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A critical examination of modernist poetry and the demands of leftist literary theory.

Different as they were as poets, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams grappled with the highly charged literary politics of the 1930s in comparable ways. As other writers moved sharply to the Left, and as leftist critics promulgated a proletarian aesthetics, these modernist poets keenly felt the pressure of the times and politicized literary scene. All four poets saw their reputations critically challenged in these years and felt compelled to respond to the new politics, literary and national, in distinct ways, ranging from rejection to involvement.

Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics closely examines the dynamics of these responses: what these four poets wrote—in letters, essays, lectures, fiction (for Williams), and most importantly, in their poems; what they believed politically and aesthetically; how critics, particularly leftist critics, reviewed their work; how these poets reacted to that criticism and to the broader milieu of leftism. Each poet’s response and its subsequent impact on his poetic output is a unique case study of the conflicting demands of art and politics in a time of great social change. 
 

The poems of Wallace Stevens teem with birds: grackles, warblers, doves, swans, nightingales, owls, peacocks, and one famous blackbird who summons thirteen ways of looking. What do Stevens’s evocations of birds, and his poems more generally, tell us about the relationship between human and nonhuman? In this book, the noted theorist of posthumanism Cary Wolfe argues for a philosophical and theoretical reinvention of ecological poetics, using Stevens as a test case.

Stevens, Wolfe argues, is an ecological poet in the sense that his places, worlds, and environments are co-created by the life forms that inhabit them. Wolfe argues for a “nonrepresentational” conception of ecopoetics, showing how Stevens’s poems reward study alongside theories of system, environment, and observation derived from a multitude of sources, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Niklas Luhmann to Jacques Derrida and Stuart Kauffman. Ecological Poetics is an ambitious interdisciplinary undertaking involving literary criticism, contemporary philosophy, and theoretical biology.

Where sound speaks louder than meaning—Stevens’s poetry as a metaphysical echo.

Wallace Stevens dedicated his poetry to challenging traditional notions about reality, truth, knowledge, and the role of language as a means of representation. Rosu demonstrates that Stevens's experimentation with sound is not only essential to his poetics but also profoundly linked to the pragmatist ideas that informed his way of thinking about language. Her readings of Stevens's poems focus on revealing the dynamic through which meaning emerges in language patterns—a dynamic she calls "images of sound."

Rosu argues that the formal aspects of poetry are deeply ingrained in cultural realities and are, in fact, generated by their context. The sound pattern pervading Stevens's poems at once addresses and violates the reader's assumptions about the functioning of language and, along with them, ideas about reality, knowledge, and subjectivity. Sound is thus the starting point of an argument concerned with Stevens's epistemology and poetics—the way his poems insist on a movement past or through a normal poetic representation of the world to gesture toward a reality that lies outside or beyond systems of representation.

The relationship between sound and meaning isolated and analyzed in The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens is firmly situated among critical debates concerning the poet's aesthetic and philosophical convictions. Rosu claims that Stevens's poetry is not ultimately about the powerlessness of language, nor is it a deconstructive enterprise of destabilizing culturally consecrated truths; rather it achieves meaning most frequently through patterns of sound. Sound helps Stevens make a deeply philosophical point in a language unavailable to philosophers.

An overview of seventy years of Stevens criticism
 
Wallace Stevens and the Critical Schools reveals a field marked by conflict and contradiction, both within and among critical works in their attempts to explicate and appropriate this major American poet. Stevens’ changing reception among the critical schools reveals much about the shifting nature of American literature and criticism in this century and illuminates the often polemical process of literary canon formation. Each chapter of this book examines a particular aspect of the 20th-century critical involvement with Wallace Stevens’ poetry, introduced by a discussion of the poet’s work as an arena for the convergence of modern critical tendencies and concerns.
 
First, the author examines the avant-garde milieu of early 20th-century modernism, which implicated Stevens in its melee of affiliations and enmities and which influenced critics’ ambivalent responses to his early work. She traces the critical controversies of the poet’s emergence before and during the 1920s, specifically the clash between New Humanism and aestheticism, and demonstrates how the quality of irony in Stevens’ work became a part of the critics’ general repertoire in their assessment of this poet.
 
The 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were decades during which Stevens criticism became dominated by the New Critical ideology. The turn toward deconstruction in Stevens criticism stands in part as a response to the New Critical dilemma, seen in the manner in which such critics as J. Hillis Miller and Joseph Riddel appropriated the concept of “decreation” to explain the sense of rupture in Stevens’ late poetry yet brought that concept to its logical end in a deconstructive paradigm.
 
Finally, Schaum identifies four major theoretical approaches to Stevens in the past two decades that continue to inform and direct the field of critical dissent and exploration in the 1980s. Such theories as Bloomian misprision, versions of hermeneutic criticism, redefinitions of the deconstructive enterprise, and the contemporary call for a new historicism continue the battle to appropriate Stevens as the “hard prize” of critical aims and investigations.