Wallace Stevens

An Anatomy of Figuration

Eugene Paul Nassar

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780812273335, 9780812273335
• eBook ISBN: 9781512818215
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book presents for the first time a thorough study of the imagery in Wallace Stevens's poetry and the patterns which these images form. Heretofore, most discussions of Stevens's work presupposed an understanding of the difficult and bizarre surface imagery and dealt mainly with broad generalizations which often left the student of Stevens's poems unsatisfied. The brilliant surface of the poems, the detailed imagery of specific passages, is here examined clearly and systematically. The images, indexed at the back of the book, are examined in four natural groups: Figures of the Mind, of Disorder, of Order, and of Change. The last half of the book is concerned with close analyses of some longer poems of Stevens's using the information gleaned from the "anatomy" of the first half.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Contents
• PART ONE. An Anatomy of Specific Figures
• Chapter One. The Two Minds of Wallace Stevens
• Chapter Two. Figures of the Mind (Reason and the Imagination)
• Chapter Four. Figures of Order
• Chapter Five. Figures of Change
• PART TWO. Structural Figuration
• Chapter Six. Double Vision in Whole Poems
• Chapter Seven. Peter Quince at the Clavier
• Chapter Eight. Le Monocle de Mon Oncle
• Chapter Nine. The Comedian as the Letter C
• Chapter Ten. Credences of Summer
• Chapter Eleven. Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
• Index to Figures
• Index of Poems Cited
• A Selective Bibliography