Poetic Responses

Andrew Epstein

doi:10.1017/9781108973946.013

Chapter 12 - Poetic Responses

from Part III - Revisionary Readings of Stevens

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2021

Andrew Epstein

Edited by

Bart Eeckhout and

Gül Bilge Han

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Bart Eeckhout: Affiliation:
Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium
Gül Bilge Han: Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden

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Summary

Epstein’s chapter challenges the tendency to overlook the significance of Wallace Stevens—and his characteristic idiom, poetics, and philosophical concerns—to the postwar avant-garde movement known as the New York School of poets. This neglect of Stevens as an important precursor causes problems in both directions: it unnecessarily limits our sense of New York School poetry, which can too easily be reduced to a chatty, pop-culture-infused poetry of urban daily life, while simultaneously reinforcing the distorted image of Stevens as a stuffy, backward-looking aesthete, devoted solely to abstraction and imagination. Epstein suggests that, for all their differences, Stevens and the New York School poets share a great deal: an obsession with painting and a passion for all things French; a delight in wordplay and the sensuous surfaces of language; an anti-foundational skepticism toward fixity in self, language, or idea; and, perhaps most of all, an embrace of the imagination and deep attraction to the surreal combined with a devotion to the ordinary and everyday.

Keywords

Wallace Stevens influence avant-garde New York School John Ashbery Frank O’Hara Kenneth Koch James Schuyler Barbara Guest Ted Berrigan

Type: Chapter
Information: The New Wallace Stevens Studies , pp. 161 - 173

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108973946.013 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2021

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