{"title":"\"Blue and White Munich\": Images of Germany in Stevensian Regeneration","authors":"Gül Bilge Han","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2024.a922170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2024.a922170","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Wallace Stevens's exploration of German cultural elements and figures, including his own heritage, functions as a creative source for his poetry and prose. While his early poetry romanticizes German culture and identity, Stevens grows skeptical in the mid-1930s and 1940s when his references to Germany increasingly inform his questioning of poetry's collective relevance and function. In several poems including \"Martial Cadenza,\" \"Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion,\" and \"Imago,\" images of Germany provide key points of departure to contemplate the regenerative potential of the poetic imagination in transcending the exigencies of the external world unsettled by war and destruction.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140150103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Stevens and Germany, Stevens in (West) Germany","authors":"Andrew Steven Gross","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2024.a922168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2024.a922168","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This first of two special issues on \"Stevens and Germany\" addresses a neglected topic. Five contributions by Philip McGowan, Gül Bilge Han, James Dowthwaite, George Kovalenko, and Christoph Irmscher explore the broad contours of Wallace Stevens's relation to Germany, spanning from youthful identification to tempered wartime and postwar reflections. The contributions also highlight moments in the poet's life and writing, including his visit to a German art exhibition in 1909 and his later genealogical research into the maternal, German side of the family. A related topic of scholarly neglect, at least in the United States, has been the postwar (West) German reception of Stevens. Not until the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall was his poetry able to slough its initial reputation as elitist and conformist. A series of new translations, most of them appearing in the twenty-first century, have helped revitalize German interest in the American poet.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140150028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"The Heart's Residuum\": Adorno's Metaphysical Experience in Stevens's \"Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas\"","authors":"George Kovalenko","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2024.a922172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2024.a922172","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Although Wallace Stevens and Theodor W. Adorno respond in distinct ways to the Holocaust, their works have a theoretical affinity. In 1940, Stevens writes a poem that, while it cannot register the unfathomable catastrophe, does speculate about the fate of the imagination in a world turned into an enormous camp through total war. Adorno, who most famously responds in his dictum against poetry after Auschwitz, develops a minimal theory of what he calls metaphysical experience. What for Adorno is the dialectical category of metaphysical experience is for Stevens poetics.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"97 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140150099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Current Bibliography","authors":"Lisa Goldfarb, Florian Gargaillo","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2024.a922181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2024.a922181","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Current Bibliography <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lisa Goldfarb and Florian Gargaillo </li> </ul> Lisa Goldfarb Gallatin School, New York University Florian Gargaillo Austin Peay State University <h2>B<small>ooks</small></h2> Gould, Thomas, and Ian Tan, editors. <em>Wallace Stevens in Theory</em>. Liverpool UP, 2023. <p>Google Scholar</p> Hart, Kevin. <em>Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation: The Gifford Lectures, 2020–2023</em>. U of Chicago P, 2023. <p>Google Scholar</p> Tan, Ian. <em>Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel: Order, Form, and Creative Un-Doing</em>. Routledge, 2023. <p>Google Scholar</p> Wood, Jamie. <em>Modernist War Poetry: Combat Gnosticism and the Sympathetic Imagination, 1914–1919</em>. Edinburgh UP, 2023. <p>Google Scholar</p> <h2>B<small>ook</small> C<small>hapters</small></h2> Azambuja, Enaiê Mairê. \"The alchemy of imagination and material reality: nothingness, impermanence, and vital materialism in Wallace Stevens's poetry.\" <em>The Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imaginations in Modernist American Poetry</em>, Routledge, 2024, pp. 119–44. <p>Google Scholar</p> Deming, Richard. \"Response and Responsibility: Stevens, Williams, and the Ethics of Modernism.\" <em>Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading</em>, Stanford UP, 2022, pp. 117–68. <p>Google Scholar</p> Eames, Rachel Fountain. \"The Quantum Poetics of Wallace Stevens and Max Planck.\" <em>Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde: Quantum Modernism and Modernist Relativities</em>, Bloomsbury, 2023, pp. 179–224. <p>Google Scholar</p> Gill, Jo. \"Wallace Stevens: Ideas of Order.\" <em>Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms</em>, Oxford UP, 2023, pp. 115–50. <p>Google Scholar</p> Marsh, Alec. \"Wallace Stevens, Stanley Burnshaw, and the Defense of Poetry in an Age of Economic Determinism.\" <em>The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900</em>, edited by Daniel Morris, Cambridge UP, 2023, pp. 86–99. <p>Google Scholar</p> Wallace, Jeff. \"'Resist the intelligence almost successfully': Wallace Stevens.