:
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
To think of the singer as a Bradleyan finite centre, resonating, as it were, to the vibrations of the sea does no violence to the poem. However, the poem goes beyond Eliot’s paraphrase of Bradley in that it asserts that the singer and its auditors understood the inhuman voice of the sea.
The idea that we are “natives” in the world, and therefore capable of understanding it at a visceral as well as an intellectual level is a constant component of Stevens’ theory of everything, and an idea that he shares with Heidegger. However, Heidegger’s ontological position is not clearly monistic. Although he regards human beings (Dasein) and Being (Sein) as of a piece, the physical world – Existenz in his jargon – obscures and hides Sein. Bradley is rigorously monistic, but less inclined toward mysticism than Heidegger. For the latter, Sein is an actor in the epistemological exchange, “unconcealing” itself to an appropriately receptive Dasein. Bradley’s Absolute, in contrast, is simply the totality of existence, it has no features except those possessed by its components, and it has no agency. Eliot’s abandonment of Bergson in favour of Bradley seems to have been motivated by what he called Bergson’s “weakling mysticism.” Bergson’s vitalism is also monistic, but like Heidegger’s Sein, his élan vital plays an active role, directing evolutionary development. Eliot judges Bergson’s view to be mystical because it assigns agency to a supernatural entity, and “weakling” because – in contrast to Heidegger – Bergson does not permit any communication between the élan vital and human beings; we are simply its product.
Another theorist of non-rational cognition with whom Eliot was familiar is Lévy-Bruhl, whose Les Fonctions Mentales he cites in his dissertation and elsewhere.19 Lévy-Bruhl’s view is that primitive cultures enjoy a “participation mystique” with their environment and especially with one another – a capacity that he says civilized people have lost. (It is not difficult to see the germ of Eliot’s theory of “dissociation of sensibility” in Lévy-Bruhl’s hypothesis – but there are many other candidates for the honour.) Lévy-Bruhl’s hypothesis is purely epistemological – without any appeal to the ontological monism of Bradley and Heidegger. As his title suggests, all his hypothesis requires is the notion that there is more than one way for the mind to grasp the world.
The “reflexive” modelling of our knowledge of the world that Eliot adopts in his dissertation is shared by practically every speculative thinker of the period. “Reflexivity” is the view that what we regard as knowledge of the world is in fact a joint product of our sensorium and nervous system on the one hand, and the stimuli provided by the world on the other hand. Such a view is compatible both with William James’ pragmatism and Bergson’s vitalism – different as they are20 – and even with Russell’s positivism. In all cases our knowledge is contingent and mutable, an artifact of an inconstant environment, though creatively adaptive to it. Stevens’ notion that one can create a fiction that is worthy of belief fits into this general schema. The phenomenologists explicitly set themselves against this prevailing “epistemological” view, in favour of the view that we – and our knowledge – are a product of the world, are caused by it.21 Pragmatists, along with Bergson, believe that we can understand the world just because we are a product of it, but they do not believe that our understanding is caused by the world as Husserl and Heidegger do, although in very different ways. Husserl’s Ideen are true much as Plato’s “archetypes”are true; Heidegger’s Dasein, in contrast, participates in Sein only if the deliberative, rational mind is put in abeyance.
Neither Eliot nor Stevens would go so far. Stevens permits the individual consciousness considerable creative freedom in its adaptation to the world. Eliot, however, would not admit so much autonomy to the individual. A parenthetical remark that I elided from Eliot’s sentence cited above draws attention to this aspect of his position: (“for I am careful not to talk of the creative activity of the mind, a phrase meaningless in metaphysics”). Eliot does not elaborate, but “the creative activity of the mind” is presumably a meaningless phrase because, on a metaphysical view, there can be no addition to creation by the finite creatures within it, hence the human mind cannot have a creative role. If that is so, Eliot’s remark is a fussy qualification, for none of the thinkers under consideration would claim that the human up-take of the world constitutes an addition to the world. On their view human cognition simply orders those fragments of the world that it assimilates. Such an ordering can reasonably be described as “creative” if the resulting order is novel. Surely that is what Stevens meant by his comment on the dust jacket of Ideas of Order: “this book ... is primarily concerned with ideas of order ... as, for example the dependence of the individual, confronting the elimination of established ideas, on the general sense of order, the idea of order created by individual concepts” (Kermode, ed. 997).
