Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T10:38:54.754Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 29 - The Romantic and Anti-Romantic in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

from Part III - Forms of Modernism, 1900–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2014

Alfred Bendixen
Affiliation:
Princeton University, New Jersey
Stephen Burt
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

Wallace Stevens's poem makes a greater claim: the earth is held as the object of his perfect and compulsory love. His loathing of things as they are points to the future modernist's need to transform them through the projection of his imagination. Notably missing from his list of consolations is religion itself, although he was still taking communion. In the early journal entry already cited, Stevens defined his five consolations namely love, nature, friendship, work and phantasy. Each was posited on the foundation of physical well-being, there being nothing good in the world except it. By the time he wrote Yellow Afternoon, Stevens seemed to possess the consolations only of nature and phantasy. Stevens's renewed romanticism, always followed by its accompanying disavowals and reconstitutions, evolving into his own amassing grand poem and marking his unique testimony to modernism in the last century.
Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×