In this Book
- Notations Of The Wild: Ecology Poetry Wallace Stevens
- Book
- 1997
- Published by: University of Iowa Press
summary
In the summer of 1903, just before he turned twenty-four, Wallace Stevens joined a six-week hunting expedition to the wilderness of British Columbia. The adventure profoundly influenced his conceptions of language and silence, his symbolic geography, and his sensibilities toward wild nature as nonhuman “other.” The rugged western mountains came to represent that promontory of experience—“green's green apogee”—against which Stevens would measure the reality of all his later perceptions and conceptions and by which he would judge the purpose and value of works of the human imagination. Notations of the Wild views his poetry as a radical reimagining of the nature/culture dialectic and a reinstatement of its forgotten term—Nature.
Gyorgyi Voros focuses on three governing metaphors in Stevens' poems—Nature as house, Nature as body, and Nature as self. She argues that Stevens' youthful wilderness experience yielded his primary subject—the relationship between human beings and nonhuman nature—and that it spurred his shift from a romantic to a phenomenological understanding of nature. Most important, it prompted him to reject his culture's narrow humanism in favor of a singular vision that in today's terms would he deemed ecological.
Gyorgyi Voros focuses on three governing metaphors in Stevens' poems—Nature as house, Nature as body, and Nature as self. She argues that Stevens' youthful wilderness experience yielded his primary subject—the relationship between human beings and nonhuman nature—and that it spurred his shift from a romantic to a phenomenological understanding of nature. Most important, it prompted him to reject his culture's narrow humanism in favor of a singular vision that in today's terms would he deemed ecological.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- A Note on the Texts and Abbreviations
- pp. xi-xii
- Works Cited
- pp. 185-190
- Index of Works by Wallace Stevens
- pp. 191-192
- Name Index
- pp. 193-195
Additional Information
ISBN
9781587292453
Related ISBN(s)
9780877455707
DOI
MARC Record
OCLC
44954283
Pages
208
Launched on MUSE
2011-07-21
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
1997