Masters Theses

Date of Award

3-1983

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Major Professor

B. J. Leggett

Committee Members

Edward W. Bratton, Joseph B. Trahern

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to define the characteristic tone of Wallace Stevens' poetry. This tone is reserved, contemplative, and deliberate. The perceptually rendered landscape descriptions of Stevens' work reveal this tone clearly because they are strikingly detailed and visual and yet, when compared to the impassioned descriptions of Keats and Hopkins, divulge very little of the poet's personal feelings for the scene.

The theory behind Stevens' detached stance is found in his belief in the inevitable influence of the poet's individual personality, or temperament, on the poem and in his opinion that the subjective elements of a poet's thought should not be allowed to dominate the poem. In other words, Stevens wants the reader to confront the subject of a poem without the interference of the poet's own opinions although he realizes that such objectivity is impossible. Stevens' desire for an impersonal stance relates his tone to the theories of aesthetic distance posited by aestheticians such as Charles Mauron, whose Aesthetics and Psychology Stevens read, and Edward Bullough. Both of these aestheticians define an aesthetic attitude, the approach that an artist should take when creating a work of art. This attitude is composed of elements that are found in Stevens' poems, and these elements are the artist's absorption in the present moment, a heightened perception of the setting which arouses associations and memories, a disregard of the practical nature of things, a pleasurable reaction to seeing reality in a new way, and a discarding of the usual organization of the scene for a new one. This complex attitude becomes the poet's process of seeing the world and recreating it in a work of art. When Stevens maintains this aesthetic attitude as he writes a poem, the structure of his landscapes becomes deliberate and the style becomes reserved.

In passages of landscape description Stevens structures his poems by constructing a seemingly physical space with words. He does this by noticing details of a scene in a sequence that explains their position in a landscape. It is helpful to think of Stevens' structural organization in terms of the mental movement of the eye of the speaker through space. As the eye moves from point to point, a scene is composed. This piecing together of details is a motif that reinforces the poet's detachment by forcing the reader to focus on the scene rather than on the poet's attitude and by preventing him from crediting nature with human emotions.

Stevens' reserved stance causes him to develop two distinct formats for landscape description. One is distinguished by curt, matter-of-fact sentences, and the other depends on complicated syntax with appositive phrases that reveal the poet's effort to describe a scene as exactly as possible. Although these formats are designed to suppress the poet's personal feeling for his subject, they nevertheless betray some amount of emotion. The curt style usually indicates that the speaker is dissatisfied with the scene; the appositive style, because it allows one to see the speaker's mind at work, retains emotions of sadness, lament, or quiet pleasure. Therefore, despite Stevens' effort to avoid subjectivity, a degree of it is exposed in the brevity or the meticulousness of his style.

The significance of Stevens' contemplative stance is that it complements his preoccupation with the relationship between the imagination and reality. Stevens' precise and dispassionate construction of a scene shows how concerned the poet is with seeing reality clearly and how convinced he is that man's consciousness and his temperament are ineluctable barriers to objectivity.

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