In the summer of 1943, Wallace Stevens was invited by the philosopher–poet Jean Wahl to speak at the “Pontigny-en-Amérique” encounters at Mount Holyoke College. The Pontigny symposia, which gathered leading European and American intellectuals in the arts and sciences, sought to discuss the role of art and the function of the artist in the midst of World War II; the suggested topic for Stevens (and for Wahl's other invited speakers, Marianne Moore and John Peale Bishop) was the relation between poetry and philosophy. Considered one of the most memorable addresses of the colloquia, Stevens read his essay “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” (later published in The Necessary Angel) at Mount Holyoke. The essay was to receive its only sustained philosophical response, sixty years later, and again at Mount Holyoke, in the commemorative address of Stanley Cavell.Footnote ²

Grounding the abstractions of Cavell and Stevens in a particular time and place, the Mount Holyoke encounters witness these figures' kinship in a milieu of social and cultural disorder. There is a passion, a sense of responsiveness and responsibility to Stevens's essay, a sense taken up and taken further in Cavell's address. Perceptible affinities between philosopher and poet emerge: an acknowledgement of the poetic within the philosophical (and the philosophical within the poetic), a modernist inflection of classical concern (shadows of scepticism attend the desires of both), a remembering of intellectual ancestry (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William James). While Stevens's essay, in many ways, will preserve the quarrel between poetry and philosophy, this interdisciplinary tension is wonderfully inflected (yet hardly resolved) by Cavell's continuing wish for their mutual contestation and communication. As Rachel Malkin describes the encounter, “their differences are in effect ones of stress. Where Cavell illuminates one aspect of an idea, Stevens will choose its shadow side, opening what Cavell has described elsewhere as “an intimacy and an abyss.”Footnote ³

Cavell is never content to view the disciplines of philosophy or poetry unproblematically. “Sometimes labels must be struggled over,” as he contends in his lifelong resistance to the classification of Emerson as pragmatist.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, it is often in Cavell's writing on Emerson that his conception of the philosophy–poetry relationship finds its finest articulation. Having devoted much of his career to celebrating the specifically philosophical achievements of Emerson and Thoreau (seeking to establish their work as legitimately philosophical, not merely the expression of literary Transcendentalists or romantic “men of letters”), Cavell's response wishes for Stevens a companion recovery. “The Figure of the Youth,” together with Stevens's other prose work and the entire body of his poetry – all ignored or dismissed by academic philosophers for sixty years – are finally granted, in the precisions of Cavell's talk, a hearing from American philosophy.Footnote ⁵

Identifying as an American writer, one remembering the history of American philosophy as well as poetry, is an enabling condition for both Cavell and Stevens. Long regarded as a poet of place, the distinctively American mood of Stevens's verse is everywhere apparent, from the round jar in Tennessee to the clattering bucks of Oklahoma. Moreover, as Simon Critchley, among others, has argued, Cavell continues to reflect on his own significance as an American writer, a reflection extending both to his inheritance of a specifically American tradition and to his desire to explore his own mastery of this natively American voice. As Critchley writes, “the singular trajectory of Cavell's thought, that takes him back from the philosophical present of Wittgenstein and Heidegger to Emerson and Thoreau, is driven by the fact that Emerson and Thoreau are American philosophers, part of an American formation, foundation and inheritance.”Footnote ⁶ Critchley also points to Cavell's claim for Emersonian writing as the realization of the romantic demand for the unification of philosophy and poetry. Cavell wishes a mutual recognition not only between poetry and philosophy but between philosophy's analytic and Continental strains, a hope held distinctively open in such Transcendentalist procedures.Footnote ⁷ Cavell writes,

America's founding texts, Cavell wishes to argue, transcend the division between philosophy and literature; they attend to the wound still festering since Plato's Republic. It is all the more disappointing, therefore, that this romantic writing (the apotheosis of which Cavell locates in Emerson and Thoreau) has not been recognized, let alone inherited, by academic philosophy in America. This disappointment is a guiding thread in Cavell's address, central to his motivation to afford Stevens, that most philosophical of American poets, a philosophical “hearing.”Footnote ⁹

