Introduction: World-Making in and through Neglected Poems

THIS SPECIAL ISSUE presents the outcome of an experiment. As such, it borrows some of its inspiration from Wallace Stevens’s aphorism that “All poetry is experimental poetry” (CPP 918). Yet the materials presented here have their proper scholarly rationale. Since the positive motivations for undertaking the experiment outweigh the negative ones, I can afford to start with a short paragraph on the latter.

In the course of setting up panels and conferences on Stevens over the past fifteen years, I’ve felt the growing desire to try out something less predictable than participants reading out their papers followed by a brief Q&A. This time-tested format is, of course, still effective as a way of sharing expertise, and it has enabled the production of a good many special issues of this journal as well as of several edited volumes. But precisely because it has been so effective, and will continue to be so for a number of projects currently in the pipeline, I was gradually longing to interrupt it with a riskier, more adventurous procedure. On this particular occasion, moreover, I wanted to dispense with most of the practical burden of organizing a conference, preferring instead to work through a third party who could carry this burden for me. In addition to such considerations about format and logistics, there was the fact that the topic of this gathering was but slowly coming into focus and required that I leave a number of options on the table as I set the ball rolling.

The positive motivations for initiating the experiment were much more numerous and powerful. First of all, this special issue wouldn’t have materialized if it hadn’t been for the concrete opportunity that arose when I was granted a fellowship by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) during the academic year 2016–2017. Thanks to the fellowship, I was able to spend ten months in the heart of Amsterdam working on three Stevens-related books. The monograph, edited volume, and selection of Dutch translations I had proposed to NIAS flew under the collective flag of “Wallace Stevens in the World.” Because I had received funding from both NIAS and the Flemish Research Council (FWO), I was able to take further initiatives in the course of the year. So I decided to multiply perspectives by launching two scholarly gatherings. One was a small conference for which I teamed up with Gül Bilge Han at Stockholm University. Its purpose was to prepare an edited volume provisionally entitled Wallace Stevens as World Literature. (The conference took place in the spring of 2018 and we are working on the book.) But knowing what I was planning to elaborate in my own monograph and what would be the kind of essays coming out of the Stockholm conference, I wanted to ensure that my research activities at NIAS also resulted in a different type of publication resolutely focused on the reading of individual poems. The only requirement for this spinoff project was that selected poems had to have an international dimension, whether in their imaginary settings, cultural allusions, or some of their diction. The question to be asked of these poems would be double: primarily, they should be the object of an extensive, in-depth analysis; secondarily, attention should be paid to the kinds of world-making Stevens engaged in while referencing the world beyond his immediate surroundings.

Thus, the plan grew to combine a number of goals. If a group of specialists was to be brought together for the purpose of analyzing individual poems, the focus had better not be on canonical verse. That would prompt the speakers merely to repeat what they had already argued at length. My experience as an editor, moreover, had made me wary of inviting scholarship that continues to return to the same well-known poems. Considering the admirable longevity of The Wallace Stevens Journal, I believed it to be of more value to explore terra incognita—if any remained to be found. Were there still poems in Stevens’s relatively compact oeuvre that were critically neglected, in the sense...