Hence it may be that there is no serious disagreement. Eliot would surely concede that the mind can transform or reformulate raw data into a coherent and intelligible “world.” It is in such a spirit that we should take the aphorisms from Adagia (which are among the most extreme claims Stevens makes for art): “Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.” Another, more “poetic,” aphorism declares: “The mind that in heaven created the earth and the mind that on earth created heaven were, as it happened, one” (195 and 201). By “creation,” then, we should take Stevens to mean “transformation of the given,” rather than creation ex nihilo.22
If we read Stevens’ poetry alongside Eliot’s thesis on Bradley we can see that Stevens and Eliot were not very far apart at that stage in Eliot’s journey toward Anglicanism. Stevens’ poetry and Eliot’s dissertation address the same epistemoligical issue – the relation between a knower and the known. And both approach it from an ontological perspective – that is to say, both speculate that there is in fact no real separation between knower and known, between mental and physical, but only an operational one. Here is Eliot in the dissertation: “Cut off a ‘mental’ and a ‘physical’ world, dissect and classify the phenomena of each: the mental resolves into a curious and intricate mechanism, and the physical reveals itself as a mental construct. If you will find the mechanical anywhere, you will find it in the workings of the mind; and to inspect living mind, you must look nowhere but in the world outside. Such is the general doctrine to which my theory of objects points” (154). Since knower and known are part of the same single reality, there is no principled means of discriminating between what the knower brings to her exchange with the world, and what the world brings to that exchange. As a consequence, Eliot suggests a modelling of the relation between knower and known (mind and object) very similar to Nietzsche’s “perspectivist” and even more similar to the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis in his later work on the role of the body. When we engage in an acquaintance with the world, Eliot says, “The real situation is rather that we have ... a felt whole in which there are moments of knowledge ... We perceive an object, we will say, and then perceive it in a special relation to our body” (156. My emphasis). The “felt whole” is what Bradley calls “experience,” that is, a unified sensibility in which “thought” and “feeling” are simultaneously operative – a state that Eliot famously found to have been lacking since the Protestant Reformation.
Though Eliot’s formulation is much drier and more abstract than Stevens’ poem, it seems quite compatible with the opening lines of “Key West” cited above. A little later in the dissertation Eliot reiterates the point in terms even more similar to “Key West”:
We can only define the thing as known and the knower as knowing, and yet both things and knower imply a transcendence of these limitations, a transcendence which has no end.
While we cannot, it thus appears, “know knowing,” [that is to say epistemology is not possible] what we can do is to describe in a general way the process of transition and development which takes place when there is an organism which is a part of the world and yet is capable to a certain degree of contemplating the world. (156, My emphasis)
In the expression “a transcendence which has no end,” Eliot is invoking Bradley’s Absolute, the single totality that embraces everything but which is itself unknowable and logically incapable of completion since that would render it finite. It is perhaps this feature of Bradley’s thought that Eliot described to Belgion as “a sort of infinite regress, which gave me a despair of philosophy for myself.” For Eliot the mise en abîme of that regress is to be evaded at all costs – not celebrated as it is by avatars of the postmodern.
Stevens seems to have shared Bradley’s sense of the ultimately ungraspable nature of reality – and to have had an intuitively monistic view of it. He addresses the question – more allegorically than philosophically – in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”:
What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,
Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,
Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied?
(“It Must Give Pleasure” VIII)
Stevens not only inverts the cathexis of the term “abysmal,” when he speaks of the angel plucking “abysmal glory” on his strings, but he also adopts the angel’s perspective. The abyss holds no terrors for the angel, who “needs nothing but deep space,” and Stevens asks rhetorically if he, the poet, is not just as fearless: “Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied?” His point would seem to be that if human beings can imagine a frightening abyss, they can just as easily imagine an angel to master it. It is this sort of confidence in the therapeutic power of the imagination that most markedly separates Stevens from Eliot.
