ABSTRACT
In the lecture quoted here, delivered at Harvard in 1946, Stevens’ image of the poet’s role attained almost megalomaniac proportions-“if the poet discovered and had the power thereafter at will and by intelligence to reconstruct us by his transformations” he “would also have the power to destroy us” (NA 45). This idea, however, was at odds with the acute realization that his language, his poetic language, was also the language of everybody else, of people who were not only, as Harold Bloom reminds us,1 his poetic forefathers, but the people around him, those which Ortega y Gasset had frightfully summarized as “The Mass Man.” This sense of exteriority and collectivity in language suggests that, in several senses, poetry’s language is a ‘material’ language, and that the imagination-Stevens’ Romantic synonym for poetic creativity-could not simply be imagined as an “act of the mind,” a matter of workings of consciousness, but needed to deal directly with this ‘material.’ ‘Material’ may suggest several, mutually implicated, meanings: the physical body of the letter as ink on the printed, mass-produced page; the phonetic sound the letters refer to as realized physically in the human body and captured by the senses; the phonemic, linguistic entity referred to by this sound, and the meanings created by their differential combinations within a language system; the sense in which this language system itself is shaped by its function within a social, cultural and political order and, not least, the way this order is built on a ‘material’ economic structure in which a book of poems, for example, can function as a commodity for consumption. In this taxonomy, ‘material’ is in each case (except possibly in the case of the ink) a metaphor for, indicating, something else.
