Getting to know him …

… Getting Acquainted with Wallace Stevens - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Richardson concludes: “By reading through Stevens’s body of work, we learn to become pragmatists,” which is to say, we learn to meditate on the workings of the mind. This claim underlines the power but also the potential impediments to Richardson’s pedagogical project. Recalling that the pragmatist method was originally designed to show “how to make our ideas clear,” she argues that true clarity is achieved by attending “to the many possible shades of meaning in the words we use.” To be “clear,” according to this counterintuitive definition, is to hold open a variety of interpretive possibilities; it is to suspend rather than to establish certainty. Any perplexity generated by the multiplication of meanings is precisely the point: from the pragmatist’s perspective, the experience of disorientation is far more valuable than easy glosses or directives. In short, thinking pragmatically sounds a lot like thinking poetically, with pragmatic criticism venturing to loosen and multiply rather than fix and authorize the many personalized paths this thinking might travel.

The book sounds interesting, though I'm not sure the thesis is altogether sound. I read Stevens's Collected Poems pretty regularly and the impression I have arrived at over the years is that they represent a steady search for faith. I have read that, whenever he visited New York City, Stevens always made a point of spending some time just sitting in St. Patrick's Cathedral.