Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens

Eleanor Cook

Published by Princeton University Press 1988

Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens

Eleanor Cook

Volume 932 in the series Princeton Legacy Library

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400859665

Overview
Contents

About this book

In the first full-length study of Wallace Stevens's word-play, Eleanor Cook focuses on Stevens's skillful play with grammar, etymology, allusion, and other elements of poetry, and suggests ways in which this play offers a method of approaching his work. At the same time, this book is a general study of Stevens's poetry, moving from his earliest to his latest work, and includes close readings of three of his remarkable long poems--Esthetique du Mal, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. The chronological arrangement enables readers to follow Stevens's increasing skill and changing thought in three areas of his "poetry of the earth": the poetry of place, the poetry of eros, and the poetry of belief.

Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens shows how, in setting words at play and in conflict, Stevens could upset the usual relations of rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic, and thus the book contributes to the current debate about logical and a-logical uses of language. Cook also places Stevens within the larger context of Western literature, hearing how he speaks to Milton, Keats, and Wordsworth; to such American forebears as Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson; and to T. S. Eliot, his contemporary.

Originally published in 1988.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xv
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
I. Harmonium
1. Places, Common and Other: A Rhetoric of Beginning Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
2. The Play and War of Venus: Love Poems and Florida Poems Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	52
3. The Limits of Word-Play: The Comedian as the Letter C Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
4. The Ludus of Allusion: Poems of Voice and Death Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
5. Ways of Ending: Religious and Last Poems Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
II. Transition
6. A Rhetoric of Beginning Again: Ideas of Order Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
7. Concerning the Nature of Things: The Man with the Blue Guitar Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135
8. Against Synecdoche: Parts of a World Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	152
III. Transport to Summer
9. Transport and the Metaphor Poems Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
10. War and the Normal Sublime: Esthetique du Mal Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
11. Notes toward a Supreme Fiction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	214
IV. The Auroras and After
12. Commonplace Apocalypse: An Ordinary Evening in New Haven Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
13. Late Poems: Places, Common and Other Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	295
Index to Works by Wallace Stevens Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	315
General Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	318

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