Wallace Stevens In Theory

The modernist poetry of Wallace Stevens is replete with moments of theorizing. Stevens regarded poetry as an abstract medium through which to think about and theorize not only philosophical concepts like metaphor and reality, but also a unifying thesis about the nature of poetry itself. At the same time, literary theorists and philosophers have often turned to Stevens as a canonical reference point and influence. In the centenary year of Wallace Stevens's first collection Harmonium (1923), this collection asks what it means to theorize with Stevens today. Through a range of critical and theoretical perspectives, this book seeks to describe the myriad kinds of thinking sponsored by Stevens's poetry and explores how contemporary literary theory might be invigorated through readings of Stevens.

Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory: Conceiving the Supreme Fiction

Leggett traces the effect of several important theoretical works on the poetry and prose of Stevens during a period in which he was formulating an aesthetic between 1942 and 1954. The author offers new readings of a number of poems and passages and clarifies certain controversial conceptions developed by Stevens, such as the supreme fiction, the relation of the new poet to tradition, and the psychologies of creativity. Originally published in 1987. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The modernist poetry of Wallace Stevens is replete with moments of theorizing. Stevens regarded poetry as an abstract medium through which to think about and theorize not only philosophical concepts like metaphor and reality, but also a unifying thesis about the nature of poetry itself. At the same time, literary theorists and philosophers have often turned to Stevens as a canonical reference point and influence. In the centenary year of Wallace Stevens’s first collection Harmonium (1923), this collection asks what it means to theorize with Stevens today. Through a range of critical and theoretical perspectives, this book seeks to describe the myriad kinds of thinking sponsored by Stevens’s poetry and explores how contemporary literary theory might be invigorated through readings of Stevens.

The poems of Wallace Stevens teem with birds: grackles, warblers, doves, swans, nightingales, owls, peacocks, and one famous blackbird who summons thirteen ways of looking. What do Stevens’s evocations of birds, and his poems more generally, tell us about the relationship between human and nonhuman? In this book, the noted theorist of posthumanism Cary Wolfe argues for a philosophical and theoretical reinvention of ecological poetics, using Stevens as a test case. Stevens, Wolfe argues, is an ecological poet in the sense that his places, worlds, and environments are co-created by the life forms that inhabit them. Wolfe argues for a “nonrepresentational” conception of ecopoetics, showing how Stevens’s poems reward study alongside theories of system, environment, and observation derived from a multitude of sources, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Niklas Luhmann to Jacques Derrida and Stuart Kauffman. Ecological Poetics is an ambitious interdisciplinary undertaking involving literary criticism, contemporary philosophy, and theoretical biology.

This book examines the function of repetition in the work of Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. All three poets extensively employ and comment upon the effects of repetition, yet represent three distinct poetics, considerably removed from one another in stylistic and historical terms. At the same time, the three are engaged in a highly interesting relation to each other - a relation readers tend to explain in terms of repetition, by positing Whitman and Stevens as the two alternative 'beginnings' out of which Ashbery emerges. Krystyna Mazur analyses the work of the three poets to discern patterns that may operate across a relatively broad spectrum of examples, as well as to consider the variety of ways in which repetition can structure a poetic text.

A provocative reassessment of modern American literature and culture through the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.