Foreword
"The modernist sensibility" is a writerly, rather than a critical, term. It designates concerns with embodied thought and emotional knowledge, terms which in turn reference subjectivity and modernist urges to unify the sensibilities, to attain "the one." The concept of this essay is to examine how Riding and Stevens enacted their writing sensibilities. The methodology is to prefer the perspectives of writing (what we call "primary" texts) to those of normative critical viewpoints -- hence the distinction between "writerly" and "critical" terms. As should be clear from the first section of this dissertation, I want to interrogate the effects of certain critical habits on our reading of poetry. In what follows, then, my skepticism is directed at critical methodologies, not at the poetry I examine.
Such a stance does not obviate established literary categories: I begin with a version of modernist sensibility which arises from both eighteenth-century Sensibility and a critical approach promoted by T. S. Eliot. My tools in this examination include textual love, Romantic conventions, reading verbs, and the injunction to speak within what T. E. Hulme called "gaps" -- for our purposes, fissures between intellect and feeling, word definition and word sound, word and act. The term "sensibility" also organizes discussion about poetic surfaces (the "body" of the poem as total presence, not divided into body and mind), the languaged human (not representational but self-sufficient, a word-bound identity), bodily understanding (akin to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "animate consciousness"), and the development of critical vocabularies for poetic emotion. These tools and subjects work in two ways: conceptually, to remark on the differing sensibilities of Riding and Stevens, and methodologically, to remark on criticism's ability to use interrupted vocabularies, to write of emotions and "gaps." In this section, as in the entire dissertation, points of view are purposefully multiple and interlayered, not strictly sequential and progressive.
Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and Riding's "When Love Becomes Words" are the primary textual focus, with some reference to other poems and Riding's prose work The Covenant of Literal Morality. I show how Stevens' reunification of sensibility and his experience of "the mind in the body" are achieved in his language; he foregrounds the sufficient word, language inhabiting itself. If his languaged human finds its reunification in the word, Riding's humanity looks for reassociated sensibility in the world. She foregrounds the meant word, human communication. This measures a difference in modernist imaginings of the possibilities of language as well as a transition from poetic modernism to postmodernism: Stevens imagines words as an entire world we can become and live in, while Riding imagines words as interactive indices of humanity.
The Embodied Mind
Writing literary criticism has everything to do with defining one's terms. The "relational momentum" of section one is a suggestive, imported model for modernist poetics. As an historically situated literary term, "sensibility" offers a firmer context for discussing our two poets' visions of knowing and emoting in language. My use of the term begins with two past uses: first, it considers how modernist poetry sought ways to reunify the "dissociated sensibility" that T. S. Eliot found so demoralizing. Second, it ponders a twentieth-century version of "the mind in the body," the eighteenth century's phrase for its desire to reincorporate sensation into thought. 1
This second definition is generally reserved for historical discussion of eighteenth-century texts in the Age of Sensibility. It has not informed discussions of modernism for the past few decades, 2 having been displaced by the Eliotic approach, as we may note from its brief treatment in literary handbooks and its exclusion from "major statements" of criticism. 3 In formal and conceptual terms, though, the term's contextual genesis dovetails interestingly with the modernist backgrounds of its twentieth-century revival. Consider one of Jerome McGann's claims about the state of sensibility at the end of the eighteenth century:
This view of the process of thought and the quiddity of language -- rather than treating both as means to conceptual ends -- informs our version of modernist sensibility. Eighteenth-century sensibility is a strain of literary feeling that got labelled "sentimental" and was defeated by Romanticism in the wars that determined how emotion would be inscribed in writing. 5
Modernism typically ends up with Eliot's objective correlative -- a piece of language that points to a world of feeling -- rather than with "the physique of language," a confidence that language itself can inscribe, not just evoke, thought and feeling, that language is a place of feeling and not a map of directions for it. "The mind in the body" is the sensible correlative to "the physique of language." It foregrounds, for my purposes, three things: the inseparability of thought from the thinking body (and thus from all other bodily processes, from emotions to digestion), the fact that the body is the fundamental locus of context in any given act of production (both making and consuming happen with and through the body), and the dialectics of writing: a body writing to other bodies. "The embodied mind" labels an effort to imagine the mind's processes of thought in a balance with the (apparently) "other" processes of the body. 8
Such an effort marks my urge to take our experience of thinking living, including its emotions, interruptions, constant motions, into our experience of thinking writing. The history of Sensibility is that of a counter to rationalism. The modernist sensibility moves to balance -- or ponder imbalances between -- emotion and intellect, the personal and the product, the body and the brain, even word and deed. We see the division between speaking human and written work as problematic for language use. We see that we are in the habit of considering emotion and thought separately, although human experiences intermingle the two. This essay is part of an ongoing effort to be aware of these divisions within our language-making, including critical commentary, and to study incarnations of sensibility in modernist poetry. Not to find heaven in a unified stasis of realization or being, but to feel one's thoughts, to observe the way writing handles process. The principal linguistic purpose of this essay is to subvert the perception of language as divided between mind (meaning) and body (form) and to encourage the perception of language as total apparence.
The Eliotic Ideology
More background: insofar as the concept of "modernist sensibility" already exists, it is connected with T. S. Eliot's work. When Eliot famously lamented the dissociation of sensibility, he largely set the terms by which modernism went on to imagine its reunification. In his 1921 essay "The Metaphysical Poets," 10 Eliot praises sensibility as the experience of thought through feeling. Chapman, for example, displays "a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling, which is exactly what we find in Donne." After Milton and Dryden, "the language became more refined, [but] the feeling became more crude." Feeling went the way of the sentimental: poets "thought and felt by fits, unbalanced." Eliot's proposed cure for sensibility's dissociation is for poets to be more intelligent and more difficult: "the more intelligent he is, the better . . . poets in our civilization . . . must be difficult . . . . The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, if necessary, language into his meaning."
In insisting on forceful intellect and linguistic difficulty, Eliot's program ironically perpetuates the dislocation of thought from feeling, which must chase after thought to try to figure out its "meaning." Eliot confirms the intellect as father of the body. 11 Thus his program was still in thrall to the main difficulty of eighteenth-century Sensibility: as McGann puts it, "A passion for enlightenment drove the quest for the reasons of the heart" ( Sensibility 43). A critic like I. A. Richards, then, writing a few years after Eliot's essay appeared, discusses "Sense and Feeling" as a matter of linguistic intelligence. Analyzing relations between the sense (or meaning) of words and the feelings they induce, Richards names the dictionary as the locus of explanation. We will manage to discuss our feelings and to know ourselves when we have adequate word knowledge: "this knowledge [of ourselves] is lying dormant in the dictionary. Language has become its repository, a record, a reflection, as it were, of human nature. No one who uses a dictionary -- for other than orthographic purposes -- can have escaped the shock of discovering how very far ahead of us our words often are." 12 Yet Richards sees that in contrast to our "marvelous apparatus of inter-engaging and overlapping symbols for handling and elucidating sense, a logical machine with great sensitiveness and power," our language for feeling is virtually unborn: we "rely upon introspection, a few clumsy descriptive names for emotions, some scores of aesthetic adjectives" (207).
Despite his desire to improve this situation, Richards comes up severely short. In part, this is due to his insistence that we understand language referentially. He nevertheless points to some avenues for developing a fuller critical sensibility. In discussing "Poem 12," for example, one of Richards' respondents provides a loosely phrased reaction: "'I can feel something I cannot understand, and I want to go on trying to understand until I get right into the poet's mind. Like falling in love.'" Richards responds: "This seems a valuable hint. The process is very like falling in love, under rather distant and formal conditions and without much intimate acquaintance" (149). The analysis stops there. But the invocation of love might well begin a response imagined according to principles of a unified sensibility .
Richards is one of many modernists who try to solve myriad splits -- dissociated sensibilities, the mind/body problem, reality and appearance -- by declaring understanding to be mediated by referential language. As he puts it, "any thoughts or feelings or impulses stirred into activity by the words, and seemingly directed towards something which the words represent, are a beginning of understanding" (306, my italics). The linguistic problem here is that a word, though single, does not (for the purposes of art particularly, not to mention the shifting nature of all words always) reference a single place, context, or idea. It is a nexus of graphical fact, emotive and intellectual promptings, referential directedness or diffusion, lyricism or dissonance, and so on. The purposes, or purposelessness, of art particularly access this tendency of words to be unsingular.