Continuing remarks from Cavell's address note Stevens's inheritance of Emerson and Thoreau, voices of American Transcendentalism the philosopher has always sought to reclaim. As Rachel Malkin has recently observed, however, although Cavell invokes the poet at several key moments of his work, he is never so open in claiming Stevens as an audibly American philosophical voice (one that he might seek similarly to reclaim, if not directly to emulate). Rather, it is in Emerson's prose that Cavell finds words of the American experience returning to him as if they were his own. Here Malkin's argument hinges on the poet’s arguable distance from communal concern. “Maybe Stevens can't be a resource for Cavell, as Emerson is,” she writes, “because he reveals a final arbitrariness, even selfishness, in desire, that is not finally at home in philosophy (or politics).” Furthermore, on the question of the poet's Americanness, Malkin has oberved that Stevens “is usually viewed either as a specifically American poet, or to be legitimately philosophical, but seldom both.”Footnote ¹⁰ Her observation is certainly borne out in recent Stevens scholarship. Critchley and Geoffrey Brazeal (two critics most recently concerned with establishing Stevens's philosophical achievement) make little of the poet's American-ness, while Harold Bloom's placing of Stevens in the Emersonian tradition (or, for that matter, Richard Poirier's wish to locate his poetry in a line of linguistically sceptical pragmatists descending from William James) is not allied to a desire to establish how this Emersonian/Jamesian writing might be philosophical.Footnote ¹¹

Stevens's epistemological concerns are typically expressed in the romantic vocabulary of “reality” and “imagination”; given this non-technical lexicon, it is perhaps inevitable (as Bart Eeckhout, among others, has argued) that his verse leave itself open to interpretation within diverse philosophical frameworks.Footnote ¹² Undeniably, Stevens was a compulsive examiner, an Emersonian self-reliant, keen to develop his ideas in confrontation with (and sometimes in downright defiance of) contemporary and classical philosophies. Such philosophical interests have been fruitfully resolved into the American tradition (in the 1990s, notably, there have been several attempts, quite apart from Poirier's, to highlight the pragmatist undercurrents of Stevens's verseFootnote ¹³) but they lent themselves just as easily to a European (mostly phenomenological or deconstructive) interpretation.Footnote ¹⁴

Such diverse interpretations still converge in their recognition of Stevens as a notoriously slippery poet, his procedures impossible to contain within any single philosophical framework. Judged as a system of ideas, indeed, Stevens's poetry is both irrational and inconsistent. Even his essays (“The Figure of the Youth” among them) usually beginning in argument, move into meditative activity rather than developed thesis. Compounding this inconsistency is the fact that much of Stevens's writing engages with the very idea of poetry; in his verse, the boundary between poetry and poetics is constantly in transgression (“The Man with the Blue Guitar” is a typical example). Stevens will confirm this impulse towards poetics by explicitly stating that “poetry and materia poetica are interchangeable terms.”Footnote ¹⁵ Furthermore, his verse and prose statements are dotted with suggestive aphorisms: “God is a postulate of the ego,” “the theory of poetry is the theory of life,” “The world is myself. Life is myself.”Footnote ¹⁶ Such statements undoubtedly imply a theoretical dimension to Stevens's aesthetic. They are consistently undercut, however, by the poet's penchant for word play and nonsensical sound. This undercutting leads to what Lee Jenkins, among others, has identified as the central tension of Stevens's work: the conflict between philosophical ambition and avowedly aesthetic impulse.Footnote ¹⁷

Stevens is philosophically ambitious, but he is equally ironic. As a result, the practice of reading him philosophically is extremely complex. His reader is asked to negotiate between a language of meaningless sound (what Stevens calls “life's nonsense”) and a language of quasi-philosophical aphorism. As Joseph Riddel phrases it, “We have been forced to pursue logically through his most alogical twirling of words a dialectical line that will make the poem comment coherently upon itself.”Footnote ¹⁸ Stevens's penchant for contradictory statement and indulgent word-play undoubtedly troubles a reading of his poetry as philosophy (indeed, as Riddel admits, it troubles a reading of the poetry as poetry).

