Cultural Not Political Colonization in the Poems of Wallace Stevens

Thompson, Erik Robb(에릭 롭 톰슨) 새한영어영문학회 2013 새한영어영문학 Vol.55 No.1

The reason for Stevens’ skepticism regarding cultural colonies is clear. Most of the people in America are descendents of immigrants who bring with them their own cultural ideas to a colony. That is the reality of the American situation, and it is also Stevens’ modest understanding of the reality of an America that was still in the process of trying to express its cultural relationship to the vast continent of North America. Tacit in that choice, however, is a rejection of a political solution that would preserve out-of-date cultural ideals such as that contained in the example of General Andrew Jackson, a figure who appears several times in Stevens’ poetry and prose and who was famous both for waging brutal wars against the Seminole Indians in Florida and for being a champion of a populist form of political democracy. Stevens’ emphasis on failure and division in his poems about American colonization, then, can be understood as a way to defamiliarize a political understanding of who Americans are as a peop in order to create a basis for a new modernist cultural understanding of an American place. Of the many characters and motifs that typify Stevens’ imaginary colonists in exile, I will focus on Stevens’ hidalgo figure as a unifying concept to cover all figures who fail at cultural colonization in Stevens’ poems. The term hidalgo, meaning a Spanish country gentleman, only appears five times in the corpus of Stevens’ poetry, but it can be deployed usefully to describe a colonist from a traditional as opposed to a modern culture. As the term is used here, hidalgo refers to the inhabitants (landed elites and feudal peasants alike) of a place who have acquired “tenure in the land” through generations of habits and customs cultivated in tandem with the particulars of a homeland’s culture, climate and landscape.

Wallace Stevens’ Hidalgo in a “most unpropitious place”

Thompson, Erik Robb 새한영어영문학회 2015 새한영어영문학 Vol.57 No.3

This article traces the course of the “hidalgo” figure across Stevens’ poetic career. The importance of this figure lies in how it plays an archetypal role in relationships to places in several poems by Stevens. What begins skeletally as a literary trope in Harmonium becomes more theoretical in Stevens’books from the 1940s and 50s. As Stevens’Spanish superego and alter-ego, the hidalgo merits critical deployment to uncover the role of the importance of places in many of his poems. In several poems from Harmonium, the hidalgo, like many of Stevens’ other personas that will evolve in later works, exists in inchoate forms such as Spanish dons and behind the masks of characters like Crispin from the poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.” In poems from the socially turbulent 1930s, the hidalgo and other Spanish personas serve to express unease with the impositions of public life on the private individual’s struggles for relationships with places. In later books from the 1940s and 50s, the hidalgo figure becomes fully recognizable as Stevens’ archetype of both the notion of place itself and of Stevens poetic voice itself. Finally, in1954, one year before Stevens’ death, it appears that the masculine hidalgo is part of a poetic construction that is always transforming seasonal change into feminine desire. This study offers readers of Stevens an archetypal localization of his familiar theme of the relationship between the imagination and reality.

Wallace Stevens’ Hidalgo in a “most unpropitious place”

에릭탐슨 새한영어영문학회 2015 새한영어영문학 Vol.57 No.3

This article traces the course of the “hidalgo” figure across Stevens’ poetic career. The importance of this figure lies in how it plays an archetypal role in relationships to places in several poems by Stevens. What begins skeletally as a literary trope in Harmonium becomes more theoretical in Stevens’ books from the 1940s and 50s. As Stevens’ Spanish superego and alter-ego, the hidalgo merits critical deployment to uncover the role of the importance of places in many of his poems. In several poems from Harmonium, the hidalgo, like many of Stevens’ other personas that will evolve in later works, exists in inchoate forms such as Spanish dons and behind the masks of characters like Crispin from the poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.” In poems from the socially turbulent 1930s, the hidalgo and other Spanish personas serve to express unease with the impositions of public life on the private individual’s struggles for relationships with places. In later books from the 1940s and 50s, the hidalgo figure becomes fully recognizable as Stevens’ archetype of both the notion of place itself and of Stevens’ poetic voice itself. Finally, in 1954, one year before Stevens’ death, it appears that the masculine hidalgo is part of a poetic construction that is always transforming seasonal change into feminine desire. This study offers readers of Stevens an archetypal localization of his familiar theme of the relationship between the imagination and reality.

