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• The Submerged Adagia:Stevens's Aphoristic Writing in The Contemplated Spouse and Secretaries of the Moon
• Bart Eeckhout

I

TO CONCLUDE the analysis of language and form undertaken in this second part of our double issue on Wallace Stevens's epistolary heritage, I propose that we turn our attention also to the aphoristic features of the poet's letters. Any novice reader of Stevens who sets out to explore the poet's writings soon encounters his self-made aphorisms, to which we are in the habit of referring collectively as his "Adagia," though they are really divided over various notebooks that also include "Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects" (available separately in a handsome facsimile edition) and "Materia Poetica" (for all of these, see CPP 899–922). The main title of my contribution is meant to establish a family connection with these compact prose writings by suggesting that Stevens's love of the aphorism seeps into his letter writing as well.

One trigger for my choice of topic has been the polemical attitude toward Stevens's aphoristic addiction taken by Marjorie Perloff in her essay "Beyond 'Adagia': Eccentric Design in Stevens' Poetry." In this essay, Perloff proposes that "Stevens' most fully satisfying poems are written in what we might call a counter-, or at least anaphoristic mode, a mode that studiously avoids the 'finish' of adagia" (22). This claim, to be sure, is about the ways in which Stevens's aphoristic tendency affected—or, in Perloff's argument, possibly hampered—his poetry rather than his letters. Yet, ever since the essay's first appearance in 2011, the provocative view proposed in it has usefully sharpened the question of Stevens's literary importance as an aphorist. The fact, moreover, that the essay became one of the most frequently downloaded contributions to The Wallace Stevens Journal since the journal moved to the Johns Hopkins University Press ten years ago suggests that, irrespective of her own preference for an anaphoristic style in the poems, Perloff was touching upon an issue that speaks to a lot of Stevens's readers.¹ [End Page 86]

A specific methodological approach for my exploration suggested itself as I started doing the requisite preparatory reading. My main theoretical inspiration in the rest of this essay will be Ben Grant, whose practical introduction to what is called, in his title, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms came out in 2016. Grant's book offers a beautiful synthesis of the history and theory of the aphorism and its many affiliated forms. A Stevens scholar going through it soon discovers how many of these forms and traditions seem to have exerted an influence on Stevens's writings. Thus, a more focused question for this contribution emerged: what, ultimately, was the allure of the aphorism and its many affiliated forms for Stevens, given what we know about the different strands of his cultural background, his literary reading, his temperamental inclinations, and his aesthetic preoccupations?

While this question could be pursued extensively with regard to Holly Stevens's Letters of Wallace Stevens, I chose to take an alternative approach for two reasons. First, in the case of Letters the corpus of examples would have been so abundant as to be practically unmanageable, considering the cornucopia of that 900-page volume. And second, when Lisa Goldfarb and I set up the conference on Stevens's letters at The Huntington in preparation of this special issue, I was expecting most contributors to delve almost naturally into Holly's standard collection, as has indeed been the case. For the sake of both manageability and complementarity, then, it seemed more attractive to steer the attention in this final essay to the two edited volumes of Stevens's letters that tend to stay out of the critical limelight, The Contemplated Spouse and Secretaries of the Moon. For readers who have little experience with either volume, let me simply say that The Contemplated Spouse is subtitled The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie, was edited by J. Donald Blount, and published in 2006 by the University of South Carolina Press, and that the slimmer Secretaries of the Moon, subtitled The Letters of Wallace Stevens and José Rodríguez Feo, was edited...

中文翻译：

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淹没的自闭症：史蒂文斯在《沉思的月亮的配偶和秘书》中的格言写作

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

• 淹没的自闭症：史蒂文斯在《沉思的月亮的配偶和秘书》中的格言写作
• 巴特·埃克豪特

一世

为了总结在关于华莱士·史蒂文斯的书信遗产的第二期的第二部分中对语言和形式的分析，我建议我们也将注意力转向诗人信件的格言特征。任何开始探究诗人史蒂文斯著作的新手读者都很快会遇到他的自制格言，我们习惯将其统称为他的“ Adagia”，尽管实际上他们被分成各种笔记本，其中也包括“ Sur”。 Plusieurs Beaux Sujects”（精美的传真版中单独提供）和“ Materia Poetica”（有关所有这些内容，请参阅CPP899–922）。我的贡献的主要标题是通过暗示史蒂文斯（Stevens）对格言的热爱也渗透到他的书信中来与这些紧凑的散文建立起家庭联系。

我选择主题的一个触发因素是Marjorie Perloff在她的论文“超越'Adagia'：Stevens诗歌中的怪异设计”中对Stevens的格言成瘾的争论态度。在本文中，Perloff提出“史蒂文斯最满意的诗歌是用我们称之为反或至少是隐喻性的模式写的，这种模式刻意避免了自动完成”的完成。“（22）。可以肯定地说，这种说法是关于史蒂文斯的格言倾向影响诗的而不是他的书信的-或者，按照佩洛夫的观点，这可能会受到阻碍。然而，自从该论文于2011年首次露面以来，事实证明，自从该论文转入约翰·霍普金斯大学出版社以来，该论文成为《华莱士·史蒂文斯期刊》下载量最高的论文之一。十年前表明，不管她自己偏爱诗歌中的隐喻风格，Perloff都在谈论一个让许多史蒂文斯的读者都能听到的问题¹ [末页86]

当我开始进行必要的预备性阅读时，一种针对我的探索的特定方法论方法提出了自己。在本文的其余部分中，我的主要理论灵感是本·格兰特（Ben Grant），他对标题中的所谓“格言”和“其他简短形式”进行了实际介绍。本书于2016年问世。格兰特（Grant）的书很好地总结了格言的历史和理论及其许多附属形式。一位史蒂文斯学者经过研究后很快发现，其中有多少种形式和传统似乎对史蒂文斯的著作产生了影响。因此，出现了一个针对这一贡献的更集中的问题：对于史蒂文斯来说，格言的最终魅力是什么？它的许多关联形式是什么，因为我们了解他的文化背景，文学阅读，他的性情倾向，和他的美学关注点？

尽管可以针对霍莉·史蒂文斯（Holly Stevens）的《华莱士·史蒂文斯（Wallace Stevens）的信》广泛地质疑这个问题，但出于两个原因，我选择采用替代方法。首先，对于字母考虑到900页的聚宝盆，实例的语料库非常丰富，几乎无法管理。其次，当我和丽莎·戈德法布（Lisa Goldfarb）在亨廷顿会议上就史蒂文斯的来信召开会议，以准备本期特刊时，我希望大多数撰稿人自然而然地钻研Holly的标准系列，确实如此。因此，出于可管理性和互补性的考虑，似乎更有吸引力的是，在这篇最后的文章中将注意力转移到史蒂文斯的两封编辑过的书信中，这些书信往往不引起人们的关注，《沉思的配偶和月球秘书》。对于没有任何一本书的经验的读者，让我简单地说一下预期的配偶的副标题是史蒂文斯，以杜的信件，由J.唐纳德·布朗特编辑和南卡罗来纳州大学出版社2006年出版的，那苗条月球的秘书，副标题华莱士·史蒂文斯和何塞的信RodríguezFeo已被编辑...