The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the changes of Stevens' style originated not from gaudy triumphs but from isolated confessions of perceived defeat and depression. The author points out that as Steven's aged, his maturity curbed his poetic excess; a change of style caused a change in substance and a well-tempered style emerged. The paper relates that Stevens, eventually known for his restless style and imagination, won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize, at age 75, a year before died.

From the Paper:

"Colors grow smaller because the poet-hero fails to resolve his opposing states of his mind. He requires a reconciling, redeeming symbol-Jung's transcendent [unifying] function to pacify his "violent disunion." These opposed states of mind negate each other until the ego finds a compensatory context, much as an emotional thesis and antithesis meld into an over-arching synthesis, not as an explicit solution but as an adjusted attitude. Having repudiated the maidens of summer and recognized the promise of the singer and the "voice within" almost simultaneously, he looks to the moon he saw and felt "When he was young, naked and alien, / More leanly shining from a lankier sky."

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