The Ecology of Wallace Stevens: A Modernist and His Landscape

What does Wallace Stevens, giant of Modernist poetry in America, have to say to a twenty-first-century ecologist? Conversely, what does an ecologist have to say about re-reading a major poet through the lens of eco-criticism?... [ view full abstract ]

What does Wallace Stevens, giant of Modernist poetry in America, have to say to a twenty-first-century ecologist? Conversely, what does an ecologist have to say about re-reading a major poet through the lens of eco-criticism? My senior thesis research looks at the whole of Stevens' poetic oeuvre, from the short lyrics of Harmonium to his late and long poems of The Auroras of Autumn and The Rock, to re-assess how the New England landscape became part of the quest for what Stevens called "the supreme fiction" of poetry, art, and life. I take particular interest in the balance that Stevens creates between the archetypal and the specific in his visions of nature -- of the mountains and rivers that are as much a part of his literary imagination as his love of Cubist painting or Symbolist poetry. In doing so, I re-imagine Stevens not just as a "figure of capable imagination" as many critics have done in the past, but as a poet who goes beyond the innate limits of form to see the world outside, "more truly and more strange."