64 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 34.1 (SPRING 2010): 64–76. © 2010 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. Ambulatory Poetics in Wallace Stevens and Henry James ERIC LEUSCHNER T HE PATH FROM Wallace Stevens to Henry James via pragmatism and William James may be a well-worn and unsurprising one. Jona- than Levin, Patricia Rae, and Joan Richardson have all identified Ste- vens as one of the major heirs of pragmatist thought within twentieth-cen- tury American literature. Yet one aspect of William James’s pragmatism that appealed greatly to his novelist brother and that has not been fully explored in relation to Stevens is the notion of “ambulation.” As Richard Hocks ar- gues in his seminal study of the brothers’ relationship, Henry James and Prag- matist Thought, the concept of ambulation greatly influenced the novelist’s style. As I hope to demonstrate, ambulatory relations also inform Stevens’ “reality-imagination complex” (L 792). Specifically, I want to focus on how the metonymic construction of Stevens’ poem “A Primitive Like an Orb” parallels the ambulatory relations of James’s late style, providing a connec- tion between the two writers. This essay begins with an account of the idea of ambulatory relations, based on the analysis by Hocks, who was the first and remains the most incisive exponent of this aspect of the Jameses. A brief analysis of ambulation in Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors will dem- onstrate how ambulation aligns with metonymy as a figurative trope. My argument concludes with an analysis of the Stevens’ “A Primitive Like an Orb” as an exemplar poem of Stevens’ late metonymic, ambulatory style. My larger argument suggests how metonymy, as opposed to metaphor and simile, functions as a fundamental trope for Stevens, but at the same time can be seen to function as a trope for Jamesian pragmatism and am- bulation. Although critics such as Levin, Rae, and Richardson connect Ste- vens to William James, they readily clarify that Stevens’ most pervasive, and self-confessed, philosophic influence was the Platonic philosopher George Santayana, not James. Although Santayana, who studied under William James and later was his colleague at Harvard, espouses a form of pragmatism, his is at odds with James’s pragmatism. George Lensing describes how Santayana may have influenced Stevens: Santayana approaches Stevens’ own resolution of the dichot- omy [fact-ideal]: the mind begins with facts but proceeds to