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This article investigates how the relation between poetry and philosophy is developed in a sample of reflections on the philosophical qualities of the American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens’s work. It offers a critical presentation of a handful of twenty-first-century published responses to Stevens’s poetry emanating from two different quarters: fellow poets and philosophers. The five selected poets (David Baker, Linda Gregerson, Carl Phillips, Stanley Plumly, and Carol Frost) collectively pondered Stevens’s philosophical qualities in a recent issue of the New England Review, while the responses by philosophers Alain Badiou and Peter Hare were published in collections of their essays. The two different angles are investigated precisely because they fall outside mainstream literary criticism on Stevens and help to dramatize several of the difficulties confronted by poets and philosophers seeking to find common ground. By pitting the voices of poets against those of philosophers, the article allows the reader to observe empirically how poets are often wary of addressing Stevens’s philosophical weight except by noting the formal and stylistic enactment of mental activity in his verse, while philosophers sometimes fail to acknowledge the intrinsic nature of lyric thinking, and thus do not always manage to contribute to a deeper understanding of the poetry as such.

The author of the article focuses on the selected short lyrics by William Carlos Williams and simultaneously draws readers attention the tension, existing in the American modernist poetry, between a modernist postulate of the autonomy of an aesthetic object and the pursuit—resulting from the tradition of American pragmatism—to treat this object as an intelligent commentary to customary activities in the environment of human communities. The author’s point of departure is the thesis by Marjorie Perloff. It claims that for modernist writing absolutely “pivotal” is the separation of the realities of the work from the event taking place in real life. Next, he demonstrates why this division cannot be maintained by such poets as Williams and Stevens. This inability is the result of a complex, non-European, pragmatistic admixture feeding the poetics of both poets. The main focus in the article, however, is placed on Williams.

This essay reconsiders the proto-ecological qualities of Wallace Stevens' poetry through a detailed reading of 'Earthy Anecdote', the little riddle poem that opens the writer's first volume, Harmonium. It argues that the poem fulfils a variety of purposes that cannot be all contained by an ecocritical reading: while it may certainly be understood as reflecting Stevens' investment in earth's natural cycles and its unspoiled natural environments, or as an affirmation of natural vitality rooted in the body and the senses, it is also about a poet in the act of finding a simultaneously local and international voice in modern art, about that poet's exploration of questions of image making or his confrontation with the epistemological and signifying limits of poetry, and about his attempts at reinventing the genre of the lyric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates the critical, editorial, and pedagogical challenges and opportunities raised by Wallace Stevens’s The Man with the Blue Guitar (both the book and the title poem). It ranges from a consideration of the title poem’s unpublished autograph and the preliminary appearance of a selection of cantos in Twentieth Century Verse and Poetry to the book published by Knopf in 1937, its subsequent repackaging in 1952, and the different ways in which especially the title poem has been integrated in selected, collected, and artistically augmented volumes for the English-speaking market, as well as in translation. Thus, a text-genetic narrative and publication history of continuous material transformations emerges that squares well with the aesthetics propagated and enacted by Stevens’s open series of variations on a theme.