DOCSLIB.ORG

The View from Key West: Toward a Global South Atlantic Lyric Marvin

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The View from Key West: Toward a Global South Atlantic Lyric Marvin The View From Key West: Toward a Global South Atlantic Lyric Marvin Alfred Campbell Lemoyne, Pennsylvania B.A., English, Vassar College, 2006 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature University of Virginia July 2015 1 Acknowledgments I am immensely fortunate to have received endlessly generous training, support, and mentorship from a wonderful department with a vibrant intellectual community. The co- directors of my dissertation, Jahan Ramazani and Jennifer Wicke, have supported and believed in my work and me more than I can ever adequately thank them for, and it means the world to me. I am honored to have been their students at the University of Virginia, benefiting from their teaching, scholarship, critical acumen, and professional and personal support. Stephen Cushman has deeply influenced this project and my development as a scholar and teacher as well. Working with, and alongside, him has been a great and matchless gift—one of my most cherished memories was a course I took under his tutelage during my early years in the department and I continue to be inspired by his pedagogical example. Courses, conversation, and research collaboration with Michael Levenson throughout my years at UVa have been enormously beneficial as well, helping to inspire my enthusiasm for the profession. I am grateful to other faculty members—Elizabeth Fowler, Deborah McDowell, Anna Brickhouse, and Rita Felski—who have supported my work and with whom I have had fruitful conversations in its conception. The continued support and friendship of Don Foster—whose mentorship at Vassar College and beyond—has also meant a great deal to me, having far exceeded his obligations to me as my teacher. I would not have entered graduate school if not for him. At the University of Virginia, I benefited from the financial support of a Commonwealth fellowship, a South Atlantic Studies Fellowship from the Virginia 2 Foundation of the Humanities, and generous travel and research grants, which allowed me to do vital archival work and share my scholarship at conferences. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge all that I owe to my mother, Susan, and my sister, Penelope—they are more than my family; they are my life. Without them, I would be nothing—or nowhere. They have believed in me when I have not believed in myself and have ensured that everything I have ever done, including this work, is for them. 3 Abstract The View From Key West: Toward a Global South Atlantic Lyric “The View from Key West” argues that the map of American modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics cannot be drawn without the Global South Atlantic that operates from Key West—a liminal space for writers of the twentieth-century to rethink nation, race, sexual difference, and gender within a transnational frame. Though the increasingly global dimensions of literary study remain focused on the novel, crossings have been equally significant to Anglophone poetics. As Jahan Ramazani’s work has repeatedly shown, there exists a “traveling poetry” even when poets remained fixed, because poems travel—literally and figuratively. “The View from Key West” offers one such mapping of a travel, looking to the South Atlantic, instead of the North, for an understanding of how a phase of American literary history has been formed, shaped, and inflected. From the peninsular tip of the United States to the larger Gulf Region and beyond, the Global South Atlantic has facilitated a crosscultural exchange where poets in the United States, Caribbean, and Americas dissolve national borders and geographical boundaries, alongside conceptual ones of culture and identity, at the same time as they run up against the gaps, tensions, and violence, of a sharp power differential left by the Middle Passage. Focusing on the work of Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, and Jean Toomer, my study shows how American poetry both remapped itself and was itself remapped by this wide array of Anglo-American, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean poets. 4 Launching investigations into Cuba, Brazil, Aruba, Central America, the Galapagos, St. Lucia, on the one hand; and the Plains States, the Midwest, the Southern United States, and New York, on the other, they reveal at once the productive cross-connections and insurmountable tensions that define the relationship between North and South. By rendering the hemisphere as mutually constitutive in this way, the Global South Atlantic Lyric decenters the former in favor of a fluid, free-ranging matrix without a center, placing into conversation poets who are often segregated by race as well as nation, crediting investments in social reality and identity to others, such as Stevens, who are not often credited with them, and revealing that American literature— like American history—must be viewed through the lens of South Atlantic, which begins in Key West and extends infinitely outward. 5 Table of Contents 1. Introduction: The Crucible 7 2. Wallace Stevens’s “Comprehensive Island Hemisphere”— 25 From Key West To Cuba 3. Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay— 92 Greater Key West and the African Diaspora 4. Elizabeth Bishop and Audre Lorde: “Driving Into the Interior” of the Hemisphere—From Nova Scotia to Tierra Del Fuego 125 5. Derek Walcott’s Poetry of Homecoming in a Global South Atlantic 202 6. Works Cited 243 6 Introduction: The Crucible Can we imagine Hart Crane without the Caribbean or Elizabeth Bishop without Rio? – William Logan, April 8, 2007 New York Times William Logan begins his review of The Selected Poems of Derek Walcott by arguing for the importance of place to Anglo-American poetics. After pointing to Byron and Shelley in Italy and Greece, Eliot and Pound in London, he ends the catalogue with this rhetorical question before addressing a Walcott who has “crossed so many borders, his poems read like a much-thumbed Baedeker.” In doing so, Logan not only rehearses Walcott’s placement within a poetic tradition his work itself foregrounds, but suggests— as neither other readers of Walcott nor even Walcott himself have done—that he stands especially close to its American modernist phase. The poet of St. Lucia occupies the same space as Elizabeth Bishop, who spent fifteen years in Brazil, and Hart Crane, who resided for a summer off the coast of Cuba, on the Isle of Pines. Walcott’s affinities to both are well known, the poet at once attracted to Crane’s dense, allusive rhetoric and epic ambition and Bishop’s skeptical orientation to place and travel that quarrels with the cultural assumptions of tourism—i.e., Logan’s Baedeker. But despite Walcott's particularly close kinship to Bishop and the relevance of place to all three poets, the contours of their shared hemispheric geography remains unacknowledged. If we have not been able to imagine these writers without such locales, as Logan suggests—and it is not clear, in Crane’s case, that we have not, critics having rendered him national through The Bridge, his paradigmatic epic of nation formation—we have certainly 7 proven able to elide their contiguity, effacing a major poetic lineage that crosses lines of nation, gender, race, and sexual identity. This is a mistake—for these three poets and more, for the whole of American poetics. Bishop’s wide-ranging peregrinations from the 1940s to the late 1960s, in which she interfused Nova Scotia, Brazil, Aruba, Mexico, and the Galapagos; Crane’s investments in the Caribbean and Mexico in 1926 and his twilight year in 1933; and Walcott’s own vexed crossings between North and South that began during the 1980s, belong to a still larger and richer map of American and Caribbean poetics that converge in Key West.` Here, at the southernmost point of the continental United States, the largest of the Keys—closer to Havana than Miami, as Bishop herself remarked to her students at Harvard later in life—modernist poetics built on a nineteenth-century hemispheric consciousness informing a trans-American ideal in Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, José Martí and Rubén Darío, to forge what I call, drawing on Joseph Slaughter, a Global South Atlantic. This critical concept is one that, according to Slaughter, aims to explore different ways of positioning Atlantic Studies in relation to the Global South … focusing on how artists and intellectuals from the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and other Southern zones imagine the Atlantic … [and] how individuals, governments or political movements, social imaginaries, texts or other cultural artifacts, and markets do (or do not) cross the oceanic space between Africa, Latin America, and surrounding “Southern” regions; and the larger structures of knowledge and power that enable or inhibit these flows (Slaughter). For a wide-ranging phalanx of mid and late twentieth-century poets that also includes Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay, 8 the Global South Atlantic provides a liminal, transnational space to dissolve national borders and geographical boundaries, reveal investments in difference (racial, sexual, class based), and revise social and literary history for the ultimate benefit of the New World, triangulating the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe to draw out their crosscurrents and intersections. Part of the “transnational turn” that has redefined literary study, this formation re- orients a map of American literature still overly indebted to F.O. Mattheissen’s American Renaissance, a modernism embedded within Eliot’s “mind of Europe” and its attendant culture capitals of New York, London, and Paris; and geographies of African American culture and the African diaspora in the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Atlantic. From such a dynamic matrix that engages with conceptions of black and white internationalism emerges a hemispheric modernism.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Wallace Stevens
    Classic Poetry Series Wallace Stevens - poems - Publication Date: 2004 Publisher: PoemHunter.Com - The World's Poetry Archive A High-Toned Old Christian Woman Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns. We agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began. Allow, Therefore, that in the planetary scene Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed, Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade, Proud of such novelties of the sublime, Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk, May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres. This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince. Wallace Stevens www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 2 Anecdote of the Jar I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