Returning to Cavell's address, I note his references not only to Stevens's “zest for the philosophical” but to the poet's “seriousness” and “diligence” in theorizing about knowledge, to Stevens's “scrupulous” return to “questions of truth and the truth and a truth.”Footnote ¹⁹ Stevens's poetry, Cavell writes, and undoubtedly he is here invoking Heidegger, “makes repeated and tenacious claims for poetry as an understanding of the world.”Footnote ²⁰ Cavell's terms (“seriousness,” “diligence,” “scrupulosity,” “tenacity”) resonate clearly with concerns regarding philosophy's modernist condition raised in his earlier writing. As early as 1967, in “A Matter of Meaning It,” Cavell had argued that all modernist artworks (his examples ranged from pop art to the theatre of Beckett to the music of John Cage) are characterized by “the possibility of fraudulence.” Philosophy, similarly, exists in a modernist state. Just as there is no standing discourse that explains or justifies what modern art is, there is no standing discourse that accounts for the practice of philosophy.Footnote ²¹ The possibility of fraudulence is alive in philosophy's writing; it forces questions “of intention and seriousness and sincerity.”Footnote ²²

Cavell's choice of similar terms for the Mount Holyoke address suggests that he is taking very seriously indeed Stevens's attempts, in the poetry as well as the prose, to theorize about knowledge. We might suggest, furthermore, that he is making an added plea for Stevens's poetry as an example of philosophy – philosophical writing as it might exist in a modernist state, at least, and answerable to equally exacting conditions. Further evidence for this plea is given by Cavell's insistence on Stevens's difficulty – a characteristic of the modernist artwork, certainly, but also a further condition to which Cavell holds philosophy responsive. As he writes of Wittgenstein, “the writing of philosophy is difficult in a new way.”Footnote ²³ Stevens's difficulty is one rather opposite to that posed by Emerson and Thoreau, Cavell argues, as the philosopher finds himself habitually inclined to insist on the Transcendentalists' difficulty, “too often finding them quoted as if their sentences are transparent, yielding their significance at a glance, without resistance.”Footnote ²⁴ It is interesting to consider how Cavell might reconcile this insistence on Stevens's difficulty with the poet's companion tendency (noted earlier) towards the aphoristic and eminently quotable.

In his reading of Stevens, Cavell's primary focus is the poet's preoccupation with the classic problem of philosophical scepticism. It is a central current of Cavell's thought that modern philosophy (he takes as his prime examples the writings of Descartes, of Berkeley and of Kant) has obsessively attempted to defeat scepticism, to overcome some sense of a gap or barrier between human perception and the world. Descartes and Berkeley, as Cavell recounts in his Mount Holyoke address, are famously reassured by the perpetual intervention of God, while Kant proposes the manner in which humankind necessarily organizes its perceptions as necessarily revelatory of the external world. Cavell's invocation of modern philosophical scepticism as an intellectual environment in which to assess Stevens's “search for reality” is attended by his continuing desire that scepticism be viewed not as a problem to be refuted but as a welcome “moment of human existence.”Footnote ²⁵ Stevens's poetry, Cavell wishes to argue, reveals scepticism in this edifying light. When Stevens writes, in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “the theory/Of poetry is the theory of life,” and implies continually that failing to imagine one's life is a failure of living it, Cavell takes him to be responding to the threat of scepticism, just as explicitly as Descartes, and Berkeley, and Kant, just as “scrupulously” as any figure in modern philosophy, but with an altogether different angle of approach. Like Heidegger, Stevens is more likely to urge that attempts to defeat scepticism merely perpetuate the sceptical attitude. At the very least, they render the existence of the external world hostage to the fate of human constructions, “inherently open to collapse,” as Cavell has it.Footnote ²⁶

