Project MUSE®: Wallace Stevens Journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/528
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Wallace Stevens Journal.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 35 (2011) through current issueLatest Articles: Wallace Stevens JournalTWOProject MUSE®Wallace Stevens Journal2160-05700148-7132Latest articles in Wallace Stevens Journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®"The Essential Prose"?: Revisiting Stevens's Essays
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985320
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THE ESSAYS MAY APPEAR a most inauspicious topic for a special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal. They have been often overlooked, and more often deprecated, not least by the poet himself. Quoting Stevens's reference, in a letter to Barbara Church, to "those lectures which I do so badly" (L 574), Tony Sharpe speaks for the experience of many readers of the poet's prose:
It is difficult to dissent from the justice of his self-assessment; read now these papers, with their Emersonian disregard for the syntax of thinking, do little to advance his cause as a theorist of literature; no one who is not already animated by an interest in Stevens is likely to seek or find enlightenment in the pages of his critical
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/528/image/coversmall"The Essential Prose"?: Revisiting Stevens's Essays2026-03-17text/htmlen-US"The Essential Prose"?: Revisiting Stevens's Essays2026-03-172026TWOProject MUSE®353752026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-17Stevens, Cavell, and Inexplicable Prose
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985321
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BY HIS OWN ACCOUNT, Stevens was against explanations. He had, he once declared, "the greatest dislike for" them (L 294). Still, he was also a writer given to behaving a little unaccountably, and his "dislike" of explanations seems in part to have been a dislike of his own tendency to give them. As George Lensing puts it, "No poet ever disparaged more and indulged more in the practice of self-commentary than did Stevens" (268). His long, detailed letters to Ronald Lane Latimer and, later, to Hi Simons and Bernard Heringman, evince a mingled attraction and mistrust. "No more explanations," as Stevens ends a long letter of 1928 (L 252), sounds less like sober discipline than the avowed "never again" of the morning
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/528/image/coversmallStevens, Cavell, and Inexplicable Prose2026-03-17text/htmlen-USStevens, Cavell, and Inexplicable Prose2026-03-172026TWOProject MUSE®654782026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-17The Necessary Angel as Necessary Amateur: Poetics, Professionalism, and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985322
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ALTHOUGH WALLACE STEVENS would eventually shed his early reputation as an aesthete or a dandy—attributed to him by Louis Untermeyer and Gorham Munson in their respective reviews of Harmonium—he never quite managed to shake that of being an amateur (Untermeyer 160, Munson 78). An insurance executive by day, Stevens famously composed his poems in the evenings and on weekends, largely from fragments scribbled down during his two-and-a-half-mile walk to work, a physical pacing of the border separating office from home that, as William Clark observes, enables the "public professional self" to be set apart from "the interests and hobbies of the amateur, private self" (7). As a writer of "after hours" poetry, Stevens
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/528/image/coversmallThe Necessary Angel as Necessary Amateur: Poetics, Professionalism, and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"2026-03-17text/htmlen-USThe Necessary Angel as Necessary Amateur: Poetics, Professionalism, and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"2026-03-172026TWOProject MUSE®797292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-17Digesting Appearances in Stevens's Solicitous Essay "About One of Marianne Moore's Poems"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985323
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AT THE HEART of The Necessary Angel, "About One of Marianne Moore's Poems" stands out from the other essays arranged by date of initial publication before and after it. As Wallace Stevens notes in his "Introduction" to the 1951 prose collection, all but that one "were written to be spoken and this affects their character" (CPP 639). When an essay will be delivered as a lecture whose audience will lack visual access to one's words and the opportunity to linger over them, an author is apt to limit its analytical demands. By implication, Stevens may have felt that he could rely on his readership to probe the essay that he sent to Theodore Weiss for publication in the Quarterly Review of Literature's Summer 1948 number
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/528/image/coversmallDigesting Appearances in Stevens's Solicitous Essay "About One of Marianne Moore's Poems"2026-03-17text/htmlen-USDigesting Appearances in Stevens's Solicitous Essay "About One of Marianne Moore's Poems"2026-03-172026TWOProject MUSE®914252026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-17"Deliciae of the Spirit": Stevens, Villon, and "The Relations Between Poetry and Painting"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985324
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WALLACE STEVENS'S AFFINITY FOR painters, paintings, and the repositories of art is well known. His passion for art likewise extended beyond museums and galleries to exhibition catalogs, which he saw as "the natural habitat of the prose-poem" (CPP 826). For a December 1949 exhibition of paintings of Marcel Gromaire1 at New York City's Louis Carré Gallery, Stevens himself contributed the catalog note. He praises Gromaire for achieving what the painter himself called "la recherche de la substance," which Stevens understood to mean "the pursuit of … the spiritual fund of the picture, … originating in the thought and feeling of the artist and perceptible in the painting" (CPP 827). According to Stevens, it is this
