APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE

211 Pages·2013·1.38 MB·English

by  Andrew Klein

RICE UNIVERSITY
Genial Thinking:
Frost, Stevens, Ashbery
by
Andrew A. Klein
A THESIS SUBMITTED
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE:
Cary Wolfe, Bruce and Elizabeth
Dunlevie Professor, Director,
English
HOUSTON, TEXAS
APRIL 2013
ABSTRACT

Genial Thinking:
Frost, Stevens, Ashbery

by

Andrew A. Klein

This dissertation explores how Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery
have responded to the problem of philosophical skepticism that they inherit from
Emerson: that while things do in fact exist, direct knowledge of them is beyond our ken.
Traditionally read within the framework of an evolving Romanticism that finds them
attempting to resolve this problem through some form of synthesis or transcendence, I
argue instead that these poets accept the intractability of the problem so as to develop
forms of thinking from within its conditions. Chapter One explains why poetry is
particularly suited to this sort of thinking and what it can achieve that philosophy (or at
least a certain understanding of it) cannot. Chapter Two focuses on the act of listening in
Stevens’s poetry as a way to show how Stevens is not, as is typically thought, interested
in “the thing itself,” but in "the less legible meaning of sounds," the slight, keen
indecision that resonates in between sense and understanding. Chapter Three focuses on
those moments in Frost’s poetry when, instead of attempting to comprehend, seize, grasp,
and represent reality through the use of metaphor, he chooses to regard its
inappropriability or otherness. And Chapter Four focuses on how Ashbery’s constant
shifts of focus are not just the wanderings of his mind, but a technique for disrupting our
absorption in a single plane of attention so as to achieve new economies of engagement.
Overall, though, the goal of this project is to move the discussion about this line of poets
out of the epistemological register within which they are usually read and into an ethical
one.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
_____________________________________________________________

This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of many people,
but I would especially like to thank:
Cary Wolfe—for blowing my mind during my first two semesters of graduate
school and sending me on an intellectual journey that, even after writing this dissertation,
I have barely begun; his advice in person and in writing has been invaluable and has
forever changed the way I see the world and “our” place in it.
Terry Doody—for opening me to the joys and wonders of poetry during a directed
reading in my second year of graduate school; for taking me under his wing as a teaching
assistant; and, most of all, for his unfailing intellectual and emotional support and
encouragement.
Philip Wood—for guiding me through the difficult terrain of 20th-century French
philosophy in a way that not only provided me with competence in this extra-disciplinary
field, but also set me on a strange path of “self”-exploration; I will always remember an
impromptu lecture that he gave our seminar about the pursuit of pleasure and the
avoidance of pain: for that hour the entire human drama made sense to me.
Susan Lurie—for meeting with me during the Spring of 2006, when I was still
wait-listed at Rice; for her seminar on race and ethnicity in American culture where I
learned a critical vocabulary that I still make use of today; for teaching me how to write a
seminar paper; and for the kind words she offers each time I see her.
Santiago Colas—for two classes during my senior year at the University of
Michigan that changed the way I read and write.
Señor Mason—for teaching me how to study.
v
Ben Saxton and Amelia Scholtz—for their encouragement, support, and
friendship throughout the last eight years.
Lina Dib—for turning me on to new avenues of research on a daily basis, reading
everything I write, and, most of all, for believing in me.
Damian Manire—for the countless hours he has spent on Skype talking with me
about the pleasures and pains of writing and the role of literature in society (and for doing
it all with a great sense of humor).
Lu Berry—for her practical guidance and emotional support.
Dave Nasser—for being there.
My friends—without whom my life would be so much less.

Above all, though, I would like to thank my family; they are behind every word
that I write, and this dissertation is dedicated to them.
CONTENTS
________________________________________________________________________

INTRODUCTION…1

1. THE POETICS OF SINGULARITY…25

2. THE TIMBRE OF THOUGHT: WALLACE STEVENS AND THE LESS
LEGIBLE MEANINGS OF SOUNDS…71

3. THE REST OF IT: ROBERT FROST AND THE LIMITS OF
METAPHOR…113

4. FLOW CHART: JOHN ASHBERY’S ECONOMIES OF ATTENTION…161

CONCLUSION…189

BIBLIOGRAPHY…193
1
INTRODUCTION…

GENIAL THINKING
________________________________________________________________________

The world is enigmatical, every thing said & every thing known & done, & must not be taken
literally, but genially.1

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

According to Simon Critchley, modern philosophy begins in disappointment; that
is, it begins “not, as ancient tradition relates, in an experience of wonder at the fact that
things (nature, the world, the universe) are, but rather with an indeterminate but palpable
sense that something desired has not been fulfilled, that a fantastic effort has failed.”2
Now, I’m not so sure that this dissertation qualifies as a work of philosophy, but it, too,
begins in disappointment—and philosophical disappointment at that. Namely, it begins
in disappointment with Kant’s settlement with skepticism, which—to spare you (and,
frankly, me) from having to suffer through a full explanation of the Critique of Pure
Reason3—I’ll simply summarize by citing the following two paragraphs from the
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics:
Since the oldest days of philosophy inquirers into pure reason have conceived,
besides the things of sense, or appearances (phenomena), which make up the
sensible world, certain creations of the understanding, called noumena, which
should constitute an intelligible world. And as appearances and illusion were by
those men identified (a thing which we may well excuse in an undeveloped
epoch), actuality was only conceded to the creations of thought.
And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances,
confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1982), 351.