We find Stevens consorting with the abyss again in the rather idiosyncratic dialogue poem “Saint John and the Back-Ache,” which is reminiscent of some of Yeats’ dialogue poems. St John represents the other-worldly perspective,23 while “Back-Ache” represents the worldly perspective. Back-Ache reckons that the mind is the “terriblest force of earth,” but St John admonishes him, observing that “The world is presence and not force. / Presence is not mind.” Thus the poem portrays the transcendent perspective as denigrating mind in favour of the world, or “presence”; and the incarnate perspective bowing down before mind as “force.” St John goes on to celebrate the sensible world in a way very familiar to readers of Stevens’ poetry, and then draws the conclusion:
My point is that
These illustrations are neither angels, no,
Nor brilliant blows thereof, ti-rill-a-roo,
Nor all one’s luck at once in a play of strings.
They help us face the dumbfoundering abyss
Between us and the object, external cause,
The little ignorance that is everything,
(ll. 19–24. CP 437)
“The dumbfoundering abyss / between us and the object” is just that mise en abîme that Hillis Miller celebrates in Stevens’ poetry as a sign of his postmodern sensibility. But Stevens himself does not celebrate it. Instead, he seeks means to deal with it, and the means presented in this poem are the same as in virtually every Stevens poem – celebration of the glory of sensory, corporeal experience.
Such celebration is not found in Eliot’s poetry – not even when, as a Bradleyan, he might well have found it philosophically possible. That Eliot does not “celebrate” as Stevens does is surely a consequence of the differences in their personalities more than their distinct life experiences, their philosophical predilections, or the profundity of their vision of the world. Of course, Stevens’ reputation initially suffered from the perception that he is too celebratory, too cheerful to be taken seriously. Now that “jouissance” is in vogue, his reputation is in the ascendency. Eliot’s reputation, in contrast, was initially founded on the bleakness of his vision – a bleakness that his readers thought reflected the bleak condition of the world in the early twentieth century. Hence Eliot’s turn to religion was widely seen as a retrograde step, a return to superstition prompted by a failure of nerve in the face of the abyss. Now neither his early bleakness, nor his later piety suit contemporary tastes.
It seems to me that such judgments ignore the sincerity, passion, and intelligence that both poets brought to the dilemma of modernism – the dilemma of how to deal with a world in which the old certainties have vanished. Stevens put that dilemma more succinctly and perspicuously than any other poet of his generation in “Of Modern Poetry:” “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.” The poet/actor is:
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
“Of Modern Poetry” was published in May 1940. It was probably written after the Franco-British declaration of war on Germany in 1939 but obviously before the French surrender on 22 June 1940. The context of war accounts for the line and a half: “It has to think about war / And it has to find what will suffice.”24 However, the examples provided by the poem of what will suffice are just the sort of thing that Stevens’ detractors seize upon: “It must / Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may / Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing.”
Eliot, writing in the same year, tentatively seeks consolation in a similarly trivial – though more anthropologically portrayed – human activity:
In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie –
A dignified and commodious sacrament.
(East Coker I)
But when Eliot returns to such physical, worldly consolations in Part III, he finds them wanting:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
The sentiment these lines express – that these earthly pleasures point the way to “the agony of death and birth” – is a bleak vision of the human condition that is almost diametrically opposed to Stevens’ more cheerful vision.
Of course, the views Eliot expressed in Four Quartets are not those he held at the time of his doctoral dissertation thirty years earlier, which are quite compatible with the cognitive relativism of the mature Stevens. Eliot’s youthful relativism occupies a halfway house between empiricism and solipsism. It was Bradley`s position – or at least Eliot thought it was, for he cited a dangerously solipsistic-sounding passage from Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, as a gloss on line 411 of The Waste Land:”Dayadhvam: ‘I have heard the key / Turn in the door once, and turn once only.’” Here is the Bradley passage that Eliot cited: “My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it ... In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul” (306).
