Wallace Stevens' 'Earthy Anecdote'; or, How Poetry Must Resist Ecocriticism Almost Successfully

Author: Eeckhout, Bart¹

Source: Comparative American Studies, Volume 7, Number 2, June 2009 , pp. 173-192(20)

Publisher: Maney Publishing

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Abstract:

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.

Keywords: AESTHETIC THEORY; AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY; ECOCRITICISM; WALLACE STEVENS

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1179/147757008X280777

Affiliations: 1: University of Antwerp, Belgium;, Email: bart.eeckhout@ua.ac.be

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