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.

Although Wallace Stevens did not travel extensively outside the United States, his poetry is deeply concerned with expanding the boundaries of the poetic imagination to reach beyond its domestic and local settings. The desire to develop a poetics that is capable of establishing new nodes of interconnection between near and far places and cultures is palpable throughout Stevens’s oeuvre. Han’s chapter outlines and explores this aspect of Stevens’s poetry in view of recent theoretical interventions in literary transnationalism and global modernism. It argues that the poet’s exploration of diverse cultural materials and settings interrogates, rather than simply asserts, the border-traversing capacities of the poetic imagination. Stevens’s vision of artistic mobility and travel both displays a transnational aesthetic sensibility and reveals its moments of implosion; it explores at once the possibilities and limits of the imagination’s worldly affiliations and global circuits. The poet’s impulse toward national and cultural border crossings is composed of complex responses to the literary-political currents of his epoch, which range from the specific context of American nativism in the 1920s to more general developments of globalization and the Cold War.

Chapter 1 examines how Stevens’ poetry tackles the problem of autonomy by simultaneously registering the contradictory impulses of aesthetic separation and social engagement. It argues that a spatial dialectic between distance and intimacy, between solitude and community, forms a constitutive part in Stevens’ understanding of the relationship between poetic and social realms. The chapter links this aspect of Stevens’ poetics to Rancière’s discussion of art’s autonomy and heteronomy. It focuses on “Secret Man” and “Re-Statement of Romance” to show how the problem of autonomy, which seems at first to be centered on the isolation of the individual poet, signals a historically rooted crisis of verse sparked by the Depression. The trope of autonomy not only responds to the period’s prominent disputes over the social immediacy or the separate status of art. It also enables the poet to model alternative forms of lyric subjectivity that exceed the confines of a self-meditative horizon.

Chapter 2 traces the ways in which Stevens explores the autonomy and social function of poetry by constructing built environments and architectural archetypes. It discusses a wide range of poems from Ideas of Order and The Man with the Blue Guitar to highlight how Stevens engages in issues of poetry’s autonomy and its social function by means of making up places for poetry. His spatial formations operate with an impulse to project an independent aesthetic territory. Far from an instance of aesthetic indifference, the impulse to demarcate a separate space is motivated by a desire to envisage new forms of engagement with the period’s unsettling cultural and sociopolitical circumstances. The chapter teases out these forms of engagement in Stevens’ approach to the cultural debates over a “usable past,” his exploration of citizen-state relationship, his treatment of the poet’s fláneuresque connection to the city, and his vision of poetry’s relation to community.

Chapter 4 focuses on Stevens’ conception of autonomy with the purpose of reassessing his poetry’s relation to philosophy. Stevens not only thematizes this relation in his poetry, but also identifies the processes that decouple the reflective operations of poetic thinking from that of philosophy. The chapter explores this aspect of Stevens’ work from the 1930s and 1940s in dialogue with Badiou’s “inaesthetics,” which allows for a consideration of poetry as a site for thinking without the support or guidance of philosophical discourse. The notion of inaesthetics becomes the enabling occasion for a focus on the divergences, rather than the affinities, between Stevens and philosophy, and for a move to a historically contextualized understanding of his poetry’s resistance to the philosophical school of logical positivism. Stevens’ skepticism toward logical positivism must be added to the historical factors behind his increased emphasis on poetic autonomy from philosophy in his writing of this period.

Chapter 3 argues that Stevens’ imaginative compositions of collectivity and audience provide another vantage point from which to highlight the contextual dimensions of his poetics of autonomy. In his longest and most intricate poem, “Owl’s Clover,” Stevens explores both the potentials and limits of aesthetic separation and autonomy for imagining new forms of collective agency, including the working classes. This exploration unfolds in tension with the period’s political-artistic aspirations to the inclusive “rhetoric of the people.” Stevens’ search for an inclusive “common” or “civil fiction” leads to a complex questioning of the imagination’s potential to expand from a local to a global vision of collectivity. The chapter demonstrates how by acknowledging the ideological pressures (fascist war and colonialism) that impede the aesthetic creation of a globally inclusive model of communal presence, Stevens takes the further step of resisting them, to affirm the continual need of poetry for envisaging prospective forms of collective life.