Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T13:23:19.101Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Stevens and philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2007

John N. Serio
Affiliation:
Clarkson University, New York
Get access

Summary

Among the great modernist poets in English, it is T. S. Eliot who, on the face of it, can lay most claim to being a philosophical poet. After all, Eliot is the only poet of his generation to have enjoyed an extensive academic training in philosophy. He even wrote a doctoral dissertation in the field. Yet, in spite of this professional training and its patent influence on especially his late masterwork, Four Quartets, it is not Eliot who has gone down in history as the most philosophical of modernist poets in English. That honor has been bestowed on another Harvard student from around the turn of the twentieth century: Wallace Stevens.

This may seem strange to anyone who still associates the name of Stevens with that of a reclusive lawyer working in the insurance industry and a playful, dandy-like poet indulging in the most sophisticated verbal jugglery. The claim to fame becomes even stranger if one takes a quick look at this poet's collection of aphorisms, “Adagia,” only to come across antagonizing proclamations of the following sort: “The poet must not adapt his experience to that of the philosopher” (909). Or, more provocatively still: “Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them” (906). In a letter of 1951 to the young scholar Bernard Heringman, Stevens can be seen to mount the same warhorse when he goes on to claim, “I have never studied systematic philosophy and should be bored to death at the mere thought of doing so” (L 636). So how could this man be considered the most philosophical among modernist poets in English?

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×