The Violence Within / The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics
Jacqueline V Brogan
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one of the leading poets of the twentieth century, continues to influence a wide range of poets writing today. However, an image persists of Stevens as an aesthete who was politically removed from his times and who also exhibited sexist and racist tendencies. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan offers careful readings from across the Stevens canon to demonstrate that, contrary to such enduring earlier assessments, Stevens's work over the years shows poetic and political changes that merge with his growing ethical concerns.
Brogan traces Stevens's evolving poetic practices along three major lines that often intersected. She situates the beginnings of Stevens's development within his early resistance to the pressures of "reality" on the imagination, an artistic stand that pitted him against the "objective" poetry exemplified in the work of William Carlos Williams. Then, in the midst of Stevens's career, World War II moved him forward with new poetic responsibilities both to witness the current world and to guide readers into their future. The emergence of an almost feminist vision defines Stevens's third line of development. Finally, in addition to identifying these developmental stages, Brogan addresses the undercurrent of race throughout Stevens's work.
According to Brogan, Stevens not only changed but matured over time. What began as an aesthetic "violence within," or a girding against such "violence without" as social unrest and war, rapidly evolved during Stevens's middle years into a set of perceptions and practices increasingly responsive to his times.
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About Jacqueline V Brogan
Reviews for The Violence Within / The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics
Charles Altieri
University of California at Berkeley
In writing about Stevens's revolutionary poetics, Jacqueline Brogan succeeds in creating a work that is itself revolutionary. Her book challenges traditional notions about Stevens the poet and Stevens the man. This is a provocative and controversial thesis, and it is certain to generate critical debate for years to come.
John N. Serio
editor, Wallace Stevens Journal
Jacqueline Brogan provides the best account to date of how Stevens's resistance to the violence of war, in all its forms, led him to espouse ethical forms of feminist aesthetic advocacy. Her book reshapes received versions of Stevens's ideological and genealogical development, presenting a new vision of his late poetry that subsequent scholars, and all students of modern poetry, will want to take into account.
Charles Berger
author of Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens
Brogan’s book proposes nothing less than a total political revision of Wallace Stevens’ commitments. . . . This indeed has all the rumblings of a revolution.
Boston Review