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Wallace Stevens's Point of View

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Joshua Kotin
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Abstract

“The earth, for us, is flat and bare. / … Poetry // Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns… Such claims saturate Wallace Stevens's work: poetry, Stevens affirms and reaffirms, is a potential source of value in a secular world. This essay tracks his attempts to realize this potential—to write a poem that would satisfy his metaphysical need. His work is relentlessly self-critical and experimental, and over his career he develops extravagant (and ultimately hermetic) responses to a stubborn philosophical problem. My aim is to reframe critical approaches to a central topic in Stevens's poetry and to re-evaluate his relation to philosophy. In the process, I hope to suggest answers to more general questions: What is experimental poetry? How do poets think in verse? Why do poets write difficult poems? What makes a poem difficult in the first place?

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 54 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

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