These sentences articulate Bradley’s “doctrine of finite centres,” which Eliot believed bore “very striking similarities” to Leibniz’s theory of monads (146). They emphasize the radical isolation of the sentient individual imprisoned in his own perspective. In the dissertation, however, Eliot was anxious to rescue Bradley from the charge of solipsism. One way out is pragmatism’s hypothesis of converging views, that is, the belief that approximately accurate “pictures” of an inaccessible reality are successively replaced (through empirical investigation and theoretical elaboration) by progressively more accurate “pictures” – although without ever attaining a complete and accurate picture of the ding an sich.25 When Eliot speaks, in the following citation, of a “higher” viewpoint, he is not speaking of a transcendent insight. What he means is that conflicting viewpoints may be subsumed in a “higher” one that accommodates them all: “The point of view (or finite centre) has for its object one consistent world, and accordingly no finite centre can be self-sufficient, for the life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or less extent) jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them. The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself “(147–8. My emphasis).
Eliot’s use of the term “soul” instead of “mind” is a little jarring for contemporary readers, but is employed, I believe, to include the somatic and emotional aspects of human experience as well as the mental. But his point is clear enough – that through our own life experiences we each construct for ourselves a world that is consistent (and presumably coherent) – “one consistent world.” The focus of the passage cited is on the interdependence of finite centres, rather than on their relation to the world at large. Each individual confronts alternate, “jarring and incompatible,” worlds through interaction with other “souls” or minds. This openness to other viewpoints means that Bradleyan souls are not Leibnizian monads. The labour of the philosophical mind – as opposed to the mind of l’homme moyen sensuel – is somehow to accommodate its own world to that of other minds, “to interpret other souls to ourself.” Finally, the shock of encountering alternate viewpoints causes the mind/soul to examine its own viewpoint – “to interpret ourself to ourself.” These remarks are more elucidatory of the lines “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison” than the Bradley citation Eliot provides for readers of The Waste Land. Given the unsorted collection of disjunct cultural “viewpoints” jumbled together in The Waste Land, it is plausible to read these lines as endorsing philosophical relativism, rather than as a morbid contemplation on suffering and loss – as they have usually been read.
The “relativism” that Eliot adopted in his dissertation, then, requires of the individual soul – or finite centre – that it engage in a delicate balancing act between its own view and the multiple views of other souls as the final paragraph of Eliot’s last chapter, entitled “Solipsism,” makes clear. There, he notes: “We need to be reminded [that] we have no direct (immediate) knowledge of anything: the ‘immediately given’ is the bag of gold at the end of the rainbow. Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say ‘this we know’” (156). He concedes that “without externality there is no knowledge” (157), but rejects the notion that the “external world” can be known positively and incorrigibly by the mind/soul. He insists that what we know is our mental state, not the external world: “If the object is only my state both object and I must be strangely transmuted, for I only know myself in contrast to a world” (157). Subtle to a fault, Eliot admits the contrary modelling of knowledge: “And it will be equally true to say that I am only a state of my objects” (152. My emphasis), that is to say, the individual “soul”or finite centre is not an independent observer of its mental states (“my objects”), but a product of them.26
The first option is very close to Husserl’s phenomenology, central to which is the claim that what we know is the sich selbst, that is, our mental phenomena. We know them directly, without mediation, as opposed to the Kantian ding an sich, which we can know only inferentially from physical phenomena. The mental entities are, for Husserl, autonomous logical entities rather than imagined manifolds – as they must be for Bradley, Eliot, and Stevens. With an assist from Nietzsche, Heidegger gave Husserl’s phenomenology an immanentist turn, replacing the sich selbst with Sein, which Dasein does not know in the Cartesian sense of holding in contemplation, but in which it participates. Bradley is somewhere between Husserl and Heidegger. He is not willing to isolate knowledge from “experience,” as Husserl is, but neither is he prepared to go so far as Heidegger toward an immanentist anti-intellectualism.
Eliot’s remark, “if the object is only my state both object and I must be strangely transmuted, for I only know myself in contrast to a world,” could serve as a epigraph for many of the poems in Prufrock and Other Observations, where the personae find themselves irretrievably imprisoned in a Bradleyan finite centre and must attempt to infer the intentions, desires, and fears of the other finite centres among whom they drift. The young man taking leave of a female friend in “Portrait of a Lady” is a case in point:
“Perhaps you can write to me.”
