ABOUT THIS BOOK

Bevis addresses the most puzzling and least studied aspect of Wallace Stevens’ poetry: detachment. Stevens’ detachment, often associated by readers with asceticism, bareness, or withdrawal, is one of the distinguishing and pervasive characteristics of Stevens’ poetic work. Bevis agues that this detachment is meditative and therefore experiential in origin. Moreover, the meditative Stevens of spare syntax and clear image is in constant tension with the romantic, imaginative Stevens of dazzling metaphors and exuberant flight. Indeed, for Bevis, Stevens is a poet not of imagination and reality, but of imagination and reality, but of imagination and meditation in relation to reality.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

William W. Bevis is emeritus professor of English at the University of Montana.

REVIEWS

“Bevis does an excellent job of discussing a difficult subject, an aconceptual state of consciousness for which the West lacks a decent vocabulary. He revises the polemics of Stevens criticism, especially by seeing the old reality vs. imagination dichotomy in an entirely new way. . . . Fascinating reading.”
—The Wallace Stevens Journal

“Lucidly written and attentive to the formal processes of the poetry, this is an original and useful study.”
—Journal of Modern Literature

“Bevis reconciles asceticism with Stevens’ theory of the poetic mind. . . . Bevis also tries to reconcile Marjorie Perloff’s ‘constructionist’ poetics with Helen Vendler’s ‘expressive’ model; Bevis accomplishes such a maneuver by taking up Perloff’s ‘topic of impersonality,’ which she has used against Stevens, and turning it on its head, so that in the end Bevis’ Stevens has become Perloff’s Pound.”
—American Literature

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Abbreviations Used in the Text

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I - The Snow Man

2. An Example: " The Snow Man"

3. Four Types of Mysticism

4. Meditative Perception: "The Course of a Particular"

Part II. Meditation and Stevens' Lyrics

5. The Structure of Meditative Experience

6. The Middle Way: "A Clear Day and No Memories"

7. The Meditative Stevens: "The Latest Freed Man"

8. The Physiology of Meditation

9. Self and Will

10. Language, Mind, and No-Mind: "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself"

11. The Tragedy of Desire in "Esthetique du Mal"

Part III. Whence Stevens?

12. Turn of the Century

13. Yeat's Chatterji

14. Santayana's Angels

15. Pound's Cathay

16. Stevens' Readings

17. Stevens' Walks

18. Overlooking Nothing: The Critics

Part IV. The Comedy of Consciousness: Stevens' Long Poems

19. Fragments and Change

20. Opus 130 and the Politics of Emotion

21. Four Types of Form

22. The Comedy of Consciousness

Postscript: Stevens, Meditation, and Modernism

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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