    [Show full text]
  • I. the Metler of NOTHINGNESS 2. Samuel French Morse, Quoted By
    Notes I. THE METlER OF NOTHINGNESS 1. My title alludes to a phrase in 'Seventy Years Later" (CP 525-6), the whole of which late poem is suggestively relevant to this chapler. Sources of quotations from Stevens's published writings will be given in the running lext, using the abbreviations already described. 2. Samuel French Morse, quoted by Peter Brazeau in his Parts of a World: Wallacr Stevens Rt'IIJembi'rrd (New York: J{andom House, 1983), p. 152. Subsequent references to this book wil! be incorporated in Ihe running h.'xl as (Brazeau, p. -), 3. WI' Dream of Honour: John Berryman '5 Letters to his Mother, ed. I{ichard J. Kelly (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1988), p. 207;'So Long? Stevens' can be found in the collection His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), p. 148. 4. Thomas C. Grey, The Wallace Stevws Case: Law alld the Practice af Paetry (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University I'ress, 1991), p. 12. 5. Pound's remarks about Stevens date from 1933, and are quoted by Alan Filreis in Modernism from RiXI1t to Left: Wal/ace Stevells, the Tllirties & Literary Radicalism (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 147. 6. John Timberman Newcomb, Wallace StePt'lls alld Literary Callons (Jackson & London: University Press of Mi5Sis$ippi, 1992), pp. 3--4. 7. Henry James, HllwtilOrne, ed. Tony Tanner (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 55, 56. 8. D.H. Lawrence, Stlldies ill Classic Amrricall Literatllff! (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 70. [n citing Sacvan Bcrcovitch, I am thinki ng principally o f The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic COllstruction af America (New York & London: Routledge, 1993).
    [Show full text]
  • “The Savage Harmony”. Wallace Stevens and the Poetic Apprehension of an Anthropic Universe
    “BABEŞ-BOLYAI” UNIVERSITY OF CLUJ-NAPOCA FACULTY OF LETTERS “THE SAVAGE HARMONY”. WALLACE STEVENS AND THE POETIC APPREHENSION OF AN ANTHROPIC UNIVERSE — SUMMARY — Scientific advisor: Virgil Stanciu, Ph.D. Doctoral candidate: Octavian-Paul More Cluj-Napoca 2010 Contents: Introduction: Stevens, the “Savage Harmony” and the Need for Revaluation Chapter I: Between “Ideas about the Thing” and “The Thing Itself”—Modernism, Positioning, and the Subject – Object Dialectic 1.1. Universalism, the search for the object and the metaphor of positioning as a “root metaphor” in Modernist poetry 1.2. “In-betweenness,” “coalescence” and the relational nature of Modernism 1.3. Common denominators and individual differences in redefining the Modernist search for the object 1.3.1. The drive toward identification, “subjectivising” the object and the “poetry of approach” (W. C. Williams) 1.3.2. Detachment, anti-perspectivism and the strategy of the “snow man” (W. Stevens) 1.4. Universalism revisited: the search for the object as a new mode of knowledge 1.4.1. The shift from static to dynamic and the abstractisation/reification of vision 1.4.2. Relativism vs. indetermination and the reassessment of the position of the subject 1.5. Individual vs. universal in a world of fragments: the search for the object as an experience of locality 1.5.1. “The affair of the possible” or “place” as the changing parlance of the imagination (W. Stevens) 1.5.2. “Suppressed complex(es)” or “place” as the locus of dissociation and transgression (T. S. Eliot) 1.5.3. “The palpable Elysium” or “place” as recuperation and reintegration (E.
    [Show full text]
  • A Performance Guide to Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird As Set by Louise Talma
    The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Dissertations Spring 2020 A Performance Guide to Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird as Set by Louise Talma Meredith Melvin Johnson The University of Soutthern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations Part of the Music Performance Commons Recommended Citation Johnson, Meredith Melvin, "A Performance Guide to Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird as Set by Louise Talma" (2020). Dissertations. 1787. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/1787 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A PERFORMANCE GUIDE TO WALLACE STEVENS’ THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD AS SET BY LOUISE TALMA by Meredith Melvin Johnson A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School, the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Music at The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Musical Arts Approved by: Dr. Christopher Goertzen, Committee Chair Dr. Jonathan Yarrington Dr. Kimberley Davis Dr. Maryann Kyle Dr. Douglas Rust ____________________ ____________________ ____________________ Dr. Christopher Goertzen Dr. Jay Dean Dr. Karen S. Coats Committee Chair Director of School Dean of the Graduate School May 2020 COPYRIGHT BY Meredith Melvin Johnson 2020 Published by the Graduate School ABSTRACT This dissertation presents a two-fold discourse, first to provide a contextual source for singers interested in 20th century composer Louise Talma, and second to provide an analytical guide to Talma’s adaption of Wallace Stevens’ poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird for voice, oboe, and piano.
