Book contents
- Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy
- Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Politics of Aesthetic Separation
- Chapter 2 Spaces of Autonomy
- Chapter 3 Community and Autonomy
- Chapter 4 Autonomy and Philosophy
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - Community and Autonomy
“The Mode of Common Dreams”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2019
- Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy
- Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Politics of Aesthetic Separation
- Chapter 2 Spaces of Autonomy
- Chapter 3 Community and Autonomy
- Chapter 4 Autonomy and Philosophy
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chapter 3 argues that Stevens’ imaginative compositions of collectivity and audience provide another vantage point from which to highlight the contextual dimensions of his poetics of autonomy. In his longest and most intricate poem, “Owl’s Clover,” Stevens explores both the potentials and limits of aesthetic separation and autonomy for imagining new forms of collective agency, including the working classes. This exploration unfolds in tension with the period’s political-artistic aspirations to the inclusive “rhetoric of the people.” Stevens’ search for an inclusive “common” or “civil fiction” leads to a complex questioning of the imagination’s potential to expand from a local to a global vision of collectivity. The chapter demonstrates how by acknowledging the ideological pressures (fascist war and colonialism) that impede the aesthetic creation of a globally inclusive model of communal presence, Stevens takes the further step of resisting them, to affirm the continual need of poetry for envisaging prospective forms of collective life.
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- Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy , pp. 94 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019