By Jacek Gutorow
As Wallace Stevens as soon as wrote, «a poem could be a part of one’s feel of life». This booklet presents a list of readerly and demanding explorations of the poems and lifetime of the yank poet. the writer reads Stevens’s poems within the context of either the prevailing serious works and the commentaries supplied via the poet himself (essays, letters, occasional notes and posthumous texts), and goals to turn out that his creative improvement used to be proficient via contradictory existential tasks: teleological, according to Stevens’s assumption of a better self which in its flip is helping to light up the that means and dynamics of the particular life, and important, showing on the very second whilst one questions his or her id and assumes existence to be an open and unfinished approach.
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Extra info for Luminous Traversing: Wallace Stevens and the American Sublime (Katowice Interdisciplinary and Comparative Studies: Literature, Anthropology and Culture, Volume 2)
Sample text
Nevertheless, equally invigorating and important are the workings of fancy. ” 48 Chapter Two “The Comedian as the Letter C”** is a poem in which Stevens not only revaluated and redefined the Coleridgean notions but also insisted on the American-ness of imagination and fancy as due to a new concept of the Sublime. This bizarre work has attracted a lot of critical attention much of which has been directed to explaining the poem’s ambiguities and obscurities. Its first readers seemed perplexed and hardly knew what to do with Stevens’s tormented diction.
In the three essays, Stevens was preoccupied with a theory of the imagination as something absolutely central to the human condition, its essence as well as its non plus ultra. His late poetry cannot be understood without reflecting on the 32 Chapter Two poet’s growing fascination with how the everyday world and the imaginative moment overlap. But the same may be said about Stevens’s first volume. ” If the Harmonium poems are fragmentary and tentative, both in poetic register and topical references, then the essays constitute a relatively consistent and coherent examination of the basic critical and aesthetic notions, and give us numerous perspectives from which we can evaluate his early poems.
Apparently, this seems to be a poem of imagination – critics have compared Stevens’s jar to Keats’s Grecian urn and remarked that both poems may be approached as metaphors. B. Kirby, for example, interpreted the jar as “a worthy symbol of creative imagination” (qtd in Merivale, 527; see also Krieger 126). Accordingly, the jar becomes a symbol or a metaphor, and it may be interpreted according to the traditional protocols of hermeneutics or New Criticism. This is also true of Yvor Winters’s interesting point (qtd in Merivale, 527) that the poem is basically about sterility and corruption – such a negative stance is also embedded in the conventional New Critical matrix as it neglects linguistic ambiguities and contradictions that subvert the poem’s semantic coherence.