Wallace Stevens and Modern Science 1

Ford Maddox Ford instructed Ezra Pound that "poetry, like
everything else, to be valid valuable, must reflect the circumstances
and psychology of its own day. Otherwise it can be nothing but a
pastiche" (The Pound Era, 80). This caution carries particular
weight in Pound's case because the Cantos like much modern poetry
which is meant to reflect the modern age's sense of cultural and
psychological fragmentation - seem so disjointed in an intellectual
sense that they appear to be only a pastiche. Wallace Stevens'
poetry, too, might come in for a similar charge, but in reality
neither Pound's Cantos nor Stevens' lyrics is characterized by
pastiche. In fact the opposite is true: Stevens' poetry (and theory of
poetry) actually embodies and leads us, not to a further sense of
modern fragmentation, but to a sense of wholeness which emerges
on the far side of the rational, scientific reductionism that in some
ways characterizes the circumstances and psychology of the modern
age.
While the subject of this paper is Wallace Stevens, Pound's Cantos
provide a useful context because of their obvious difficulty. Their
patchy, disjointed appearance causes many readers to take them for
an incomprehensible hodgepodge, merely a collection of allusions
and quotations. But in reality the Cantos have an underlying
coherence of imagery which is meant to defy rational
interpretation.1 Pound, one of whose many useful dicta on poetry
was "Only emotion endures," deliberately sought to force his
readers to interpret or understand his poetry primarily in emotional,
intuitive, and (through the masterful control of rhythm and sound)
bodily terms. The Cantos are not a pastiche; rather, they resist the
intelligence successfully. They challenge the modern age - which is
the age of scientific rationality - to find kinds of meaning or
understanding that operate beyond or outside conventional modern
rationality.
With the idea of "resisting the intelligence," we are squarely in the
realm of Wallace Stevens, from who~ often-quoted sentence in the
Adagia this phrasing is taken: "Poetry must resist the intelligence
almost successfully." One reason for saying the intelligence must be
resisted is that by the early twentieth century the rational, objective,
scientific means of describing the world had seeped so thoroughly
into the western world's cultural patterns and intellectual
complexes (what Pound called the "paideuma") that it threatened
(sometimes explicitly) to eliminate the emotional - not to say the
spiritual - elements of human reality. If 'only emotion endures,"
then the scientific elimination of emotion would also eliminate
experiences of lasting value. Western culture's journey down the
road of pure rationality was a disaster in the making, as perhaps the
two world wars imply. The culture had to change.
Pound's idea was that the use of language was the key to making a
transition, as Hart Crane said, "from a decayed culture toward a
reorganization of human valutions"2. "It is essential that great
poetry be written," Pound said, emphasizing the importance of
language, and particularly poetry, in the healthy maintenance of
culture and civilization.
Pound's method was to build up sequences of imagery which
convey emotional and moral meaning generally intended to be felt
rather than inferred. Stevens' method, similar to some extent, was to
build up patterns of rhetoric (as Helen Vendler shows in On
Extended Wings) which both contain and evoke particular ideas or
"propositions" (as Stevens often said) about reality itself, rather than
(e.g.) culture. But even though Stevens is usually held to be a highly
rational poet, and his poems are in many other ways very tightly
controlled, the poems themselves do not operate by conventional
linear rationality. They do not begin with one thought or event and
reason or narrate logically to an end, but are "meditative" (as Louis
Martz shows). Poems like "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,"
"The Auroras of Autumn," and "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"
(to name only three better-known works) are composed of a number
of shorter poems or cantos built up around a particular idea or
theme, or set of themes.
This method can, as in Pound's Cantos, seem like mere pastiche.
And when combined with what is commonly termed in Stevens
criticism his predilection for "the gaiety of language," the sense of
pastiche and superficial word play makes the poetry itself seem
superficial; or as Yvor Winters argued, Stevens' poetry might even
seem hedonistic.

But throughout his poetry, Stevens treats serious themes and ideas
which are in their background, their philosophy and their
presentation distinctly yet unconventionally part of the
circumstances and psychology of the modern period. His ideas and
sensibilities feel highly rational, and yet they press beyond the
limitations set by rationalist, scientific cultural patterns. In fact, his
synthesis of the rational and the poetic transports the modern
sensibility into the perennial aspects of culture. The word
"perennial" here refers to "the perennial philosophy" - the ways of
understanding which attend to questions about the place and nature
of human consciousness and, ultimately, the human spirit. One of
Stevens' unique contributions, I'm about to argue, is that he comes
at spiritual concerns, especially late in life, by synthesizing
scientific ways of understanding with poetic ways of understanding.
Stevens was, for example, aware of developments in modern
physics, and he commented on these developments in his letters and
essays. In a letter to Barbara Church (Letters, p. 725) he refers to
quantum theory and wonders if the philosophy of the sciences will
turn out to be a poetic concept itself. Further, his references in "A
Collect of Philosophy" and other prose pieces name physicists in
connection with their ideas' influences on philosophy; he quotes
Samuel Alexander, Andre George and Dr. Joad on the relationships
between mind and reality suggested by certain interpretations of
quantum physics. And Joan Richardson tells us in her biography of
Stevens that he as generally familiar with developments in quantum
physics and-relativity theory.
In being aware of modern physics' implications for philosophy,
Stevens was also aware of radical changes in the western view of
nature and the relation of human consciousness to nature. Briefly
put, quantum physics implies than an observer participates directly
in the reality of what s/he observes, in a "complementary"
relationship between observer and object. This departs significantly
from the previous, but still widely held Newtonian-Cartesian view
that a human observer is objectively separate from what s/he
observes.
Science being the dominant world-view of the modern age, and
Stevens being aware of developments in the philosophy of modern
science, it's fair then to wonder if or how his poems (and theories of
poetry) were influenced by science. In ways parallel to the modern
physicists, Stevens sought keenly to devise a working theory of the
human relationship with reality - or nature, or the universe, put it
however you choose.
We know from many poems, including "Description Without
Place," that for Stevens reality as we experience it depends on the
way we describe it. The words we use, since they have meanings
(however ambiguous the meanings prove to be), shape the reality
we move in. A poem or configuration of words is a reality itself, but
moreover it is an expression of reality as it has been composed by a
particular consciousness or maker, like the singer of "The Idea of
Order at Key West."
"Description Without Place" meditates on this principle. The poem
begins, "It is possible that to seem - it is to be," and then later
proposes: "observing is completing" (a statement, by the way, that
sounds very similar to the quantum idea of complementarity). These
assertions come in the context of "description," and so:

If seeming is description without place,
The spirit's universe, then a summer's day,
Even the seeming of a summer's day,
Is description without place.
(CP 343)

The experience of a summer's day, in other words, does not occur
in a "place;" it is composed of a description which occurs "in the
spirit's universe," which is not a physical location. The poem goes
on to speak of "the difference that we make in what we see," until
toward the end of the poem emerges the statement, "It is a world of
words to the end of it,! In which nothing solid is its solid self."
This is a poetic expression of, or parallel with, quantum physics'
finding that reality does not happen apart from the observation of its
happening, but complementarily with it. Werner Heisenberg, one of
the major minds in twentieth century physics, concluded that an
event cannot be said to have happened, or be "real," until it registers