‘Resist The Intelligence Almost Successfully’: Wallace Stevens

This chapter addresses the prominence of the words abstract and abstraction in Wallace Stevens’s poetry, offering a close reading of a range of Stevens’s poems but focussing on ‘The Ultimate Poem is Abstract’ and ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’. It builds on but distinguishes itself from existing critical work by Ragg, Altieri and Skibsrud by arguing for abstraction in Stevens as a word that must do its work as poetry. It proposes, following Ben Lerner’s theory of the ‘hatred’ of poetry (which is also a love) that Stevens’s conception of an ultimate abstract poetry can never be realised in actual poetry. Rather, Stevens creates a glamour around abstraction, a condition of sensual attraction towards the kind of philosophical as well as aesthetic work that poetry might aspire to – ‘It Must Be Abstract’. Such work, it is argued, involves a new way of imagining the relationship between the human and the inhuman; Stevens calls into question such polarities as being and nothingness, cold and warmth, through the singular deployment of recurrent figures such as the sun and the giant.