Tim Morris

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Biographical note:  Tim Morris completed his doctorate at King’s College, Cambridge in 2001, and has since worked as a College Tutor in English at Cambridge University and as an Associate Tutor in the School of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is currently Teaching Fellow in American Literature at the University of Dundee. He has also published five books of poetry, and his poems have appeared in Poetry Review, CCCP Review and Jacket.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857806
ISBN-10:  1876857803
ISBN-13:  9781876857806
Author:  Tim Morris
Title:  Wallace Stevens
Series:  Salt Studies in Contemporary Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-06
Extent:  240pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  14 mm
Weight:  360 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 16.99
Price:  USD 26.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  A new study of the major poems of Wallace Stevens, which have been very influential both in accounts of American modernism and on later poetries. The book aims to address the issue of Stevens’ resistance to varieties of critical practice and to provide new information about the influence on his work of European and American aesthetics.

The book charts Stevens’ poetic career through the composition of his major long poems. A number of different critical contexts and methods are applied (polemical, archival, biographical, aesthetic and bibliographic) as they are most relevant to differing stages of Stevens’ career. The influence on his work of European theories of ‘pure poetry’, nineteenth-century American painting and idealism and the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce are elucidated.

The study takes close account of Stevens’ reading, and examines some of the key annotations he made in his own books. Early versions of the poems in manuscript and typescript are examined in order to discover Stevens’ practice of composition. Stevens’ changing techniques and ideas are traced as they developed throughout his career. The book also takes account of Stevens’ influence on later poets in America, and discusses the often-made accusation of the lack of explicit political or social engagement in his work.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
A Note on the Text
Introduction
Chapter 1
Pure Poetry: Stevens’ Aesthetic Education
Chapter 2
An American Nature: Stevens, Emerson and Landscape
Chapter 3
Revisions and Reworkings: The Priorities of Composition
Chapter 4
Stevens and Croce: Varieties of Lyrical Intuition
Chapter 5
Late Stevens and After
Notes
Bibliography

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Excerpt from book:  

Why should we read Wallace Stevens today? It seems that in the face of critical saturation, every new work about Stevens must provide some answer to this question for itself. There can be little doubt that the field of Stevens scholarship is well attended, and that many aspects of his life and work have been researched, from his biography to his influences, from his social and political milieu to the rather quaint practice of suggesting what his poetry might mean to us. Such is the density of this material that there is even a book about the books about him. 1 But I would suggest that the question is perhaps back to front, that the compelling interest in a poet’s work should properly be there before the critical work begins, and the responsibility of that work is to persuade others of this interest and to provide new information with which to freshen this field. My commentary here, in the most general sense, concentrates on these two aims. It would be in the reader’s interest then, to be familiar with the poems discussed in this book before continuing here, in order to perhaps read more closely by tending to disagree. The decision to investigate closely Stevens’ most demanding poems comes from this prior sense that his work still has much to say about relations of experience and its representation (we might even say its publicity) which seem still to press against much contemporary poetry’s sense of its own endeavours. All this of course is yet to be proved, but it is helpful to know early on what an author is trying to achieve. There is no final claim made here for Stevens’ centrality to modernism, or custody of a romantic heritage, or even of his authority as an explorer of a distinctively modern consciousness. Stevens is still important to us today because of the scope of his ambition and because his poetry concerns itself with issues and problems which cannot be separated from any poetic enterprise.

But this approach must carry the following warning. Stevens’ work has very often been the pretext for the presentation of a particular critical agenda, so open is it to varieties of interpretive practice and commentary. For this reason it is important to remember that the ambition of commenting upon and reforming critical method simultaneous with the common scholarly currency of ‘explication’ must never lose sight of the fact that the terms of its ambitions have been conceived only through the poems themselves. With this in mind, what is presented here is a commentary on what I take to be Stevens’ most important long poems, which, in the context of the myriad of formalised critical approaches now utilised by literary critics, believes its persuasiveness can only be detected at the point of contact between commentary and poem. If there is a program here, as there inevitably must be, it is to discern why the long poem was important for Stevens, to discover the formal pressures involved in their composition, and to provide new information to help illuminate their operations.

The interest in trying to illuminate and find fertile and empirically compelling contexts for Stevens’ long poems is not to ask the question, what do these poems mean? Or, how do they mean it? though partial answers to these are inevitably suggested. My question is, why are these poems composed in just this way? In Stevens we see an artistic career stubbornly atypical in its personal sense of itself, yet wholly suggestive in the public idealisms this ‘standing apart’ tries to guarantee. This kind of approach is necessarily a dialectical one, though in a very specialised sense. For in reading Stevens, we are powerfully discouraged from investigating the pressures that bear upon the poems from without; the poems have so often reached their own conclusions first.

In the spirit of Paul Valéry, a writer very important to Stevens, it is appropriate to first clear the air and examine the terms with a short polemical study of some of Stevens’ most persuasive explainers, in order to see which terms are consistently employed, and how, and to identify some serious critical pitfalls. The intention is to place before the reader historically some of the critical difficulties of Stevens’ work which the rest of the commentary will try to clarify.

Unpublished endorsement :  Tim Morris’s study offers a fresh, and a radical account of Stevens’ major works. It re-opens the question of his aestheticism through a synergy of elegant writing and close reading, that moves with an enviable grace and clarity, out into the wider vistas of Modernist politics, and philosophy. Of evident value to students of Stevens’ poetry, this book is also a suggestive illustration of the varied legacy of Romanticism, and its continuing power to shape our, as well as Stevens’, ‘world of words’.

Geoff Ward