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The language of the intensest rendezvous: Rhetorical disruption in the poetry of Wallace Stevens

Anne Bratton Fairbanks, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Abstract

The linguistic difficulty of Wallace Stevens's poetry brought him few appreciative readers during his lifetime, but today Stevens's uncertainties seem to embody the distrust of language that postmodern theories of writing and reading teach. His poetry is filled with rhetorical oddities--jarring vocabulary choices, unusual and complicated syntax, bizarre figures of speech, surprising humor, and puzzling use of poetic form. Stevens's linguistic disruptions reject the worn-out traditions of Romanticism about the power of language to unify nature and divinity. We seeks instead to startle the reader into active, intellectual engagement with his highly individual Modernist poetry. Although some poems display terror at the emptiness rather than exhilaration at the freedom when the old world order is gone, other poems turn language into a tool for devising new realities to fill the void that remains. Critics often ignore the bizarre in his poetry, or judge it as poetic weakness, or else they focus on his strained linguistic usage as evidence of emptiness and of the void. But rhetorical disruption in Stevens's poetry is often constructive and creative. It often highlights the power of the poet--and, by extension, the reader--to use metaphoric language to create meaning where none is inherent. Stevens's poetic language enables the reader to enter "the intensest rendezvous" with the finite twentieth-century world--with the constantly changing earth and its creatures--through a living, Modernist poetry of this earth. Stevens's use of rhetorical disruption is especially important to "The Comedian as the Letter C," "The Owl in the Sarcophagus," "The Man on the Dump," "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Ploughing on Sunday," "Depression before Spring," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad," "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "The Man with the Blue Guitar," and "A Primitive like an Orb."

Subject Area

American literature|Literature|Rhetoric|Composition

Recommended Citation

Fairbanks, Anne Bratton, "The language of the intensest rendezvous: Rhetorical disruption in the poetry of Wallace Stevens" (1997). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9725119.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9725119

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