Wallace Stevens - Close Reading
E-concept: ‘De-peripheralisation’
Sarah Laanani (z5260338)Bird songs signify a radical redirection from Cartesian dualism towards an eco-critical approach to restore an eco-phillic relationship between the human and natural Worlds. Wallace Stevens’ bird poem Of Mere Being is inextricably invested in undoing Romanticism’s anthropomorphic representation of the Avarian world (Heinzelman 10) and discovering a true sense of Being in an unfiltered reality that supersedes human meaning and comprehension. As such, Stevens’ poem creates a peerless opportunity to explore the depths of my newly developed e-concept ‘de-peripheralisation’ though an open dialogue with various eco-critical theorists. Essentially, ‘de-peripheralisation’ seeks to disassemble the anthropocentric assumptions controlling our gaze and corrupting our intra-activity. The human ‘peripheral’ vision privileges certain modes of beings in the foreground and delegates others to the background. By liberating the foreground and background and the subject and object from a hierarchised dualist construction, ‘de-peripheralisation’ de-centres the human gaze to expose a new reality where a new sense of Being can emerge. Therefore, through a close reading of Stevens’ poem, the e-concept ‘de-peripheralisation’ attains resonance and ethos in contributing to the discourse of eco-criticism.
Stevens unmasks an ecocritical dimension to his poetry when using language as a mechanism to promulgate a non-representational and ‘de-peripheral’ perspective of the natural world. In his “Language” lecture, Heidegger (207) establishes a non-dialectical stance rejecting the Cartesian view of language as an instrument to representation, as he grapples with the idea of language as language– an entity that speaks. Thus, Heidegger’s dehumanisation of language resonates with Stevens who also deploys language to speak for itself through sound. Stevens’ auditory language effectively enacts a sense of presence and space for the bird figure within a non-anthropocentric realm of being: “a gold feathered bird, sings”. However, Stevens’ personification of the singing bird should not be misinterpreted as anthropomorphism, rather as a recognition of the bird’s innate lyrical voice that has been reversibly ascribed as a nonhuman quality. Parallel to Heidegger, Stevens radiates a ceaseless goal to bring language to language, “without human meaning”. As such, by refusing human involvement and participation in the bird’s signing, Stevens’ negation (“without”) performs the politics of exclusion. He avidly continues this method of estrangement and alienation through an explicit tone characterised by diction: “without human feeling, a foreign song”. Moreover, Stevens illustrates the power of sound in not only empowering the bird as a more-than-human agent, but in further mobilising the poem to an utterance and a sense of movement. The truncated sentences transform the sonic verbs into salient signifiers of the bird’s vitality and movement: “The bird sings. Its feathers shine”. As such, this sense of movement generated through the verbs typifies a moment of becoming for the bird figure, a liberal departure from an ontologically confined space. In acknowledging the agency of the bird through an eco-diegetic approach, Stevens further draws on Jane Bennett’s theory of Vital Materialism, as he demonstrates an ecological awareness of the intricacies of the natural world. Through a ‘de-peripheral’ lens, it is not only the subject (bird) that sings, but also the object (poem), as Stevens takes on a Heideggerian approach to unveil the capacity for language to speak. Essentially, Stevens generates a “foreign” sound as an open doorway to an alternate world, a non-anthropocentric path to understanding that life exists beyond human existence.
