WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL最新文献

Wallace Stevens's exploration of German cultural elements and figures, including his own heritage, functions as a creative source for his poetry and prose. While his early poetry romanticizes German culture and identity, Stevens grows skeptical in the mid-1930s and 1940s when his references to Germany increasingly inform his questioning of poetry's collective relevance and function. In several poems including "Martial Cadenza," "Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion," and "Imago," images of Germany provide key points of departure to contemplate the regenerative potential of the poetic imagination in transcending the exigencies of the external world unsettled by war and destruction.

This first of two special issues on "Stevens and Germany" addresses a neglected topic. Five contributions by Philip McGowan, Gül Bilge Han, James Dowthwaite, George Kovalenko, and Christoph Irmscher explore the broad contours of Wallace Stevens's relation to Germany, spanning from youthful identification to tempered wartime and postwar reflections. The contributions also highlight moments in the poet's life and writing, including his visit to a German art exhibition in 1909 and his later genealogical research into the maternal, German side of the family. A related topic of scholarly neglect, at least in the United States, has been the postwar (West) German reception of Stevens. Not until the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall was his poetry able to slough its initial reputation as elitist and conformist. A series of new translations, most of them appearing in the twenty-first century, have helped revitalize German interest in the American poet.

Although Wallace Stevens and Theodor W. Adorno respond in distinct ways to the Holocaust, their works have a theoretical affinity. In 1940, Stevens writes a poem that, while it cannot register the unfathomable catastrophe, does speculate about the fate of the imagination in a world turned into an enormous camp through total war. Adorno, who most famously responds in his dictum against poetry after Auschwitz, develops a minimal theory of what he calls metaphysical experience. What for Adorno is the dialectical category of metaphysical experience is for Stevens poetics.

• Moodus Noises
• David Epstein

Machemoodus, Native American term meaning "the great noise of the earth"; thus, the town named Moodus, Connecticut, near where a geological feature has given rise to spontaneous chthonic sounds.

All solutions have long since taken their graves.An elemental howl in the dark: behind your spectral dam,angst accumulates. In southeastern Connecticut

you traipse miles of forest, gliding the contours,tracing altitude: stalking the vertiginous plane of white pine,visiting empty mobile homes, retreating to trees,

watching opossums and thinking howthe cost of self-awareness brings with itincongruence. You reach into your ghost's throat and,

constricting your erstwhile larynx, produce a sound.Such battering of the air has been likenedto a pair of empty steel tanks attempting union,

or to the distant keening of the earth itself. Once,a couple lingered in the woods, contemplating post-high school ennui,while their hands plied each other's corporeal liens.

In the gray pre-dawn, along the beaten track of your wanderings,you pursued what passes now for mystery,as if, after centuries, you still had it in you to care. [End Page 112]

Wallace Stevens's "Credences of Summer" (1947), in particular section IV's articulation of "the limits of reality," may be read as significantly German-influenced by connecting two distinct lines of inquiry: the poet's personal connection to Henry and Barbara Church, and his increased interest, from 1944, in genealogical researches on Pennsylvania. By 1947, Stevens's engagement with Germany had evolved from his early, romanticized identifications with a native peasantry to engage with post-WWII Germany as a concept of pure imagination.

• The Teacher, and: The Old Argentine Wandering
• Ethan Yan

The Teacher

(for Dr. Kraft)

Aquinas taught the things of the worldThrough the things of the sky and the blueInfinity of his reason, but not tangling

Like the river at the end of the mindThat taught the things of the skyThrough the apparitions of the sky.

And one must imagine that this river,A saraband of the sun and the starsTangling within itself, was a creation

Of all things, and of the craftsman, incarnate,Of all things, like the silent sepulcher distilledFrom the night, nothing inside but the river itself

And the kind, gray sun waking the planetsAcross the evergreen eternity of the river changingContinuously in a series approaching a final slate—

There, in the definition and space of the sepulcher,The sun, the river, and the grounding convergedTangling, forever changed in perception. [End Page 113]

The Old Argentine Wandering

Too much he has had with the world,For many snowbound nights those birds have hung,And many a night, bounded by the frost of the sky,

The birds galloped across the directionOf the valley, across the gliding night, withinThe glimmering of the glass beads,

But without the sight to see the birds,He had forever remained bound by night—Frozen by the bounding of the night,

Which is the bounding withinOf the supposed self, which, boundlessIn the perception of that same night,

Supposed a new threshold to things, crossingA total strait among the stars and orbiting notThe compass itself but the bound ideas. [End Page 114]

• For The Moment, at Least
• Jacque Vaught Brogan

Notre Dame

October 12–13, 2023

The Poem is mad. In fact, it almost refused to meetThis year. But it showed up today, saying, "I don't want to talk about it.Any of it. At all. Even if it is trueThat your 'unprecedented' wildfires have 'reversedSeven years' progress in cleaning our air,' "it is just too easyTo recall the odd orange haze that, all of June,Sullied the sky and dimmed the sun. Even if it is trueThat 'dangerous particulates' stretched all the wayFrom Canada past Florida, it is just too simpleTo underscore how the sumacs have suffered the effect—How they are 'hung with dried leaves, /Clinging to broken branches like dead moths.'(Your words, dear friend, not mine.)"

The Poem is, frankly, being pissy. "And," it continuesTo complain, "even if the extensive drought and heatThrough summer's end blighted the corn and wheatOf the entire Midwest, it is too facile, by far, to turnTo the trees and say, 'The oak leaves drooplike dirty gloves' or that 'Patches in the maplesare missing, / Having turned a crackled brown /Before dropping far too early, / Alreadymere leaf-trash on the ground.'"

It refuses to talk about it—All the suffocating earthquakes and floods elsewhere—And cringes when it cries that it didn't want to hearAbout the babies and beheadings or that nowThere is "No safe place left in Gaza."

"It takes courage," the Poem insists,"—or can we still say, 'real chutzpah'?—to report that last month'The Banyan Tree on Maui,' though seemingly burnedBeyond hope, was 'showing sprouts on its lower limbs,'And that just this past week, the Banyan is re-leafing,Against all odds, 'even in its upper canopy.' [End Page 107]

"SO?—WHAT OF THIS?," the Poem demands."What OF it? Dare you admit (much less describe)How today, at this rendezvous by the lakes, we see poplarsAnd Northern Ash still fanning full green leaves—Waving them in quiet applause to this changing season?Or that here and there random leaves, having reachedTheir longed-for color, let go, make clicking soundsAt first, among the blowing upper branches,Then drift, side to side, riding the soft breezeThrough light and shadowed limbs, before landing—