ABSTRACT: Wallace Stevens's poetics may be read fruitfully through the lens of Aristotelian ethics with an eye to their differences. Whereas Aristotle situates human flourishing in contemplative participation in the divine, Stevens reimagines virtuous happiness as inseparable from human embodiment, limitation, and even disability, positioning these conditions as fundamental rather than exceptional. By integrating deviation, weakness, and mortality into his vision of the divine, Stevens constructs a philosophical anthropology that treats disability as central to both human life and poetic creation.

ABSTRACT: Wallace Stevens's awareness and rejection of his sexism in his earlier works, and even within his own psyche, proves to be more extensive and elaborate than previously thought. Drawing upon insights gleaned from Sandra Gilbert and their curious affinity with Sigmund Freud's famous formulation of the id, ego, and super-ego as having specific gendered consequences, this essay traces Stevens's growing acceptance of the feminine principle and rejection of Freud's masculinist rhetoric, most particularly in the essays written during and after World War II. His final admiration of Simone Weil leads him to "decreate," quite deliberately, many of his best-known works, as well as the very late and often overlooked poem "Two Letters."

ABSTRACT: Wallace Stevens’s “Lebensweisheitspielerei,” a late poem with a German title, exemplifies his spirituality of presence as it focuses on life as a concept. The poet’s spiritual development gave rise to a spontaneous, improvisatory impulse to play that celebrates presence and calls into question the apparent bleakness of his earlier poems. Stevens’s search for a “sun of fuller fire” is related to the Hegelian dialectic and Charles Altieri’s recent attempt to secularize Hegel in Stevensian criticism.

ABSTRACT: It remains to be seen whether the GDR as a Leseland was more a wish of cultural policy than a reality, but it did produce some remarkable editorial achievements. These include the Weiße Reihe of twentieth-century poetry from around the world. The fact that Wallace Stevens did not appear in it until more than twenty years after his appearance in the West German edition, from which numerous translations were taken, may have banal causes or indicate a delayed hospitality. In any case, the censorship reports show how hard the experts tried to read both the author and the poems through the lens of socialist realism, which over time had become an empty phrase for a concept that remained valid.

Reviewed by: Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity by Ian Tan Krzysztof Ziarek Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity. By Ian Tan. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Ian Tan’s book is the first extended study of Wallace Stevens devoted almost entirely to the conversation of Stevens’s poetic oeuvre with Martin Heidegger’s ideas about poetry, dwelling, and the event (das Ereignis). What sets the study apart from other scholarly books or essays that explore the relation between Stevens and Heidegger is, first, the comprehensive nature of Tan’s treatment of Stevens, which begins with Harmonium and proceeds all the way to the last poems from 1954–55; and second, the focus on Heidegger’s notion of the Ereignis. It is indeed the Ereignis that constitutes not only the pivot of Tan’s presentation of Heidegger but also the prism for his extensive analysis of Stevens’s poetry. The linchpin of Tan’s argument finds its explicit articulation in the section title “The Appropriative ‘Force’ of Ereignis and Poetry” (15). While many critical texts highlight the proximity (of poetic interests) between Stevens’s late poetry and Heidegger’s thought, Tan argues for adopting the Heideggerian lens for both early and late poems by Stevens. Such a lens does not mean that Heidegger’s work provides a rigid interpretative framework but rather that the understanding of the event as an opening to being (beyond metaphysical ideas and figurations) can be traced throughout Stevens’s poems and his reflections on poetry. Chapter 1, which serves as the Introduction, locates Stevens, and more broadly the relation of poetry and philosophy, in the context of phenomenology [End Page 117] and post-phenomenological thought (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Nancy, among others), with the emphasis on the quasi-transcendental sense of presence elaborated there. The book patterns its approach after “the phenomenological significance of poetry in order to read Stevens’ poetic output as dramatisations of Heideggerian appropriations of Being” (16). This approach is developed in chapters 2 and 3, first by reexamining how Stevens and Heidegger can be read in conversation and then by outlining the significance of later Heidegger’s thought, especially about the event, for reading Stevens. Subsequent chapters trace the arc from Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium, through the relation between poetry and politics in the 1930s, to the idea of the Supreme Fiction, and the question of being in the late poetry. Some of the most interesting insights come in chapter 4, “Considering Presence and Place in Stevens’ Harmonium,” and in particular the discussion of poems like “Sunday Morning” and “The Comedian as the Letter C,” which are rarely studied in the context of scholarship inspired by phenomenological thought and which are presented by Tan in terms of “poetic appropriations” of being, anchored in Heidegger’s discussion of the event and poetic dwelling. What is novel, at least to my knowledge, is that the reading of those early poems focuses on tracing proximity to being in terms of a non-metaphysical sense of presence evoked in them. Tan’s claim is that these approximations of being eschew the subject-object divide and move away from the representational view of language. Perhaps the most characteristic reading for this chapter comes in the section entitled “‘Sunday Morning’ and the Post-Metaphysical Poem” (73–75), in which Tan characterizes the poem’s crucial theme in terms of freedom toward “an authentic attunement facing Being and our possibilities to be” (75). While I like the emphasis on the relation to being, a more developed analysis of Stevens’s language in the poem, tracing its “post-metaphysical” openings, would be important in this context. Chapter 5 examines the contentious interpretations of Stevens’s relation to politics, trying to nuance the approach to the political dimension of poetic writing, especially given Stevens’s predilection toward abstraction, which is often discounted as divorced from historical reality or uninterested in contemporaneous affairs. Tan’s position is that politics in Stevens does not manifest in terms of commitment, critique, or commentary but makes itself known through transforming our relation to the world by means of the imagination. In this manner, poetry “opens up...