Furthermore, Stevens illuminates the constraints of anthropocentric culture in constraining the scope of human experience and repressing the human capacity to attain an expansive worldview. Through the work of ecopoiesis, Stevens utilises language as a performative and transformative tool to produce a new reality, where a true essence of Being surfaces. To first undermine human exceptionalism, Stevens appeals to diction (“end”) to assert the confines of the human mind and further prompt readers to perceive it as an enclosed place that restricts a sense of meandering: “The palm at the end of the mind”. Through metallic imagery, Stevens accentuates a sense of immobility and imprisonment to suggest that humans are metaphorically captive in a “bronze” cage: “in the bronze décor”. As such, Stevens juxtaposes the corruption of the human world to the purity of the natural world untainted by empirical episteme and a ‘peripheral’ vision when he states: “A gold-feathered bird”. By attributing the purest metal (gold) to the bird, Stevens alludes to the absoluteness of the bird figure in superseding representational logic and occupying a true state of Being. Asserting his aversion of Enlightenment ideals, Stevens constructs happiness and contentment as the antonym of “reason”, contesting that logic (being) is the binary opposition of happiness/unhappiness (Being). By reading “reason” as the subject of the verse, we uncover a new dimension of reality that seeks to create a pathway from superficiality and representation to authenticity and non-representation. As we engage further in a Derridean deconstructive reading, the rampant metal imagery transforms into a symbol of malleability and change. Stevens’ final line reaches a rhythmic climax with the accumulative alliteration effect dramatising the rise of the phoenix: “The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down”. As a symbol of renewal and rebirth, Stevens appeals to language and poiesis to commence the process of metamorphosis, enabling the phoenix’s “fire” to reshape the prison bars of nineteenth century philosophy and create an escape route from essentialism. He renders the metamorphosis of the bird as a tangible prospect and reachable goal as the “feathers dangle down”. Additionally, movement created within language (“dangle”) empowers Stevens to dispose readers from their initial position of anthropocentric bias and allow them to re-emerge anew from this disposition (Kerr 565). Through a ‘de-peripheral’ view, Stevens exemplifies the inherent parallels between humans and the nonhuman worlds, allowing us to read the phoenix’s metamorphosis as a shift towards a different mode of epistemological thinking and ‘Being’.
Stevens’ non-dialectical unification of the human, bird and palm as inseparable elements uncovers another ecological dimension to the poem. By refusing human supremacy, Stevens exemplifies a relentless desire to reconcile humans and the more-than-human world not as a unitary whole, but as multiplicitious agencies that are inextricably entangled with one another. This notion explicitly manifests through his syntax and typographical choice to insert a comma between two independent clauses posing as two separate stanzas: “…In the bronze décor, / A gold-feathered bird”. In doing so, Stevens refuses the separation of the palm in stanza one and the bird in stanza two, binding them together as intrinsically intertwined in their mode of Being. The concept of human and nonhuman interconnection materialises further through Stevens’ prepositional phrases: “The wind moves slowly in the branches”. By situating the wind “in” and as part of the branches, Stevens subverts a hierarchised inequity between the realms of existence and effectively sanctions the obtrusion of the background into the foreground (de-peripheralisation). Hence, by diffusing the binary of the object and subject, Stevens’ bird becomes emblematic of instability, crossing between the threshold of inside and outside, imagination and reality (Corey 290). In bringing language to language, Stevens’ poem not only produces a highly speculative and precarious space, but also inhabits that very space: “The palm stands on the edge of space”. This marks a point of undecidability, as Stevens pushes the lyric to a state of regeneration (phoenix), allowing various elements to constantly undo themselves and resist representation. Hence, Stevens’ ‘de-peripheral’ view amalgamates the human, animal and plant worlds though their shared autonomy and what Derrida refers to ‘automaticity’ – a communicative behaviour mediated through signals (Wolfe 67) to push for ecological harmony.
To summarise, Stevens’ poem Of Mere Being displaces readers from the traditional Gestell and repositions them within a ‘de-peripheral’ framework, as an emancipatory strategy to liberate the bird figure from the constraints of anthropocentrism. Applying ‘de-peripheralisation’ to Stevens poem unveils the bird’s immanent autonomy and intrinsic value an independent entity that does not rely on the human world to attain its significance.
References:
Corey, Joshua. “Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds by Cary Wolfe (review).” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 44, no. 2, 2020, pp. 289–91. Literature Online, https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2020.0036.
Heidegger, Martin, and Albert Hofstadter. Poetry, Language, Thought. Perennial Classics, 2009.
Heinzelman, Kurt. “The Need of Being Versed: Frost, Stevens, and Birds.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, 2017, pp. 10–22. Literature Online, https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2017.0002.
Kerr, Joshua. “Thinking Through Sound: Martin Heidegger and Wallace Stevens.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 4, 2019, pp. 553–70. JSTOR Journals, https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.33.4.0553.
Stevens, Wallace. “Of Mere Being”. Poetry Foundation, 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57671/of-mere-being
Wolfe, Cary. “NEVER AGAIN WOULD BIRDS' SONG BE THE SAME, OR, ECOPOETICS WHEN "THERE IS NO WORLD".” Angelaki : Journal of Theoretical Humanities, vol. 23, no. 6, 2018, pp. 66–77. Taylor & Francis Journals Complete, https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2018.1546992.