Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-84956-2 - The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens Edited by John N. Serio Frontmatter More information the cambridge companion to wallace stevens Wallace Stevens is a major American poet and a central figure in modernist studies and twentieth-century poetry. This Companion introduces students to his work. An international team of distinguished contributors presents a unified picture of Stevens’ poetic achievement. The Introduction explains why Stevens is among the world’s great poets and offers specific guidance on how to read and appreciate his poetry. A brief biographical sketch anchors Stevens in the real world and illuminates important personal and intellectual influences. The essays following chart Stevens’ poetic career and his affinities with both earlier and contemporary writers, artists, and philosophers. Other essays introduce students to the peculiarity and distinctiveness of Stevens’ voice and style. They explain prominent themes in his work and explore the nuances of his aesthetic theory. With a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading, this Companion provides all the information a student or scholar of Stevens will need. john n. serio is Professor of Humanities at Clarkson University, New York, and editor of the Wallace Stevens Journal. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-84956-2 - The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens Edited by John N. Serio Frontmatter More information THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO WALLACE STEVENS EDITED BY JOHN N. SERIO © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-84956-2 - The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens Edited by John N. Serio Frontmatter More information cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sa˜o Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru,UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521614825 © Cambridge University Press 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2007 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library isbn-13 978-0-521-84956-2 hardback isbn-10 0-521-84956-x hardback isbn-13 978-0-521-61482-5 paperback isbn-10 0-521-61482-1 paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-84956-2 - The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens Edited by John N. Serio Frontmatter More information CONTENTS List of contributors page vii Chronology x List of abbreviations xvi Introduction 1 JOHN N. SERIO 1 Wallace Stevens: a likeness 8 JOAN RICHARDSON 2 Stevens and Harmonium 23 ROBERT REHDER 3 Stevens in the 1930s 37 ALAN FILREIS 4 Stevens and the supreme fiction 48 MILTON J. BATES 5 Stevens’ late poetry 62 B. J. LEGGETT 6 Stevens and his contemporaries 76 JAMES LONGENBACH 7 Stevens and romanticism 87 JOSEPH CARROLL v © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-84956-2 - The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens Edited by John N. Serio Frontmatter More information CONTENTS 8 Stevens and philosophy 103 BART EECKHOUT 9 Stevens’ seasonal cycles 118 GEORGE S. LENSING 10 Stevens and the lyric speaker 133 HELEN VENDLER 11 Stevens and linguistic structure 149 BEVERLY MAEDER 12 Stevens and painting 164 BONNIE COSTELLO 13 Stevens and the feminine 180 JACQUELINE VAUGHT BROGAN 14 Stevens and belief 193 DAVID R. JARRAWAY Guide to further reading 207 Index 214 vi © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-84956-2 - The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens Edited by John N. Serio Frontmatter More information CONTRIBUTORS MILTON J. BATES is the author of Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (1985) and The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling (1996). He has edited the revised edition of Stevens’ Opus Posthumous (1989) and Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book (1989). He teaches at Marquette University. JACQUELINE VAUGHT BROGAN has published several books on twentieth-century poetry, including Stevens and Simile: A Theory of Language (1986), Part of the Climate: American Cubist Poetry (1991), Women Poets of the Americas (co-edited with Cordelia Cha´vez Candelaria, 1999), and The Violence Within/The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics (2003). She teaches at the University of Notre Dame. JOSEPH CARROLL is the author of The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold (1982), Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism (1987), Evolution and Literary Theory (1995), and Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (2004). He has also published a contextualized, annotated edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (2003). He teaches at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. BONNIE COSTELLO is Professor of English at Boston University specializing in modern and contemporary poetry. She is the author of Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions (1981), Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (1991), and Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry (2003). She is General Editor of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (1997). BART EECKHOUT is the author of Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (2002). He has guest-edited two special issues of the Wallace Stevens Journal, one on ‘International Perspectives’ (2001) and the other, with Edward Ragg, on ‘Wallace Stevens and British Literature’ (2006). He teaches at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. vii © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-84956-2 - The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens Edited by John N. Serio Frontmatter More information LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ALAN FILREIS is Kelly Professor, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, and Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (1991), Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties and Literary Radicalism (1994), and a new edition of Ira Wolfert’s Tucker’s People (1997). He has just completed a new book, entitled The Fifties’ Thirties: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–60. DAVID R. JARRAWAY is Professor of American Literature at the University of Ottawa and is the author of Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark (1993), Going the Distance: Dissident Subjectivity in Modernist American Literature (2003), and many essays on American literature and culture. B. J. LEGGETT is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee. His books on Stevens include Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory: Conceiving the Supreme Fiction (1987), Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext (1992), and Late Stevens: The Final Fiction (2005). GEORGE S. LENSING is Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth (1986) and Wallace Stevens and the Seasons (2001). JAMES LONGENBACH is the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester. He is the author of three books of poems, including Fleet River (2003) and Draft of a Letter (2007), as well as five critical books, including Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (1991) and The Resistance to Poetry (2004). BEVERLY MAEDER teaches at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. She is the author of Wallace Stevens’ Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute (1999). ROBERT REHDER’S books include Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry (1981), The Poetry of Wallace Stevens (1988), Stevens, Williams, Crane and the Motive for Metaphor (2004), and he has edited A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1999). He is the author of two books of poems: The Compromises Will Be Different (1995) and First Things When (2007). He holds the chair of English and American Literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. JOAN RICHARDSON is the author of Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879–1923 (1986), Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923–1955 (1988), and co-editor, with Frank Kermode, of the Library of America’s edition of Stevens’ Collected Poetry and Prose (1997). She has just published A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (2006). She teaches at The Graduate Center, CUNY. viii © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-84956-2 - The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens Edited by John N. Serio Frontmatter More information LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS JOHN N. SERIO has been editor of the Wallace Stevens Journal since 1983.Hehas published Wallace Stevens: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1994) and, with B. J. Leggett, Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays (1994). He has also edited Poetry