Originally published in 1980. Wallace Stevens: The Making of the Poem emphasizes the ideas that Wallace Stevens embeds in his poetry, providing the first study to provide an intellectual biography of ...Stevens. It examines Stevens' naturalism, his ideas of the self, and the imagination, among other topics. The concepts that emerge from long reading of the poetry of Stevens are slight and basic, but these concepts do accord, even if they never emerge into a coherent philosophy. The accordance is probably a result of Stevens' preference for naturalistic thought.
The French language mattered profoundly to Stevens, and no collection expresses that love more clearly than Harmonium. From “To the One of Fictive Music”: Sister and mother and diviner love, And of ...the sisterhood of the living dead Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom, And of the fragrant mothers the most dear And queen, and of diviner love the day And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread Of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown Its venom of renown, and on your head No crown is simpler than the simple hair. If “Anecdote of the Jar” is understood as an allegory for writing poetry (as it often is), then the image of a clay pitcher has a substantial impact on the way Stevens imagines his art, by emphasizing its long history and its roots in folk culture.
In a barroom, for example, where Judy Garland might by chance appear (“A Fish-Scale Sunrise”), promising to be the barkeep’s “paloma blanca celebrating / the birth of another day,” she then orders ...the haddock, prepared “New England- / style, Ritz-cracker-crusted,” and the spell is broken (14). Or going in the other direction, from the low hum of the humdrum to high-held notes, the poet finds himself in a supermarket parking lot, and he gets drawn in by “this lasso of red raffle tickets,” by a man from the VA hospital (“The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad”), before the poem rises to say: What no one wants to know is how his voice was lost or why or what he sounded like when he was a young man or what thoughts have escaped him and flown away—fly away still— never rooted in speech. When the good doctor says brown he means the color of gravy as in gravy train: and in the sweater’s weave he can feel the comfort of bringing in wood on the first cold day in November or watching trees waltz recklessly in the wind, knowing that if they fall they’ll find sleep in their own dead leaves. (22) And in the poem which serves as title poem to the collection, “The Place of the Solitaires,” the material world seems to be cascading around the poet at this stage in his life: “Friends are rampaging rivers / bringing us end tables and night tables / and breakfast bars with one stool”; and “It seems every closet in the world / vomits up clothes we can wear.”
In the first full-length study of Wallace Stevens's word-play, Eleanor Cook focuses on Stevens's skillful play with grammar, etymology, allusion, and other elements of poetry, and suggests ways in ...which this play offers a method of approaching his work. At the same time, this book is a general study of Stevens's poetry, moving from his earliest to his latest work, and includes close readings of three of his remarkable long poems--Esthetique du Mal, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. The chronological arrangement enables readers to follow Stevens's increasing skill and changing thought in three areas of his "poetry of the earth": the poetry of place, the poetry of eros, and the poetry of belief.
Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens shows how, in setting words at play and in conflict, Stevens could upset the usual relations of rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic, and thus the book contributes to the current debate about logical and a-logical uses of language. Cook also places Stevens within the larger context of Western literature, hearing how he speaks to Milton, Keats, and Wordsworth; to such American forebears as Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson; and to T. S. Eliot, his contemporary.
Originally published in 1988.
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This book traces the presence of the theater, both as an abstract concept and a literal space, in the plays and poetry of Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens as it attempts to explain the parallel ...depictions of consciousness that are found in both authors' work. Literary modernists inherited a self that was fallible, a self that was seen as an ultimately failed gesture of expression, and throughout much modern literature is a sense of disillusionment with more traditional notions of selfhood. As more conventional ways of thinking about consciousness became untenable, so too did conventional models of artistic expression.This book shows how Stein and Stevens provide powerful examples of this modern attempt to stage the new subject.
