The condition of ascent: temperament, perception and transcendence in the later poetry of Wallace Stevens
Citation:
Martin Dyar, 'The condition of ascent: temperament, perception and transcendence in the later poetry of Wallace Stevens', [thesis], Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of English, 2007, pp 245Download Item:
Abstract:
‘Poetry’, Wallace Stevens said, 'is the expression of the experience of poetry' (CPP904). This thesis explores the connection in Stevens’ writing between ‘the experience of poetry’ and the poetic temperament. Stevens viewed himself as an authentic literary artist, a poet, as he said, born and not made (NA122), and as such, he theorised his life’s work in terms of the possibility of extreme aesthetic goals and an extreme sense of aesthetic duty. The two concepts of aesthetic capacity and aesthetic obligation define the poetic temperament as it relates to the thematic patterns of Stevens’ ‘poems about poetry.’ This thesis proposes Stevens’ attestation of an aesthetic obligation as a key foothold in the critical debates that surround the poet’s romanticist leaning. With regard to the concept of aesthetic capacity, this thesis identifies and examines, in the collections Parts of World (1942) and Transport to Summer (1947), the ways in which Stevens constructed a thematic sphere centred upon the notion of perceptual adeptness, in the late 1940s, he would increase the epistemological relevance of this focus upon ‘the subtilization of appearance’ and the related aesthetic powers of discernment, insight, and disclosure. In The Auroras of Autumn (1950) and The Rock (1954), it is explained here, the tropes he had used for the depiction of an innate poetic condition of mental and sensory intensity, form the basis of (and the key means to interpret) the idiosyncratic visionary schemata that define his penultimate and final collections of poetry. Commonly, Harmonium (1923), Stevens’ first collection, is said to contain the poet’s full achievement. Against this view, by illustrating Stevens’ development towards ‘a new knowledge of reality’ (CP534) and a nouminous ‘centre of the imagination’ in the later poetry, both the poet’s oeuvre and the poetic temperament which is its primary subject are understood as a condition of ascent.
Author: Dyar, Martin
Advisor:
Matterson, StephenQualification name:
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)Publisher:
Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of EnglishNote:
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English, Ph.D., Ph.D. Trinity College DublinMetadata
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