Siobhan Phillips
In the following essay, Phillips asserts that daily
routine and ordinary patterns were important to
Wallace Stevens and helped to shape his poetry.
No twentieth-century poet attended more to
daily routine than did Wallace Stevens. From a
1927 letter that outlines his schedule (Collected
941) to a 1955 message in which he describes ‘‘try-
ing to pick up old habits,’’ from the ‘‘Exchequer-
ing’’ (34) quotidian of ‘‘The Comedian as the Letter
C’’ to the recurrent daily syllables of ‘‘The World as
Meditation’’ (442), ordinary patterns are vital to
both his life and his art. Stevens sometimes
struggled with diurnal repetition and sometimes
tried to escape it, but he never took such regularity
for granted; in his writing and living, he would
redeem rather than evade quotidian necessity.
Through this effort he realizes a vital philosophical
possibility: his ordinary rounds provide a response
to dualism that resists idealist and empiricist
extremes.
To recognize this response in Stevens’s hum-
drum routines is to extend recent critical recogni-
tion of the poet’s sense of the ordinary. Such
attention is salutary, butonly specific analysis of
repetition demonstrates why the ‘‘normal’’ (Stevens,
Letters767) or the ‘‘commonplace’’ (643) should be
so important to this poet. A focus on everyday
repetition, moreover, helps to suggest why the
‘‘mode’’ (Collected403) of the ordinary should be
central not only to Stevens’s work but also to
twentieth-century literature in general. As Stevens’s
diurnal rhythms inscribe a practicable interdepend-
ence of imaginative freedom and realistic fact, they
demonstrate how an enduring experiential order
can fill a modernist epistemological need. In so
doing, the poet evinces a modern citizen’s vision
of the common as well as a modern artist’s choice
of the commonplace; his use of the quotidian allows
a seemingly esoteric craft to join, elucidate, and
celebrate democratic life. Beginning with ‘‘The
Man with the Blue Guitar’’ and culminating in
‘‘The Auroras of Autumn,’’ Stevens’s everyday
poetics would show his fellow citizens the creative
possibility in basic patterns.
Such patterns are hardly a novel subject for
Stevens criticism, and many readers have noted
the poet’s literary focuson environmental cyclic-
ity, including the recurrence of days and seasons.
Like his workday routine, his poetic rounds
bespeak a basic conviction that human life and
work exist in continuous relation with worldly
process. This relation could seem to endorse Ste-
vens’s pragmatist affinities: to exemplify John
Dewey’scontentionsinArt as Experience,for
example, that imaginativework continues ‘‘nor-
mal processes of living’’ (10) and joins the ‘‘basic
rhythms’’ (151) of one’s environment. Equating
experience and poetry, however, the environment
and the poem, underestimates Stevens’s ordinary
art: while Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, like his
pragmatist philosophy in general, manifests little
concern with individual creativity, Stevens’s expe-
riential artistry reinforces subjective power. Prag-
matist literary criticism wonders whether ‘‘there is
something tantalizingly oxymoronic in the phrase
‘pragmatist imagination’’’ (Levin 195) and consid-
ers how identity can emerge through rather than
against ‘‘the contexts that mediate and shape’’ it
(176), but Stevens’s daily habits solve the prob-
lem of this paradoxical emergence, thereby
detailing the ‘‘poetics of transition’’ that both
Jonathan Levin and Richard Poirier describe.
Stevens’s version of poetic pragmatism suggests
how an ostensibly empiricist acceptance of
process can allow an ostensibly idealist achieve-
ment of subjectivity.
The need for both is apparent from Stevens’s
earliest treatment of daily repetition, which fears
that ordinary rhythms would erase individuality.
For ‘‘The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,’’ trapped
in the ‘‘malady of the quotidian’’ (Collected81),
only a stop to the world’s returns would allow his
individual ‘‘orations.’’ The poem knows, though,
that ‘‘time will not relent.’’ ‘‘The Comedian as the
Letter C,’’ the first version of which appeared the
same year as the first version of ‘‘The Man Whose
Pharynx Was Bad,’’ therefore tries to accept daily
necessity, testing whether a poet can evacuate ego-
tism and imagination in favor of self-effacement
and acquiescence. James Longenbach, the bestIN ‘THE AURORAS’ AND ‘AN ORDINARY
EVENING’ STEVENS EXTENDS THE QUOTIDIAN
IMPLICATIONS OF KEATS’S VERY EARTHLY HEAVEN,
FINDING RECOMPENSE NOT IN THE REPETITION OFTHE HEREAFTER BUT IN THE RETURNS OF THE HERE
AND NOW.’’Of Modern Poetry