    [Show full text]
  • Elizabeth Bishop, Brazil, and the Question of Home
    Elizabeth Bishop, Brazil, and the Question of Home Yuko Matsukawa GLINDA. en close your eyes and tap your heels together three times. And think to yourself: “ere’s no place like home; there’s no place like home; there’s no place like home.” e Wizard of Oz (1939) e rst stanza of one of Elizabeth Bishop’s most anthologized poems, the villanelle entitled “One Art,” declares, “e art of losing isn’t hard to master;/ so many things seem lled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster” (166)1. Bishop (1911-1979) was no stranger to loss: having lost her father when she was eight months old and then having had her mother institutionalized when she was ve, the most profound loss she experienced was that of a stable and loving home. A childhood of being shuttled back and forth between the homes of her maternal and her paternal grandparents as well as that of an aunt did not alleviate her sense of alienation, though boarding school and later Vassar College gave Bishop friends with whom she would stay and/or travel, abroad and within the United States. But it was not until she moved to Brazil in 1951 that she found a place she could call home for over a decade and a half. Her years abroad in Brazil suggest that she was an expatriate writer; yet within the context of American writers who lived abroad, she followed not her immediate ― 527 ― “Lost Generation” predecessors such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose sojourns in Europe were predicated on the assumption that there would always be a return home to the United States, but writers who preceded them and stayed in Europe for most of their lives̶Henry James and Gertrude Stein come to mind̶as well as her contemporaries whose ties to France ( James Baldwin) and Tangiers (Paul Bowles) also rewrote how we understand American writers abroad.
    [Show full text]
  • 6 X 10.Long New.P65
    Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19086-2 - Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction Edward Ragg Index More information Index abstraction Stevens’ embracing of 4, 77, 87, 97, 182, autotelic abstraction 213 184–5 and the bourgeois 5, 97, 107, 148, 162, 165, in Stevens’ later career 2–3, 99, 185, 209 167, 203, 231 Stevens’ modifying of 5, 11, 143, 165, 166, ‘cool’ and ‘warm’ abstraction 2, 5, 20, 24, 172, 174, 229 25, 167, 205, 213, 230 and textual speakers 4, 27, 55, 58, 60, 63, and domesticity 5, 25, 146, 210, 216, 218, 66–76, 77, 86, 87, 90, 95, 97, 98, 109, 220, 221, 223, 225, 229 110, 111, 112, 114, 118, 119, 121, 126, 127, expressions of 4, 25, 28, 210 131, 134, 135, 156, 229, See also idealist ‘I’ and gastronomy. See gastronomy and time 91, 102, 189–98 as generalization 18, 19, 23 and the visual 19, 26–7, 60, 76, 86, 94, 95–7 and the habitual 83, 94, 133, 227 Aestheticism 7 as human task 8, 26, 132, 179, 205, 229 Alcestis Press, The 31, 36, 49, 55, 56, 155 and idealism. See philosophy for ‘idealism’ Altieri, Charles 6, 23, 26–7, 28, 80, 134, 142 and inhumanity 8, 138, 203 Arensberg, Walter 218 and mediation 76, 94, 98, 134, 163, 170, 172, Ariadne 126, 127–9 174, 180, 183, 199 Armory Show, The 209, 212 and mental processes 5 Arnold, Matthew 80, 81 and metaphor 103, 176–8, 185–203 Arp, Jean 213–14 misunderstandings concerning 4, 9, 133 art and art-collecting.
    [Show full text]
  • 'Bordeaux to Yucatan': Stevens's French Connections Tony Sharpe
    ‘Bordeaux to Yucatan’: Stevens’s French Connections Tony Sharpe Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug… (CPP 53)1 I suppose that most Stevens aficionados know these lines by heart; and as the beginning of what is probably his most anthologised poem, they are likely also to be familiar to a broader readership. Familiarity may not breed contempt, in this instance, but it might desensitise us to what remains surprising about the opening of ‘Sunday Morning’. Stevens’s catalogue, starting with a pluralised abstract noun, ‘complacencies’, moving to more particularised items in a scene that still has about it a potential for being generalised (we all know, the inference seems to be, what it is to yield to that leisurely coffee, those oranges, that sun-warmed chair), then unexpectedly culminates in a specific that combines abstract with concrete, ‘the green freedom of a cockatoo/ Upon a rug’. This, as Keats said of his Grecian Urn, teases us into thought: is this exotic bird a released parrot or a figure in the carpet, and if the latter, in what sense is it free, and in what sense can its ‘freedom’ be ‘green’? If we think it is an actual cockatoo, then ‘green’ could be a transferred epithet, albeit one which retains some strangeness, by assigning colour to an abstract noun. All these items listed serve, we learn, to counteract ‘The holy hush of ancient sacrifice’: and so the poem goes on to explore the implications of its title.
