In this Book

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.

Table of Contents

restricted access Download Full Book
  1. Cover
  2. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Frontmatter
  2. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Contents
  2. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. ix-x
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. A Note on the Texts and Abbreviations
  2. pp. xi-xii
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Stevens's Earthy Anecdote: A Prologue to What Is Possible in Rereading Stevens
  2. pp. 1-20
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 1. "A Nature to Its Natives All": Wallace Stevens in the Landscape
  2. pp. 21-36
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 2. "The Westwardness of Everything": Stevens's Ktaadn
  2. pp. 37-63
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 3. "Notations of the Wild": The Case for an Ecological Poetic
  2. pp. 77-86
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 4. A House Built by and for the Body: Nature as House(hold)
  2. pp. 87-123
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 5. "The Genius of the Body, Which Is Our World": Stevens's Sensorium
  2. pp. 124-146
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. 6. The Impersonal Person: The Self in the World / The Self of the World
  2. pp. 147-166
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Notes
  2. pp. 167-184
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Works Cited
  2. pp. 185-190
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Index of Works by Wallace Stevens
  2. pp. 191-192
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Name Index
  2. pp. 193-195
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
Back To Top

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.