The World as Meditation

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1952

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context: American Modernism

During the period between World War I and World War II, artists of all kinds began to look to new vocabularies and new modes of expression to capture the speed and wonder of the rapidly industrializing world. In America, poets like Stevens moved away from traditional forms and from traditional subjects to forge a new American poetic model. Along with writers like William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, Stevens developed a style characterized by an increasingly individualized perception of the world, an experimental attitude toward language, and imagery that both acknowledges and subverts the increasingly mechanical world. “The World as Meditation” embodies Stevens’s belief that the poetic imagination can compose and transform reality, not just mediate it. The poem’s internal perspective follows a central feature of Modernist poetry, the personal narrative. Against a retelling of a Classical text, that psychological dimension stands out as distinctly modern.

The New Critical approach to poetry began during this time, encouraging readers to participate in close reading of poetic works. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” defines the role of the poet in a New Critical context and asserts that the right combination of poetic features can elicit an expected response independent of the poet. The poet becomes the deliverer of signs that convey emotion, not the source of the emotion itself. Almost immediately, other modes like the Reader Response school of criticism addressed what was seen as an erasure of the author in New Critical theory. Stevens’s essays “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” and “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” from his volume The Necessary Angel provide a particular context for his work within Modernism. Each essay explores how the poetic imagination constitutes the means of transport and of grace. These essays show Stevens as a Modernist in that reason can no longer mediate the complex reality of a world thrown into rapid change. Appearance alone cannot be trusted, except through the filter of the imagination. In “The World as Meditation,” Penelope “composed” (Line 4) not only her identity but Ulysses as well, who both is and is not present (Line 19) through her imaginative process. She chants “his name with its patient syllables” (Line 23) as the most tangible representation of his form, next to the shadow that emerges each morning in the east with the sun. Penelope’s desire—her feeling—and her actions (repeating his name, combing her hair) combine to create a beauty and truth beyond Ulysses himself, a “barbarous strength” that “would never fail” (Line 21).

Philosophical Context: 19th- and 20th-Century Philosophy

The relation between thought and things, between feeling and the world, remains a focus for philosophers and for poets. Like much of Stevens’s work, this poem refutes Cartesian Dualism, French philosopher René Descartes’s idea that the body and mind, sense and thought, operate independently. Many late 19th- and 20th-century poets and philosophers sought to refute or rethink Descartes’s proposal that we apprehend the world through deductive reasoning. Nineteenth-century American philosopher William James suggested instead that our thoughts and actions develop from outside influence, the stuff of day-to-day experience—and many Modernist artists and writers responded to this new philosophical context as a way to understand and react to massive social, political, and economic shifts. In this vein, “The World as Meditation” depicts a version of artistic creation that emulates James’s Pragmatism.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant, another influence on Stevens, complicates perception by dividing the material world into two realities, one that is perceived and one that is the thing itself. Many Stevens poems explore Kantian ideas, and the dual nature of the images in “The World as Meditation” can be seen as a representation of Kant’s two realities—but at the same time, that duality entails specific nuances, as perception and the “thing in itself” are inseparable. This leads into Phenomenology, a philosophical movement with widespread popularity in the early 20th century through figures like Sartre and Heidegger, a particular influence on Stevens. Phenomenology examines consciousness through experience without separating the experience of an object from the object itself. A phenomenological approach integrates feeling and perception into the nature of objects in a way that Descartes cannot. In a Cartesian world, the perceiver does not change the perceived, only decides. Stevens’s Penelope accesses “a barbarous strength” (Line 21) derived from her daily ritual of perception, in which she creates not only herself but the projection of Ulysses as she questions the horizon. Each day, “it was Ulysses and it was not” (Line 18), meaning the world that existed for her was the one she composed herself. Penelope thus resembles Stevens’s singer in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” for whom there was no reality except “the one she sang, and, singing, made” (“The Idea of Order at Key West.” Collected Poems, 1923. Line 43).