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/528/image/coversmall"Deliciae of the Spirit": Stevens, Villon, and "The Relations Between Poetry and Painting"2026-03-17text/htmlen-US"Deliciae of the Spirit": Stevens, Villon, and "The Relations Between Poetry and Painting"2026-03-172026TWOProject MUSE®514292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-17On the Road Home (CPP 186)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985325
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"On the Road Home" is a poem often cited yet rarely interpreted. Content to extract a single line or stanza as indicative of Stevens's conception of truth, scholars frequently risk reducing the poem to the equivalent of an eloquently abstract sentence from Adagia or The Necessary Angel. Ironically, such instances of synecdochic reduction are precisely the kind of logic the poem attempts to elaborate and question, as befits a poem collected in a volume entitled Parts of a World. Even isolating "On the Road Home" as a single poem is misleading as it comprises somewhat of a triptych on truth, sandwiched between "The Man on the Dump" and "The Latest Freed Man," three poems Stevens repeatedly printed in sequence—as the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/528/image/coversmallOn the Road Home (CPP 186)2026-03-17text/htmlen-USOn the Road Home (CPP 186)2026-03-172026TWOProject MUSE®489302026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-17The Woman in Sunshine (CPP 381–82)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985326
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Abstraction may arise because an artist's aim is to represent his or her feelings about a scene rather than its visual appearance. How do you paint the sense of exhilaration you feel experiencing a perfect summer day? Stevens's "The Woman in Sunshine" is a literary approach to this challenge:
It is only that this warmth and movement are like
The warmth and movement of a woman.
It is not that there is any image in the air
Nor the beginning nor end of a form:
It is empty. But a woman in threadless gold
Burns us with brushings of her dress
And a dissociated abundance of being,
More definite for what she is—
The poem is an extended simile, reversing the conventional comparison of a beautiful woman to a summer
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/528/image/coversmallThe Woman in Sunshine (CPP 381–82)2026-03-17text/htmlen-USThe Woman in Sunshine (CPP 381–82)2026-03-172026TWOProject MUSE®63582026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-17An Apology, and: Lying Awake, and: Atlantic Beach
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985327
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There are many truths, … not parts of a truth
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/528/image/coversmallAn Apology, and: Lying Awake, and: Atlantic Beach2026-03-17text/htmlen-USAn Apology, and: Lying Awake, and: Atlantic Beach2026-03-172026TWOProject MUSE®44542026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-17On Stevens
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985331
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He mutter
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/528/image/coversmallOn Stevens2026-03-17text/htmlen-USOn Stevens2026-03-172026TWOProject MUSE®26982026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-17The Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imaginations in Modernist American Poetry by Enaiê Mairê Azambuja (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985332
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Enaiê Mairê Azambuja's The Zen of Ecopoetics joins a substantial body of scholarship on the East Asian influences on modernist poetry. Azambuja takes a deep dive into various threads of East Asian thought and creative practice related to Zen Buddhism as a means of illuminating the poetics and ecological insight of the four poets she addresses: William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings. Drawing on scholarship on each of these poets, she outlines each poet's exposure to East Asian sources, demonstrating their affinity with the core insights of Zen Buddhism and Taoism. She further aligns these insights with the recent "new materialism" of ecocritical scholars like Jane Bennett and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/528/image/coversmallThe Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imaginations in Modernist American Poetry by Enaiê Mairê Azambuja (review)2026-03-17text/htmlen-USThe Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imaginations in Modernist American Poetry by Enaiê Mairê Azambuja (review)2026-03-172026TWOProject MUSE®138672026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-17Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets by Ange Mlinko (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985333
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Reading Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets in Key West is an exercise in exacting magic, in checking the physical place with its textual representation and re-living it in a sort of triple vision: from Ange Mlinko's poetic descriptions to the actual Florida Keys and back to the poets' ornamental fecundity that attracted me in the first place.In winter 1989 during an undergraduate modern poetry seminar led by Professor Kathryn Chittick at Trent University, I fell under a linguistic spell cast by Wallace Stevens as I prepared a presentation on his "Of Modern Poetry." After two weeks of immersion in his poetry, and essays about it in The Wallace Stevens Journal, I was hooked by the kaleidoscopic linguistic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/528/image/coversmallDifficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets by Ange Mlinko (review)2026-03-17text/htmlen-USDifficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets by Ange Mlinko (review)2026-03-172026TWOProject MUSE®281882026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-17