My self-possession flares up for a second;
This is as I had reckoned.
“I have been wondering frequently of late
(But our beginnings never know our ends!)
Why we have not developed into friends.”
I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
Suddenly, his expression in a glass.
My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.
Prufrock is equally incapable of surmounting his “mental states” so as to connect with other “finite centres.” “Portrait” was completed in 1910 and “Prufrock” in 1911, but Eliot did not read Bradley until 1913, so he could not have derived these isolated souls from Bradley. It would seem that Bradley provided Eliot with a philosophical explanation of what he had already observed in his own experience and expressed in poetry.
The female denizens of Eliot’s early poetry are as unlike Stevens’ women as they could be. Where the Eliot personae are unable to penetrate the social masks of the women they encounter, Stevens’ speaker in “Sunday Morning” is well able to see into the mind of the dreaming woman in a peignoir, and he understands the lust of the elders ogling the objectified Susanna in “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” And even though the speaker of “Key West” cannot see into the mind of the captivating singer, he understands her transformation of the scene. Where Stevens’ poems stress communication – albeit often imperfect – Eliot’s early poems stress the distance between the speaker and the other, as in the ironically titled “Morning at the Window,” written while he was at Oxford in 1915 and by then very familiar with Bradley:
They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
Critical commentary on the early poems of this nature has stressed the personae’s preoccupation with inaccessible female figures – typically described in a misogynistic way. While those are undeniable features of these poems, they are more fundamentally bleak depictions of Bradley’s belief that, as “finite centres,” we are inescapably isolated from one another. As we have seen, in Bradley’s philosophy each of us – each finite centre – constructs a distinct “world” out of perceptions which are never identical. Whether the goal of philosophy is self-knowledge (sophrosyne) or objective knowledge of the world, such a doctrine leaves us in a kind of cognitive limbo. That is particularly so if we believe, as Eliot does, that “I only know myself in contrast to a world.” The speaker of “Morning at the Window” is “aware” of the “damp souls” of housemaids, and perhaps pities them for their restricted lives, but he does not empathize with them as the speaker of “Sunday Morning”or “Peter Quince” or “Key West” does with the “others” in those poems.
The second stanza of “Morning at the Window” is more opaque than the first. The “twisted faces” are presumably those of the housemaids in basement kitchens seen from the street, but the “aimless smile”of the female passer-by with muddy skirts is perplexing. The condition of her skirts may be taken to symbolize some sort of moral stain, or simply the state of the streets, since skirts in those days went to the ankle. Muddy streets and skirts add to the generally squalid nature of the scene. But the aimless smile that, Cheshire cat like, “hovers in the air / And vanishes along the level of the roofs,” far from bringing closure, seems to open a mise en abîme that should please J. Hillis Miller.
Although the fog is a “realistic” feature of a London morning in the early twentieth century, its tossing up twisted faces and tearing the smile from a passer-by, is at least metaphorical, if not symbolic. On a naturalistic level, the fog would obscure both the faces and the smile, so we are obliged to read the fog metaphorically as representing the conceptual world of the speaker who must attempt to accommodate these contrasting female presences, “tossing up” the “twisted faces” and sending the “aimless smile” up into the sky like Mary Poppins. We might contrast Eliot’s Cheshire cat smile to Stevens’ Susannah or the singer in “Key West.” The smile is not only disembodied but it also receives the epithet “twisted,” one that is recurrent in Eliot’s early poetry, always with lubricious connotations.27 Certainly the elders in “Peter Quince” are as lewd-minded as one could wish – as indeed is the speaker – but Stevens’ poem is about the successful communication of feelings, in contrast to the failure of communication characteristic of the Eliot poems under scrutiny:
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the selfsame sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna.
“The Idea of Order at Key West” is also about communication, although it is less confident about what it is that is communicated – unsurprisingly since the aesthetic feelings expressed and aroused by the singer are more subtle than the erotic feelings aroused by Susannah and the addressee of “Peter Quince.” “Key West” asks whether the singer perceives – in a Wordsworthian manner – a spirit manifested by the sea, or merely expresses her own response to that “externality”:
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
And the question put to Fernandez later in the poem, is precisely the need “to interpret other souls to ourself” to which Eliot referred in the concluding chapter of his dissertation:
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
In short, why does the song alter our perception of “externalities”?
