Abstract

ABSTRACT:

In his search for a language purified from the trivia of personal anxiety, and immune to the weight of public expectation, Wallace Stevens continually recalibrates his approach to rhyme. This essay argues that Stevens’ newly incisive approach to this ‘traditional’ device distinguishes his poetry from the works of his modernist peers. Though Stevens’ early poems are wary of the tendency of rhymes to precipitate unwanted closures, in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ Stevens finally alights on the combination of stylistic economy and measured abstraction that will characterise his late, great, meditative works.

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