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.
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