Selecting Three Poems by W. Stevens: A Roundtable Discussion

Alan Filreis, University of Pennsylvania

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Excerpt reprinted from:

George S. Lensing, J. Donald Blount, Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, Stephen Burt, Eleanor Cook, Alan Filreis. Selecting Three Poems by W. Stevens: A Roundtable Discussion. The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 33, no. 2 (Fall 2009), pg. 238-257

Abstract

Three poems by Stevens indicate a particular aesthetic predicament, expressions of near-cessation: "Mozart, 1935," "The Man with the Blue Guitar," and "The Plain Sense of Things." In the third poem, the imagination re-emerges at precisely the point of its termination. In the second, the poet ventures into pure sound just when an ideological model for the poem collapses. In the first, the poem is the result of a dodge on the matter of others' pain.