Abstract

The poetry of Wallace Stevens, constructed as it is around the poet’s central insight that poetry is an unofficial view of Being, has invited philosophical commentary from critics such as Simon Critchley and J. Hillis Miller who attempt to read Stevens’ imaginative engagements with reality as indicative of his continued interest in the most fundamental questions concerning the links between poetic language, epistemology and ontology. Yet, despite Marjorie Perloff’s indication that a study of Stevens’ poetic vocabulary yields repeated emphasis of the terms “being”, “consciousness”, “reality” and “truth”, no sustained attempt has been made to read Stevens with a philosopher who aligns poetic insight with a reconceptualization of the metaphysical significance of these concepts as defining a new mode of philosophizing. This dissertation will read Stevens’ poetry with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in order to examine how both treat poetic writing as more philosophical than philosophical theories, not due to its lack of propositional statements, but because language places us in appropriative proximity with Being in a way which philosophy cannot. To focus Stevens’ poetry through Heidegger is also to concretize the poet’s incessant inquiry into the relationship ‘between phenomenal consciousness and … external reality that provides the ground for it’. More than that, it is ultimately to see both philosopher and poet engaged in probing the ways in which the affective language of poetry seizes and unsettles us by placing us in open response to our environment – an ‘obscure threshold of sense’ which replaces the interiority of representation with the mutual appropriation of Da-sein and Being. To the extent that both Stevens and Heidegger understand the act of perception to be more than just a passive observation of an objective world which stands apart from a deep understanding of the human being’s interpretive investments in reality, phenomenological engagement is freighted with philosophical weight, for it can never be a simple description of the world as an object of dispassionate observation. Rather, perception is a statement of how the perceiver finds himself in an attitude of comportment towards the world. For both, truth is not a function of correspondence between theory and a state of affairs it attempts to encapsulate, but a deep revelation about the infinite horizon of the world. I will thus argue that it is Heidegger’s philosophical arguments about the way the human being is always sustaining himself in a relationship towards Being which provide a compelling theoretical framework through which we can understand how Stevens positions the poetic self. This conjunction allows us to unpack the primacy both Stevens and Heidegger accords to poetic language and the poet, for it is the poet who places us in life-sustaining communion with the world, and in so doing, opens up new ways of approaching subjectivity as being endlessly alive to its imaginative appropriation of reality.