Speaking of Stevens's encouragement, in “A Collect of Philosophy,” to raise the question of why philosophers choose the examples they do (and here Cavell lists the classic examples of epistemology: Descartes taking his case of sitting before a fire, Kant that of a drifting boat, Berkeley that of a cherry, Heidegger that of a tree, G. E. Moore that of a human hand), Cavell argues that Stevens enters a claim to have made, in his body of poetry, a “distinctively valuable contribution” to the problem of scepticism.Footnote ²⁷ It is worth pausing over this point, as Stevens's supposed contribution to classical philosophical problems goes to the heart of the current analysis. While Cavell concedes the philosophical pertinence of Stevens's prose and poetry (that his epistemological promptings are “philosophically consequent,” that they “matter”) and is adamant that the poet's work calls for “a hearing” from professional philosophy, this is not tantamount to claiming identity with it. Indeed, while Cavell takes Stevens's epistemological promptings with the utmost seriousness, he is aware also – in his own words, and the phrasing here is crucial – that Stevens could not be assured of “his protection from the mastery of philosophy.”Footnote ²⁸

The context for this remark is Cavell's discussion of Emerson; most specifically, how most philosophers (including Stevens) “could not count” on Emerson as a philosopher. Again, the intimation is of some form of necessary safeguard, of a protection that cannot be guaranteed. Putting aside, for the moment, Cavell's invocation of Emerson, “mastery” is a term suggestive of domination, of colonization, of the subsumption of one by the other. My argument here is not that Cavell seeks to preserve or to protect Stevens from philosophy, or that poetry in general stands in need of such protection. Indeed, Cavell quite explicitly states that the relationship is better conceived as one of contestation, where philosophy and poetry are in competition with each other, as for the same prize.Footnote ²⁹ Rather, I wish to argue that in raising the issue, via Stevens, of “the mastery of philosophy,” Cavell reveals his own desire to protect philosophy from its essential impulse to dominate. It is of the first importance to Cavell, and here we are undoubtedly directed to his romanticism, to preserve the poetic within the philosophical.

At least in the analytic tradition, a tradition to which Cavell continues to hold himself responsive, philosophy has habitually quested for correspondence with the external world. Excluding the metaphorical or the figurative, the analytic philosopher cleanses his discourse of plurality and hopes to isolate a singular truth. The literary thinker, on the other hand, has traditionally sought to capture plural worlds, worlds of analogies and allegories and endless figuration. One of Cavell's key contributions to philosophy is his claim that philosophy needs to recognize this many-sided world and communicate with literature, that philosophy must lose the desire for singularity, for mastery, and instead hold itself open to the possibilities and limitations of language. Following Emerson, indeed, and in the face of dispiriting probability and the inevitability of disappointment, Cavell is continually advising hope and improvisation, patience and persistence, resourcefulness and waiting. “An attitude to our pursuits that is precisely unimposable and unrewardable,”Footnote ³⁰ an attitude found in the writings of his philosophical heroes (Emerson, primarily, but also Thoreau and the British Romantics), is central to Cavell's work, and central to the guidance he offers his reader.

Philosophy, in Cavell's vision, rewards response over assertion: the philosophical impulse should be tempered by losing the desire to speak first. As Timothy Gould points out, this willingness to wait, “to suspend the urgency of arriving at a solution,” is indeed present in Cavell, and not merely when he is discussing explicitly philosophical texts.Footnote ³¹ Of course the downside to such willingness, such disciplinary liberation, is that it is all too easy for Cavell's critics to connect this seeming avoidance of solution with another aspect of his writing, as Gould phrases it, “a sense of its increasing refinement, its urge to make detailed distinctions and to record them in what seem like merely fussy variations of wording.”Footnote ³² To such readers, Gould concludes, Cavell is not just refusing (like Wittgenstein but also like Cavell's own contemporary, the late Richard Rorty) to advance an argument; he is refusing to allow his work to have any cadence, any conclusion, at all.Footnote ³³