\" <em>Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity: Human and Inhuman</em>, Edinburgh UP, 2023, pp. 132–57. <p>Google Scholar</p> <h2>A<small>rticles</small></h2> Altieri, Charles. \"Stevens as Modernist: The Intensities of <em>Harmonium</em>.\" <em>The Wallace Stevens Journal</em>, vol. 47, no. 2, Fall 2023, pp. 156–63. <p>Google Scholar</p> Dong, Feng. \"Stevensian <em>Dao</em>, or the Possibilities of Change.\" <em>Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies</em>, vol. 49, no. 2, Sept. 2023, pp. 175–98. <p>Google Scholar</p> Eeckhout, Bart, and Florian Gargaillo. \"Still Whipping Hullabaloos among Spheres.\" <em>The Wallace Stevens Journal</em>, vol. 47, no. 2, Fall 2023, pp. 131–43. <p>Google Scholar</p> Goldfarb, Lisa. \"<em>Harmonium</em> through the Years.\" <em>The ","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140150106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stevens, Germany, and the Churches","authors":"Philip McGowan","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2024.a922169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2024.a922169","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Wallace Stevens's \"Credences of Summer\" (1947), in particular section IV's articulation of \"the limits of reality,\" may be read as significantly German-influenced by connecting two distinct lines of inquiry: the poet's personal connection to Henry and Barbara Church, and his increased interest, from 1944, in genealogical researches on Pennsylvania. By 1947, Stevens's engagement with Germany had evolved from his early, romanticized identifications with a native peasantry to engage with post-WWII Germany as a concept of pure imagination.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140156938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"For The Moment, at Least","authors":"Jacque Vaught Brogan","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2024.a922175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2024.a922175","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> For The Moment, at Least <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jacque Vaught Brogan </li> </ul> <p>Notre Dame</p> <p>October 12–13, 2023</p> <p><span>The Poem is mad. In fact, it almost refused to meet</span><span>This year. But it showed up today, saying,</span><span> \"I don't want to talk about it.</span><span>Any of it. At all. Even if it is true</span><span>That your 'unprecedented' wildfires have 'reversed</span><span>Seven years' progress in cleaning our air,'</span><span> \"it is just too easy</span><span>To recall the odd orange haze that, all of June,</span><span>Sullied the sky and dimmed the sun. Even if it is true</span><span>That 'dangerous particulates' stretched all the way</span><span>From Canada past Florida, it is just too simple</span><span>To underscore how the sumacs have suffered the effect—</span><span>How they are 'hung with dried leaves, /</span><span>Clinging to broken branches like dead moths.'</span><span>(Your words, dear friend, not mine.)\"</span></p> <p><span>The Poem is, frankly, being pissy. \"And,\" it continues</span><span>To complain, \"even if the extensive drought and heat</span><span>Through summer's end blighted the corn and wheat</span><span>Of the entire Midwest, it is too facile, by far, to turn</span><span>To the trees and say, 'The oak leaves droop</span><span>like dirty gloves' or that 'Patches in the maples</span><span>are missing, / Having turned a crackled brown /</span><span>Before dropping far too early, / Already</span><span>mere leaf-trash on the ground.'\"</span></p> <p><span> It refuses to talk about it—</span><span>All the suffocating earthquakes and floods elsewhere—</span><span>And cringes when it cries that it didn't want to hear</span><span>About the babies and beheadings or that now</span><span>There is \"No safe place left in Gaza.\"</span></p> <p><span>\"It takes courage,\" the Poem insists,</span><span>\"—or can we still say, 'real <em>chutzpah'</em>?—to report that last month</span><span>'The Banyan Tree on Maui,' though seemingly burned</span><span>Beyond hope, was 'showing sprouts on its lower limbs,'</span><span>And that just this past week, the Banyan is re-leafing,</span><span>Against all odds, 'even in its upper canopy.' <strong>[End Page 107]</strong></span></p> <p><span> \"SO?—WHAT OF THIS?,\" the Poem demands.</span><span>\"What OF it? Dare you admit (much less describe)</span><span>How today, at this rendezvous by the lakes, we see poplars</span><span>And Northern Ash still fanning full green leaves—</span><span>Waving them in quiet applause to this changing season?</span><span>Or that here and there random leaves, having reached</span><span>Their longed-for color, let go, make clicking sounds</span><span>At first, among the blowing upper branches,</span><span>Then drift, side to side, riding the soft breeze</span><span>Through light and shadowed limbs, before landing—</s","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140150108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stevens's \"Peter Quince at the Clavier\" and the Pleasures of Merely Going Round","authors":"Christoph Irmscher","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2024.a922173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2024.a922173","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The author links a critical journey through \"Peter Quince at the Clavier\" with his own academic journey since completing, over thirty years ago in Germany, a dissertation that dealt with Wallace Stevens's poetry. A foray into artistic treatments of the \"Susanna and the Elders\" theme (from Albrecht Altdorfer to Thomas Hart Benton) highlights the extent to which Stevens explores, creatively responds to, and then detaches himself from the long-established voyeuristic implications of the story, using them to outline his own theory as to how we should read his poem and, indeed, poetry in general.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140150030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}