Richards is an historical example, but most of our poetic interpretations, still shaped by the dominance of Eliotic attitudes, operate within language's definitional, "difficult" power. Such a perspective is hard to re-think in literary studies, given the ways we are accustomed to understand one another's writing. Situated in the complex communicative word, we multiply the definitional web by adding our own conceptual words. The critical (academic) urge to knowledge involves assertions of "objective" perspective which remove us from realms of non-objective poetic understanding -- as well as from feeling, which we classify as subjective.
In an article on petroglyphs, Charles Lock reminds us that "perspective was the very condition of the scientific revolution, and thus of the cognitive revolution by which knowledge became 'objective.'" 14 Of course, as dualisms do, positing subject and object separates the two: "Perspective is the way out of participation, our protection from confusion and involvement. Being left outside is the price of objectivity" (413). In this study of " sensibility," our very drive to delineate our subjects, to define our terms, can inhibit our ability to speak from within the writing and so perpetuate the split between rational knowledge and bodily understanding, a knowledge better understood as love.
Durations and Gaps
Alternatives: we want to construct critical sensibilities to overcome Eliot's rationalism without relinquishing his insight that modernist writers were imagining the possibility of reunified sensibilities. We want, that is, to keep Eliot's goal and construct methods which do not (like his) make it impossible of attainment. This is a methodological, not a utopian, project to craft reunifying ways of seeing, including but not overborne by the rational. To put it another way: To see the language of the modernist sensibility, we need to be able to speak it. Relinquishing the objective fallacy, and resisting the dominance of rational understanding, are places to begin.
Philosophy can provide some of the language. Henri Bergson and T. E. Hulme used two terms which fit a vocabulary of modernist sensibility. Consider Bergson's sense of "duration." In a discussion of metaphysics, Bergson distinguishes two views: one sees the multiplicity of elements as coordinates along the flow of time, the other focuses on a temporal unity underlying, and thus separate from, perceived reality. In both cases, the effort to establish meaning in a particular context leads adherents to an artificial stop in duration: "they freeze this flux either into an immense solid sheet, or into an infinity of crystallized needles, always into a thing which necessarily partakes of the immobility of point of view ." 17 By contrast, Bergson locates successful metaphysics in a "continuity of durations," fluctuating between materialities of repetition and an eternity which is "the concentration of all duration" (64).
In a similar vein, T. E. Hulme wanted his contemporaries to see in existence not only its continuity (which, he claimed, they did see) but also its discontinuity: "Our principal concern then at the present moment should be the re-establishment of th e temper or disposition of mind which can look at a gap or chasm without shuddering." 18 The philosophical "flux of interpenetrated elements" here may be contrasted, literarily, as certainty and undecidability and, scientifically, as the position and momentum used as a metaphor for poetics in the first chapter. In defining the modernist poetic sensibility, Bergson's "continuity of durations" helps us talk about the dynamic interactions of rational, emotional, physical, and linguistic forces. Hulme's distasteful "chasm" indicates the difficulty of writing about emotions, probably the most formidable interstices between recognizable mental and bodily processes.
Of course, philosophical goals are not historically the goals of sensibility, much less of poetry. In Rational Meaning , Riding faults philosophy for abstracting its ideas away from materiality (including language's materiality). 19 She invokes an expansive notion of "idea":
Towards, for example, one of Riding's most critically aware essays. In "T. E. Hulme, The New Barbarism, & Gertrude Stein" (1928), 20 Riding writes at length about Hulme's influence on the modernist definition of poetry. She judges him a failed philosopher, whose categories are "interpretations of history" made for art rather than philosophy. Moreover, Hulme's frames of reference disintegrate in contact with lived reality: "Only one true general category does, in fact, exist, the single barbaric absolute in which religion, ethics, and art combine to objectify and fix the temporal phases through which the human intelligence, out of imperfection and caprice, passes" (Contemporaries 151). Which is Riding's extreme way of foregrounding human life, the "single barbaric absolute" divided and conquered by what she calls the "wisdom professions" (among which are religion, science, and increasingly poetry -- any professionalized institutional pursuit).
Writers of the destructive strain of the "new barbarism" denigrate the human being, personally and bodily, according to Riding. Whether or not it was Hulme's fault, "Certainly a general degradation of the person was taking place in poetry at the time that he was writing . . . Poetry felt forced to objectify itself and to do this successfully it had to enter upon a philosophical career" (Contemporaries 160-161). This drive, Riding claims, underwrites (in every sense) poems such as The Waste Land, whose allusive difficulty marks it as a subject of intellectual history rather than of poetry.
Riding contrasts the barbarism overseen and perpetrated by philosophers and intellectuals with the example of Gertrude Stein, whom Riding praises for her positive barbarism, a simple, present humanity in language:
What Riding recognized in Stein in 1928 21 is what I would call our best major example of modernist sensibility, in both aesthetic and humanist senses of the term. Stein writes with a communicative readiness, a "continuity of durations," a poetry that tries to balance language's meaning status with its object status and so locate the mind of language (its meanings) within its body (its physicality on the page).
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A Pronoun Speaking to Pronouns
Stevens was more aware of these subjects than has been generally noted. 23 His prose ruminations about charged terms -- "poetry," "imagination," "reality," "truth," and so on -- have a permanent slipperiness to them, as though conceived in the very "gaps" we want to look at. His poetic uses of such heady words defy Eliot's exhortation to difficulty even as they might appear to be following Eliot's instructions. As section one argues, Stevens expands (some might say "obscures") the function of word signs, eschewing not only subjectivity and egotism as referents for the poetic "I" and characterization, but also consistent meanings and intentions for his diction. But critical readings of Stevens have been mostly carried out as though we think Stevens is doing what Eliot said modernist poets should do -- so we seem to proceed correctly when we try to translate what we think must be the "comprehensive," the "allusive," and the "indirect" in Stevensian poetic diction and syntax . Many studies of Stevens still posit that his abstract diction has primary and meant connections with intellectual definitions of those words. In other words, Stevensian criticism seeks intellectual explanations for his sensibility, and thus ensures that his sensibility is neither understood nor even properly envisaged.
Stevens himself denied that he was particularly affected or obscure. Countering accusations that his poetry is excessively "decorative," Stevens wrote in a 1935 letter to Latimer: "To my way of thinking, there is not the slightest affectation in anything that I do" (L 287). And to the notion that he is difficult, Stevens replied to Peter H. Lee, twenty years later, "No one tries to be more lucid than I do" (L 873). In each response, Stevens seems to me perfectly sincere. His aesthetic sensibility -- what kept him writing within the same poetic styles -- explains the connections between his two types of poems. When Stevens mingles intellectual diction and complex syntax with the kind of nonsensical play that led Kenner to call him a disciple of Edward Lear, he charges the surface of all the poems. In blocking referential understanding, Stevens makes the word-surface stronger, enthrones the play of language. He takes words out of the world of experiential reality that a poet like Wordsworth conveyed, but he does not hand them over to a place where sense does not exist. Stevens reported himself as sincere (not "affected") and lucid because his poems enact nothing but themselves: they are their surfaces, they "mean" (enact) what they say.
Stevens' textual sensibility works to make the language event as achieved a realm as the natural human body. We might best explore this claim by way of the most critically traced origin of Stevens' poetry: Romanticism. 25 The Romantic context unites our considerations of eighteenth- and twentieth-century sensibility in two ways: first, the Romantic movement emerges soon after and largely set against Sensibility. Second, Romanticism's most successful poets translated "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" into more reasonable recollections in tranquility, and so perpetuated the dissociation Eliot decried. In contrast with the intellectual and philosophical programs we may imagine to be cunningly obscured within his poetry, critical attention to Stevens' effort to achieve his supreme fiction often assumes that the poet -- necessarily thwarted -- is mired in compensatory gestures (or made serene by "abundant recompense"). Such critical recognition is still carried out under the signs of Romantic overcoming. Joan Richardson writes that Stevens' "real" nature eludes us because of the "impossibility of speaking his mind and his subsequent recourse to the written word." 26 But Stevens' written word is not a "recourse," not a substitute for speaking.