Returning to the Mount Holyoke encounters, Cavell argues, curiously, that Stevens's engagement with classical philosophical arguments is itself a distinctively valuable philosophical contribution. While Stevens seeks, in his essay, to establish “that it is often the case that the concepts of philosophy are poetic,”Footnote ³⁴ he is still keen to maintain a distinction between the poet and the philosopher. Cavell, in contrast, is perhaps more open to questioning these boundaries. When Stevens writes, for example, “a poet's natural way of thinking is by way of figures, and while this includes figures of speech it also includes examples, illustrations and parallel cases generally,”Footnote ³⁵ he provokes a comparison with Cavell's early admission, in The Claim of Reason, that he takes examples to be the subject matter of criticism and philosophy.Footnote ³⁶ Cavell's implication here is that examples are not to be understood as illuminations of independently given theories. Correspondingly, as Lawrence Rhu has pointed out, Cavell does not write with advance conviction of what an example is meant to illuminate or what a distinction (between the everyday and the metaphysical, between the philosopher of traditional epistemology and the philosopher of ordinary language: neither distinction is allowed to solidify) actually comes down to.Footnote ³⁷ This is particularly true of the parables that drive Part IV of The Claim of Reason. Indeed, throughout his work, it seems that Cavell is managing philosophy so as to place a more traditionally poetic style of thinking (to borrow Stevens's phrase) centre stage.

In line with this emphasis on exemplarity, Cavell wishes to claim Stevens's poetic examples as philosophically consequent. Noting the explicit reference to Kant, he turns to the poem “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself”Footnote ³⁸ from Stevens's 1954 collection The Rock:

Cavell reads this poem as a meditation on the problem of perception: the idea that we do not see the world immediately, only mediately or indirectly through our own subjective apparatus of perception. What Cavell attributes to Stevens, in his reading of “Not Ideas about the Thing,” is the idea of poetic counteraction, the poetic idea – and it is crucial that this idea is a poetic one – that we can overcome our sense of perceptual gap (the gap between subject and object) by learning to appear to the world early, in what Stevens calls, in the late poem “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “an original earliness.” Thus the perceptual gap may be filled by getting to objects before they are dictated to us, before, as Cavell says, the division hardens. Stevens's poetic counteraction, in sum, involves “making something happen the moment before.” The poetic instances he offers, in illustration of this point, are the “scrawny cry” of a bird before daylight and the “distant rising” of the sun.

Acknowledging that Stevens's promptings here might be consequent philosophically (that these examples, in other words, facilitate that poetic counteraction that allows us to experience the world “the moment before”) will no doubt require, as Cavell admits, a willingness to reconceive our received ideas of philosophy and poetry. As John Hollander has pointed out, in an early review of Cavell's The Claim of Reason, a philosophical example characteristically works like a diagram on a classroom blackboard: it is used to clarify, to typify or to diagram a point in some alternative way for the present moment. In this sense, it is fundamentally different from the poet's example, which often acts to puzzle the reader as much as to resolve the puzzlement; “a poetic trope,” Hollander writes, “is more like a systematic erasure of received diagrams.”Footnote ³⁹

Following out Hollander's distinction, Stevens's epistemological promptings are clearly of the latter sort. It is highly revealing, therefore, that Cavell imputes to these poetic instances an illumination of their own. He is perhaps suggesting that the poetic example, through its ability to evoke human perception as somehow estranged (something that can only be evoked by a “scrawny” cry, a “distant” rising), might come closer to our actual experience of the world. In this sense, perhaps the poetic example enters a plea to be recognized as an equally valid form of philosophical instruction. We are back to Cavell's idea of poetry and philosophy “contesting” with each other. Again, the idea might not be to render poetry philosophical (or, indeed, to render philosophy poetic) so much as to put into question the essence of philosophy, in this case the precise functioning of its central examples. This functioning is one of the key threads in The Claim of Reason.

Cavell's Mount Holyoke address invokes the influential paper of Rudolph Carnap, where the philosopher grants that metaphysics, while scientifically or cognitively meaningless, “may be understood and accepted as poetry”; that is, in a form which makes no cognitive claims on the world.Footnote ⁴⁰ Poetry, of course, works both to complicate and to rejuvenate the human relationship with language. This foregrounding of the linguistic is often taken to delineate literature's very domain. In his turn to poetry, it is perhaps this troubled relationship (between language and language users) that Cavell is most eager to connect to our experiences of scepticism.

