Before redress: Language and reality in modernist poetry

This study concentrates on the actual or projected relationship of language to what modernist poets called "reality," as it is encountered by one significant current of twentieth century poetry, beginning with Wallace Stevens' treatment of the relation of poetry to pain in "Esthetique du Mal" and subsequently diverging into questions about language's relation to the reality of the self and the reality of the world, as these questions are posed by the work of Robert Lowell and Robert Duncan. I argue that the terms Stevens uses in his 1944 poem provide a way to recognize the radical discoveries Lowell and Duncan made about the capacity of poetry to establish new responses to what I will call the modernist problem of reality. I claim that Stevens' particular examination of the resources which the social medium of language offers poetry permits us to see how Lowell and Duncan found intentional ways of coping with the perpetual escape of reality from poetry. I argue that these methods are powerfully new because they are only available to an agency which is constituted in part by its dependence on language.So the argument suggests that a generation of American poetry's most intense encounters with reality happened where our literary histories still may be watching for them least---in the modes of experience which we can only detect as a poetic agency moves through the language which makes it up. Acknowledging this possibility entails shifting away from the most widely available paradigms of current literary criticism. Reading for the distinctive forms of agency which language provides poets involves thinking of poetic language not simply as a manifestation or an expression but rather as a peculiar site of consciousness, permitting not only embodiment of a state of mind but also the means for reflecting on or re-conceiving it. Such an emphasis means that we must attend to the formal features of poems in the context of what poets desire from poetry and not as tactics to be posited against or harmonized with the content of a particular poem. For the line of modernism which Lowell and Duncan continue, form is a mind's way of being.