The striking difference, then, between these early poems of Eliot and those of Stevens is not just that Stevens’ poems are gorgeous, playful, and bright, while Eliot’s are ironic, brooding, and dark – as the early critical consensus observed, to the disadvantage of the “superficial” Stevens. A more substantial difference is that Eliot’s poems are frequently about the failure of communication between finite centres, while Stevens’ are as often about the mystery of successful non-verbal communication between minds or between minds and nature. Eliot’s mode suited an audience traumatized by the shock of the First World War, the Communist Revolution in Russia, the incomprehensibility of modern physics, and the upsurge of the irrational licensed by psychoanalysis. Neurotic, neurasthenic, and bleak poetry was perceived to be realistic and relevant, while cheerful and playful poetry was dismissed as an exquisite expression of escapism.
This superficial – not to say malicious – view of Stevens’ poetry has had remarkable staying power. When the Faber edition of Selected Poems finally introduced Stevens to a British audience, the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement repeated opinions long current in America: “It might seem,” he (or she) wrote, “that this subjective, exquisite poetry, inclining easily to the frivolous, the recherché, the chic, but then as suddenly tending towards the ominous, the superstitious, the mystic wonderland of religious terms divorced from religion, would find a wide and appreciative audience in England today.” However, the reviewer does not expect that to be the case because of the shallowness of Stevens’ ideas: “It helps neither the contemporary poet nor his puzzled, plodding readers to overlook the fact that a great deal of hermetic writing is the result of a refusal on his part to think before he speaks” (“The Poetry of Wallace Stevens” TLS 396).
That Stevens’ poetry is difficult to construe can hardly be denied. But to label it “hermetic” implies a deliberate esotericism – such as is undeniably the case with Yeats’ poetry but is certainly not true of Stevens. Militating against the charge of esotericism are the recurrent efforts Stevens has made to explain his poetry in prose and in responses to queries in letters. Truly hermetic poetry would be capable of explication by means of an interpretive schemata such as Yeats’ A Vision or Joyce’s schema for Ulysses. But there is no such interpretive schema for Stevens’ poetry – nor for Eliot’s, of course. Stevens’ attempts in late essays to assist his readers lead him to try to elaborate the philosophical principles that he intends the poems to express. The difficulty/obscurity of Stevens’ poetry is, in my judgment, not a consequence of its esotericism but of its great subtlety. The alternative explanation, offered by hostile critics, that the obscurity is caused by the confused and incoherent nature of his philosophy cannot, of course, be brushed aside.28 But my inclination is to the first explanation.
Stevens responded many times to readers who found his poetry obscure. In a letter to Harriet Monroe – as Harmonium was going to press and he was feeling uncertain about the merit of the poems in the volume – Stevens did let slip an admission that the alleged obscurity of his poetry was perhaps deliberate: “Only the reading of these outmoded and debilitated poems does make me wish rather desperately to keep on dabbling and to be as obscure as possible until I have perfected an authentic and fluent speech for myself” (Letters 231). But even here he characterized the obscurity of which he half-seriously accuses himself as a strategy designed to protect himself from misunderstanding, rather than intended to mystify or to protect some esoteric message. If we ask why he needed such protection, the answer would be that he was well aware that he had not yet come to a determinate “theory of everything,” even though that was his – perhaps quixotic – goal.
