Reality in America: Realism and Rhetoric in Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

ALLACE STEVENS’ essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (1941) is, among other things, an extensive performance of the slippery rhetorical power of abstractions, most particularly, the abstraction that goes by the name of “reality.” To read the essay this way is to turn from its explicit aim—to explore the ideal “role of the poet” in modern life (CPP 660) and the proper balance of imagination and reality in the modern artwork—and to discover in it a muted but important subtext: an exploration of the problematical allure of “reality,” then a popular aesthetic and political term of praise. In what follows, I want to demonstrate that Stevens’ elaborate and implicit turning over of his key term “reality”—a deconstruction avant la lettre that calls the essay’s very genre into question—deserves greater attention than it has received. For one thing, it asks us to adjust our sense of what the essay seeks to argue about the aesthetic realm. Whereas “The Noble Rider” tends to be read by both sympathizers and detractors as claiming that the aesthetic imagination (what Stevens calls “a violence from within”) is a counterforce protecting the mind from modernity and war (“a violence without”; CPP 665), 1 the essay also shows Stevens contending that the aesthetic can educate a population made vulnerable to rhetoric (by modernity and war) about the force of that very rhetoric. 2 What is crucial is that Stevens performs this contention rather than states it explicitly. His style is tricky, as it were, on purpose—an attempt to try out, rhetorically, the hope that poetry (the aesthetic) can “quicken” readers’ sensibilities. The gradual complication of “reality” in the essay seems designed to awaken readers’ attention to “the sound of words,” especially, I will argue, in the alluring sound of propaganda, a concern which, for obvious reasons, saw an intensification in the late 1930s in the United States and abroad. Michael Denning cites the “tremendous outpouring of studies of propaganda and the manipulation of the mass media” in the late 1930s, and reminds us that 1937 was the year the Institute for Propaganda Analysis was founded (107). Secondly, to read the essay this way helps explain Stevens’ critique of a vulgarized imagism that he associates with William Carlos Williams (and