Harmonium (poetry Collection) - Knowing The Ultimate Plato

Knowing The Ultimate Plato

In the ancient quarrel between poetic imagination and philosophical reason, Stevens sides with the former, though he emphasizes not an unchanging mental faculty but rather the continual work of imaginative reconstruction of the material the world provides --- turning ever-changing shades of green into ever-changing shades of blue, so to speak. One of Stevens's themes is the contrast between an imaginative, poetic disclosure of reality as opposed to rationalist abstraction. See for example "On the Manner of Addressing Clouds". Stevens defends the sensuous ground he favors against the philosophers' Plato in "Homunculus et la Belle Etoile", contrasting and recommending instead "the ultimate Plato".

Despite Stevens's commitment to this theme, interpreters have not been prevented from exploring the philosophical implications of his poetry. A few poems from Harmonium, on no account excluding "The Comedian as the Letter C", "O Florida, Venereal Soil", "Bantams in Pine Woods", "Palace of the Babies", and "Theory" are occasionally mentioned as examples of pataphysics, an attempt to go beyond metaphysics that is sometimes cited as responsible for the high tides of language in Stevens's poetry. It has also been read as expressing philosophies as various as Santayana's, Nietzsche's and Kant's. (See "The Snow Man" and "Gubbinal" for some references.) Many would agree with Simon Critchley, who favors a broadly Kantian reading, that Stevens was the philosophically most important poet writing in English in the twentieth century. Anca Rosu reads Stevens as claiming poetry as a way of thinking and reaching for the knowledge usually associated with philosophy. This brings him close to Martin Heidegger, she writes, but "the notable difference is that while Heidegger's passion for poetry threatens his profession -- philosophy, as it has traditionally been understood -- with its end, Stevens, being a poet, can only triumph in the triumph of poetry." She finds deeper philosophical affinities between Stevens and the American philosophers William James and George Santayana, "who themselves challenged the tenets of traditional philosophy by stressing the cultural construction of such notions as reality, truth, and knowledge." She emphasizes that Stevens's purpose is not to replace philosophy with poetry but "to enhance the poetic and endow it with philosophical import."