In the preliminaries of his Mount Holyoke address, Cavell had granted the inescapably obvious difficulty of Stevens, both in poetry and in prose. Opening to a philosophical hearing of the poet, listening to his philosophical appeals, still the philosopher finds a continual challenge in tracking and unravelling his movements of thought. Cavell will admit to this difficulty in his discussion of Stevens's search for the poetic examples of philosophy. “It is no more obvious what Stevens is asking for,” he writes, “than it is obvious what Stevens's poetry calls for in coming to terms with it.”Footnote ⁴¹ Positing “ease” as an eventuality in taking poetry to our lives, Stevens will not simply facilitate this reception. He will not simply preserve, as Cavell has it, his reader's “intactness.” One source of this difficulty, no doubt, is Stevens's insistence on the possibilities and obscurities of the human habitation of the world. Time and again, the poet observes how reality is finally inaccessible via the frameworks of thought and language, how poetry never fully succeeds in coinciding with the world of experience.

Preserving one's “intactness” when reading “Reflections on Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke” is a challenge no less inescapable, no less obvious. Cavell's address is welcomed with difficulty as an accepted form of philosophical discourse. He offers not philosophical argument nor logical inference but a disorderly fusion of musings, connections and inclinations; rememberings and hearings and impressions; inventive flights from Emerson to Heidegger, from Wittgenstein to Thoreau. “Beads of philosophy that I have been stringing along” is the philosopher's own gloss on this loosely connective practice.Footnote ⁴² Secured in the term “Reflections,” of course, is the idea of resemblance or mirror image, as well as the more traditional senses of consideration or thought. Also secured is the philosopher's more general inclination to follow through on even the smallest impression of affinity between his cohort of philosophical heroes. Cavell wishes to “hear” the philosophical in the poetic, certainly, but he is equally keen to view Stevens as an image of Emerson, to capture possible likenesses between Stevens and Heidegger.

Pushing further on the idiosyncrasies of his procedure, it is worth returning to the opening pages of Cavell's address, to initial remarks on the Mount Holyoke event. The question of “what might have been gained or been missed”Footnote ⁴³ in the philosophical voices of the original effort is one key concern, as Cavell (together with the event organizers) shares the sense of Stevens's texts having never adequately received their philosophical response. That Cavell might write personally, following a further suggestion of the event organizers, is never really in question, given his lifelong desire to view the autobiographical as internal to the writing of philosophy (a desire first made explicit in his 1994 book A Pitch of Philosophy and given its most recent expression in his 2010 autobiography Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory). Among the remaining motivations for Cavell's response to Stevens is the philosopher's more general wish to question what human knowledge is, “given that it is at any time based on such impressions” (and memories), to interrogate what a human life comes to “given that it is modified by such fitful things.”Footnote ⁴⁴

The word “impression” is of central importance. In classical philosophy, impressions are understood as predictable effects of objects upon the senses. The writings of Locke and Hume, in the epistemological tradition characterized by Cavell as attempting (misguidedly) to solve the sceptical problem, employ this understanding of the term. Cavell is interested, rather, in the understanding of “impression” as an experience given unpredictably by the world, “in which it captures my interest, matters to me, or fails to – a product of significance, not of causation.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In keeping with this latter sense of “impression,” the drift of Cavell's engagement with Stevens registers the decisiveness of the comparatively unknown (Cavell's conviction, for example, that Walden is a likely source from which Stevens may be thought to have acquired truths characteristic of Heidegger's work) as well as the simply accidental. There is an enlivening liberty to this approach – a feeling of the fortuitous in imagined encounter and speculative exchange – directing and gifting momentum to Cavell's address. Finding a route between historical event and imagined encounter, Cavell's engagement with Stevens urges a response to the poet's philosophy, certainly, but it also enters a companion plea for the stylings of his own philosophy.

