Wallace Stevens: Parts of an Autobiography, by Anonymous

Certain passages in a handful of poems by Wallace Stevens flirt with personal self-reference. This is the case with "Yellow Afternoon" from Parts of a World, for example. Some critics take such moments to reveal his views on contemporary social issues such as World War II; others read the same passages back into Stevens' biographically determinable circumstances. Yet the poems in question arguably inscribe their resistance to critical-biographical as well as social-historical templates, and in fact track his moving toward a theory of autobiographical writing. In those poems, one can say that he first seeks an aesthetic particularity, but then concedes their ethical import and regards himself as a representative self. However, late Stevens poems such as "World Without Peculiarity" and "Prologues to What Is Possible" edge toward the disappearance of self altogether. Paradoxically, that defines the point where they allow for an utterly "peculiar" mode of autobiographical writing.