Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Violence Within/The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics

The Violence Within/The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics

Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught

Hardcover

Poetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0820325198
ISBN13: 9780820325194
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: Aug 18 2003
Pages: 200
Weight: 1.03
Height: 0.87 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.46
Language: English

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one of the leading poets of the twentieth century, continues to influence a wide range of poets writing today. However, an image persists of Stevens as an aesthete who was politically removed from his times and who also exhibited sexist and racist tendencies. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan offers careful readings from across the Stevens canon to demonstrate that, contrary to such enduring earlier assessments, Stevens's work over the years shows poetic and political changes that merge with his growing ethical concerns.

Brogan traces Stevens's evolving poetic practices along three major lines that often intersected. She situates the beginnings of Stevens's development within his early resistance to the pressures of reality on the imagination, an artistic stand that pitted him against the objective poetry exemplified in the work of William Carlos Williams. Then, in the midst of Stevens's career, World War II moved him forward with new poetic responsibilities both to witness the current world and to guide readers into their future. The emergence of an almost feminist vision defines Stevens's third line of development. Finally, in addition to identifying these developmental stages, Brogan addresses the undercurrent of race throughout Stevens's work.

According to Brogan, Stevens not only changed but matured over time. What began as an aesthetic violence within, or a girding against such violence without as social unrest and war, rapidly evolved during Stevens's middle years into a set of perceptions and practices increasingly responsive to his times.

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