Nearly twenty years later, responding to the difficulties Hi Simons’ was encountering in construing his poetry, Stevens admits that successful communication is not his first priority, but denies any deliberate attempt to be obscure. He points out that poetry attempts to articulate thoughts that are perhaps unfamiliar, and therefore difficult: “Sometimes, when I am writing a thing, it is complete in my own mind; I write it in my own way and don’t care what happens. I don’t mean to say that I am deliberately obscure, but I do mean to say that, when the thing has been put down and is complete to my own way of thinking, I let it go. After all, if the thing is really there, the reader gets it. He may not get it at once, but, if he is sufficiently interested, he invariably gets it. A man who wrote with the idea, of being deliberately obscure would be an imposter. But that is not the same thing as a man who allows a difficult thing to remain difficult because, if he explained it, it would, to his way of thinking, destroy it” (Letters 403). Finally, another fourteen years later, in responding to still another reader, he even more strongly asserts the poet’s right to think and express uncommon thoughts: “When you say that parts of my book [Collected Poems] baffle you and that you feel as if you did not know English when you read those parts and sit and look into space and despair, content yourself with the thought that every poet’s language is his own distinct tongue. He cannot speak the common language and continue to write poetry any more than he can think the common thought and continue to be a poet. It is not a matter of a great difference but just of a difference and this you know already” (Letters 873).
This last remark is distressingly close to the “uncanny” argument often deployed as a criterion for great poetry. On this argument, rebarbative impenetrability is a hallmark of profundity. Of course, such a criterion is an open invitation to charlatanism – either of the poet or the critic, or both. However, the notion that new ideas are initially puzzling is well entrenched in our culture, and no doubt is well founded when applied to such counter-intuitive scientific theories as relativism and string theory, or intricate and subtle philosophic arguments. Aesthetic modernism, of course, attached itself to developments in the sciences, arguing that like them, it was charting new territory, and postmodernism has continued the association – although it now applies not just to works of art. With the advent of deconstruction, impenetrability is now also seen as a virtue in literary criticism as well as in science and the arts.
But Stevens claims no cognitive novelty or revelatory features for his poetry. All he claims is that the poet speaks his own language – by which he means his own idiom. The poet needs his or her own idiom, because it is his or her own experience of the world that is expressed in the poetry – not the common experience of everyone, but his or her peculiar, intimate encounter with the world. In Stevens’ view, the poet does not express “what oft was thought,” but rather – as Wordsworth said – the experience of a man “endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm, and tenderness than other men.” The presumption of Wordsworth and Stevens is that if their ruminations are to enlarge the souls of their readers, they must first dislodge the idées fixes in their readers; hence, there must be some initial confusion.
Eliot also justifies the difficulty of poetry, but instead of appealing to the novelty or subtlety of what the poetry expresses, as Stevens does, he appeals to the complexity of the contemporary world it represents, or expresses: “It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning” (“The Metaphysical Poets” Selected Essays 289). This remark amounts to the claim that since contemporary culture is in a disorganized state, the poetry that reflects it cannot be more transparent or perspicuous than the culture itself.
A dozen years later, in After Strange Gods, Eliot changed his ground. It is no longer the complexity of modern civilization that causes the obscurity of poetry, but the nature of the personal experience that is being expressed. Like Stevens he stresses that expression – not communication – is the heart and soul of poetry: “I should say that the poet is tormented primarily by the need to write a poem ... And what is the experience that the poet is so bursting to communicate? By the time it has settled down into a poem it may be so different from the original experience as to be hardly recognisable. The ‘experience’ in question may be the result of a fusion of feelings so numerous, and ultimately so obscure in their origins, that even if there be communication of them, the poet may hardly be aware of what he is communicating; and what is there to be communicated was not in existence before the poem was completed. ‘Communication’ will not explain poetry” (138). Once again, the justification of obscurity is complexity, but he adds the factor that the act of composition is not fully conscious, implying that the understanding of it cannot therefore be fully articulated.
Later in the same work, like Stevens, Eliot stresses that the personal nature of poetic expression inevitably occasions some degree of obscurity: “The difficulty of poetry (and modern poetry is supposed to be difficult) may be due to one of several reasons. First, there may be personal causes which make it impossible for a poet to express himself in any but an obscure way; while this may be regrettable, we should be glad, I think, that the man has been able to express himself at all. Or difficulty may be due just to novelty” (150). It is not clear what Eliot means here by “personal causes.” Given Eliot’s protection of his personal life from beyond the grave, one is tempted to suppose that he had in mind the suppression of embarrassing, wicked, or criminal behaviour or thoughts.