Compare the affective address in Wordsworth's "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798" and Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." In Wordsworth's poem the conventions of Romantic address are in full view. The poem's context is specific in date and locale, it is written by an "I" seeking to uncover his own mind, and it is "spoken" to a specific, and present, "you." As we find about three-fifths of the way in to the poem, the speaker's sister is meant to be witness to his experience of nature and self-awareness:
The poet is also "a man speaking to men." He is feeling within the context of his real-world status, addressing and experiencing, and wanting to make sense -- to have "emotion recollected in tranquility" -- in a language dominated by the effort to clarify the experience of thought, emotions, and human relations. This Romantic experience is arguably in the grip of dissociated sensibility both in dividing feeling (the inspiration) from thought (the translation of the inspired moment into a shared language experience), and in privileging the ability of the linguistic intellect to communicate felt experience. A strong sense of the "pastness" of the poem separates present readings yet further from the poetic moment. This is a poetry of memory.
The opening of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" is a different story. Although Stevens begins with an historical form of poetic address, he empties that form of its previous significations. The poem is dedicated to Stevens' friend Henry Church, 27 but Church is not implicated in the action of the poem in anything like the way Dorothy Wordsworth is present in "Tintern Abbey." Stevens' prologue acts as the vestibule between the real world (indexed by the name "Henry Church") and the body of the poem, and it establishes the "Fiction" within a textual love:
So much for interpreting the passage through the intellectual history of nouns. Imagine, though, a reading through sensibility that ponders verbs, the words of feeling and action. If nouns attach to the (interpreting) mind, verbs attach to the (acting) body. In their processual activity, verbs do not accumulate conceptual weight: they remain relatively free of associational luggage. In Stevens' prologue, the active verbs are "feel," "press," "meet," "sit," and "bring." By themselves, they do not bestir the rational machinery set in motion by the large nouns just discussed. For example, one does not associate even the most fraught verb here -- to "feel" -- with the context and systematizing that spring to mind when one sees the noun "truth" and thinks of writers from Plato to George Oppen. Consequently, the verbs are a powerful place for reading the effective enactment of the stanza within a vocabulary of sensibility.
The verbs act in the context of a real-world human relationship but not in the context of the "real" world. The dedication and prologue instruct us to read the "you" as Henry Church (in the absence of such a dedication, we might alternatively take the "you" self-reflexively or personally: as the poem itself or as the reader). The "I" reads as Stevens himself, mostly because of the conventions of poetic address -- beginning with a dedication to a friend or patron -- but also because we do not again see the "I" until the final three cantos (this excludes the use of "I" by Nanzia Nunzio, as she speaks with Ozymandias in the eighth canto of "It Must Change"). But though we know who the "I" and "you" are meant to be, their scene is unimaginable. Sensory experience is diaphanized, and we do not "know" what is and what is rhetorical. Are we to imagine the poet lying in bed pressing a book to his belly? In what sort of place do the poet and his friend meet and sit? The relations are uncertain, both syntactically and physically: neither word meaning nor bodily postures are clearly imaginable, in the sense of "imaging" a concept or a place, creating a mimetic corollary in the imagination. The uncertain relations serve to take the palpability of senses, and the reality of the "you" and the "I," into an abstract languaged world. The unimaginability balances the understanding of nouns and verbs and the sensing of them: each is uncertain, thus each meets on a more equal plane than if we were able to parse the "point" of the passage (even the above paraphrase of the nouns has only a loose attachment to meaning) or imagine its physical scenery.
The beginning of the notes toward a supreme fiction, then, is in the dynamism of human feeling abstracted from the actual world. This feeling is importantly transacted through the sense of touch. 28 "Pressing," "meeting," "sitting": this is not a vision, not transacted through the eyes. If metaphors of sight are the mind's physical lens, then metaphors of touch are the medium of whole-body experience (think of the contrast between the "body wholly body" and the speaker's final turn away towards the "glassy lights" in "The Idea of Order at Key West"). These verbs of touch, abstracted from actual touching, retain their active verbal force removed from the necessity of subject and object. They enact pure action; they make the stanza a process.
And it is a process of embodied human love: "I feel," "I press," "I meet you," "we sit at rest," and "you bring [] peace." These are vivid, even erotic, textual motions, and they are held close and looped back around into each other by the textual openings at the beginning of each line and the textual absolutes that close each line. Note the starting string of words: "And for," "Do I," "Close to," "In the," "Equal in," "In which," "For a," "The vivid": these words open each line with indefinite invitations, a series of re-beginnings that keep the poetic moment open-handed, open-minded. They keep the gaps of direction open.
The words ending each line perform potentially closing moments, but as abstractions they point to absolute, dynamic, states. One may inhabit them, one may let them go: "love," "man," "night," "truth," "light," "rest," "being," "peace." The lines are breathing -- in at the start, out at the end -- with a rhythmical regularity and a graphemic equality that make them parallel durations, enactments of bodily sense. Even the first word, "And," suggests a verbal moment which has just passed, as though these words are an addition, or an answer to a question posed prior to the lines themselves. Only the period at the end of the stanza marks a real gestural close to this prologue.
The sensibility here moves thought towards feeling: makes thought-words (nouns) inexact, dependent on and interactive with feeling-words (verbs). It also moves feeling towards thought: both emotion and sense-relation are ambiguous and abstract. At issue is not "purely" ideational abstraction, but non-representation, sense perception not attached to either clear objects or clear ideas. Performativity here is not a question of voicedness, action is not subject to precision, ideas are not delimitable. Within Stevens' languaged world, this prologue demonstrates a reunification of sensibilities.
The opening of the poem's first section, "It Must Be Abstract, " confirms Stevens' departures from Romanticism:
Shifting from dedicatory prologue to the body of the poem, with the disappearance of the "I" and the newly defined "you" (the "ephebe"), takes the motion of thought and feeling into a world even further from the personal subject and object. The answer to the prologue's opening question might be, then: I feel love for abstract, languaged humanity -- not humanity dissolved or disassembled, but not the egotistical self either. As the title of one of his poems puts it, Stevens locates sensibility in "Men Made Out of Words." 29
If we resist the forms of Stevensian poetic love, or imagine them as compensatory or inhuman, perhaps it's because we are accustomed to love as a specifically directed and ego-oriented feeling, accustomed to an ideal of exclusive, coupled love. As Winquist writes, "Love is particular and singular. . . . Love is an intense valuation of specificities in the finite display of experience. . . . Identity in difference is a condition for love" (Desiring Theology 149). We think, that is, of love as a particular act, of humanities as embodied identities. It is impossible to have the enfleshed human on the page, so we may expect representations of individualized humanities to stand in for the human. When we have that expectation and it is not met, we feel we are in the presence of compensations (Romantic poetry). In Stevens' poetry, though, there is a languaged humanity which is not representational, and there is a languaged love which is not attached to real-world individuals.
"An abstraction blooded"
This textual love is not a solitary phenomenon. It interacts with and enables what we think of as a separate force: imagination. In his essay "Imagination as Value" (1947, later included in The Necessary Angel), Stevens connects imagination and love in his typically epigrammatic, indicative way. He makes a remarkable series of claims for imagination's genius, its culminant status in abstraction, and a future "science of illusions" in which the imagination may function better than reason. This new "science" is not metaphysical, however; neither is it the sole province of physical scientists. It is a use of imaginative power allied with the physical world, something different from the powers poets have thus far called upon. Stevens declares the loss of power in the poet's role, or at any rate in those laboring and labelled as "poets": "the world may, certainly, be lost to the poet but it is not lost to the imagination" (142). Since the "poet" as salvific, world-gaining force is "lost," Stevens wants to change the terms in which we think of a "poet," replace the name "poet" with the notion of an earthly imaginer: "the great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to be written" (142). If poetic value has been achieved in metaphysical matters (poems of heaven and hell), Stevens' imaginative value is allied with the physical, with the poem of the earth. Imagination may be seen as a human value different from "poetic" value.
It is crucial to grasp the physical nature of Stevens' imaginer. Not the physical as against the metaphysical, but the physical as wholly present. In the Adagia Stevens writes that "The earth is not a building but a body" (OP 186), allying earth with the natural human form, the constituent human body. And again in "Imagination as Value" Stevens declares the imagination available to everyone: "It is an activity like seeing things or hearing things or any other sensory activity" (NA 145). Imagination, that is, is a sense. Stevens wants to embody the realm of poetic perception, so that imagination and what we tend to think of as separate bodily senses participate in the perception of the world. He might be said to want to fold Coleridge's secondary imagination back into the primary imagination, to unify them as a single perceiving sense.
