Abstract
In Wallace Stevens’ phenomenological poetry, Nature and the human respons to Nature are inseparable components of a single experience of a “world.” is human feeling for the things of the world that makes them “things,” bi that feeling has its basis in what is already there. This fundamental phenom enological idea is expressed with particular vividness in one of Stevens’ la poems, entitled ‘An Old Man Asleep’:
The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping now. A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity. The self and the earth — your thoughts, your feelings, Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot; The redness of your reddish chestnut trees, The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.1
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Notes
Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), p. 349; hereafter cited in the text as CP. Poems reprinted from this collection are by permission of the publisher.
Ronald Sukenick, Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure (New York: New York University Press, 1967), p. 148.
‘Someone Puts a Pineapple Together,’ part of ‘Three Academic Pieces,’ in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, by Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1951), pp. 83–89.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,’ in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 22.
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 162.
Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 104.
See Albert Hofstadter’s explanation of this concept and his translation in his introduction to Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1971), pp. xix–xxi.
The Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 798.
Joseph Riddel, The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), p. 117.
Letters of Wallace Stevens, p. 823.
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 55–57.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Primacy of Perception,’ p. 40.
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Ruppert, J. (1984). Nature, Feeling, and Disclosure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic — Epic — Tragic. Analecta Husserliana, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6315-3_6
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