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Wallace Stevens |
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In the debate between those who feel that art is, in its creation of beauty and commentary on the nature of reality, an end in itself, and those who feel that art should serve some larger, usually social purpose, the poetry of Wallace Stevens is a near-extreme instance of the former point of view. Consequently, he has been given scant attention from a SOCIOLOGICAL perspective, with critics of that orientation tending to dismiss him more by their silence than by outright attack.
His work has also been subjected to little PSYCHOLOGICAL discussion, if by that term one principally understands an analysis of human psychology as presented in the author's texts. Given the lack of personal detail in Stevens' work, BIOGRAPHICAL criticism has focused on his development and growth as a poet, while HISTORICAL research has sought to locate him in terms of the traditions, especially the Romantic, that he inherited, and the literary and artistic movements of his own time.
Traditionally, Stevens' poetry has tended to be analyzed and interpreted on its own apparent terms, with the majority of critics taking some variation of a FORMALIST approach in their discussion of his techniques and his themes of imagination as transfiguration of mundane reality and successor to traditional religious faith in a world bereft of secure and definite meanings. Nonetheless, at least three studies in the 1980s took something of a MYTHOLOGICAL approach by arguing, in their different ways, that Stevens is a poet of religious belief.
Since so much of his work calls into question some basic assumptions about the stability both of language and of reality itself, it all but goes without saying that in the last two decades his poetry has come in for a good deal of DECONSTRUCTIONIST attention, with some critics even arguing for--or, most notably in the case of Harold Bloom, against--the proposition that Stevens was something of a DECONSTRUCTIONIST himself.
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