For Stevens is not a prophet, not critiquing and stirring the non-poetic world to action. The Stevensian sensibility makes an image of the world and so makes the world its own: "The Platonic resolution of diversity appears. The world is no longer an extraneous object, full of other extraneous objects, but an image. In the last analysis, it is with this image of the world that we are vitally concerned" ( NA 151). This image, if it is to include the understanding -- that is, if it is to function as a unifying principle (the "resolution of diversity"), synthesizing logical understanding and embodied imagination -- operates in the field of imagination and love:
We see this demonstrated in the third canto of " It Must Be Abstract":
One gap is marked by a strong graphical difference: the "first idea" of this canto is followed by one of only four ellipses in the poem. These "unnecessary" ellipses force empty, unworded space into the line, indicating a visual and definitional gap for the first idea. That gap gives us time to ponder the fact that this undefined "first idea" cannot be given a fixed meaning. Because its meaning is unspecified, it cannot be, most importantly, a specific Genesis-moment in an historical or philosophical context. Thus the cognitive motion we make most readily in the face of "idea" terms is disabled, and we are pushed back to "The poem refreshes," "we share," and "a moment." The ellipses of sensibility.
Stevens' ellipses, then, mean because they are not necessary. They do not signify that something is left out of this passage. Rather, something is included: the ellipses themselves, indicators of a physical, graphical, and lexical "gap" necessary to the enactment of inclusiveness. In the words that follow the ellipses this inclusive sensibility is insisted on. The indeterminate use of "It" in "It satisfies" is nothing like a pronoun reference error which we need to set right ; "It" includes "The poem," "a moment," and "the first idea."
And these are all things which "we" experience. Not we know, but "we share," "We move," "we feel from what we think," "we say," and we are "pierced." Again, this "we" is not "universal man" in Pope's didactic sense (these are not moral or practical instructions exportable from the poetic world), nor Stevens and Church, nor an inclusive term overseen by a controlling "I." Rather, the "we" is the "abstracted" version of the human brought into language. (Nor does this abstraction mean an overcoming of language.)
The movement of Stevens' lines is pluralizing: the "immaculate end" becomes a "late plural," whose "and," whose "candid kind to everything," whose "strange relation," locates moments of sensibility in the multiplicity of word-making. The stress is on that and, whose sounds calls in the an as well: "And sends us," "And the candor," "An elixir," "an Arabian," "And throws," "And still," "and rises and howls hoo and falls."
The Vulgate heart as the place of thought: "thought / Beating in the heart"; bodily experience as neither revolutionary nor transcendent, but something poetry knows. Continuity and linking are shown to be the important element of one prosodic term, long used: alliteration. "Winged by an unconscious will" we move, pierced we do not stop. The problem with talking about "knowing," about "meaning," is a problem of the habit of saying that form moves and meaning stops. "Internal difference" -- inside the body -- is not one, constant, difference, but the place of dynamic understanding, "where the meanings are." Emily Dickinson understood this; Wallace Stevens wanted to understand it; Laura Riding understood it in spite of herself and slowly violated that understanding in an idealistic desire to order and know the world, with certainty.
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A Human Speaking to Humans
Critical work on Laura Riding commonly stresses the brainy and recondite harshness of much of her writing, partly because of her unusually strong resistance to any critical interpretation of her individual works. 35 From her earliest essay to her last prose, though, Riding's humanist sensibility only intensified. In both gentle preaching and shrill exhortations, she urged love among humans and for language. Her early pursuit of a humanized, non-institutional writing was less programmatic than it later became. One of her frustrations with poetry was its power to elude her communicative plans, certainly more than prose did -- readers and writers both expect to see and say what is meant in prose as they do not in poetry. Changes from early to late writings index Riding's (gloriously unsuccessful) effort to relinquish a personal, egotistical power over language in order to improve the use of language as a human tool, as a communicative device which brings word and act, word and mouth, writer and human, closer together.
Just as her struggle with poetics is most interesting early on -- not least in a greater variety of genres and approaches -- Riding's struggle with love and sensibility is more interesting in her first fifteen years of writing than in her later prose-driven re-emergence. What Stevens' textual sensibility finds a sufficient world, Riding increasingly protested as a barrier between writer and world. As she wrote in a 1933 poem, "The World and I":
Riding's idea of unity does not inhere in or necessitate relinquishing the self to the writer. In the poem "Poet: A Lying Word," for example, she specifically does not wish readers to "lose" themselves as she tries to dismantle what we might call the fourth wall of reading:
Not only must "you" avoid self-relinquishment; you must also "speak as you see": react to, participate in this utterance, this "written edge of time." This is a fairly early vision of the reader-as-creator -- as we saw in the preface to Progress of Stories in the last section, and in her caution against readerly laziness in Contemporaries and Snobs, Riding does not want readers to "fall" absorptively into the writer's "mouth" and "eyes."
Whether or not Riding's fierceness is due to various dissatisfactions with real-life love (until she met and married Schuyler Jackson 38), her poetry was executed -- and self-consciously so -- in a kind of mental/linguistic urgency that vied with the power of action. Her poetry is in the business of asking questions: What is the difference between the power of the word and the act, and what is the nature of the word as act? Is the artful word an act or an escape from action? Is the communicative word a sufficient act? What does one do with the individual self?
Her poem "When Love Becomes Words" raises all these questions. This five-page poem appears in her Collected Poems as one of the "Poems Continual," with no indication of its original context. It was first published in 1937 in the third and final edition of Epilogue, 39 a journal she and Robert Graves issued collaboratively with a group of friends on Majorca. The three issues of Epilogue are an extraordinary assembly of essays, poems, and stories on a wide range of subjects, from the nature of God to photography. Epilogue III ranges from Riding's opening essay "The End of the World, and After," to a joint essay on "Politics and Poetry," to a long series of notes on "Advertising" in America and England. The collaborative nature of this journal is striking: far from being a mass of disparate voices, it often reads as though one voice harmonized everything. (Certainly, Riding's was the dominant influence in these journals.) This harmony is more forceful in the prose than in the poetry -- but that it shows in the poetry at all is striking, given the drive for and expectation of unique signature in a poet.
But Epilogue is all about linguistic collaboration at the end of history, as the epigraph for all three volumes indicates: "Now time has reached the flurrying curtain-fall / That wakens thought from historied reverie / And gives the word to uninfected discourse." Common purpose is avowed and reaffirmed throughout, as is the insistence that history is over, that we have become ourselves at last. 40 Riding proclaims herself the guru of ultimacy, and Graves credits her with the right to do so: "I concede that you have the right to speak with such certainty because I am aware that you do indeed perceive human history with eyes trained on it from some point outside" (Epilogue III, 122). As bizarre as such a concession is, and as much as Riding clearly led this cult of idealism, Epilogue is a group project in wrenching free of temporal and cultural norms, a kind of Bloomsbury as Blithedale trying to delineate and bestir western consciousness.
In this project, Riding wants to make words enactments. Her version of modernist sensibility wants to use words as she later admonished writers to do in The Telling: "human reality" is "the natural object of knowledge" (114), and "if you write, write as a human being, not as a 'writer,'" because the realm of writing is removed from that of the human: "literary reality is reverently shrouded as if it were the real thing" (116). "The writer" suffers two principal problems. First, idiosyncracy of the self and of the meanings attributed to words inhibits communication. Second, the use of language is only one aspect of being human, but the product (and, increasingly, the act) of writing makes it seem the only one. The written work is the only place writer and reader see each other, and the icon of the work -- finished poem or book -- becomes the end of being and of communicating.
The Epilogue project is of course trapped in these conditions, but it tries in various ways to undermine them. It discredits, for example, the romantic aspiration towards individualism and individually sensed "spots of time." To undo the conditions that foster these romantic drives, we must give over the urge to individuated sensations and originality. Insofar as we relinquish individual experiences of sense, time, and creativity, we may hope to have those experiences collaboratively. This hope is partly articulated in "When Love Becomes Words," one of four Riding poems in this volume. Nine other writers 41 contribute poems, but poetry takes up only 41 of the volume's 258 pages. This is yet more evidence of Riding's shift away from poetry. She had published her final integrated book of poems, Poet: A Lying Word , in 1933; all her poetry subsequent to that book is an inquisition of poetry's possibilities, burning poetry in its own creative fires.
