Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value
"Altieri provides the most authoritative treatment of Stevens in more than a decade. . . . He combines aesthetics and philosophy in a rigorous manner that is nonetheless resolutely literary. Wisely eschewing a commentary on all of Stevens's poems, Altieri extracts original interpretive insights from close reading, as seen in his discernment, in 'Farewell to Florida,' of a flight from the female that is as much wishful thinking as renunciation, and a reading of 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' in which he emphasizes how the different perspectives ‘fuse’ over the disjunction emphasized by critics such as Harold Bloom. Altieri's detailed explication . . . reveals him as a dazzling reader of this difficult poet. Summing Up: Highly recommended."—Choice(December 2013)"Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernityis an enormously stimulating book. Charles Altieri is remarkably ambitious, marvelously learned, and an intensely thoughtful reader of Stevens (and many others). He is the rare critic who is speculative, theoretical, and interpretive, but who also recognizes that the practice of criticism usually begins in strong affection and an urge to celebrate."—Robert Chodat, Boston University, author ofWorldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo"Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernityalters what we think of as philosophical approaches to poetry and, more crucially, philosophical approaches to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Charles Altieri does not simply apply philosophical models to Stevens's work nor does he simply address questions of influence. He succeeds in brilliantly capturing Stevens's underlying and insistently philosophical spirit, demonstrating how Stevens uses the imagination and feeling dynamically to 'respond to the world of fact' to establish value. Altieri works his way through Stevens’s early to late poems—from 'Earthy Anecdote’ and 'The Latest Freed Man’ to ‘The World of Meditation’ and ‘The Plain Sense of Things’—showing philosophical affinities (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein) and at the same time offering groundbreaking close and careful readings. He illuminates how Stevens’s poems—their structure, grammar, and rhythms—invite us to participate in and value the world.Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernitywill have a profound impact on and long resonance in Stevens criticism. It is a book that serious readers of Stevens and of modern poetry will return to again and again."—Lisa Goldfarb, Associate Professor and Associate Dean, Gallatin School of New York University, author ofThe Figure Concealed: Wallace Stevens, Music, and Valéryan Echoes, and president of the Wallace Stevens Society"Can poetry establish values? This brilliant, learned, subtle, and original book argues persuasively that Wallace Stevens is a philosophical poet. Charles Altieri supports this claim through detailed readings of selected poems from all Stevens' poetry books taken up in sequence. Nietzsche is shown to be a major resource for Stevens, as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are for Altieri. Stevens, Altieri demonstrates, investigates tirelessly, through the practice of poetry, ways poetry can actualize values. 'Stevens,' Alieri asserts, 'provides a brilliant way of reconciling experience and world by defining imagination as involving the theory of values because it provides images of the mind's power over the possibility of things.'Altieri persuasively demonstrates that the sequence of Stevens’s books makes a story. It is the story of Stevens’s progressive movement toward solutions for his search for values through poetry-making. This movement proceeds through the development of what Altieri calls 'aspectual thinking' in poetry and through an exploitation of the grammar of 'as.' Stevens in one place calls this process 'the intricate evasions of as'; in another, 'the edgings and inchings of final form.'Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernityis also, covertly or indirectly, a record of Altieri’s own search for a phenomenology of value that will satisfy him. A major book for all those interested in Stevens and in the uses of poetry and criticism in our time."—J. Hillis Miller, UCI Research Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and English, University of California, Irvine