Lynne Bornstein Bermont
Yale University

Is Activist Poetry Possible?
Perspectives of Wallace Stevens and Maurice Blanchot

This paper examines the role of poetry in the initiation of radical, historical change according to Wallace Stevens and Maurice Blanchot. Through their investigation of poetry’s activist and subversive potential, Stevens and Blanchot both describe the following qualities of modernist poetics: the materiality or corporeal nature of language; the ontology of language or its assertion of autonomy; and the potentiality of language, or its ability to expand what is and what is not into what might become.

However, Stevens and Blanchot often formulate poetry’s activist and subversive potential in terms of negation in various forms. Through their mutual insistence on negation, Stevens and Blanchot evoke alchemy in their depiction of poetry as an agent of social transformation. That is to say, alchemy provides a model with which to reconcile creation ("poesis" or making) with negation: the initial steps in alchemy require elimination and destruction to release the energy of inherent potential within matter. Given this alchemical model, how could poetry translate into real action? Does this evocation of alchemy suggest that poetry can inhabit only an elusive, mystifying or self-contained realm?

This paper will explore both the power and limitations of poetry engaged in activism. Selected texts of Stevens’ poetry and essays and Blanchot’s La part du feu (1949) offer insight in response to these questions and, in addition, trace the influence of Mallarmé and Surrealism on notions of literary commitment and the responsibility of the poet. Ultimately, Blanchot and Stevens address the following question: does the relationship between "words" and "sword" transcend their mutual letters, i.e., their presence on the page? Incidentally, it is this self-conscious and material presence of words that implicates poetry’s own irrevocable reflexivity and incapacity for action. However, Stevens and Blanchot also explain how poetry, as a mode of impossibility, is instrumental as the figuration of possibility.