Mind of Winter: Wallace Stevens, Meditation, and Literature

Mind of Winter: Wallace Stevens, Meditation, and Literature
ISBN-10
082298511X
ISBN-13
9780822985112
Series
Mind of Winter
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
356
Language
English
Published
2004-06-25
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh Press
Author
William W. Bevis

Description

Bevis addresses the most puzzling and least studied aspect of Wallace Stevens’ poetry: detachment. Stevens’ detachment, often associated by readers with asceticism, bareness, or withdrawal, is one of the distinguishing and pervasive characteristics of Stevens’ poetic work. Bevis agues that this detachment is meditative and therefore experiential in origin. Moreover, the meditative Stevens of spare syntax and clear image is in constant tension with the romantic, imaginative Stevens of dazzling metaphors and exuberant flight. Indeed, for Bevis, Stevens is a poet not of imagination and reality, but of imagination and reality, but of imagination and meditation in relation to reality.

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