Wallace Stevens’ “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” in Owl’s Clover: Two Texts and Two Authors

김준환 한국현대영미시학회 2008 현대영미시연구 Vol.14 No.1

This paper reads Wallace Stevens’ “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,” the second poem of Owl’s Clover (1936), in its socio-political contexts of the mid-thirties. Most of the previous readings have interpreted the text without distinguishing not only between “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue” (1935-36) and its revised version titled “The Statue at the World’s End” (1937), but also between Stevens in 1935-36 and Stevens in 1937 and 1940. While Stevens in 1935-36 wrote and interpreted the original version responding specifically to Stanley Burnshaw’s urge to follow his popular-front leftism, Stevens in 1937 and 1940 tried to “generalize” or de-contextualize the original text out of its socio-political contexts by deleting historically specific referents and interpreting it in terms of “adaption to change” or “reality” versus “imagination.” By comparing and contrasting his letters written from 1935 to 1936 and the original version with his letters from 1937 to 1940 and the revised version, this paper proposes the need to distinguish two texts and two authors in the interpretation of Owl’s Clover as well as “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue.”

Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Poesis and Wallace Stevens’ “On an Old Horn”

에릭탐슨 문학과환경학회 2016 문학과 환경 Vol.15 No.1

The term “ecocriticism” implies the struggles between ecology and literary criticism. In this essay it is practiced on the ground of the poetry of Wallace Stevens. In the first section, important criteria for considering a text to be environmental writing will be examined against differing views of Stevens as an environmental writer. Specifically, the relevance of Stevens’s position regarding a humanist, ethical orientation to the natural world will be called into question: Does his writing prescribe or describe a particular organicism? And what role does aesthetics play in Stevens’s ecology? Where most critics must first account for Stevens reputation as a writer of “pure poetry” that is merely decorative and language-based, a Batesonian approach allows an ecocritical approach to Stevens that privileges aesthetics as a way to show correspondences between art and nature. The second section notes correspondences between the poem “On an Old Horn” and Gregory Bateson’s theory regarding the mental aspects inherent to both human culture and ecosystems. For Bateson this scientific “panpsychism” is based on his systems theory of learning, specifically a type of formal reasoning termed abduction, or metaphorical reasoning. The conclusion of this paper proposes that poetry relates to culture in Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Poesis and Wallace Stevens’ “On an Old Horn” 221 ecologically adaptive or maladaptive ways.

Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Poesis and Wallace Stevens’ “On an Old Horn”

Thompson, Erik Robb 문학과환경학회 2016 문학과 환경 Vol.15 No.1

“생태비평” 이란 생태학과 문학비평 간의 고군분투를 의미한다. 이 글에서는 월리스 스티븐스의 시라는 까닭으로 생태비평이 적용된다. 첫 번째 부분에서는 생태환경 글쓰기가 되기 위해 고려되는 중요한 기준이 생태환경 작가로서의 스티븐스에 대한 다른 관점들을 검증할 것이다. 특히 인도주의자로 여겨지는 스티븐스에 대한 연관성과 자연계에 대한 윤리적 순응을 다음과 같은 의문으로 제기할 것이다. 그의 글쓰기는 특정한 생체설을 묘사하거나 명시하는가? 그리고 미학은 스티븐스의 생태학에서 어떤 역할을 하는가? 베이트슨풍의 접근이 예술과 자연 간의 유사성들을 보여주는 방법으로서 미학의 특권을 가진 스티븐스에게 생태비평적 접근을 허용 하는데, 어디에서 처음으로 대부분의 비평가들이 미사여구가 거의 없는 ‘순수시’를 쓰는 작가로써의 스티븐스의 명성을 확인하는가? 두 번째 부분에서는 “오래된 뿔피리로 (On an Old Horn)” 와 인류의 문화와 생태계 둘 다를 내재한 정신의 측면에 연관된 그레고리 베이트슨의 이론 간의 유사성에 주목한다. 베이트슨에게 과학적 “범심론”은 특별하게 은유적 추론이나 귀추법(abduction)으로 불리는 형식추론 유형으로서 그의 논리체계의 기반이 된다. 이 논문의 결론은 시가 생태적으로 적응 또는 부적응의 방식으로 문화에 연결된다는 점을 제시한다. The term “ecocriticism” implies the struggles between ecology and literary criticism. In this essay it is practiced on the ground of the poetry of Wallace Stevens. In the first section, important criteria for considering a text to be environmental writing will be examined against differing views of Stevens as an environmental writer. Specifically, the relevance of Stevens’s position regarding a humanist, ethical orientation to the natural world will be called into question: Does his writing prescribe or describe a particular organicism? And what role does aesthetics play in Stevens’ s ecology? Where most critics must first account for Stevens reputation as a writer of “pure poetry” that is merely decorative and language-based, a Batesonian approach allows an ecocritical approach to Stevens that privileges aesthetics as a way to show correspondences between art and nature. The second section notes correspondences between the poem “On an Old Horn” and Gregory Bateson’s theory regarding the mental aspects inherent to both human culture and ecosystems. For Bateson this scientific “panpsychism” is based on his systems theory of learning, specifically a type of formal reasoning termed abduction, or metaphorical reasoning. The conclusion of this paper proposes that poetry relates to culture in ecologically adaptive or maladaptive ways.

