Wallace Stevens writes without feeling. The accusation has always been there, though variously intellectualized and variously qualified (sometimes this depends on politics, sometimes on literary criticism). The poet's early career dogged by charges of dandyism and effeteness, and his later work noted for austerity, asceticism, even irresponsibility, criticism of Stevens has always been attended by the prevailing notion that the poet, in fact, had nothing (nothing human, at least, nothing of his celebrated “ordinary”) to say. Even in poetic eulogy, Stevens's sometime contemporary, John Berryman, was led to bemoan the “something … something … not there” in Stevens's developing verse.

Edward Ragg, in his new book Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction, is determined to defend Stevens against criticism that would define the poet as “abstract” in this negative (inhuman, impersonal and reductively universalizing) sense. Ragg's focus is “abstraction” as one of the shaping forces of modern art. Ragg asks how abstraction became a question for Stevens as a poet. How has the issue engaged his critics? Did the poet's attitude towards abstraction change, and do we find different expressions of abstract writing throughout the corpus? Ragg's close readings emphasize Stevens's fascination with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painting, as well as the examples of philosophy and Romantic poetry. By tracing the poet's interest in abstraction from Harmonium to his later works, Ragg argues that Stevens only fully refined this interest in the latest poems.

Finding compelling analogues in the work of Merleau-Ponty, Proust, Mauron, Focillon, Picasso and Cézanne, and moving effortlessly between philosophy, art theory and close readings of individual poems, Ragg's scholarship is both wide-ranging and careful. Particularly welcome is the attention he confers on Stevens's key essays of the early 1940s, and his inspired reading of “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” Ragg's argument, most generally, is that Stevens negotiated the many influences of philosophy, painting and poetry to devise an abstract aesthetic of his own. This ideal Stevensian “self” is not solipsistic, not imaginatively indulgent, but an aesthetic creator who encourages his readers to taste, imagine, create and re-create through abstract discovery. “I have been trying to see the world both as I see it and as it is” (74), writes Stevens, and although it is not always easy to see what this means (indeed, Stevens's enigmatic prose statements are at least partly to blame for the reductive terms in which he is sometimes read), Ragg negotiates the changing terms of this poetic, and the flux of Stevens's intellectual influence, with admirable care and clarity.

Ragg does, however, make the odd confusing statement. “Stevens's mature aesthetic shifted as he absorbed his theoretical speculations concerning abstraction and came to rely more on abstract meditation itself as catalyst” (205), is a prime example. Strange as this might seem, furthermore (given the range and depth of Ragg's engagement), this book would certainly have benefited from a clearer statement, ideally at the outset, of what the term “abstraction,” in both its philosophical and its artistic contexts, is usually taken to mean. Noting in his introduction that “the word ‘abstract’ has occasioned critical debate” (13), the closest Ragg comes to a positive definition (at 203 he defines abstraction as “the conceptual attainment of an unattainable ‘universal’”) is hardly illuminating. On the whole, however, Ragg's meticulous scholarship will surely inspire further debate on this vexed and central question of Stevens studies. His book takes up and takes further the intuitions expressed by Charles Altieri (Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism) and Alan Filreis (Wallace Stevens and the Actual World) in the early 1990s. “It Must Be Abstract,” proclaims the great American poem of 1942; with Ragg's latest offering, Stevens's imperative is enlivened once more.