Barszcz discusses Emersonian influences which can be found in the early poems of Wallace Stevens, specifically in his collection "Harmonium" published in 1923. While there is limited evidence that ...Stevens read Emerson, there are distinct verbal borrowings that go beyond mere echoes of Emerson's works. In the poem "Invective Against Swans," Stevens uses the word "Paphian," which refers to the city where Aphrodite emerged from the sea. This word is reminiscent of Emerson's description of sunsets in his essay "Nature." It is likely that Stevens was familiar with this essay, given Emerson's prominence during that time. Another similarity between Stevens and Emerson can be found in Stevens' poem "Anecdote of the Jar," which echoes Emerson's description of American nature as both wild and threatening. Stevens presents a jar as a symbol of order and civilization in the face of the chaotic wilderness. However, both Stevens and Emerson suggest that organizing nature comes at a cost. These examples demonstrate the influence of Emerson on Stevens' poetic style and themes.
There is a vast catalogue of research on Wallace Stevens's 1934 poem "The Idea of Order at Key West." The article offers a complementary alternative by carrying out a practical experiment of reading ...Stevens through a special method. It looks past interpretive determinations in order to bring into view the experience of reading the poem through the medium specific elements of the vanishing intermedialities by which the reader of any inclination is affected. The notions of design and agency are employed in an innovative fashion to evidence the effects of the words employed. Keywords: Intermedial experience, three-tier model of mediality, design, agency, Wallace Stevens
Ian Tan’s book is the first extended study of Wallace Stevens devoted almost entirely to the conversation of Stevens’s poetic oeuvre with Martin Heidegger’s ideas about poetry, dwelling, and the ...event (das Ereignis). What sets the study apart from other scholarly books or essays that explore the relation between Stevens and Heidegger is, first, the comprehensive nature of Tan’s treatment of Stevens, which begins with Harmonium and proceeds all the way to the last poems from 1954–55; and second, the focus on Heidegger’s notion of the Ereignis. ...he reads them in terms of a poetic portrayal of being and of the relation to the world, emphasizing the tropes of grounding and journeying, as well as openness to otherness, in “The Auroras of Autumn” while relating them to Heidegger’s discussion of the way and the movement of language. ...appropriative proximity becomes a trope for exploring the relation between poetry and philosophy.
To say a poem is like music is to say it is like a process or performance, an event happening in time, and therefore fugitive. To judge from the number of books and articles on the two subjects, ...criticism finds it easier to discuss poetry’s relationship to visual art than its relationship to music, although, in the primacy it gives to sound and the way it unfolds in time, poetry has demonstrably more in common with music than with visual art. Stevens scholarship is not an exception, having been more focused over the years on the poet’s relationship to modern painting and visual art than on his relationship to music. Before we place too much stress on Picasso’s Old Guitarist as the source for “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” we should remember that Stevens played the guitar himself.