Wallace Stevens’s “Necessary Angel” as Relationship between the Map and the Territory

Thompson Erik Robb(에릭롭톰슨) 새한영어영문학회 2011 새한영어영문학 Vol.53 No.3

Alfred Korzybski’s dictum that the map is not the territory provides the basis for a cultural analysis of Wallace Stevens’s “necessary angel.” Using this distinction, the cultural construct of the necessary angel can be understood to comprise a relationship between the discrete categories of the map and the territory. Unlike Gyorgyi Voros’s and other ecocritics who stress the relationship in Stevens’s poetry between the verbal and natural world, this article does not aim to demonstrate Stevens’s interest in the natural environment. More narrowly, it examines the necessary angel within a cultural map-territory framework, specifically in two poems, “Angel Surrounded by Paysans” and “Dance of the Macabre Mice.” This article applies the concept of the necessary angel as metaphor for an ecological relationship between a culture and its cultural territory to the analysis of these poems. At stake in the aptness of this metaphor is the cultural-ecological pertinence of the imagination to cultural experience. For example, the angel’s poetic mediation in these poems reveals whether they signify a healthy adaptation to a cultural territory or an unhealthy one.

동양화에서 색채를 배우다 : 월러스 스티븐스의 습작 시절

장미정 ( Jang Mi-jung ) 영미문학연구회 2021 안과 밖 Vol.- No.50

This paper purports to deliver a discovery by the author regarding a piece of work in Wallace Stevens' juvenilia. It thus also purports to present an evidence on the pervasiveness of East Asian influence in the development of British and American modernist poetry. Stevens has not been often discussed as closely associated with East Asian art and literature. However, “Colors,” a short poem written in 1909, reveals that the poet was impressed by the use of vivid colors in Chinese and Japanese visual arts and tried to imitate the effects in words in his own work. Particularly, this paper discloses that the words in “Colors” have come from a book by Laurence Binyon called Painting in the Far East. Binyon was the curator of East Asian art at the British Museum at that time, and he was the person who introduced emerging Imagist poets such as Ezra Pound and H. D. to East Asian art and literature. His book, first published in 1908, contained one of the earliest accounts of the history of art in East Asia written in Europe and North America. Stevens did not personally know Binyon, and the fact that he obtained the book and read it corroborates the thesis that many young poets, at either end of the Atlantic, were interested in East Asian art early in the twentieth century,

“폐허의 영감(靈感)” ―월러스 스티븐스의 「로마의 노철학자에게」

윤준 한국현대영미시학회 2014 현대영미시연구 Vol.20 No.2

Wallace Stevens’ “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” a meditative eulogy on the last phase of the life of George Santayana, has often been regarded and extolled as one of his best last poems. Based on Edmund Wilson’s article on his visit to the old philosopher in Rome in 1945, it places the focus on the philosopher’s attitude toward death and the significance of his life. Indeed, Stevens’ meditation on the old philosopher’s achievement even at the end of his secluded life served well to the poet in his seventies as an invaluable opportunity to look back on his own life both as a man and as a poet. However, Stevens’ sympathetic reflections on Santayana’s life and work are rendered with his peculiar complex rhetoric and presented in his apparently obscure atmosphere produced by the repetitions and variations of abstract words and phrases. The aim of this paper is to uncover the depth and the wealth of Stevens’ moving reflections in the poem by paying attention to some essential intertexts and examining its thematic and structural aspects.

Strange Rhetoric, Enigmatical Grammar, Poetic Logic: Wallace Stevens`s The Auroras of Autumn

( Kelly S. Walsh ) 한국영어영문학회 2015 영어 영문학 Vol.61 No.2

The recent turn in Stevens criticism has largely been phenomenological in nature, concerned with moving past the poet’s “failure” to overcome the epistemological problem of the relation of mind and world, imagination and reality, and thereby realize the “supreme fiction.” While many of these critics, who tend to focus on Stevens’s later poetry, have interpreted the effects of grammar or rhetoric in isolation, there has not been a satisfactory account of their complex interplay, which, at heightened junctures, realizes a multidimensional poetic world simultaneously constituted by seeing, interpreting, and feeling. My intervention, then, is pedagogical in inflection. I make the case that Stevens’s efforts in the later poetry to move beyond epistemology can be productively put in relation to the classical liberal arts trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. But pedagogical, too, in the sense that these poems self-consciously teach us to read differently, to be attentive to the richness, vitality, and subtlety of rhetoric and grammar, which, in their active interpenetration, create a poetic logic of their own.one that takes us beyond empirical truth, beyond the types of truths religion has traditionally proffered humankind. In resisting “the intelligence / Almost successfully,” in continually framing and unframing phenomenal reality, the “endlessly elaborating” dance of grammar and rhetoric ultimately discloses the extent to which we share in the making of the logic of the poem.