ABSTRACT
A number of critics have argued against reading Steven’s poetry as progressing from a simple beginning to a more complex and fuller end. In discussing his late poems, Steven Shaviro argues: “The logic of Stevens’s poetry is repetitive and accretive, not dialectical or progressive.”1 Paul Bové quotes and develops Joseph Riddel’s critique of Helen Vendler’s On Extended Wings, where Riddel argues that “there is no more a consummated arrival in later Stevens than there was a meaningful departure in the earlier”: Bové demonstrates ways in which the Romanitc notions of progress, upheld by a number of New Critics, when applied to the course of Stevens’s poetry as well as to particular poems, create a paradigm with substantial areas of blindness (Bové, 183-5). Indeed, Stevens’s characteristic life-long preoccupation with certain patterns of thought, the recurrence of words, concepts and structures in his poetry, in effect produces a body of work which constantly gestures backward, as his poems engage in rethinking and refiguring the earlier work. While one can certainly trace a development in his poetry, that development is importantly built on recurrence; Stevens’s oeuvre grows by accretion and refiguration. By thus returning, or at least gesturing backward, by constantly redefining their terms, the poems achieve what Gertrude Stein describes as the “gradual difference” enacted by continual repeating: saying the same thing over and over produces a result which is “endlessly the same and endlessly different” (Stein, GMMA, 243).
