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Luminous Traversing: Wallace Stevens and the American Sublime. By Jacek Gutorow. Opole, Poland: Uniwersytat Opolski Press, 2007.
The Polish poet and scholar Jacek Gutorow, who describes his own poetry as an attempt which fails to attain the sublime, has chosen a difficult enterprise. His post-Kantian analysis of the American sublime in the poetry of Wallace Stevens encompasses the ways in which Stevens uses both the European and the American traditions of the sublime, whose history he carefully traces, as well as the subtle alterations by which Stevens transgresses them in order to adapt them to his own poetic vision. Gutorow defines the poetic vision of Stevens as "his sublime fascination with the imperfect and flawed" (195) and perceives the poet's need to represent the full spectrum of human existence with all of its inherent contradictions. His observations lead him to conclude that Stevens is a tentative poet who recognizes the fact that the mind cannot attain the sublime, yet seeks nonetheless to approach it. For Gutorow, the quest of Stevens marks him as "a founding myth" of American modernity: "The greatness of Wallace Stevens lies in the fact that he was the first to notice how the poetic and existential dilemmas add up to a sense of mystery which permeates our existence" (195).
The book's title of "luminous traversing" has its source in a passage from "The Comedian as the Letter C," in which the failed poet Crispin takes on yet one more new form: "He was a man made vivid by the sea / A man come out of luminous traversing" (CPP 24). Gutorow feels that the principal interest of Stevens, as evidenced by the constant ironic reshaping of Crispin, is to be found in his preference for continual transformations, a poetic process that can only be a means to an end and is not an end in itself: "Thus it was rather the process and joy of transformation, and not the final form, that interested the poet" (194). The creation of a sublime sense of final form capable of transcending the world and of representing it as a whole was a poetic possibility that Stevens certainly considered in his poem "The American Sublime" and later used as a point of reference in "Esthéthique...