Altieri’s chapter defines four basic modes of thinking in Wallace Stevens’s poetry. Harmonium (1923) reconceives what poetic thinking can be—from an ideal of cogent masculine argument to the possibility of thinking against generalization. Such thinking offers allegories that fascinate without resolving. And it shifts the sensuality of poetry from an emphasis on referring to sensuous detail to a lyric sensuality that is basic to the forms of concreteness established by the workings of the medium. Second, Stevens turns in Ideas of Order (1936) from valuing the eccentric to imagining how poetic thinking can become central to ordinary life. Third, by the final poems of Transport to Summer (1947), Stevens seems to become embarrassed by his own rhetoric of the hero and major man. He becomes increasingly concerned with blending the unreal of fiction with the work of realization, a concept strikingly parallel to Paul Cézanne’s idea of how art brings force and vitality to nature. Finally, that theoretical concern for blending fictionality with realization generates in The Rock (1954) a mode of poetic thinking inseparable from a sense of self-conscious dwelling that enables us to value the artifice present in even the most elemental of experiences.

I hate moral criticism of any kind – primarily because it characteristically deals with a very limited range of values that can meet the generalizing test of moral or ethical significance. So I seek a conceptual framework for literary experience capable of reveling in how such experience might challenge any sense that the soul is simple enough to live exclusively in relation to those moral values. I imagine this conceptual framework comprising two levels. The first will align the literary with the many ways our language games resist epistemic practices. This level will stress modes of display involving participation, attunement, and exemplification. That opens the way to experiences that do not simply confirm the judgments of the discursive intellect. But were we only to characterize literary experience in this negative way, we would not have a strong account of why we are drawn to slow reading as involving significant cultural ideals. So we need a second level of analysis in order to build a positive model that provides a substantial alternative to traditional ethical thinking.

I

Almost any ethics will occlude literary value just because ethics must deal in general principles. (Even the poststructuralist praise of the event of singularity that the text offers must generalize that condition as the basis for subsequent claims about how literature enables certain ethical qualities.) So I will instead revel in the possibility that at least for literary criticism we need not rely on ethical thinking in any form. Instead I want to develop a roughly phenomenological view of values, or, more properly, of valuing because I think this approach to aspects of value will prove more flexible in adapting to a range of literary texts and more supple in characterizing the kinds of investments involved in literary experience than any form of reading sponsored by specifically ethical modes of reading. This phenomenological approach has the advantages of flexibility and of fluid passages between first-order care about objects of attention and second-order attention to the intensity involved in our various modes of engagement with particular literary texts.

I begin with some crucial distinctions. First, phenomenology lends itself to talking about noninstrumental values, which are crucial to literary experience. “Noninstrumental values” are not necessarily mere moments of fantasy released from the world of instrumental labors.

As is evident from my epigraphs, it would not be easy to use T. S. Eliot's various remarks on painters as an incisive measure of how the visual functions in his poetry. Nor will it help much if we want to supplement what David Trotter calls ‘parallel histories’ between literature and various aspects of visual art. We get a better picture of his relation to the visual arts if we concentrate on the pains and difficulties that Eliot's work displays when it renders visual experience. Such comparisons allow us to trace analogies between his own discomfort before images that seem to be vying for his attention and modernist visual artists' own alienation from claims that description or representation provided the most stable means of characterising knowledge and so clarifying values. Eliot's own actual relation to the visual arts seems, then, an outgrowth of his wariness before all visual experience, because that experience seemed so insistently bound to objective surfaces that it could not display the density of relations that, for Eliot, constituted a livable reality.

It is clear from Eliot's letters that what most interested him in the visual arts were images of St Sebastian.

The history of Eliot criticism offers a depressing form of justice: the very vocabulary for appreciating poetry that he did so much to shape has turned out to be in large part responsible for the decline of his power and influence in the academy. Ambivalence now becomes effeteness, complexity idealism, and the desire for intricate unities a defensive projection of mastery by which to ward off threats of castration. Consequently, what had been staged as a revolutionary modernism now gets taught primarily as a reactionary evasion of historical realities from which we can be freed by a less pretentious modernism or, even better, by an enlightened postmodernism.

