Starting from Wallace Stevens’s own reflections on newness and its dynamic interchange with what comes before, the introduction explains how The New Wallace Stevens Studies is different from and complementary with previous edited volumes on the poet. After accounting for the selection of topics and contributors, it offers individual chapter summaries that simultaneously elucidate the volume’s tripartite rationale. The first group of essays explores concepts that have begun to emerge in Stevens criticism, from imperialism and colonialism to the poet’s utopian politics, his ideas about community-building and audience, his secularism, and his transnationalism. In the second part, contributors apply recent methodological and theoretical advances that have left a prominent mark on literary studies but not yet on Stevens scholarship. These include world literature, ecocriticism, urban studies, queer studies, intersectional thinking, and cognitive literary studies. Contributions to the final part reassess and deepen our understanding of issues that have long inspired critics. Here investigations include Stevens’s reception by later poets, his attitude toward modern fiction, different modes of his poetic thinking, aspects of his rhetoric and style, and his lyrical ethics.

What happens when, with the knowledge and insights gained from queer studies and relevant biographical and historical scholarship, one tries to resituate Stevens not only within the aesthetic circles that may be drawn around his work but also and especially within the social circles in which he moved during his lifetime, and the poetic circles of those who have been attracted to his writings? To diversify the types of scholarship presented in The New Wallace Stevens Studies, Eeckhout’s chapter tilts more toward the biographical than other chapters do. From the new modernist studies, its investigation derives an interest in social networks at the expense of a narrow focus on self-reliant individuals; from queer studies, it borrows a fundamentally querying spirit about sexual identities and desires. Eeckhout offers a bird’s-eye survey of Stevens’s most significant queer precursors, contemporaries, and heirs, paying particular attention to the latter two groups. As case studies, he singles out Stevens’s friendships with George Santayana and José Rodríguez Feo, in which not-knowing played a central role, and the attractiveness of his licensing the fictive imagination to poets such as James Merrill and Richard Howard.

This chapter examines how writers have spatialized and dramatized the psychology of hope and desire that drives so many New Yorkers lives through scenes of arrival. This literary motif stages a recognizable, affectively charged moment in which the individual first confronts the emblem of twentieth-century technological modernity. New York in such instances stands for the Modern City, the solidly material emanation and at the same time figurative torchbearer of a new century. Into this cityscape, ready for mutual love, the individual arrives propelled, like an inexorably moving train, by desire.

Among the great modernist poets in English, it is T. S. Eliot who, on the face of it, can lay most claim to being a philosophical poet. After all, Eliot is the only poet of his generation to have enjoyed an extensive academic training in philosophy. He even wrote a doctoral dissertation in the field. Yet, in spite of this professional training and its patent influence on especially his late masterwork, Four Quartets, it is not Eliot who has gone down in history as the most philosophical of modernist poets in English. That honor has been bestowed on another Harvard student from around the turn of the twentieth century: Wallace Stevens.

This may seem strange to anyone who still associates the name of Stevens with that of a reclusive lawyer working in the insurance industry and a playful, dandy-like poet indulging in the most sophisticated verbal jugglery. The claim to fame becomes even stranger if one takes a quick look at this poet's collection of aphorisms, “Adagia,” only to come across antagonizing proclamations of the following sort: “The poet must not adapt his experience to that of the philosopher” (909). Or, more provocatively still: “Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them” (906). In a letter of 1951 to the young scholar Bernard Heringman, Stevens can be seen to mount the same warhorse when he goes on to claim, “I have never studied systematic philosophy and should be bored to death at the mere thought of doing so” (L 636). So how could this man be considered the most philosophical among modernist poets in English?