Wallace Stevens in Theory ed. by Thomas Gould and Ian Tan (review)

Reviewed by: Wallace Stevens in Theory ed. by Thomas Gould and Ian Tan Andrew Osborn Wallace Stevens in Theory. Edited by Thomas Gould and Ian Tan. Liverpool University Press, 2023. For poets to become recognized as major—worthy of regularly taught, single-author courses at colleges and universities, say, or able to sustain long-running, single-author journals devoted to their writing—it helps for them to have written in more than one genre. Stevens's foray into drama did little to advance his cultural importance, but the essays published as The Necessary Angel and much of his long-since-collected "Uncollected Prose" have secured his status as Wordsworth's various prefaces once augmented his. The Letters are arguably comparable to Keats's and Dickinson's in their contribution. It has also been fortunate for Stevens, as Thomas Gould and Ian Tan claim, that his "investments in a mode of thinking he called 'theory' anticipated the emergence of a discourse known as theory in arts and humanities departments in the 1960s" (2). What these editors of Wallace Stevens in Theory call "the wider institutionalization of Theory" effectively "institutionalized Stevens as a theoretical poet" and in a way that furthered his canonicity (4). Indeed, in a 1964 issue of ELH devoted to the poet, Joseph Riddel introduced his copious contribution thus: "There is not yet a Wallace Stevens 'industry.' But Stevens' rise in critical esteem since his death in 1955 portends one" (106). A couple of decades later, one looking back would see what Riddel called "The Contours of Stevens Criticism" whelmed by what came to be called Theory, much of it initially French in origin or inflection. (While structuralism took many of its cues from the binaries of Saussurean linguistics, poststructuralism then took cues from the signifier's arbitrariness, though only a little Foucauldian-Nietzschean genealogy or Lacanian-Freudian analysis suffices to trace inspirations to German, Slavic, and other hotbeds of European thought.) From Melita Schaum's perspective in the late-1980s, American literary academics like Riddel and J. Hillis Miller had sought "to dislodge Stevens from his position in the New Critical framework by inscribing him into a poststructuralist context"; her Wallace Stevens and the Critical Schools identifies Harold Bloom's Freudian-Gnostic theory of strong, anxiously motivated misreading, Heideggerian hermeneutics, Deconstruction, and a mode that presages the New Historicism as the most relevant (xv-xvi). If "Stevens criticism can be taken as a bellwether of the broader theoretical zeitgeist," as Gould and Tan suggest (1), and if the fifteen chapter-essays of Wallace Stevens in Theory may be taken as representative of Stevens criticism, then Theory has largely moved on from all but one of these and from the psychoanalytic and gender-attentive theorizing to which The Wallace Stevens Journal devoted special issues in the 1980s. In this third decade of the third millennium, Stevens scholarship now favors theories of performativity, queer theory, ecopoetic theory, affect theory, and cognitive theory. Heideggerian phenomenology and hermeneutics remain End Page 115 popular philosophical lenses and, as evidenced by Zachary Tavlin's and George Kovalenko's essays on Stevens and Theodor W. Adorno in the edition and this journal's current issue, respectively, the Frankfurt School's Marxian-psychoanalytic cultural theory has enjoyed renewed esteem. In Harmonium's "Theory," a laconic answer perhaps to fellow modernist poets' takes on the framing challenge that Henry James's Portrait of a Lady had engaged in narrative, Stevens asserts that circumstance conditions the perception of personal substance: "I am what is around me. // . . . / One is not duchess / A hundred yards from a carriage" (CPP 70). His claim here and his subsequent instances of portraiture pertain to the efficacy of staging, so he probably knew that his one-word title shares its etymology with theater, and that before a theory could be confused with a philosophy it was a view from the nose-bleed benches in Dodona, Delphi, or on the south slope of the Acropolis. Later, in a reflexive passage of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," he coyly speculates that "A more severe, // More harassing master would extemporize / Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life, // As...