Strange Rhetoric, Enigmatical Grammar, Poetic Logic: Wallace Stevens’s The Auroras of Autumn
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The recent turn in Stevens criticism has largely been phenomenological in nature, concerned with moving past the poet’s “failure” to overcome the epistemological problem of the relation of mind and world, imagination and reality, and thereby realize the “supreme fiction.” While many of these critics, who tend to focus on Stevens’s later poetry, have interpreted the effects of grammar or rhetoric in isolation, there has not been a satisfactory account of their complex interplay, which, at heightened junctures, realizes a multidimensional poetic world simultaneously constituted by seeing, interpreting, and feeling. My intervention, then, is pedagogical in inflection. I make the case that Stevens’s efforts in the later poetry to move beyond epistemology can be productively put in relation to the classical liberal arts trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. But pedagogical, too, in the sense that these poems self-consciously teach us to read differently, to be attentive to the richness, vitality, and subtlety of rhetoric and grammar, which, in their active interpenetration, create a poetic logic of their own—one that takes us beyond empirical truth, beyond the types of truths religion has traditionally proffered humankind. In resisting “the intelligence / Almost successfully,” in continually framing and unframing phenomenal reality, the “endlessly elaborating” dance of grammar and rhetoric ultimately discloses the extent to which we share in the making of the logic of the poem.
Abstract
The recent turn in Stevens criticism has largely been phenomenological in nature, concerned with moving past the poet’s “failure” to overcome the epistemological problem of the relation of mind and world, imagination and reality, and thereby realize the “supreme fiction.” While many of these critics, who tend to focus on Stevens’s later poetry, have interpreted the effects of grammar or rhetoric in isolation, there has not been a satisfactory account of their complex interplay, which, at heightened junctures, realizes a multidimensional poetic world simultaneously constituted by seeing, interpreting, and feeling. My intervention, then, is pedagogical in inflection. I make the case that Stevens’s efforts in the later poetry to move beyond epistemology can be productively put in relation to the classical liberal arts trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. But pedagogical, too, in the sense that these poems self-consciously teach us to read differently, to be attentive to the richness, vitality, and subtlety of rhetoric and grammar, which, in their active interpenetration, create a poetic logic of their own—one that takes us beyond empirical truth, beyond the types of truths religion has traditionally proffered humankind. In resisting “the intelligence / Almost successfully,” in continually framing and unframing phenomenal reality, the “endlessly elaborating” dance of grammar and rhetoric ultimately discloses the extent to which we share in the making of the logic of the poem.
참고문헌 (25)
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