Wallace Stevens' Poetics

"Stevens' poetry undermines the safeguarded classifications people use to contain knowledge. Political labels were prominent in 1930s America, when Marxism led many writers to prioritize politics over aesthetics. Stevens' poetry employs rhetoric to show that art and state function through similar appeals, and that these forms of persuasion govern history. The long poem, Owl's Clover, responds to Depression ideologies by dramatizing the nominal barriers people construct to stem their fears. This study also responds to critical misapprehension about Owl's Clover, and argues that the poem's rhetorical poetics are crucial to understanding Stevens' complete poetry as an ethical challenge to the destructive and rigidly repetitive routes of history."--BOOK JACKET.

First sentence: Wallace Stevens fulfills an unusually casual prophesy made by Ezra Pound about literature, in 1936: "the transition may have been from literary to rhetorical."

Year

2000

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

Editions

1

Pages

224

ISBN

9780333946787

Data source: Wikidata