"When Love Becomes Words" is a fascinating combination of problems in language and poetry. It is an exercise in deliberate control and a demonstration of how poetry forces slippage. It partly enacts Riding's desire to give over the passion of the individual sexual kiss in favor of the passion of shared language, and it also indicates her desire to work on a proportion between language and act -- between the modes of (speaking) mind and (acting) body. Riding wants to know if we might experience in language the union of thought and feeling not possible in the individualized world of touch and kiss. She once again addresses a "you," which can be read as Robert Graves -- to whom, at the time, she was denying her sexual favors 42 -- or as the "you" of Epilogue's Majorcan group, or as the "you" on paper: the reader, "whoever you are holding me now in hand." Consider the first three stanzas:
Tellingly, the opening nouns (the undone, the unwritten) are absolute or substantival uses of adjectives, taking words from the descriptive world and making them things. The attributes become the objects themselves. Which is what happens when love becomes words: attributes, things belonging unextractably with the human, are made objects: words. The poem asks how we might keep love -- empowered by its locus in the human (body) -- empowered in words, since the separated written word is so much an extraction, a removal, from the human. This is an emotional way of asking the question of written sensibility: how to keep the enabling engine of the constituted human operating in writing?
The subject is made more tangible in stanza two. We make and desire products, wanting from each other something "which moves unstrangely," familiar thought somehow transcending history but enacted in a history of "works." These works give way in the third stanza to overlapping considerations of mouths and kisses: kissing lips, written spoken kisses, kissing time, the tongue that is the intermediary "between thought and said." The multiple roles and goals of the human body are concentrated in the mouth which speaks and kisses, which embodies the language that writing removes from the body and makes a textual surface. The "enactment" of "lost literature" is imprinted on time's mouth. But in the gap between action and inaction works are also unachieved, "rescued from enactment"; there is a body of word-thoughts unrealized in the world. The difference between what emerges as product and what remains dormant -- no, not dormant, but unwritten -- is a duplicate of the gap between what can be represented and what cannot be. The move from the abstract, unaccomplished nouns of stanza one to the dislocated physical nouns of stanza three traces the gap between the depersonalized abstract, what departs from the human, and the embodied human.
The movement of Riding's poetic language enacts its "contents." The syntax is overlapping, the phrases as if blocking each other, so that the search to stop, the readerly effort to understand, is dislocated in the directions. Everything seems to modify everything else. The grammar, too, is unachieved until stanza three. Again, the first stanza has no verb to bring the abstract nouns to action: they simply pile up. Stanza two makes us expect that the type of "works" we expect of one an other will be described -- but it never is, quite. If these works are "exceeding not so much loveliness . . . As simplicity," what does it mean to exceed simplicity? Is that "exceed" in the sense of excess or supersession? This is language climbing on top of itself but not reaching any object -- until stanza three, where a locale is achieved in the mouth, in the exact intersection where language is of the body and leaves the body, at once.
The first grammatical "sentence" of the poem is in the form of dialogue: "And I shall say to you, 'There is needed now / A poem upon love, to forget the kiss by / And be more love than kiss to the lips.'" The promise of speech is one of the awkwardnesses of this writing, which hovers between the working-towards-clarity which is speech (we continue talking until we think we have been understood) and the poetry-as-assertion which is one of Riding's most frequent modes. When love becomes words, the transition appears by the contrast between action and words and also between speech and writing. A "spoken kiss" achieves a reality other than the physical kiss. The poem continues:
The urge to "telling the thing in a natural tone" belies the strange tone and motion of the language. Conjunctions and prepositions pile up phrases, making it seem as though a sequence of points is being made. But the points continually "falter." The first four lines have no finite verb and thus gesture to infinity: "to instruct . . . By telling" is a continuity, not a definite statement. The "and" is not primarily (as in Stevens) a marker of continuation, but rather an endless modifier. Accepting the parallel between "nothing" and "doing," we might live in that between "unnatural days" and "natural tone." The unlyrical movement here -- we cannot call it cadence, for it is a kind of second-language haltingness -- is meant to force attention, to force paratactic stops, not to carry us forward as Stevens' mostly hypotactic lyricisms do.
These linguistic levels interact with the personal level, on which Riding is explaining to Graves the importance of intercourse outside sexual relations. The "rebated sentiment" comes when we turn away from "foolish deed" to words, from a specific lover to the "you" of language, to find "what we feel [with the body] in what we think [with the verbal mind]" and experience more feeling by virtue of having it in thought. Instead of trying to stop words with action, we try to incorporate action into words. This personal level posits an experience of textual love, taking the love impulse out of the realm of the exclusive coupled kiss and into the larger world, where words can stand in for -- can be -- the loving human. In this configuration of the erotics of reading, an individual kiss is the unexportable substitute for the preferable universal kiss. This reverses the usual notion of the written kiss as a pale reflection of the passion experienceable in the "real" world; it also reverses the usual disparagement of writing as a substitute for life.
At the linguistic level, by contrast, these reversals reflect the problem of a human writing. Relinquishing the personal, the actual bodied self, in the act of writing is like relinquishing the individual communicative kiss in the hope that words might then salvage the unspent ("rebated") physical passion. But this is of course an impossible hope. In suggesting it as a possibility, Riding is pointing out that language, just when it seems most excitingly sensible (in Merleau-Ponty's sense), is still "the nothing we are now doing."
Riding insists that we all share this condition, losing ourselves in a common humanity that is a joint sensibility. As the fifth and sixth stanzas say,
To compare Riding's poem to "Dover Beach" might illuminate the distance between Arnold's love as salvation and Riding's love as knowledge. In Arnold's poem all hope is lost except in what the individual lovers can provide for one another. 46 In Riding's poems, everyone is meant to meet on the plain of language and effectively reclaim a heritage of mutual understanding and love. In the 1980 Introduction to her Collected Poems, Riding acknowledges the parallel between her literary hopefulness and Arnold's literary gospel: "Arnold was probably the last critic-and-poet of the modern cultural ancien régime to fly a banner of moral hope against the evidence of the development of a widening vacancy" (6). Riding distinguishes herself from Arnold by claiming accessibility, by claiming to have eschewed elitist literary models, and by pointing out that poetry was a medium, not a goal, that it was the linguistic parallel to a non-systematized human understanding. As she puts it: Arnold's was an "earnest, a vigorously sincere, version of literary gospel. It perpetuated an aristocratic tradition, a higher-lower level distinction in human aspiration" (7) in which poetry itself was a kind of salvific achievement. Not so for Riding, who says "I did not identify poetry with a fixed actuality, an achieved realization, an effectual continuum of expressive verbal imaging of the human spiritual desideratum. I identified it with an objective of which it itself was not the ultimate reality of attainment of it" (7-8).
We may well raise our eyebrows at Riding's claim to poetic democracy. We may think this her revisionist self-history, that she believed she was trying to use poetry -- or abandon poetry -- to rally a collective consciousness, but that she was really hiding away in England and Majorca during her first writing period, no more writing for the people than Language poets were doing in America in the 1970s. To follow this argument, however, would be to indict nearly all literature as elitist. We'll turn in a moment to another, explicitly moral, call to arms, The Covenant of Literal Morality, but it is important to recognize that Riding is evoking democratic urges like Whitman's in poems such as "When Love Becomes Words." She does not, however, use his powers of lyrical persuasion. Her poem's very awkwardness is an index of a refusal of the experiential isolation that poetic beauty can wreathe around a lyric poem. This is against Romantic conventions which, for all their apparent reachings out, interpose a curtain of expressive loveliness between experience (composition) and witness (reading).
But what of curtains of the abstruse? Though Riding's diction is accessible, her syntax is usually not so. So we want to mark a difference between conceptual and syntactic logic. Conceptual logic is the logic of philosophy and fiction: it uses language as a constructing rather than a vehicular tool. The difference is important. It marks language as a constructive device for a something else, whether conceptual or narrative. Syntactic logic is poetic dynamism, language for itself: it is an effort to interrupt (Riding) or continue (Stevens) following. Following is the natural condition of a live language and the ceaseless body; stoppage is the cultural condition of works.
In analyzing poetic language . . . we
will always encounter the same
property of the artistic: that it is
created expressly to liberate
perception from automatism and that
the aim of the artist is the 'seeing';
it is 'artfully' created in such a way
as to hold perception and to bring
it to its highest possible intensity
and longest duration, while the
object is perceived not in its spatial
aspect but, so to speak, in its
continuity.
48
The "shadow round us / Immaculately of shade" conjures the image of the Platonic cave, an association most compellingly allied with the personal realm of the poem, in which she is explaining to Graves her sexual refusals. Love between individuals, in the idiosyncratic voices of two people loving, is a mere form of love on earth, a form of which there is a larger communicative Form. To individualize love is to live in the shadow of love. Our understanding of language is insufficient because "results," the experience of living, precede our realizing what we can "mean" and be in language. So words become part of the "omens" of lived experience, separated from our thoughtful interpretation, "the thing we mean."
One irony of poetic syntax: it is in allowing language to be for itself, to be a surface, a "thing," that it becomes strong enough to contest, and therefore to re-present, the human. The parataxis of our un-rhetorical -- unwritten and thus "unachieved" -- experience of language, the language in which we think and feel, can be the most effective meeting ground of word and act.
My last selection from "When Love Becomes Words" is the best display of Riding's desire to combine language, body, and thought, in order to achieve the ultimate state of being that the entire Epilogue project longs for. This poem's stylistic desire is to transmit felt thought -- not rhetorical intellectualism -- as directly as possible from writer to reader. Its communicative desire is for a total unification of sensibility (still to be achieved in poetry, here), because Riding was immersed whole-heartedly in human improvement projects. At this point, she still wrote something like poetry, trying to make it lead rather than follow:
The 19 Commandments
Perhaps the extremest example of Riding's desire for human perfection, one beyond and outside acts of writing, is a brief pamphlet she wrote in London, in 1938, The Covenant of Literal Morality. It is a slight work, sixteen pages long, composed of nineteen propositions, "Prescriptions" in ten parts, and a list of the charter members of the Protocol. 54 Members of the First Protocol of this Covenant had to agree to five "Preliminary Questions" before they could be privy to the Protocol itself. The questions insist that "there is such a thing as essential morality, based upon truth and a love of what is good; as distinguished from relative morality, determined by conditions of time and place"; that "morally conscious people should now seek one another out . . . and establish an intercommunication based on a common will to repudiate evil"; and that "as a morally resolved person it is your right and responsibility to work in this self-assured way for world order."
This is the political version of Riding's will to make a better world. But it is a utopian ideal based entirely on the personal and individual: "the present disorders in the world cannot be cured by mere diplomatic, military, or political action, economic revolution, religious revival, scientific rule, or by any traditional means that do not imply an essential morality." The locus of morality, as of right language use, is in the individual. As the nineteenth and final proposition puts it, "We start from the moral centre of life; and our first instruments are ourselves; and our first object is the unification of ourselves as forces of judgement."
In a sense, The Covenant of Literal Morality is the morally idealistic predecessor to the linguistic ideals of The Telling. This latter work bids the world to use its language cooperatively, lovingly, responsibly, and accurately. As with the Covenant, the physicality and partibility of the presentation 55 has an odd effect on the writing, though the urge in both is towards a unity that begins with the individual. Riding rejects "the new hybrid scientific-philosophic thinking, which, first, threw out the human substance in words and made them subject to a weird logic of physicality, as if we the speakers and orderers of words had died, all, but left the words behind" (12). As she writes in "The Idea of Rebeginnings," at issue is "the reason of human identity. . . . It is a contest of joy in one another. The watch for 'Who?' is a watch for who-can-take-perfect-joy-in-one-another" (91).
And this "watch" leaves room for permitting failures in being and language, "gaps" that create opportunity: Riding does not want us "[t]o halt the journey before we come mind to mind (face to face in mind) with one another and lose the privileges of error that defective knowledge of ourselves confers" (14). This opening to error is a forerunner of the postmodern embrace Riding enacted but was never able to accept. 56 Some of the last lines of poetry she wrote from within a poetic sensibility, unlike the embattling poetic lines of "When Love Becomes Words," suggest how Riding was baffled by the effort to find in poetry the possibility of felt sensibility one can sometimes nearly taste there. Here are the final lines of The Second Leaf, a single quarto of 1935 (reprinted as part 2 of "Disclaimer of the Person" in the 1938 collected Poems):
Bataille would say to both the Covenant and The Telling that "the realm of morality is the realm of project. The opposite of project is sacrifice. . . . And whereas, in project, the result alone counts, in sacrifice it is in the act itself that value is concentrated. . . . Sacrifice is immoral, poetry is immoral." 57 When he writes that "poetry is, necessarily, no less silence than language " (29), Bataille sees, rather than Merleau-Ponty's pleasing sensible, the terrible necessity of poetry that Riding saw in its "nothing." As "poetry leads from the known to the unknown" (136), it is the linguistic battle-ground of the lived and the productive self, "The putting to death of the author by his work" (151). Whereas Riding never ceased to hope for some kind of "oneing," Bataille called such a desire the urge to be "everything." But "experience at the extreme limit of the possible nevertheless requires a renouncement: to cease wanting to be everything" (22). This acceptance of fracture and of the impossible marks Bataille as one who could ecstatically embrace the postmodern condition; her resistance to such terms of life marks Riding as a writer who could not. She wanted an ecstasy of absolutism and human unity, not the fractured self and impossibility of precise communication insisted on in both postmodern art and the critical machinery that deconstructs it.
| 1 | See for example Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L'Homme machine (1747), which argues that body and mind are of the same matter, that sex and sensibility go together. The widespread eighteenth-century perception that thought had become rigorously intellectualized by Enlightenment rationalism, and that something had to be done about it, may well have provided the perceptual breeding ground for the hold of increasing scientific rationalism. That is possibly a dangerously broad generalization; but it informs, to my way of thinking, a great deal of the kind of presumption of rationalism's superiority -- rationalism, that is, severed from emotion or embodiment -- that still shapes our critical "rigour." |
| 2 | Though the term had some resonance for criticism earlier in this century, "sensibility" seems to have been emptied of its eighteenth-century significations. See for example William Van O'Connor's Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry (rpt., 1964; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). This is, mostly, a book about literary history, with remarks on the position of modernist poets regarding questions of isolation, irony, imagism, and the like. But O'Connor pushes the discussion further at times, pondering the implications for poetic feeling in modernist poetry which is frequently dehumanized, isolated, and lacking in common iconographic knowledge. |
| 3 | For the second, think of books
(targeted to an academic audience) such as Criticism. Major
Statements, ed. Charles Kaplan and William Anderson (New York: St.
Martin's, 1991). The thirty-eight essays range from Plato to the late
1980s, engaging, steadily, less and less with ideas of sensibility. In the
twentieth-century selections, some critical categories brush against
realms of feeling -- imagination, psychology, the "objective
correlative," emotional possibilities in reader response -- but there
is a striking neglect of "sensibility" and little concern about
developing critical vocabularies for feeling and the body. As for handbooks: in C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon's useful text A Handbook to Literature, 6th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1992), "Sensibility" merits two short paragraphs. The twentieth-century version gets two sentences, mentioning Eliot's "dissociation" (which has its own entry earlier in the book) and vaguely defining modernist sensibility as "innate sensitivity to sensory experience, out of which the poet fashions his or her art" (435). Such a handbook is worth considering here because it is on the front line of explaining our critical methods. This handbook, too, reflects the paucity of critical vocabularies for poetic sense and feeling. |
| 4 | Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 23. Subsequently cited in the text as Sensibility. In contrast with the (few) studies there are of the Age of Sensibility, most of which interrogate social and cultural realms, McGann's study develops a view of Sensibility's poetry -- from Ann Batten Cristall to Ann Yearsley, with powerful implications for our readings of modernist and contemporary poetry -- as a feeling poetry overshadowed, written out of the canon, by the successes of Romanticism and the preference of the dominant modernists for intellectual poetry. |
| 5 | As McGann argues in Sensibility . When he discusses Wordsworth's condemnation of the Della Cruscans, for example, McGann maps one of the moments that decided how emotion may be written in poetry. See especially 75-80, 87-89. |
| 6 | Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-century Sensibility and the Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 4. |
| 7 | See Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (New York: Methuen, 1986), especially 3- 31. Note that the concern with manners and morals, with the state of society and the place of women, is central to the Age of Sensibility, as it is not to this discussion of modernist writing. |
| 8 | In emphasizing the bodily activity
of thought, I have much company, from theorists such as Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and critical works such as Mark Johnson, The Body in the
Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), Richard C. McCleary, Imagination's
Body (Washington: University Press of America, 1986), Mark Seltzer's
more culturally-oriented Bodies and Machines (New York:
Routledge, 1992), and others to whom this section makes subsequent
reference. In studying the modernist sensibility, I find many writers insisting on embodied mind and personalized writing. H.D., for example, locates vision in the womb and the brain: "The brain and the womb are both centres of consciousness, equally important " (Notes on Thought and Vision, 1919). |
| 9 | Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science; with a prelude in rhyme and an appendix of songs, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974). |
| 10 | T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), 241-50. |
| 11 | As Peter Nicholls notes, "For Eliot, . . . a decadent language is one which has become somehow 'bodily', a condition which prevents 'objectivity' and which is quickly marked as 'feminine'." See Modernisms. A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 195. |
| 12 | I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism. A Study of Literary Judgment (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), 208. Subsequent references appear in the text. |
| 13 | Charles E. Winquist,
Desiring Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 134.
