Wallace Stevens in creative conversation : the occasion of long-considered sense

Abstract

This thesis contends that Stevens is engaged in creative conversation. His poems generate conversations between each other and with earher poets. For Stevens is in conversation with Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. My definition of creative conversation originates in Milton and is developed through the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Maurice Blanchot. Conversation is a useful description of Stevens at work because it allows interpretation to learn from the explications within his poems. Chapters one and two concentrate on one poem by Wallace Stevens called 'Metaphor as Degeneration' (CP 444). The first section of chapter one offers an interpretation of the poem in order to analyze it in creative conversation in chapter two. The second section reviews what critics have had to say about 'Metaphor as Degeneration' over the last thirty-five years.