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Chapter 3 - Community and Autonomy

“The Mode of Common Dreams”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2019

Gül Bilge Han
Affiliation:
Stockholms Universitet
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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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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • Community and Autonomy
  • Gül Bilge Han, Stockholms Universitet
  • Book: Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy
  • Online publication: 17 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108648790.004
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  • Community and Autonomy
  • Gül Bilge Han, Stockholms Universitet
  • Book: Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy
  • Online publication: 17 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108648790.004
Available formats
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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.

  • Community and Autonomy
  • Gül Bilge Han, Stockholms Universitet
  • Book: Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy
  • Online publication: 17 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108648790.004
Available formats
×