Wallace Stevens, 1938

 

Bibliography

 

Buttel, Robert. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967. In
       chapter six of Buttel's book, he discusses the relation between Stevens' peotry and painting.
       Looking at the whole of Stevens' career, Buttel sees a marked influence from the
       Impressionists and Matisse.

Costello, Bonnie. "Effects of an Analogy: Wallace Stevens and Painting." Wallace Stevens:
        The Poetics of Modernism. Ed. Albert Gelpi. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.  In this article,
        Costello discusses the whole of Stevens' poetic career and its relation to painting.  Her work on
        Harmonium focuses attention upon the influence of post-Impressionists.

Kern, Stephen.  The Culture of Time and Space.  Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.  This book is a
        discussion of the interrelations between developments in technology, science, art and literature
        during the Modern period.  It details the rising of a new consciousness of time and space due
        to these developments. For example, Kern discusses the telephone's ability to "abolish" old
        notions of space, or the way cubism infused painting (a supposedly "static" medium) with
        "movement," or the feeling of the passage of time.


Lentricchia, Frank. Modernist Quartet. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994. This book is an
        attempt to locate the intellectual and cultural inheritance of American Modernism, and its
        illustration in the "central" texts of Modernism by Frost, Stevens, Pound and Eliot. Beginning
        with a group of Harvard philosophers, including George Santayana, William James and
        Josiah Royce, Lentricchia traces American philosophical modernism through these four
        poets and attempts to "evoke the genteel environment as cultural origin of modernist
        reaction" (xiii).
Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
        Longenbach's intellectual biography of Stevens is an attempt to contextualize history with
        Steven's career as a poet and lawyer. He draws parallels between Stevens' career and
        ideological debates of the time over such things as the fate of American liberalism and the
        relationship of literature to political action.

MacLeod, Glen.  Wallace Stevens and Company: The Harmonium Years 1913 - 1923.  Ann
        Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983.  MacLeod provides a lively description of the heady
        atmosphere surrounding the Arsenberg salon during these years and the influence it had on
        Stevens during the writing of Harmonium.  MacLeod also discusses a few literary figures
        who, he believes, influenced Stevens during this time, including Gertrude Stein, W. B. Yeats
        and a group he calls the "Patagonians," comprised of Carl Van Vechten, Donald Evans, and
        Allen and Louise Norton.

MacLeod, Glen.  Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract
        Expressionism.  New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.  MacLeod posits Stevens' poetic
        development as parallel to contemporaneous developments in modern art in America from
        the 1910s through the 1950s and sees him as "perhaps the most central and representative
        American poet of his time" (xviii) because of this.  This analysis is an investigation of those
        parallels and how visual media affect written ones and vice versa.
Seyhan, Azade.  "Visual Citations: Walter Benjamin's Dialectic of Text and Image."  Languages of
        Visuality: Crossings between Science, Art, Politics, and Literature.  Ed. Beate Allert.
         Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996.  Uses Walter Benjamin's idea of "Schellenkunde" (science
        of thresholds) to discuss the "zones of passage" between image and text.  Although Azade
        does not reference modern poetry, technology or hypertext theory, his discussion of the
        interplay between the visual and the verbal and Benjamin's place in that discussion is
        illuminating.
Steinman, Lisa M.  Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets.
        New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.  Steinman focuses on modernist poetry and defenses of it
        written by Williams, Moore and Stevens between 1910 and 1945, and how and why these
        authors were engaged in defining the relationship of poetry to science and technology. The
        second chapter, "Modernism, Modernity and Technology: Following the Engineers," helps us
        see these poets' potentially negative "stances" in relation to machines and technological
        modernity.  Her analysis illustrates that some modern poets not only advocated but
        appropriated elements of the new technology. Williams and Stevens, in particular though,
        were critical of it, and the examples she cites from their prose and poetry provide an
        interesting counter-point to Pound's or, say, Crane's excited engagement with technology.
Tichi, Cecelia.  Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. Chapel
        Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Tichi discusses the interrelations between
        technology and literature during the Modern age to reveal a "machine-age consciousness" (18)
        and its representation in the literature of the time.

 

 

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