This volume's concern with the topic of Eliot and desire provides an opportunity to escape this entire revenge cycle. For we are invited to look carefully at how his formal and thematic elements are woven into specific emotional configurations, so that we have to develop for those elements an imaginative density not easily subsumed under the now standard litany of complaints about his impersonality and abstraction. This does not mean we cannot be critical of Eliot. Indeed focusing on how desires are staged within his work may reveal an even more monstrous fascist or patriarch than our more tepid thematizing has allowed us.

The invitation to write this chapter arrived at a most opportune time. I have been trying to think through a book that sets the contemporary against the postmodern by arguing that there are several features of contemporary literature and visual art, even work promoting itself as postmodern, that have strong claims upon us. But these claims have been blunted by the ambitious, overgeneralised abstractions dominating our rhetorics about the postmodern. Crude theory in effect colonises the art and limits its capacity to serve as ‘equipment for living’ as we enter the twenty- first century. Now I have the opportunity to work on one of the most important of these features – the possible ways in which these contemporary experiments have the power to modify our approaches to moral thinking.

These modifications will not stem from direct ethical arguments; nor will they depend on the dramatic engagements with exemplary dilemmas that occupy most philosophers seeking to bring literary works into moral theory. Most contemporary art and literature with even the slightest experimental ambitions tend to be extremely wary of making any ethical claims for themselves. I can partially finesse this problem by relying here on contemporary poetry, which is considerably less cynical and/or less insistent on transforming the moral into the political than is the visual art most celebrated by postmodern theorists. But even then we cannot avoid that wariness but instead treat it seriously as carrying a possible moral weight, or at least as asking us to qualify what we do in the name of the moral weight.

All our current instruments agree that we are working in the wake of an “aesthetic ideology” that is less a fixed set of beliefs than a set of malleable assumptions deriving from Kant and then from Romanticism about what works of art make available for society. But that very malleability makes it very difficult to get the kind of handle on the past which will allow us to test the degree to which we can escape the hold of this ideology without losing an entire cultural heritage. In fact this malleability creates a condition in which that ideology continues to haunt those who would reject it, especially those who seek to build a new politics on notions of person, text, value, and community, since such notions tend to be covertly shaped either by that ideology directly or by problematic oppositions it generates. Therefore trying to work somewhat free of this ideology requires arguing on two fronts – against an oversimplified political dismissal of some fixed version of this aesthetic ideology and also against those theorists like Eagleton and Derrida who hope to correlate versions of post-modern politics with ideals recuperated directly from that ideology. My ultimate ambition is to elaborate alternative ways of providing a language of value for the arts, and hence for the ways that the arts contribute to social life. But before I take on that conceptual task I want to set the contemporary scene by rehearsing a narrative that I hope clarifies some of the basic underlying factors affecting our conceptual commitments.

When I was asked to write on the figure of Eliot in modern poetry I thought of several reasons not to accept. On a personal level I could imagine no way that such critical work would not reveal more about my limitations than about Eliot's powers, since I would miss or mistake crucial aspects of his heritage. And on a theoretical level I deeply mistrust any study claiming to speak of influences. Where such studies are not obvious, they tend to rely on loose speculations about specific echoes or to invoke problematic analogies attempting to establish one writer's shaping overall projects for another.

Yet here I am. The theoretical problem quickly became a challenge to test a concept of impact that might avoid the problems worrying me, since impact is less a matter of one poet deliberately engaging another than it is a matter of the currency of ideas and of a logic informing how writers shape ambitions or develop styles. Thus we shift from trying to inhabit the mind of specific writers to attempting to describe a theater in which Eliot becomes a stimulus focussing a range of possible investments in versions of his work. And then we also shift the personal stakes. My fears did not subside, but they were outweighed by the opportunity to take responsibility for my own love of Eliot: I could ask how and why the now dominant account misses much that was, and is, culturally vital in Eliot's work; and I could use the reception of Eliot's work by other poets to make clear what in his work does not yield to appropriation or modification, but marks instead his still distinctive modernist voice.