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Introduction: ‘Stevensian’ and the question of abstraction 1935–2009

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

Edward Ragg
Edward Ragg
Affiliation:
Tsinghua University, Beijing
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Summary

The idea of life in the abstract is a curious one and deserves some reflection.

Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between ‘the nostalgia of the infinite’ and ‘the nostalgia for the infinite’ defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé). Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poésie pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art.

[R]ecently I have been fitted into too many philosophic frames. As a philosopher one is expected to achieve and express one's center. For my own part, I think that the philosophic permissible (to use an insurance term) is a great deal different today than it was a generation or two ago. Yet if I felt the obligation to pursue the philosophy of my poems, I should be writing philosophy, not poetry; and it is poetry that I want to write.

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Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction , pp. 1 - 29
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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References

Altieri, Charles, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977)Google Scholar
Donoghue, Denis, Connoisseurs of Chaos: Ideas of Order in Modern American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)Google Scholar
Frye, Northrop, ‘The Realistic Oriole: A Study of Wallace Stevens’ in Wallace Stevens: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. Marie, Borroff (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), 161–76Google Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis, ‘Theoretical and Atheoretical in Stevens’ in Wallace Stevens: A Celebration ed. Frank, Doggett and Robert, Buttel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 274–85Google Scholar
Kermode, Frank, Wallace Stevens (London: Faber, [1960] 1989)Google Scholar
Vendler, Helen, ‘The Qualified Assertions of Wallace Stevens’ in The Act of Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens ed. Roy, Harvey Pearce and Miller, J. Hillis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965)Google Scholar
Masel, Carolyn, ‘Stevens and England: A Difficult Crossing’ WSJ 25.2 (2001), 122–37Google Scholar
Bates, Milton J., ‘Pain is Human: Wallace Stevens at Ground Zero’ The Southern Review 39.1 (2003), 169.Google Scholar

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