A new look at the poetry of being : elements of Nietzsche and Cassirer in the poetry of Wallace Stevens

The purpose of this study is to develop a new approach, more satisfactory than those taken previously by critics, to understanding and defining the philosophical and aesthetic basis for Wallace Stevens' poetry. The investigation centers particularly on Stevens' later poetry, which is found by some critics to constitute a "poetry of being." Such criticism sees Stevens in his later poetry turning away from his earlier interest in the imagination in favor of an attempt to achieve a "glimpse of being." While this thesis rejects such views as ultimately unsatisfactory, it finds them a promising point of departure for a more suitable perspective on the poetry.

The study first examines the criticism of three major proponents of the notion of the "poetry of being"--J. Hillis Miller, Helen Regueiro, and Thomas J. Hines. While the analysis refutes some aspects of this body of criticism, it emphasizes those potentially constructive features which can be profitably employed in the development of a more clearly consistent view of the poetry. The discussion then turns to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche in order to bring to light a more valid and more thoroughly applicable philosophical foundation for Stevens' poetry-for his poetic presentation of the concepts of "truth" and "being." Finally, in order to provide an adequate description of the aesthetic theories underlying Stevens' work the investigation turns to the phenomenological philosophy of Ernst Cassirer.

Thus, by means of a tripartite discussion, the study proceeds from the "poetry of being," through the philosophy of Nietzsche, to the phenomenological and aesthetic theorizing of Cassirer. The examination reveals an undeniable relation between Stevens' poetry and Nietzschean philosophy with respect to the affirmation of life--of man's "being"; and it finds in Cassirer's "theory of symbolic forms" an expression of man's creative tendency and capacity adequate as a basis for the "supreme fiction"--the philosophical keystone of Stevens' poetic endeavors. The "poetry of being" is redefined as a poetry not of disinterested observation of the truth of things but of creation of, and participation in, that truth--a "truth" of which "fiction" is a vital part.