Book contents
- The New Wallace Stevens Studies
- Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
- The New Wallace Stevens Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- IntroductionThat Which Is Always Beginning
- Part IEmerging Concepts in Stevens Criticism
- Part IIRecent Critical Methods Applied to Stevens
- Part IIIRevisionary Readings of Stevens
- Chapter 12Poetic Responses
- Chapter 13Poetic Fiction
- Chapter 14Poetic Thinking
- Chapter 15Constructive Disorderings
- Chapter 16Manner and Manners
- Chapter 17Lyrical Ethics
- Index
- References
Chapter 12 - Poetic Responses
from Part III - Revisionary Readings of Stevens
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2021
Book contents
- The New Wallace Stevens Studies
- Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
- The New Wallace Stevens Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- IntroductionThat Which Is Always Beginning
- Part IEmerging Concepts in Stevens Criticism
- Part IIRecent Critical Methods Applied to Stevens
- Part IIIRevisionary Readings of Stevens
- Chapter 12Poetic Responses
- Chapter 13Poetic Fiction
- Chapter 14Poetic Thinking
- Chapter 15Constructive Disorderings
- Chapter 16Manner and Manners
- Chapter 17Lyrical Ethics
- Index
- References
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
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The New Wallace Stevens Studies , pp. 161 - 173Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
References
Works Cited
Altieri, Charles. “How John Ashbery Modified Stevens’ Uses of ‘As.’” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Eeckhout and Goldfarb, pp. 183–200.Google Scholar
Berrigan, Ted Dear Sandy, Hello: Letters from Ted to Sandy Berrigan. Coffee House Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 1973. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold “The Charity of the Hard Moments.” John Ashbery: Modern Critical Views, edited by Bloom, , Chelsea House, 1985, pp. 49–80.Google Scholar
Eeckhout, Bart, and Goldfarb, Lisa. “Introduction: After Stevens.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Eeckhout and Goldfarb, pp. 1–11.Google Scholar
Eeckhout, Bart, and Goldfarb, Lisa editors. Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens. Bloomsbury, 2017.Google Scholar
Epstein, Andrew. Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture. Oxford UP, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Andrew Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry. Oxford UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Epstein, Andrew “‘The Rhapsody of Things as They Are’: Stevens, Francis Ponge, and the Impossible Everyday.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 47–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Filreis, Alan. “Coda: Wallace Stevens of the New York School.” Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism, edited by Lisa Goldfarb and Bart Eeckhout, Routledge, 2012, pp. 163–69.Google Scholar
Filreis, Alan “Later Poets.” Wallace Stevens in Context, edited by MacLeod, pp. 120–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldfarb, Lisa, and Eeckhout, Bart. “Introduction: Back at the Waldorf?” Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism, edited by Goldfarb, and Eeckhout, , Routledge, 2012, pp. 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Golding, Alan. “The ‘Community of Elements’ in Wallace Stevens and Louis Zukofsky.” Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernism, edited by Gelpi, Albert, Cambridge UP, 1985, pp. 120–40.Google Scholar
Golding, Alan From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry. U of Wisconsin P, 1995.Google Scholar
Harvey, Giles. “Fall Preview: Poet John Ashbery Makes His Elliptical Way into Library of America.” The Village Voice, 4 Sep. 2008, www.villagevoice.com/2008/09/04/fall-preview-poet-john-ashbery-makes-his-elliptical-way-into-library-of-america/.Google Scholar
Janssen, Lesley. “Triangulating Poetics: Late Wallace Stevens and a New York School.” Modern Language Review, vol. 110, no. 4, Oct. 2015, pp. 992–1010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jarraway, David. Wallace Stevens Among Others: Diva-Dames, Deleuze, and American Culture. McGill-Queens UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Keller, Lynn. Re-Making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition. Cambridge UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Kenner, Hugh. A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers. Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.Google Scholar
Koch, Kenneth Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry. Simon & Schuster, 1998.Google Scholar
Ladkin, Sam. “Frank O’Hara’s Ecstatic Elegy: ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ in Memory Wallace Stevens.” Blackbox Manifold, vol. 10, 2013, pp. 1–43.Google Scholar
Lehman, David, editor. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. Doubleday, 1998.Google Scholar
O’Hara, Frank Standing Still and Walking in New York. Edited by Allen, Donald, Grey Fox, 1975.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” 1982. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition, Northwestern UP, 1996, pp. 1–32.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie “‘Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?’ Revisited.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, Fall 2002, pp. 135–42.Google Scholar
Phillips, Siobhan. “Stevens and an Everyday New York School.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 94–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, Joan. “‘Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds’: Stevens, Susan Howe, and the Souls of the Labadie Tract.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Eeckhout and Goldfarb, pp. 171–82.Google Scholar
Roffman, Karin. The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017.Google Scholar
Schuyler, James The Diary of James Schuyler. Edited by Kernan, Nathan, Black Sparrow, 1997.Google Scholar
Schuyler, James Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951–1991. Edited by Corbett, William, Turtle Point P, 2004.Google Scholar
Serio, John N., editor. The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens. Cambridge UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Shapiro, David. John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry. Columbia UP, 1979.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverberg, Mark. The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Between Radical Art and Radical Chic. Ashgate, 2010.Google Scholar
Stevens, Wallace. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Kermode, Frank and Richardson, Joan, Library of America, 1997.Google Scholar
Stitt, Peter A. “The Art of Poetry XXXIII: John Ashbery.” Interview. The Paris Review, no. 90, Winter 1983, pp. 30–59.Google Scholar
Ward, Geoff. Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poetry. St. Martin’s P, 1993.Google Scholar
Accessibility standard: Unknown
Why this information is here
This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.Accessibility Information
Accessibility compliance for the HTML of this chapter is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.