    [Show full text]
  • The Creation of Space for Engaged Reading and Creative Interpretation in the Collected Works of Wallace Stevens
    Cleveland State University EngagedScholarship@CSU ETD Archive 2017 The Creation of Space for Engaged Reading and Creative Interpretation in the Collected Works of Wallace Stevens Lauren Cannavino Cleveland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/etdarchive Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! Recommended Citation Cannavino, Lauren, "The Creation of Space for Engaged Reading and Creative Interpretation in the Collected Works of Wallace Stevens" (2017). ETD Archive. 1010. https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/etdarchive/1010 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by EngagedScholarship@CSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in ETD Archive by an authorized administrator of EngagedScholarship@CSU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE CREATION OF SPACE FOR ENGAGED READING AND CREATIVE INTERPRETATION IN THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WALLACE STEVENS Lauren Cannavino Bachelor of Arts in English Cleveland State University December 2006 Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH at CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY December 2017 THIS THESIS IS HEREBY APPROVED FOR Lauren Cannavino candidate for the Master of Arts degree in English for the Department of English & CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY’S College of Graduate Studies by ____________________________________________________ Thesis Chairperson, Dr. Frederick J. Karem _______________________________________
    [Show full text]
  • Elizabeth Bishop's New York Notebook, 1934-1937 Loretta Blasko
    What It Means To Be Modem: Elizabeth Bishop’s New York Notebook, 1934-1937 Loretta Blasko Presented to the American Culture Faculty at the University of Michigan-Flint in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Masters of Liberal Studies in American Culture May 4, 2006 First Reader Second Reader, Blasko ii Acknowledgements A special thanks to: Sandra Barry of Halifax, Nova Scotia, for your knowledge in all things E.B. and your encouragement; Susan Fleming of Flint, Michigan, for your friendship and going the distance with me; Dr. J. Zeff and Dr. J. Furman, for your patience and guidance; Andrew Manser of Chicago, Kevin Blasko and Katherine Blasko of Holly, Michigan, my children, for pushing me forward; Alice Ann Sterling Manser, my mother, for your love and support. Blasko Contents Acknowledgements, ii Forward, vi Introduction, x Part I 1934 Chapter 1. The Water That Subdues, 1 Cuttyhunk Island. Chapter 2. It Came to Her Suddenly , 9 New York, Boris Goudinov , Faust , The House o f Greed. Chapter 3. Spring Lobsters, 20 The Aquarium, the gem room at the Museum of Natural Science, Hart Crane’s “Essay Modem Poetry,” Wilenski’s The Modern Movement in Art, John Dryden’s plays. Chapter 4. The Captive Bushmaster, 34 Marianne Moore’s “The Frigate Pelican,” Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, and Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises . Chapter 5. That Face Needs a Penny Piece of Candy, 54 Henry James’s Wings o f the Dove, What Maisie Knew, and A Small Boy and Others, The U.S.A. School of Writing, Salvador Dali. Blasko Part II 1935 Chapter 6.
    [Show full text]
  • R This Dissertation Has Been 63-4676 M Icrofilm Ed Exactly As Received
    r This dissertation has been 63-4676 microfilmed exactly as received LORD, Georgianna Wuletich, 1931— THE ANNIHILATION OF ART IN THE POETRY OF WALLACE STEVENS. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1962 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan significant value. All of its efforts, therefore, are to make the un­ real— that in which the imagination desires to believe— real and therefore worthy of belief. Stevens’ poetry and thought, then,springs from a dialectic between the imagination and reality, both of which are, in their most basic sense, internalized in the mind as wish (aspiration) and reason. Wish Implies the urge toward pleasure; reason, toward common sense and logic. Wish is the impulse toward grace; reason, toward gravity. Stevens believed that the dialectic between reality and the imagination is endless, that there is a war in the mind that will never end because the mind's desire to satisfy itself will never be fulfilled. Indeed, the major premise of Stevens' thought is that the wish of the imagination will never be ful­ filled. Underlying that major premise is a clash of irreconcilable desires: the desire to achieve fulfillment; the desire to be discon­ tent. Put another way, it is the desire to believe and the inability to (desire not to) believe. The imagination and reality enjoy a temporary armistice whenever each new wish postulated by the imagination is momentarily refined and sanctioned by reason, instead of being denied categorically. Ihat tem­ porary armistice is, as Stevens writes in "The Necessary Angel," a bal­ ance of imagination and reality (imagination and reason).
