Abstract
What, if anything, is there still to be gained from situating Stevens within the context of early twentieth-century European philosophy rather than American philosophy? I cannot offer a general answer, but I can elaborate the speculative gain involved in relating Stevens to Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences, written in the period 1934–37, the same years in which Stevens reorients his poetic career. I am aware of no evidence that Stevens ever read this book. Yet the line of thinking it develops seems to me closely woven into Stevens’ sense of the world. This is not a matter only of Stevens and Husserl having parallel ideas. Husserl’s capacity to blend the transcendental and the elemental in his book helps us see what is philosophically dynamic and engaging about Stevens’ sense of the distinctive tasks his poetry had to perform (at least the poetry after Harmonium).
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© 2008 Charles Altieri
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Altieri, C. (2008). Stevens and the Crisis of European Philosophy. In: Eeckhout, B., Ragg, E. (eds) Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583849_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583849_5
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