Lauterbach on Stevens

From Ann Lauterbach’s “Is I Another? A Talk In Seven Beginnings,” as published in The Night Sky: Writings On The Poetics Of Experience:

Stevens moves me, because he comes to the very brink of transcendent vision, only to subvert it through a kind of alchemical pragmatism, where sequels of flamboyant mediation lead him back the “ordinary” and even beyond to the stripped profane dump, “the the.” In Stevens, the obdurate declivity between authorial subject and textual object quickens, so that Foucault’s “possible room for possible subjects” begins to emerge. In this regard, Stevens provides a prelude to Ashbery’s cast of shifting pronouns, where the idea of a single self, coherent and cogent, gives way to plural subject positions, aspects of perception and response, within a characteristic habit of mind. (37-38)