2 Simon Critchley, Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, 2nd ed. (New York:
Routledge, 2004), xvii. All further references will be given parenthetically.

3 More seriously, though, I summarize here because I am less interested in what Kant himself actually said
than I am in the way in which he has been inherited and interpreted by a certain critical tradition.
2
thing in its internal constitution, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in
which our senses are affected by this unknown something. The understanding
therefore, by assuming appearances, grants the existence of things in themselves
also, and so far we may say, that the representation of such things as form the
basis of phenomena, consequently of mere creations of the understanding, is not
only admissible, but unavoidable.4

Or, to hopefully make it even more accessible, here’s Stanley Cavell’s five-point
schematization:
(1) Experience is constituted by appearances. (2) Appearances are of something
else, which accordingly cannot itself appear. (3) All and only functions of
experience can be known; these are our categories of the understanding. (4) It
follows that the something else—that of which appearances are appearances,
whose existence we must grant—cannot be known. In discovering this limitation
of reason, reason proves its power to itself, over itself. (5) Moreover, since it is
unavoidable for our reason to be drawn to think about this unknowable ground of
appearance, reason reveals itself to itself in this necessity also.5

No matter how you put it, though, the disappointing fact here is that, as Cavell explains,
“[t]o settle with skepticism…to assure us that we do know the existence of the world or,
rather, that what we understand as knowledge is of the world, the price Kant asks us to
pay is to cede any claim to know the thing in itself, to grant that human knowledge is not
of things as they are in themselves” (63). Thus, “Thanks for nothing,” Cavell says,
because, in effect, Kant has left us in two incommensurable worlds, “in one of them
determined, in the other free, one of which is necessary to the satisfaction of human
Understanding, the other to the satisfaction of human Reason” (64). Or, rather, to follow
this thought out, as Cavell does, because we are not fully at home in either world, we are,
ultimately, in neither world, or, “as it is said, between worlds” (64).

4 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, with Selections from the Critique of Pure
Reason, ed. Gary Hatfield (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 61-62.

5 Stanley Cavell, “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant (Terms as Conditions)” in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes,
ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford University Press, 2003), 62. All further references will be given
parenthetically.
3
In short, then, my disappointment stems from the fact that, for all intents and
purposes, we are caught between worlds, knowing, on the one hand, that things do in fact
exist, but, on the other, that direct knowledge of them is beyond our ken. But, more than
this—which, once you get used to it, seems entirely reasonable and not at all worth being
disappointed about—my disappointment stems from the fact that there have been so few
viable suggestions as to how philosophical thought should proceed in the wake of Kant’s
settlement. Indeed, as Derrida has shown time and time again, it seems that post-Kantian
philosophy has had an exceptionally hard time acknowledging that “the great
metaphysical dream of the soul moving frictionlessly towards knowledge of itself,
things-in-themselves and God is just that, a dream” (Critchley xvii). The overarching
question that I want to ask here, therefore, is: how might philosophical thought proceed
when philosophy, as traditionally understood—which is to say, philosophy as the pursuit
of the true nature of things—has become impossible?

In the following pages, I would like to suggest that, however else philosophical
thought might proceed, one way in which it can and has proceeded is by means of a
practice which I find running throughout the Emersonian tradition of American literature
and which I have chosen to call genial thinking. This is a complex and often
contradictory practice, which I will be drawing out and refining in the chapters that
follow; but, to begin explaining what I mean, let me restate my epigraph: “The world is
enigmatical, every thing said & every thing known & done, & must not be taken literally,
but genially.” In this statement, drawn from an 1846 entry in Emerson’s journal, I find
both a tidy summation of the problem of philosophical skepticism and a prescription for
4
how we might proceed in the wake of Kant’s settlement with it. The summation
comprises the first half of the sentence—“The world is enigmatical, every thing said &
every thing known & done”—and is relatively easy to state. In effect, it says that the
world-in-itself is unknowable. The prescription, however, is more difficult: the world
“must not be taken literally, but genially.” What does this mean? That it must not be
taken literally makes sense enough in that, if the world is ultimately unknowable, then
there is indeed no way that it can be understood as such, without exaggeration or
inaccuracy. But genially? This seems like a rather odd word to set in opposition to
“literally.” “Figuratively” or “metaphorically” would make more intuitive sense, seeing
as that they are common antonyms of “literally” and that they follow the general logic of
Emerson’s claim: that if the world cannot be known as such, it can therefore only be
known through our various representations of it. But genially? What can this possibly
mean?
The online concordance6 to Emerson’s complete works finds the word “genial”
thirty-four times and, for the most part, it is used, as we use it today, to refer to someone
who is pleasantly cheerful—as when, in “Clubs,” he describes a certain unnamed friend
as being “of such genial temper that he disposes all others irresistibly to good humor and
discourse”7; or when, in “Plutarch,” he says that the Roman “was a genial host and guest,
and delighted in bringing friends and guests to the supper table” (CW 10:319). But there
are other times when Emerson uses the word differently—as when, in “Thoughts on
Modern Literature,” he warns us not to forget “the genial miraculous force we have

6 “A Concordance to the Complete Works of RWE - Compiled by Eugene F. Irey” at http://www.rwe.org/.

7 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Clubs” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition,
Vol. 7 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 233. All further references will be given parenthetically as CW
followed by the volume and page number.