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

Charles Altieri, one of our foremost analysts of modernism, has in his recent work argued for the importance of the affects, which philosophy has too long subordinated to cognition and ethics. In Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, Altieri focuses his attention on modernist poetry, especially that of Wallace Stevens. He argues that critics have failed to appreciate the degree to which modernist poetry, like modernist art, breaks from the epistemology that arose from cultures of empiricism. If we recognize the limits of that authority we can also recognize the close positive affinities between how we feel and how we value. Nineteenth-century writing wanted to build values out of ways of looking at what could be established as fact. Early modernist poetry, particularly that of Stevens and Pound, labors to adapt Nietzschean attitudes toward poetry. Then Stevens embarked on an imaginative journey to find in linguistic activity itself a sufficient model for how we compose values. In both stages of his career facts must be respected, but they will not bear values simply by virtue of their connectedness to the world. We have to understand the constructive power taking place on intimate levels as we pursue that connectedness. Stevens matters, Altieri argues, because of the range and depth and intelligence by which he explores what such connectedness might involve. Stevens offers elaborate and moving experiments exploring how imaginative writing can help human beings grapple with questions about values that are at the very heart of our common experience. Review "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." Source: Choice "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." Author: Robert Chodat, Boston University, author of Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo "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