The New Wallace Stevens Studies ed. by Bart Eeckhout and Gül Bilge Han (review)

Abstract

The New Wallace Stevens Studies seeks to extend the continuing importance of Stevens criticism into the present century by present-ing “confluences of what used to be there, what happens to be here, and what is in the process of becoming” (1). The book opens up new possibilities of reading Stevens in the light of contemporary theoretical movements in the humanities, neurosciences, and environmental studies, while preserving the impression of the poet as responding to the intellectual and cultural currents of Anglo-American modernism in the locality of his sensibilities as a poet-businessman based his entire life in Hartford, Connecticut. Divided into three sections, this collection of essays presents curated critical perspectives of Stevens which consciously foreground emerging scholarly voices that engage with what the editors Bart Eeckhout and Gül Bilge Han term “new fields, cutting-edge theories, and untried methodologies” (3) in seeking innovative approaches through which to explicate Stevens’s often repetitious claims about imaginative vitality and its relationship to reality. Subtitled “Emerging Concepts in Stevens Criticism,” part I of the essay collection presents updated perspectives on the politics found in Stevens, a poet who has been criticized for his inability to imagine a politics of the “real” despite his advocacy of the existential importance of the poetic imagination. Lisa Siraganian’s chapter, “Imperialism and Colonialism,” locates sites of poetic complexity in the verse that speak to the complicated conditions underlying the poet’s comfortable surveyal of political movements from a distance. Siraganian posits an overarch-ing dialectic at work in Stevens’s appropriation of world-events into the ambit of poetic consciousness, claiming that “Stevens was invested in the problem of imperialism—to the extent that he was—because im-perialism entailed a belief system that