As If in a Book: Everyday Reading in Stevens Nora Pehrson When I complain of the “bareness”—I have in mind, very often, the effect of order and regularity, the effect of moving in a groove. . . . But books make up. They shatter the groove, as far as the mind is concerned. They are like so many fantastic lights filling plain darkness with strange colors. —Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie Moll, January 17, 1909 “OFTEN WHEN I am writing poetry,” Wallace Stevens explained in a 1949 letter to Barbara Church, “I have in mind an image of reading a page of a large book” (L 642). Unsurprisingly, therefore, meta-readerly scenes occur from first to last in Stevens’s verse, and they illustrate his changing ideas not just about the lyric but about creativity itself. “[W]hat one ought to find” in poetry, Stevens insisted in the same letter, “is normal life, insight into the commonplace, reconciliation with every-day reality” (L 643). His own solitary reading practice afforded him the simultaneous grounding and revelatory moments of insight necessary to sustain a generative relationship to “every-day reality,” or to the outward, communal world inhabited by his readers. Like a flash of brilliance, or a sudden illumination of strange and fantastic colored lights, his immersion in a text, as he saw it, could constitute “a momentary existence on an exquisite plane” (CPP 786). It could bring about a state of heightened receptivity and attentiveness—one that would ultimately wane but that left his sense of himself and of the environment beyond the text invigorated and transformed. For Stevens, the ordinary habit of reading was a means of opening up to the extraordinary value and artistic potential latent in the everyday—an accessible and reliable way of prompting creative discovery, but also, secondarily, of connecting with his actual readership. In the pages that follow, I first consider, briefly, Stevens’s private reading habits by way of his journal entries and personal correspondence. Then, I turn my attention to a group of six poems that focus specifically on the activity of reading: “The Reader,” “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light,” “The Lack of Repose,” “The House Was Quiet and the World [End Page 48] Was Calm,” “Large Red Man Reading,” and “The Novel.” Arising out of Stevens’s own reading practice, these poems, which depict and enact the experience of reading an absorbing and challenging text, elicit a parallel response in us, Stevens’s real-life readers, drawing us in as active collaborators in the textual process. This may seem contradictory, given that the poems, with one exception, evoke solitary figures reading in private spaces. Unobserved, unaccompanied, apparently indifferent to company, if these readers speak, it’s to themselves. Yet the solitary reading experiences in question are figured through various grammatical and rhetorical strategies—shifting pronouns, direct address, wordplay, and open-ended syntax—that are more suggestive of an interpersonal exchange. Stevens took his readers increasingly into account with each published volume—not by lessening the difficulty of his work, but by invoking the reading experience itself as a subject, thereby projecting his poetry outward to share his own habits and include his readers in the process. Using theories of the everyday, I will explore how Stevens’s collaborative stance—a result of his self-referential, open-ended, experimental lyricism—corresponds to his efforts to achieve an ongoing creative relationship to what he called the “normal”—that is, the shared, social, collective—experience of daily life. As a group, the reading poems remain an underappreciated part of Stevens’s work, one that has perhaps been overshadowed by the seemingly more ambitious aims of long poems such as “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Yet to focus on these particular poems about reading is to deepen our sense of Stevens as an artist, to see him afresh as a poet chiefly and principally devoted to connecting with his readership.1 Furthermore, isolating the reading poems as a unit helps us see Stevens—as Susan Howe and other contemporary poets do—as a forerunner of postmodern experimentalism and a precursor to the avant-garde interest in capturing and...

cows at night Lloyd Jacobs it is of little use to prove or disprovethe reality of an external worldexcept to know which valise to take ancients buried arms and provisionsfor the journey, postured the sojournerfor combat or for the hunt or for love the dream went on all my eighty yearsonce more I tried to shake free of itbut winding sheets entangled me until a minion of God or Satanstood above my restless bed roused meled me into the mid-summer night we stood at the meadow’s westerngate just beyond lay seven sad chewinggreat gravid passive cows dark silhouettes in rotund formthunderheads in bright moonscapedark and empty as my destination they stood in unison, gathered round melowing a tuneless fecund song untiltears wet my face. [End Page 105] Lloyd Jacobs Britton, Michigan Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press