Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and WritingUniversity of Missouri Press, 2002 - 303 pages Often considered America's greatest twentieth-century poet, Wallace Stevens is without a doubt the Anglo-modernist poet whose work has been most scrutinized from a philosophical perspective. Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing both synthesizes and extends the critical understanding of Stevens's poetry in this respect. Arguing that a concern with the establishment and transgression of limits goes to the heart of this poet's work, Bart Eeckhout traces both the limits of Stevens's poetry and the limits of writing as they are explored by that poetry. Stevens's work has been interpreted so variously and contradictorily that critics must first address the question of limits to the poetry's signifying potential before they can attempt to deepen our appreciation of it. In the first half of this book, the limits of appropriating and contextualizing Stevens's "The Snow Man," in particular, are investigated. Eeckhout does not undertake this reading with the negative purpose of disputing earlier interpretations but with the more positive intention of identifying the intrinsic qualities of the poetry that have been responsible for the remarkable amount of critical attention it has received. |
Contents
1 | |
Chapter 1 | 35 |
Chapter 4 | 44 |
Chapter 5 | 56 |
PART | 133 |
Chapter 8 | 155 |
Between the Senses of Sense | 184 |
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Common terms and phrases
abstract aesthetic American argues become behold Bevis called consciousness context deconstruction Eleanor Cook Eliot Emerson epistemological Essays experience fact feeling Filreis final Frank Kermode Frank Lentricchia Harold Bloom Hartman Helen Vendler Hillis Miller human Idea of Order imagination Imre Salusinszky interpretation intertextual Jacques Derrida James Longenbach Key West letter limits lines Literary Canons Literature Longenbach lyric Maeder meaning meditative metaphysical Mind of Winter Modern Motive for Metaphor nature Newcomb Nietzsche Northrop Frye object paradox pears perception philosophical Plain Sense pleasure poem's poet poet's poetic Poirier possible potential question quoted R. P. Blackmur readers reading Stevens reality resistance rhetorical Richard Poirier romantic Schopenhauer Sense of Things Snow sound stanza Stevens criticism Stevens's poetry Suberchicot sublime Supreme Fiction T. S. Eliot textual theoretical theory thought tion University Press voice Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens Journal William wind Word-Play Word-War writing