Charles Altieri reviews The Likeness of Things Unlike

Sharon Cameron. The Likeness of Things Unlike: A Poetics of Incommensurability. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025. 208 pp.

Review by Charles Altieri

4 April 2025

Great criticism indicates how demanding works of art become if one desires the full experience of what they can make available. Such criticism elaborates how the work invites complex and intense modes of engagement. It brings to our attention intricate and exciting modes of multifaceted entanglement among textual details and structural patterns while speculating clearly and movingly about why these relations matter for connecting the work to the world. In Cameron’s book I encountered surprising and rich new ways of appreciating the authors on whom she focuses. Even her footnotes provide lucid and elegant modes of appreciation for how scholarship can help her readers develop frameworks for taking her objects of study as sponsoring compelling states of attention.

The book presents six essays: an exciting and challenging introduction followed by discussions that, for me, require a series of quotations because my prose cannot match hers. Each essay unfolds a drama of consciousness that resists discursive interpretation because of the synthetic nature of the feelings produced by how the works construct “assemblages” of incommensurable particulars. This is her summary:

In Emerson’s writing paratactic images—“the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos”—are non-identical in logic but inseparable in context and conjoin the personal and the impersonal in a contact that is momentary and non-teleological.

Whitman’s assemblages burst our conception of what kinds of things can be brought into relation . . . as when one quality or entity routinely allies itself with another from which it is presumed to be alien.

Dickinson conjoins abstraction with an upsurge of sensation in poems that allure and enchant but do not impart or explain. [p. 140]

Then Cameron turns to twentieth-century writers more prone to thematize their own strange ways of imagining:

In Cather’s novels, antipodal states coincide, wedged deep in experience but outside understanding—as when in O Pioneers the dead and the living meet in the shared recollection of ‘the old things, before they were born, that comfort people like the feeling of their own bed does when they are little.’ [p. 140]

Wallace Stevens is a quite different case requiring extraordinary care in description. He is not concerned with the dead and the living but with “incommensurables that are not contrasted in pairs . . . but that flow liberally through his poems” [p. 140]:

In the effaced margins between resemblance and difference, a dazzling interplay of objects and orientations often linked by appositives that cannot be pulled apart emerge and disappear—erratic, spontaneous, strange beyond accounting. [p. 141]

“Beyond accounting” is the crucial element that links these American imaginations in their struggles against common sense and philosophic discourses tied to empiricist models of understanding.

In the space remaining to me I want to elaborate the sensibility established in her chapters on poetry. Here she summarizes her essay on Whitman as she adapts Walter Benjamin’s concept of “free translation” that “emancipates works from the barriers” of ordinary language:

This . . . ‘emancipation’ is visible in Whitman’s translation of flesh into grass that grows again, of death into ‘song’ and light, and of course the ‘I’ into the ‘you’ and ‘all’ . . . To read Whitman is barely to understand him. How can affect for a beloved extend to a stranger? How can one slip out of agonies as out of a garment? How could any fragment of experience discover the whole from which it is riven? [p. 60]

Our best theorist of impersonality here offers a brilliant rendering of how I and you can be as fully entangled as flesh interacting imaginatively with grass. Cameron’s treatment of Emily Dickinson seems to me even richer because of the particular intricacies of the bonds she produces “between abstraction and sensation whose ontology is not caught in a binary that drives these modes apart.” I was especially struck by the way her way of reading made “like Eyes that Looked on Wastes” come alive as an assemblage (p. 138):

Dickinson’s poems never relinquish the pull between incommensurable pieces of the world which emerge in each poem anew . . . Such poems stop short of meaning but are redolent of it, … beyond calculation, sublimes that lean toward or away from each other to form unsituated wholes … thick with lived experience whose cohesion cannot be breached. [p. 99]

Cameron’s readings of Stevens may be even more exciting because she concentrates on a basic quality of his poetry largely ignored by critics. And she does a great job illustrating how her mode of attention can substantially modify how we approach his poetry. “The likeness of things unlike” emerges in the ways that Stevens’s poems dwell on “what it is to be large in space” (p. 138). For example:

‘Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly’ also posits ‘a pensive nature’ that is ‘larger and yet a little like’ our own . . . In these convergences, sun, wind, breath, thought, air, all flock, flow, and are reflected in each other in Stevens’ metaphor of ‘a glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.’ [p. 139]

Why do these concerns matter? Simply put, poetry enacts the imagination becoming present in ways that not only activate perception and sensibility but also put reflection and sensation on the same level, enabling appreciation of the ways mind and world can be correlated as they rearticulate what a plain sense of things might involve. And I see Stevens finding language for a major concern in Modernist painting perhaps best articulated in Georges Braque’s Violin and Candlestick at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. After Fauvism, the Modernist ambition is less to reconcile opposites than to cultivate multiple lines of relation providing distinctive spaces in which sensibilities are invited to dwell. Reconciling opposites matters much less than reconciling ourselves to the intricate structures of relational fields.