‘Inactive contemplation’: Wallace Stevens and Charles Mauron

The final chapter of Modernism and Still Life crosses the Atlantic to consider the American poet, Wallace Stevens. It argues that his creative project was underpinned by the desire for a transformative attentiveness to the everyday, an ‘illumination of the usual’, which coincides with the still life aesthetic. The chapter is structured around the poet’s annotated personal copy of Aesthetics and Psychology (1935), authored by the French aesthetician, Charles Mauron (1899–1966). Mauron’s text, which Stevens read and closely annotated during the 1930s, provides a unique paradigm through which to approach the poet’s still life meditations in his lyric poetry and criticism, with particular focus on Parts of a World (1942). This chapter reads Stevens’s ‘still life’ poems in the light of two traditions in the pictorial representation of the genre: one characterised by sensuous abundance and the other by ascetic abstinence. Such an approach illuminates the poems’ internal debates about aestheticism and asceticism, absorption and detachment, contemplation and activity and uncovers the ways in which Mauron’s theory of ‘inactive’ and ‘active’ contemplation shaped the poet’s ‘still life aesthetic’. The chapter ends by revealing the nexus between Bloomsbury, Mauron and Stevens.