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Proquest Dissertations u Ottawa L'Universite canadienne Canada's university FACULTE DES ETUDES SUPERIEURES L=d FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND ET POSTOCTORALES u Ottawa POSDOCTORAL STUDIES L'University canadienne Canada's university Gaye Elizabeth Taylor AUTEUR DE LA THESE / AUTHOR OF THESIS Ph.D. (English Literature) GRADE/DEGREE Department of English FACULTE, ECOLE, DEPARTEMENT/ FACULTY, SCHOOL, DEPARTMENT The Meaning of the Earth and the Will of Men: Re-examining the Nietzschean in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium TITRE DE LA THESE / TITLE OF THESIS Donald Childs DIRECTEUR (DIRECTRICE) DE LA THESE / THESIS SUPERVISOR CO-DIRECTEUR (CO-DIRECTRICE) DE LA THESE / THESIS CO-SUPERVISOR Bernhard Radloff Anne Raine Milton Bates David Rampton Marquette University Gary W. Slater Le Doyen de la Faculte des etudes superieures et postdoctorales / Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The Meaning of the Earth and the Will of Men: Re-examining the Nietzschean in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium. A Dissertation by Gaye Elizabeth Taylor Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of the University of Ottawa in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy April 30,2010. © Gaye Elizabeth Taylor, Ottawa, Canada, 2010 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Vote reference ISBN: 978-0-494-73913-6 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-73913-6 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, prefer, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantias de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1+1 Canada It must be an odd civilization in which poetry is not the equal of philosophy. (Wallace Stevens to Henry Church, October 15, 1940) Abstract This dissertation is concerned with re-examining "the Nietzschean" in Wallace Stevens' first book of poems, Harmonium (1923). In the final decades of the twentieth-century, such critics as Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Joseph Riddell, Milton Bates, and B. J. Leggett discovered deep and abiding affinities between Nietzsche's thought and Stevens' poetry. While never denying the existence of a Nietzschean creative will in Stevens, my dissertation argues for significant zones of ambivalence towards Nietzsche's thought in Stevens' poetry, particularly towards the Nietzschean valuation of "the meaning of the earth." Significantly guided by B. J. Leggett's readings of Nietzschean intertexts in a number of Stevens' early poems, the second and third chapters of this dissertation seek to supplement—and to complicate—the idea of a Nietzschean will to creative power in Stevens by marking the ways in which these poems extend Nietzsche's mandate by assigning creative agency first to women, and then to "the common man." The last two chapters of the dissertation, however, strike a more independent course, arguing that a number of famous early poems, such as "Sunday Morning" and "The Snow Man," but especially the long poem, "The Comedian as the Letter C," demonstrate that working against an investment in a Nietzschean will to creative power was Stevens' adamant conviction that the limiting function of the earth itself in all its guttural materiality ensured that the outcome of the will to imagine could only ever be, at best, "sufficient"—never self-surpassing. Contents Acknowledgments i Abbreviations ii Introduction: The Alp at the End of the Street. 1 Chapter I. "Merely the effect of the epatant"?: The Question of 12 Stevens and Nietzsche. Chapter II. "Heavenly Labials in a World of Gutturals": 57 Feminine Becoming in Harmonium. Chapter III. "A Giant on the Horizon": The Will of the Commons in 111 "Lettres d'un Soldat, (1914- 1915)." Chapter IV. On be(holding) the "meaning of the earth" in New England. 174 Chapter V. Thus Spake Good Clown Crispin (and his four "chits"). 218 Conclusion: Brave Men and Bare Earth. 277 Works Cited and Selected Bibliography 287 Acknowledgments I would like first to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Don Childs, for his spirited guidance over the past five years. I also thank Milton Bates, Bart Eeckhout, B. J. Leggett, Glen MacLeod, Guy Roytella, Robert Storey, and especially Craig Gordon, for their kind responses to queries, large and small. Above all, I thank my family: my beloved husband, Andrew, without whose indefatigable support on all fronts this dissertation would have remained unfinished, and our darling daughter, Rebecca, a very high candle indeed, though only five years old. 1 Abbreviations Wallace Stevens CPP The Collected Poetry and Prose of Wallace Stevens CS The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie. L Letters of Wallace Stevens OP Opus Posthumous SM Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens and Jose Rodriguez Feo. SP Souvenirs and Prophecies Friedrich Nietzsche BGE Beyond Good and Evil BT The Birth of Tragedy DD The Dawn of Day GM The Genealogy of Morals GS The Gay Science OTF "On Truth and Falsity in their Non-Moral Sense " SL Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. TI The Twilight of the Idols WP The Will to Power Z Thus Spake Zarathustra 11 Introduction: The Alp at the End of the Street. IX Statue against a Clear Sky Ashen man on ashen cliff above the salt halloo, O ashen admiral of the hard, hale blue. .. X Statue against a Cloudy Sky Scaffolds and derricks rise from the reeds to the clouds Meditating the will of men in formless crowds. (Wallace Stevens, "New England Verses," 1923) Wallace Stevens was notoriously reluctant to acknowledge his creative influences and his poetic allusions are almost always subtle and open to varying interpretations. In his entire poetic corpus there are only two lines that unequivocally and obviously allude to Friedrich Nietzsche: the reference to "Nietzsche in Basel" gazing into a pool in "Description Without Place" (1945) and the use of the word "Ubermenschlichkeit" in "The Surprises of the Superhuman," a poem from the "Lettres d'un Soldat" sequence (1917). Yet a number of influential critics have repeatedly drawn the poet and the philosopher together in complex constellations, Harold Bloom, for example, identifying Nietzsche as one of Stevens' essential "influences." While eschewing the very concept of literary influence, others, notably J. Hillis 1 Miller and Joseph Riddel (in their later work as deconstructionists, that is), and B. J. Leggett in his Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext (1992), have offered rigorous explorations of intertextual relation between Stevens and Nietzsche. Rounding out a broad spectrum of "Nietzschean" critics are Milton Bates, whose Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self '(1985) estimates that "[n]owhere else in Stevens does one have an intellectual influence whose sources and extent can be specified with as much certainty" (248), and J. S. Leonard and C. E. Wharton, co-authors of The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality (1988), who believe Nietzsche, that is, "particularly the later and increasingly flamboyant Nietzsche of The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra" to operate as Stevens' "poetic precursor even more than philosophical influence" (xi). Extending Bates' careful explication of the Nietzschean aspects of the poet's "major man," Leonard and Wharton discover "a range of other Nietzschean themes apparent in Stevens' figurations—including the 'three metamorphoses,' 'death of God,' solar images, and 'eternal recurrence'" (103-4). According to Leonard and Wharton, "No poet has dealt with these Nietzschean figures as explicitly, persistently, and insightfully as Stevens (in prose, and from his earliest major poems—"Sunday Morning" and "Peter Quince"—to the last)" (104). Bringing to bear an impressive range of citations from Stevens' corpus, Leonard and Wharton build a persuasive case that their poet was "influenced" by Nietzsche. It seems likely, for example, that the opening lines in section V of "It Must Be Abstract" in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"—"The lion roars at the enraging desert, / Reddens the sand with his red-colored noise, / Defies red emptiness to evolve his match"—do "directly appropriate]" (113) Zarathustra's proclamation that "in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the 2 spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness" (ZI i). So, too, might the phrase "bright scienza outside ourselves" in "Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun" be "a direct allusion to 7a gaya scienza,' the Italian title under which The Gay Science was originally published" (Leonard and Wharton 123).
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