Subsequently cited in the text. He continues: theological literature
"insinuates formulations of extremity into the fissures of ordinary
discourse, thereby generating an extraordinary discourse. . . . Use
functions are redirected. There are new trajectories, new lines of
filiation in the signifying play of discourse. . . . . Thinking exceeds
its representational economy. Becomings are formations of power as well as
representational assemblages of meaning. Minor literatures are
political" (135). These points describe most twentieth-century poetic discourses. They also apply to criticism which tries to negotiate poetic ruptures by rupturing itself. |
| 14 | Charles Lock, "Petroglyphs in and out of perspective," Semiotica 100-2/4 (1994), 410. |
| 15 | Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens. A Biography: The Early Years, 1879-1923 (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 27. She is referring to Vendler's article "Sizing Up American Poetry," The New York Review of Books, XXXII: 17 (November 7, 1985), 56. |
| 16 | Charles Bernstein, Content's Dream. Essays 1975-1984 (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1986), 27. For more thoughts on the details of subjectivity, see Winquist's Desiring Theology, chapter four: "The Incorrigibility of the Body and the Refiguring of Discourse" (34-44). |
| 17 | Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics [1903], trans. T. E. Hulme (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1912), 62. Arguably Bergson's words are philosophically strained echoes of an idea put forward in 1854 by the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann. He distinguished two manifolds in the real: the discrete and (what Riemann took as more accurate) the continuous. |
| 18 | T. E. Hulme, "Humanism and the Religious Attitude," in Speculations, ed. Herbert Read (London: Kegan Paul; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1924), 4. |
| 19 | "The philosophic mistake was to treat ideas -- ideas in the sense of complex mental constructions -- as occupying a separate category of intellectual existence from that in which the meanings of words had their abode, with the meanings of words havin g the character of miniatures fashioned in the image of ideas" (RM 163). |
| 20 | Part of this essay -- section 4 of the longer version in Contemporaries and Snobs -- appeared in transition 3, June 1927. |
| 21 | Several years later, Riding
condemned Stein as a practitioner of the worst kind of literature,
"'automatic' literature, consisting of records of experience without
explanation -- experience that cannot be explained because it is
meaningless: fatal, helpless, convulsive reactions of consciousness. This
literature confesses not merely limitation, but innate human stupidity.
The best that can be said of Gertrude Stein is that she is the prophet of
this literature. It has been her function to display truth as the
unintelligible to the stupid" ( Epilogue II, 16-17). Much later, Riding criticized Stein's poetry for not allowing words "to carry out their meaning-functions": "How Gertrude Stein's verbal constructions sounded is how human existence would sound if human beings abandoned their linguistic proficiencies as encumbrances upon the intelligence, yet held on to words as accessories of an intelligent, mentally therapeutic exercise of stupidity." See "The Word-Play of Gertrude Stein," in Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, ed. Michael J. Hoffman (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 240-60. Such a judgment accords with Riding's later views of language. |
| 22 | Parker Tyler, The Granite Butterfly. A Poem in Nine Cantos, ed. Charles Boultenhouse and Michael Fournier (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1994). This is a beautiful facsimile of the first edition, with abundant supplementary materials including Williams' review, 97-104. |
| 23 | Bonnie Costello, placing Stevens
in the context of Thoreau and landscapes, puts it tellingly: "The
poet of supreme fiction (the subject of formalist, epistemological, and
phenomenological readings) has been replaced by a poet of contingencies.
Psycho-social, political, economic, and linguistic contingencies have
held our attention most; toward these Stevens is variously described as
evasive or engaged. What we have not addressed as much are the physical
conditions of consciousness and the perceptual base of its activity, which
Stevens so often invokes as both limit and need. Stevens' romantic
resistance to materialist views of reality has blocked this line of
relatedness. We have tended to follow his lead in addressing the Cartesian
split as a problem to be solved by the pre-eminence of mind. But the body
in the mind remains a part of his poetic even at its most abstract."
See her "Wallace Stevens: The Adequacy of Landscape," The
Wallace Stevens Journal 17:2, Fall 1993, 203-16. To some extent, Costello reflects the very interpretive tendencies she protests: I am not at all convinced that Stevens "address[es] the Cartesian split" as a mind problem. Is it not his intellectual interpreters who have led us along that path? |
| 24 | See Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices. Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 27-29. Most of chapter 3, "The Ear Heretical" (100-41), is very apt to any discussion of literary somatics. |
| 25 | Many critics place Stevens in the Romantic tradition, from J. V. Cunningham's 1949 comparison of Stevens with Wordsworth ("The Poetry of Wallace Stevens," Poetry 75, December 1949, 149-65), to (most famously) Harold Bloom, to the latest elaborated connection developed in Joseph Carroll's book, Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction. A New Romanticism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). |
| 26 | Richardson's excellent work on Stevens emphasizes more reason and recompense than I tend to see in him. But she is elucidating the man, and therefore wants to understand the connection between the self "on paper" and that "in reality." I want to understand his papered world, the sufficiency of the achieved language. |
| 27 | Church was a wealthy art patron and professional expatriate who began a correspondence with Stevens in 1939. Stevens idealized him, admitting in a letter: "You have so thoroughly lived the life that I should be glad to live" (L 401). |
| 28 | Note that touch is the dominant trope of the senses for the Age of Sensibility (as the sense of sight dominates from Plato through the Renaissance). |
| 29 | Which ends: "The whole race
is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate."
In the apologia for literature that begins Epilogue II, Riding interestingly endorses this version of languaged (or literatured) humanity: "In literature people must be measured as words are measured: for their truth, not for their humanistic vitality -- for what they are ultimately, not historically" (2), and "Books are by people; but literature is by people only as they are literature -- as they exist in the world of words rather than in the world of people" (4). |
| 30 | I'm referring to the famous
passage in The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (trans.
Albert J. Wehrle; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1978) in which Mikhail Bakhtin
claims that in the poetic work "the utterance is detached both from
its object and from action. Here social evaluation is complete within the
utterance itself. One might say its song is sung to the end. The reality
of the utterance serves no other reality" (127). To which Alan Davies can provide a counter: "The poet addresses the reader. It's a direct thing. The poem is the moment of that address. . . . There's no third person in the poetic relationship. Just two mes. At its best there's no you. No one is other to the shared moment. . . . The poem is not off to the side at all. It can't be. It's not a moment of discourse. It's a moment of intercourse." See "Peer Pleasure," in Aerial 8, ed. Rod Smith (Washington DC: Edge Books, 1995), 169-81. |
| 31 | See Duncan's poem "Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow," in The Opening of the Field (New York: Grove Press, 1960). |
| 32 | Bernard of Clairvaux, "On Conversion" (1140), in Bernard of Clairvaux. Selected Works, trans. G. R. Evans (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 87. The editor reminds us that in "Vulgate and early Christian Latin usage the heart (cor) is the seat of thought" (68, note 2). |
| 33 | Amittai F. Aviram, Telling
Rhythm. Body and Meaning in Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1994), 7. Here is a fuller excerpt: "I conceive of this
catchy, sometimes liberatory power of rhythm to disrupt the commerce of
meanings and to impose its own transindividual order as sublime
precisely because it is an experience that exceeds the sphere of ordinary
language, much as do the thought of God or the view of the Milky Way. In
speaking of the sublime power of rhythm in connection with the body, I
conceive of the body's relation to language as an unknowable source of
endless surprise and momentary subversion of the known -- that is, of
language." Aviram's emphasis on rhythm is a much needed corrective to the theoretical focus on meaning. But he separates rhythm and meaning too absolutely, and emphasizes too much the failures of language: poetry, he writes, "allows us to witness the failure of language to address the power of the very material out of which its signs are made -- the rhythm is telling" (64). Language is not a defeat because it is itself and not something else; there is no "perfect" realm against which singularities (language, one person) are weak and inadequate. Language does not feel its own inadequacy. In Kathy Acker's words, "the demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless." |
| 34 | Gerald L. Bruns, "Stevens without Epistemology," in Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, ed. Albert Gelpi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 25. |
| 35 | See for example her reaction to
Susan Sontag's choice of Progress of Stories as one of the
"Neglected Books of the Twentieth Century": "Choosing a
single work out of a life production of size, and discarding the rest . .
