Poetry and Poetics After Wallace Stevens

by Eeckhout, Bart; Goldfarb, Lisa

• ISBN13: 9781501313486
• ISBN10: 1501313487
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-11-17
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

As the figure of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) becomes so entrenched in the Modernist canon that he serves as a major reference point for poets and critics alike, the time has come to investigate poetry and poetics after him. The ambiguity of the preposition is intentional: while after may refer neutrally to chronological sequence, it also implies ways of aesthetically modeling poetry on a predecessor. Likewise, the general heading of poetry and poetics allows the sixteen contributors to this volume to range far and wide in terms of poetics (from postwar formalists to poets associated with various strands of Postmodernism, Language poetry, even Confessional poetry), ethnic identities (with a diverse selection of poets of color), nationalities (including the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and several English poets), or language (sidestepping into French and Czech poetry).

Besides offering a rich harvest of concrete case studies, Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens also reconsiders possibilities for talking about poetic influence. How can we define and refine the ways in which we establish links between earlier and later poems? At what level of abstraction do such links exist? What have we learned from debates about competing poetic eras and traditions? How is our understanding of an older writer reshaped by engaging with later ones? And what are we perhaps not paying attention to-aesthetically, but also politically, historically, thematically-when we relate contemporary poetry to someone as idiosyncratic as Stevens?

Author Biography

Bart Eeckhout is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He is editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal, author of Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (2002), and co-editor of Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (2008), Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism (2012), and five special issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal.

Lisa Goldfarb is Associate Professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, USA. She is President of The Wallace Stevens Society, Associate Editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal, author of The Figure Concealed: Wallace Stevens, Music, and Valéryan Echoes (2011), and co-editor of Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism (2012) and two special issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations

1. Introduction: After Stevens
Bart Eeckhout (University of Antwerp, Belgium) & Lisa Goldfarb (New York University, USA)
2. Frost or Stevens? Servants of Two Masters
Bonnie Costello (Boston University, USA)
3. The Strands of Modernism: Stevens beside the Seaside
Lee M. Jenkins (University College Cork, Ireland)
4. Hearing Stevens in Sylvia Plath
Bart Eeckhout (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
5. Moving the “Moo” from Stevensian Blank Verse: Elizabeth Bishop's Use of Prose
Angus Cleghorn (Seneca College, Canada)
6. Henri Michaux's Elsewhere through the Lens of Stevens' Poetic Theory
Axel Nesme (University of Lyon, France)
7. Stevens across the Iron Curtain
Justin Quinn (University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic)
8. Stevens and Seamus Heaney
George S. Lensing (University of North Carolina, USA)
9. The Not So Noble Rider: Stevens, Oppen, Glück
Edward Ragg (Tsinghua University, China)
10. The Stevens Wars
Al Filreis (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
11. Stevens' Musical Legacy: “The Huge, High Harmony”
Lisa Goldfarb (Gallatin School, New York University, USA)
12. “Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds”: Stevens, Susan Howe, and the Souls of the Labadie Tract
Joan Richardson (Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA)
13. How John Ashbery Modified Stevens' Uses of “As”
Charles Altieri (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
14. Silly to Be Serious: Lateness and the Question of Late Style in Stevens and A. R. Ammons
Juliette Utard (University of Paris-Sorbonne, France)
15. Unanticipated Readers
Lisa M. Steinman (Reed College, USA)
16. “This Song Is for My Foe”: Olive Senior and Terrance Hayes Rewrite Stevens
Rachel Galvin (University of Chicago, USA)
17. “The California Fruit of the Ideal”: Stevens and Robert Hass
Rachel Malkin (University of Oxford, UK)

Notes on Contributors
Index