Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (review)

In this intriguing analysis of Stevens’s poetry, letters, and prose, Gyorgyi Voros rereads Stevens’s work “as a modernist nature poetry that reimagines the Nature/culture dialectic and seeks to reinstate the forgotten term—Nature or, to use Stevens’s term, ‘reality’—in that dialectic” (11). Pointing to lines like “The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world” and “the most beautiful . . . thing in the world is, of course, the world itself,” Voros effectively problematizes prevailing notions of the poet as “a humanist who deified the imagination” and who lived exclusively in the mind, with poetry, his supreme fiction, as the only consolation for the absence of “vanished gods” (6). Framing her study with phenomenology and ecology, Voros convincingly demonstrates that “[f]or all his renown as a poet of abstractions, Stevens was preoccupied with physical experience—with the place the human body holds within the greater body, the ‘body wholly body’ of the world” (2–3).

Beginning with a hunting expedition Stevens took in 1903, Voros illustrates the lifelong impact the trip had on the poet’s life and writings, in that it offered the standard against which Stevens “would measure the ‘reality’ of all his later perceptions and conceptions and the validity and purpose of works of the ‘imagination’” (44). Then, after making the case for “an Ecological Poetic,” where she outlines ways in which ecological ideas and terminology can illuminate our reading of literature, Voros devotes her attention to two groups of images to which Stevens repeatedly turns in order to communicate his vision of his place within the world: Nature as house, and the body as natural phenomenon and “medium for knowing the world.” Voros then concludes her study with a discussion of Stevens’s attempt to “create a self able to live by immersion in physical reality, defined by its environment, part of the whole but accepting Nature’s Otherness and acknowledging the limits of human perception and consciousness” (147).

Voros is a fine writer, who articulates sometimes difficult and complicated concepts in clear, accessible prose. Her provocative study both challenges and expands our understanding of Stevens, asking us to broaden our limiting impression of the poet as “the portly, gray-suited, suburban metaphysician, the aesthetic hedonist, the connoisseur of modernism” (42), and to recognize him also as an ecological poet who verbalized “a sense of the immediacy and profound presence of earth itself, rock-bottom foundation of human thought and experience” (6).