. is an especially self-flattering form of condescension, and also a
conveniently self-protective evasion of critical responsibility"
(Antaeus 20, Winter 1976, 157). In an unfavorable review of Anarchism is not Enough, a Times Literary Supplement writer recognized Riding's rejection of criticism: "This is a book to which criticism cannot be applied -- a view in which nobody would more cordially agree than the author, whose fluent and garrulous self-satisfaction is perhaps the most abiding memory that one gets from reading it" (16 August 1928, 590). |
| 36 | Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 272. |
| 37 | She also praises Francis Thompson. Since she does no more than mention his name, her admiration for him must be explained by the religious seriousness of his work. Having given up the priesthood, he is hounded by heaven in his poetry, which in its intensity is surely a candidate for art that "spiritualizes" existence. |
| 38 | When she met Schuyler in 1939, Riding quickly renounced the celibacy she had practiced (almost) resolutely for about eight years. After one early bout behind closed doors with him, she reportedly emerged to say, "Schuyler and I do." It is enticing to ponder what her love poems for him might have been like. |
| 39 | A 1938 work, The World and Ourselves (London: Chatto & Windus), was considered by Riding to be the fourth volume of Epilogue. However, it is really a collection of letters Riding solicited and edited, followed by her prescriptions on how to live ("Recommendations"), and it does not reflect the more collaborative nature of the first three volumes of Epilogue. As she writes in her prefatory materials, "I have thought it important at this time to suspend the work of general criticism begun in the first three volumes, and to make a special inquiry into the state of the world to-day in relation to ourselves " (ii). |
| 40 | "There is no 'new' material
of experience, no sudden strange apparition to be 'seen'; there is no
'more' material. There is available to man at every moment all the finally
available material of experience" (Epilogue I, 18). On the dust jacket of Progress of Stories , Epilogue is advertised as an effort "to unify modern critical attitudes into a coherent view of life and thought." |
| 41 | Riding's other poems are "I
Remember," "The Forgiven Past," and "The Cycle of
Industry." The other poets in Epilogue III are Harry Kemp,
Norman Cameron, James Reeves, Sally Graves, Alan Hodge, Ward Hutchinson,
Robin Hale, Robert Graves, and William Archer. Kemp's poems read and sound
most similar to Riding's, but others of these poems are less tense with
the difficulty of poetry and more lyrical with its pleasures. For the full text of "When Love Becomes Words," see Appendix I. |
| 42 | See Deborah Baker, In Extremis. The Life of Laura Riding (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 239-48, for some comments on Riding's renunciation of sex -- what she called in one Anarchism essay "The Damned Thing" -- with Graves from approximately 1932 until she met Schuyler in 1939. |
| 43 | Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible , trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 135-38. Merleau-Ponty wrote this work from 1959 to 1961, and died before completing it. The chapter from which these excerpts come, "The Intertwining -- The Chiasm," is a kind of somatic parallel to Hulme's more conceptual notion of a "gap or chasm." |
| 44 | Examples: Riding ends The
Telling with an incredible ideal of human unity: as we tell "the
Story of the Whole, and the words begin to come faster from the different
telling-centers, a spell of concentricity -- the out-spoken force of
original One-being travelling between them -- will be upon us; and other
than true-telling, whether in mutual error of difference or in the evil of
isolate purposed difference, will become impossible. There will be no
where in which, no when at which, to tell other-than-true, and no one to
tell it. We shall have arrived at our ultimate identities, selves that
Agree. And none will be missing from the count of those: it will tally
perfectly with ONE" (56). And William Carlos Williams, more modestly, in Spring and All: "In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader. We are one. Whenever I say "I" I mean also "you." And so, together, as one, we shall begin." Both of these writers are children of Whitman, in the way I indicated earlier (see the "Collective Communication" set-aside, above). |
| 45 | Riding's "nothing" has
something in common with Buddhist "emptiness" (sunyata),
as I suggest in chapter one (note 18). This emptiness is not a question of
void, but of what Nagarjuna calls "codependent arising." In
The Embodied Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), Francisco J.
Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch write tellingly about how
"Things are codependently originated; they are completely groundless.
Nagarjuna's arguments for complete codependence . . . are applied to three
main classes of topics: subjects and their objects, things and their
attributes, and causes and their effects. . . . everything is 'empty' of
an independent existence, for it is codependently originated"
(223-24). Riding's ultimacy is of a self interactive with other selves, not producing or wishing to produce separate things but rather ultimate "nothings" together. |
| 46 | Here is the final stanza of
"Dover Beach":
|
| 47 | Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism. A Series of Lectures (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 246. |
| 48 | Viktor Shlovsky, Mayakovsky and His Circle , ed. and trans. Lily Feiler (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972), 115-16. |
| 49 | Charles Olson, "The Escaped Cock. Notes on Lawrence & the Real," in Human Universe and Other Essays /I>, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 123. |
| 50 | Trans. Sally O'Dricoll and Deirdre M. Mahoney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994; orginally pub as La Syncope: Philosophie de ravissement, Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1990). |
| 51 | Almost as though Riding wanted to do away with Saussure's parole altogether, in favor of a deeper communication solely in langue. |
| 52 | Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage, 1990), 329. |
| 53 | Ron Silliman, The New
Sentence (1977), 15: "In much the same manner as Stein, Joyce, or
Hemingway, every major western poetic movement has been an attempt to get
beyond the repressing elements of capitalist reality, toward a whole
language art." Silliman's is the class-struggle version of Riding's protest against "the forced professionalization of poetry" ( Contemporaries and Snobs 21). He claims that "the subjection of writing (and, through writing, language) to the social dynamics of capitalism" makes words "become commodities" (8). When he says "the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such" (15), he foregrounds the linguistic sensibility that Riding was moving away from during the 1930s. |
| 54 | Many of the 27 charter members
had known Riding and Graves for some years; some also appeared in
Epilogue. The copy of the Covenant at Cornell University's Carl A. Kroch Library has, loosely inserted in the pamphlet, a nine-paged typed addendum. This was obviously written much later -- its typeface and paper look much like that used in parts of the manuscript of Rational Meaning -- though there is no date specified on its pages. Its purpose is to lament the failure of the Covenant, "a work of dedicated application to keeping a clear moral consciousness," with which, she writes, "I crowned my years of industrious literary idealism." Unfortunately, Riding laments, the signatories of the First Protocol went off in their separate ways, clutching the thing of the pamphlet instead of the ideal of the covenant. |
| 55 | Sixty-two numbered sections are preceded by a brief "Nonce Preface" and "Outline" and followed by a series of reflexive commentaries longer than the "main" text itself. The "Preface for a Second Reading" is itself glossed by "Some After-Speaking: Private Words" (subdivided into "An Invitation," "The Idea of Rebeginnings," "Extracts from Communications," and "Some Notes, enlarging on some Features of the Text"), bringing The Telling to 185 pages. |
| 56 | As Mark Taylor notes in TEARS (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), "Unlike (almost all) their predecessors, postmodernists not only recognize but gaily embrace the fictions among which they are destined to err" (37). |
| 57 | Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (trans. Leslie Anne Boldt; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988; originally published as L'Experience Interieure, Editions Gallimard, 1954), 136-37. Subsequent references appear in the text. |