Returning to the opening epigraph, there is, to Cavell's mind, a “false step” in Stevens's assessment of the philosopher–poet that ensures he will remain unsatisfied.Footnote ⁴⁶ The “radiant and productive atmosphere” that Stevens grants to the poet is a privilege of his profession; “the philosopher,” he writes, “fails to discover.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Malkin notes the irony of Stevens's assessment here, at least when such remarks are placed in the context of Cavell's work. “What sets Cavell apart philosophically,” Malkin writes, “is precisely his recognition of desire as exiled from philosophy.” Aligning Cavell's philosophical practice with that of Stevens's poet-figure (or unsettling Stevens's own version of the literature/philosophy distinction), Cavell's “unguarded” expressions testify to his wish that the philosopher, though not exactly a poet, may have a comparable sphere of discovery. Indeed, Malkin will cite Cavell's late essay “Performative and Passionate Utterance” as evidence not only of the philosopher's stress on the accidental and the unexpected but of his ongoing wish that philosophy open itself to the possibilities of desire.Footnote ⁴⁸ Later in his essay, Stevens will complicate his initial limitation of philosophy by noting that philosophers' ideas, like poets', are often “triumphs of the imagination,” that the philosopher will often experience “the same miraculous shortenings of mental processes.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This description of philosophy accords with Stevens's definition of poetry, in the introduction to The Necessary Angel, as “the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The echoes with Cavell here (who once described philosophy, in one of his many definitions, as “the effort to bring my own language and life into imagination”Footnote ⁵¹) are uncanny. However, before we place undue weight on the comparison (aligning Stevens's philosophical poet with Cavell's poetic philosopher is always a temptation), we might note the more general thrust of Stevens's essays, not only “The Figure of the Youth,” but “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” and his 1952 piece “A Collect of Philosophy.” On the whole, the shared ground between poetry and philosophy is reluctantly conceded. For example, “A Collect of Philosophy” is concerned to establish the inherently “poetic nature” of some philosophical concepts, but the division between these disciplines (a division that is relatively fixed, relatively secure) is implicit. “There is a poetic style or way of thinking,” Stevens states quite unequivocally at the beginning of the essay, and this poetic style of thinking “is by way of figures, and while this includes figures of speech it also includes examples, illustrations and parallel cases generally … The philosopher intends his integration to be fateful; the poet intends his to be effective.”Footnote ⁵²

Strangely, it seems that Stevens is unwilling to allow either that philosophy might transform or that it might sidestep explication or argument for illustration or figure. Given the poet's admiration for Santayana (described by Cavell as “the figure most likely to occur to an American intellectual who hears that someone is proposing, or remembering, some confrontation of philosophy and poetry by one another”Footnote ⁵³), this resistance to philosophy (not just to its traditional modes of expression) is all the more peculiar. Bringing philosophy to poetry or, more precisely, managing philosophy so as to place traditionally poetic concepts centre stage, might be Cavell's desire, but it is certainly not Stevens's. Given the poet's philosophical ambitions, the point is an interesting one.

We might push further on these tensions by noting Stevens's claim, again in “The Figure of the Youth,” that poetry is a distinctly individual enterprise, that “there can be no poetry without the personality of the poet.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Reading Stevens's verse, however, the wish to reveal this personality is not immediately obvious. Indeed, his poetry is more often noted for its atonality, its “blankness” of tone. As Eeckhout recognizes, there is always a barrier when reading Stevens's verse. “Aside from its obvious difficulty,” Eeckhout argues, “there is a nagging sense that the poet is reigning in more sanguine feelings, mocking himself with the most refined irony, being icily detached, or perhaps ambivalently wavering about what exactly it is that he should feel.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This stance of ironic detachment, paradoxically, renders his poetic voice much less personal than those of certain philosophers, certainly less personal than the unguarded vulnerabilities of Cavell. If Cavell wishes to claim a certain poetry for philosophy, and if this includes a recognition of philosophy's autobiographical dimension as well as its capacity to discover, Stevens's philosophical poetry, together with his prose statements on the philosophy–poetry relation, do not offer an easy template. As Cavell wishes the intimacy of the philosopher and poet, Stevens will always preserve their distance.