A singing bird inside the human mind

This article presents a posthumanist reading of Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, ‘Credences of Summer’, and ‘Of Mere Being’, and discusses what it means to be post/human. Posthumanism fundamentally challenges the human/non-human divide and posits a hybrid concept of humanity that traditional humanism may well consider nonhuman. I argue that Stevens’ poetry aligns with such posthumanist views. The first three poems represent an all-encompassing non-human nature beyond human knowledge and power, thus suggesting that the typical anthropocentric worldview of humanism is unsustainable. Nevertheless, a physical and qualitative distinction between the human and the nonhuman remains intact in these poems. This non-anthropocentric dualism is reconfigured at the non-dualistic moment envisioned in ‘Of Mere Being’, when an artificial bird on an artificial tree is singing within the mind of an anonymous person, who is nearing death and thus about to become nonhuman. The recognition of this radical vision of humanity in this canonical text reaffirms that the posthuman does not necessarily align with contemporaneity but is rather immanent inside the human, awaiting discovery

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Non-human · Singing · History · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism