Joan Richardson

How to Live, What to Do is an indispensable introduction to and guide through the work of a poet equal in power and sensibility to Shakespeare and Milton. Like them, Stevens shaped a new language, fashioning an instrument adequate to describing a completely changed environment of fact, extending perception through his poems to align what Emerson called our “axis of vision” with the universe as it came to be understood during his lifetime, 1879–1955, a span shared with Albert Einstein. Projecting his own imagination into spacetime as “a priest of the invisible,” persistently cultivating his cosmic consciousness through reading, keeping abreast of the latest discoveries of Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, and others, Stevens pushed the boundaries of language into the exotic territories of relativity and quantum mechanics while at the same time honoring the continuing human need for belief in some larger order. His work records how to live, what to do in this strange new world of experience, seeing what was always seen but never seen before. 

Joan Richardson, author of the standard two-volume critical biography of Stevens and coeditor with Frank Kermode of the Library of America edition of the Collected Poetry and Prose, offers concise, lucid captures of Stevens’s development and achievement. Over the ten years of researching her Stevens biography, Richardson read all that he read, as well as his complete correspondence, journals, and notebooks. She weaves the details drawn from this deep involvement into the background of American cultural history of the period. This fabric is further enlivened by her preparation in philosophy and the sciences, creating in these thirteen panels a contemporary version of a medieval tapestry sequence, with Stevens in the place of the unicorn, as it were, holding our attention and eliciting, as necessary angel, individual solutions to the riddles of our existence on this planet spinning and hissing around its cooling star at 18.5 miles per second.

This volume provides a lucid and elegant introduction to America's defining philosophy. Richardson charts the nineteenth-century origins of pragmatist thought and its development through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on the major first- and second-generation figures and how their contributions continue to influence philosophical discourse today. At the same time, she casts pragmatism as the method it was designed to be: a way of making ideas clear, examining beliefs, and breaking old habits and reinforcing new and useful ones in the interest of maintaining healthy communities through ongoing conversation. Through this practice we come to perceive, as William James did, that thinking is as natural as breathing, and that the essential work of pragmatism is to open channels essential to all experience. Joan Richardson is a distinguished professor of comparative literature and English at the Graduate Center.

In this compelling account of the emergence of the quintessential American philosophy, Richardson demonstrates pragmatism's engagement with various branches of the natural sciences and traces the development of Jamesian pragmatism from the late nineteenth century through modernism, following it into the present. She combines strands from America's religious experience with scientific information to offer interpretations that break new ground in literary and cultural history. The work is a fine example of the value of interdisciplinary approaches to producing literary criticism. The author's highly original readings of Edwards, Emerson, William and Henry James, Stevens, and Stein, track the interplay of religious motive, scientific speculation, and literature in shaping an American aesthetic.

While Stevens was struggling in his poems to become a "platonic man," a beacon of planetary consciousness, he grew ever more abstracted from a wife who was slavishly dependent on him, and his sullen, rebellious teenage daughter fled the parental home for a marriage the poet angrily vetoed. Nevertheless, Richardson asks us to believe that Stevens, unlike Frost and Williams, was a poet wholly immersed in the demands of everyday life. Her empathetic attempt to humanize him often falters, and she stretches the slender evidence when she claims that this aloof idealist was a "naive socialist" in the 1930s who later espoused "commitment to the left." Despite its flaws, this companion to her acclaimed Wallace Stevens: The Early Years offers a noble, touching, insightful portrait of a writer who wielded imagination as his supreme instrument. Her close reading of his life and work illuminates the ways individual poems arose from his encounters with Freud, Plato, Nietzsche and his essential loneliness in a godless age.

Stevens claimed that he never read other poets, yet, as this massive biography reveals, he held imaginary dialogues with his favorite "man-poets," Hardy and Plato among them. A successful insurance executive and man of letters, he had a precarious sense of self and attempted in his verse to define an ideal self abstracted from his humdrum, bourgeois world. Combining psychobiography and criticism, this first half of a two-volume work argues that Stevens made his wife into a mother figure because he was unable to integrate the feminine into his psyche. The poet comes across as demanding, priggish, miserly, aloof, but the real subject here is the process of his mind, how his arresting images crystallized, and how they amplified or concealed his inner self. Richardson's dense, wordy study rewards the patient reader. No other book gets into the workings of Stevens's imagination so deeply. The author, a professor at City University of New York, has uncovered fascinating material on Stevens's meeting with Dada artist Duchamp and his borrowings from commedia dell'arte.