Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value

Altieri provides the most authoritative treatment of Stevens in more than a decade.... He combines aesthetics and philosophy in a rigorous manner that is nonetheless resolutely literary. Wisely eschewing a commentary on all of Stevens's poems, Altieri extracts original interpretive insights from close reading, as seen in his discernment, in 'Farewell to Florida,' of a flight from the female that is as much wishful thinking as renunciation, and a reading of 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' in which he emphasizes how the different perspectives `fuse' over the disjunction emphasized by critics such as Harold Bloom. Altieri's detailed explication... reveals him as a dazzling reader of this difficult poet. Summing Up: Highly recommended.

Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity is an enormously stimulating book. Charles Altieri is remarkably ambitious, marvelously learned, and an intensely thoughtful reader of Stevens (and many others). He is the rare critic who is speculative, theoretical, and interpretive, but who also recognizes that the practice of criticism usually begins in strong affection and an urge to celebrate.

Can poetry establish values? This brilliant, learned, subtle, and original book argues persuasively that Wallace Stevens is a philosophical poet. Charles Altieri supports this claim through detailed readings of selected poems from all Stevens' poetry books taken up in sequence. Nietzsche is shown to be a major resource for Stevens, as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are for Altieri. Stevens, Altieri demonstrates, investigates tirelessly, through the practice of poetry, ways poetry can actualize values. 'Stevens,' Altieri asserts, 'provides a brilliant way of reconciling experience and world by defining imagination as involving the theory of values because it provides images of the mind's power over the possibility of things.' Altieri persuasively demonstrates that the sequence of Stevens's books makes a story. It is the story of Stevens's progressive movement toward solutions for his search for values through poetry-making. This movement proceeds through the development of what Altieri calls 'aspectual thinking' in poetry and through an exploitation of the grammar of 'as.' Stevens in one place calls this process 'the intricate evasions of as'; in another, 'the edgings and inchings of final form.' Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity is also, covertly or indirectly, a record of Altieri's own search for a phenomenology of value that will satisfy him. A major book for all those interested in Stevens and in the uses of poetry and criticism in our time.