Finally, when asked by Donald Hall in a 1957 interview if his poetry was becoming more accessible, Eliot said he thought it was. He accounted for the alleged obscurity of his early poetry in much the same way that Stevens did in his letter to Harriet Monroe:
The other element that enters into it, I think, is just experience and maturity. I think that in the early poems it was a question of not being able to – of having more to say than one knew how to say, and having something one wanted to put into words and rhythm which one didn’t have the command of words and rhythm to put in a way immediately apprehensible.
That type of obscurity comes when the poet is still at the regime of learning how to use language. You have to say the thing the difficult way. The only alternative is not saying it at all, at that stage. (Writers at Work 105)
The two poets were in substantial agreement, then, on the matter of obscurity. Both defended it on expressive grounds, that is they maintained that because what they had to say wss subtle, novel, and intricate, the poetry must appear difficult. The implied justification was that novelty is itself a value. So to that extent, they are both convinced modernists, since “modern” essentially means nothing other than novel. It is worth noticing that their defence of difficulty was very similar to that of the apologists of postmodernism. However, Stevens and Eliot looked forward to a time when the difficulties of their poetry would disappear in the light of a new cultural and cognitive regime, whereas postmodernism enshrines obscurity as a virtue in itself.
In a sense Eliot’s and Stevens’ careers followed inverse curves. Eliot first contemplated a career as a professional philosopher, and then abandoned it for one as a publisher and literary journalist. Although Eliot was first, and always, a poet, philosophy and literary journalism engaged him emotionally and intellectually in a way that was very different from Stevens. Stevens’ work as an indemnity lawyer was completely divorced from his life as a poet. He never contemplated any vocation other than poetry, merely earning his living as a lawyer – conscientiously and efficiently, certainly, but without any sense of vocation. In contrast, Eliot’s activities as editor of the Criterion did arise from a sense of vocation, as he made clear in the manifesto he wrote for the final issue of the first year of publication cited above.
When Stevens turned to public lecturing late in life, his motive was to rescue his poetry from the puzzlement it occasioned, even among his sympathetic readers. He read philosophy in order to find the means to render his poetry more accessible, or at least better understood. If he had any ambition to make the world a better place, the instrument of that improvement was his poetry, not his prose. Recognizing that his poetry was not being heard, Stevens endeavoured to educate an audience for it. In order to do so, he had first to educate himself in philosophical articulations of the epistemological and ontological issues that his poetry engaged. He was never more than an imperfectly informed amateur in philosophy – as is the case for most of his commentators, including myself. But it is a great disservice to Stevens to suppose that his poetry can be reduced to his prose attempts to explain what it is about – just as it would be a disservice to Eliot’s poetry to reduce it to “a personal grouse” or to Anglican preaching.
Eliot was very careful to avoid the trap into which Stevens might be seen to have fallen. He consistently refrained from explaining his poetry, insisting that its sense is co-extensive with its expression. Eliot’s posture here was far closer to esotericism than was Stevens’. This is not to deny that they both believed there is a residue of the inexpressible in poetry; in that respect both poets exhibit a continuity with romanticism. But however romantic or mystical their poetry may or may not be, they were men of their time, and had to deal with their deepest beliefs and experiences in terms available in their day. Where Eliot required some positive belief, Stevens was content – or at least made do – with recurrent attempts to capture his “belief” in his poetry. Even though there is certainly some development and alteration in that articulation, Stevens does not appear to have experienced the serial adoption and rejection of belief systems that characterized Eliot’s development up to his conversion.
Stevens and Eliot, then, despite beginning from very similar positions with respect to religious belief, followed very different paths. Stevens’ path was fairly straightforward – a development from Humanistic scepticism toward a belief in a something beyond the human – a belief very similar to Bradley’s’ position – and to Eliot’s at the time he wrote the second draft of his dissertation. In the coming chapter I will examine Eliot’s relationship with Ramon Fernandez, the Mexican-French essayist invoked in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” as a further window on Eliot’s movement away from Humanism toward Anglicanism. That Eliot and Stevens both responded to Fernandez’s Humanism is a fortuitous circumstance that permits a reasonably focused comparison of their relative postures.