The practical muse

the long version

This book reconsiders the poetics of three modernist writers, T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, in connection with the pragmatism of William James. Since the late 1970s, Richard Rorty has written about "neo-pragmatism," a way of testing "truths" according to consequence rather than correspondence. Rorty's "neo-pragmatism" has become the reigning definition of pragmatism, and his interpretation of literary modernism is widely accepted. Patricia Rae's study, while accepting Rorty's view that there is philosophical solidarity between pragmatism and modernism, rejects his interpretation of both as forms of dogmatic skepticism. If pragmatism and modernism coincide, Rae argues, the case of these three writers suggests that the intersection lies not in a rejection of "truthfulness to experience" but in a cautious respect for it. The keystone to this reinterpretation is an account of historical pragmatism in the work of William James, and of the continuity between his careers as a pragmatist and as a psychologist of "inspiration." Where Rortyan pragmatism is dogmatically skeptical and fictionalist, Jamesian pragmatism is cautiously optimistic. As Rae explains, this optimism stems from James's earlier efforts to describe religious inspiration in the discourse of empirical psychology. The case studies of Hulme, Pound, and Stevens trace a similar arc from the theory of creative inspiration to expressive practice. They show that each writer represents the "muse" as an entity similar to James's liminal "divinity." They then explain how each writer regards the muse-figure as provisionally authoritative, and treats its edicts as "practical truths." Finally, they propose a connection between the writers' accounts of inspiration and the various styles of "hypothesis" in their work.