    [Show full text]
  • Fall 2004 the Wallace Stevens Journal
    The Wallace Stevens Journal The Wallace The Wallace Stevens Journal Special Conference Issue, Part 1 Special Conference Vol. 28 No. 2Fall 2004 Vol. Special Conference Issue, Part 1 A Publication of The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Volume 28 Number 2 Fall 2004 The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 28 Number 2 Fall 2004 Contents Special Conference Issue, Part I Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecticut Edited by Glen MacLeod and Charles Mahoney Introduction —Glen MacLeod and Charles Mahoney 125 POETS ON STEVENS: INQUIRY AND INFLUENCE A Postcard Concerning the Nature of the Imagination —Mark Doty 129 Furious Calm —Susan Howe 133 Line-Endings in Wallace Stevens —James Longenbach 138 On Wallace Stevens —J. D. McClatchy 141 A Lifetime of Permissions —Ellen Bryant Voigt 146 NEW PERSPECTIVES ON STEVENS Planets on Tables: Stevens, Still Life, and the World —Bonnie Costello 150 Wallace Stevens and the Curious Case of British Resistance —George Lensing 158 Cross-Dressing as Stevens Cross-Dressing —Lisa M. Steinman 166 STEVENSIAN LANGUAGE “A Book Too Mad to Read”: Verbal and Erotic Excess in Harmonium —Charles Berger 175 Place-Names in Wallace Stevens —Eleanor Cook 182 Verbs of Mere Being: A Defense of Stevens’ Style —Roger Gilbert 191 WALLACE STEVENS AND HISTORICISM: PRO AND CON Stevens’ Soldier Poems and Historical Possibility —Milton J. Bates 203 What’s Historical About Historicism? —Alan Filreis 210 Wallace Stevens and Figurative Language: Pro and Con —James Longenbach 219 THE COLLECTED POEMS: THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS Prologues to Stevens Criticism in Fifty Years —John N. Serio 226 The Collected Poems: The Next Fifty Years —Susan Howe 231 Wallace Stevens and Two Types of Vanity —Massimo Bacigalupo 235 Position Paper: Wallace Stevens —Christian Wiman 240 Stevens’ Collected Poems in 2054 —Marjorie Perloff 242 KEYNOTE ADDRESS Wallace Stevens: Memory, Dead and Alive —Helen Vendler 247 THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM Poets of Life and the Imagination: Wallace Stevens and Chick Austin —Eugene R.
    [Show full text]
  • Selecting Three Poems by W. Stevens: a Roundtable Discussion
    University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Poetics Studies Papers Department of English 10-2009 Selecting Three Poems by W. Stevens: A Roundtable Discussion Alan Filreis University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/poetics_papers Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Filreis, Alan, "Selecting Three Poems by W. Stevens: A Roundtable Discussion" (2009). Poetics Studies Papers. 3. https://repository.upenn.edu/poetics_papers/3 Excerpt reprinted from: George S. Lensing, J. Donald Blount, Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, Stephen Burt, Eleanor Cook, Alan Filreis. Selecting Three Poems by W. Stevens: A Roundtable Discussion. The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 33, no. 2 (Fall 2009), pg. 238-257 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/poetics_papers/3 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Selecting Three Poems by W. Stevens: A Roundtable Discussion Abstract Three poems by Stevens indicate a particular aesthetic predicament, expressions of near-cessation: "Mozart, 1935," "The Man with the Blue Guitar," and "The Plain Sense of Things." In the third poem, the imagination re-emerges at precisely the point of its termination. In the second, the poet ventures into pure sound just when an ideological model for the poem collapses. In the first, the poem is the esultr of a dodge on the matter of others' pain. Keywords poetry, poetics, Wallace Stevens, modernism, sound poetry Disciplines Literature in English, North America Comments Excerpt reprinted from: George S. Lensing, J. Donald Blount, Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, Stephen Burt, Eleanor Cook, Alan Filreis. Selecting Three Poems by W. Stevens: A Roundtable Discussion.
    [Show full text]