As heir to Emerson and Whitman (see, e.g., Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, 214), Stevens voiced the distinctive American genius that emerged from the country's brief republican interlude between colony and empire.
In terms of political chronology, I trust Robinson Jeffers: he wrote the poem "Shine, Perishing Republic" on the eve of the First World (European) War. Stevens and Jeffers were contemporaries: Stevens the humanist, Jeffers the "inhumanist" (see Arthur B. Coffin, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism, U. of Wisconsin, 1971). Stevens wrote comedy, Jeffers tragedy. Both suffered intensely for their art, but in remarkably different ways. Jeffers's relative independence from the bourgeoisie left him less compromised politically. Stevens in correspondence referred to himself as a "man of the left" and in his poetry his sympathies with the common life are evident--but his position in the rising corporatocracy meant that he would always be guarded in his political expression. He was careful to cultivate an image of apolitical insouciance.
With intellectual roots that ran deep into the brief republican interlude, Stevens, who lived during the rise of American empire, was a man out of time. Subliminally, he understood this. Instinctively, he struggled to translate 19th century British, French, and American Romanticism into his 20th century reality. He was not unaware of Romanticism's revolutionary credentials. But living as he did on the wrong end of the political revolution, he set his sights on completing the Romantic project of cultural revolution: what M. H. Abrams rightly called "natural supernaturalism" or the conversion of theological vocabularies and concepts into humanistic ones.
In 2008, Leon Surette published a study of Stevens and T. S. Eliot (The Modern Dilemma) in which he argues that pre-Anglo-Catholic Eliot was more of a humanist than scholars credit and Stevens, throughout his life, was less of a humanist than scholars credit. It is a perfectly reasonable thesis, but the book as a whole suffers from an inadequate definition of humanism: for Surette limits that definition to the militantly "secular" or anti-clerical and most often atheistic version of humanism that emerged in late 19th century Europe as an alternative to traditional religion. This leads Surette to make absurdly sweeping and historically inaccurate claims such as "Humanism is not a philosophical position, but an ethical and social one [one wonders what such a statement can possibly mean--ethics are not philosophical? There is no such thing as "social philosophy"?], and is compatible with a range of philosophical positions [including ethical and social ones?]--except for theism" (p. 78).
In the case of Eliot, this definition seems plausible for, as everyone familiar with that poet's biography knows, Eliot became a traditional believer after he was already a renowned poet. That said, historically speaking, one may be a traditional believer and a humanist (witness Erasmus and More).
Stevens, on the other hand, was never a traditional believer as Surette admits--unless one accepts the rumor of his deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism and interprets that "conversion" in traditionalist terms. Surette rightly points out, however, that, even if we are persuaded by the rumor, it is irrelevant for understanding Stevens's poetry for it came too late to have had any effect on Stevens's poems. This would seem to contradict Surette's contention that Stevens was less of a humanist than scholars have credited--especially in light of Surette's own definition of humanism.
It is true that, in correspondence, Stevens expresses a dislike of humanism and it seems obvious that the version of humanism that Stevens rejected is, in fact, the atheistic sort that Surette's definition describes (see Surette, 222). But that does not mean that Stevens was not himself a humanist--of a competing variety.
Stevens was also known to protest that he was not a Romantic (see Surette, 263). Be that as it may, anyone who reads Stevens's poetry recognizes it as Romantic and, as Harold Bloom has sagely observed, "Romanticism, even in its most remorseless protagonists, is centrally a humanism..." (Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, 57). In order to make his argument stick, Surette is obligated to take many of Stevens's own statements about his work at face value--a signal critical failure on Surette's part.
On page 286, Surette comes very close to admitting that Stevens represents a genuine humanistic alternative to the version of humanism that conforms to his overly-narrow definition, but he seems to be far too invested in that definition to be able to modify it. His procedure reveals itself here to be peculiarly deductive precisely where induction is called for.
On page 318, Surette finds that Stevens "twists himself into knots" in an effort to "retain the sense of sanctity" while yet "abandoning belief in the transcendent." If anyone twists himself into knots, however, it is Surette: for he must maintain that Stevens is not a humanist in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Perhaps most damaging to Surette's case, if not his credibility as a critic, is the fact that his book relies heavily on Stevens's correspondence with Hi Simons, makes use of Simons's essay on Stevens's poem "The Comedian as the Letter C," but omits any mention of Simons's 1942 review of Parts of a World in the journal Poetry. Entitled "The Humanism of Wallace Stevens," Simons's review identifies the foundation of Stevensian humanism as a "conviction that life must be nobly lived to be worth living." According to Simons, this conviction "gives its tone to Stevens' humanism, a humanism with an aesthetic instead of a moralistic basis" (Simons, 452).
Unlike Surette, Simons recognized that humanism comes in a variety of philosophical flavors. This view is consistent with the known history of humanisms that have arisen throughout history in many parts of the globe. Surette's study is an object lesson in how to write an erudite and yet disappointing book. Let future authors take note.
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