THE SPIRIT'S OWN SEDUCTION: THE EROTIC CENTER OF WALLACE STEVENS' POETRY.
Item
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Title
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THE SPIRIT'S OWN SEDUCTION: THE EROTIC CENTER OF WALLACE STEVENS' POETRY.
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Identifier
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AAI8103926
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identifier
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8103926
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Creator
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FISHER, BARBARA M.
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Contributor
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Allen Mandelbaum
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Date
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1980
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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This study demonstrates the rich erotic substratum that runs through the entire Stevens canon. By examining major texts and some of the shorter poems, it explores the transformations of eros, partly as a measure of the poet's development and partly as an indication of his versatility. The study provides an entry into both the broad and subtle dimensions of Stevens' humor, and--because erotic energy develops into philosophical, theological, and aesthetic modes in the poetry--offers a meeting ground for the major critical approaches to his work.;I have defined eros in the broadest possible way, because a serious study of the erotic content in Stevens' poetry must refer to sources as widely distant in time and place, and as distinct in philosophical bias, as Plato, the speculative theologians, and Freud. Because the mythopoeic power of Plato's dialogues exerted an abiding influence on Stevens, however, and because almost all subsequent meditations on the relation of loving to knowing refer back in some way to the Symposium and the Phaedrus, I have relied upon Plato's original model of eros as a dynamic principle to describe the progress of desire from a physical to a metaphysical object. I have used the Symposium in general for a reading of Stevens' poetry, but more particularly to show that Plato's Diotima "prefigures" Stevens' key figure of "a woman with the hair of a pythoness.".;Two questions have served to establish the thematic boundaries of each of the six chapters in the dissertation: What are the most apparent, and recurrent, objects of desire in the poetry? What is the relation of the poet to his own "interior paramour"? In sequence, then, the chapters address the following themes: (1) desire aimed at knowledge of the unknown and the sublime; (2) the background, characteristics, transformations, and significance of the Paramour; (3) desire aimed at destruction, and the sexual elements in Stevens' humor; (4) the erotics of place; (5) symbolic and mythographic dimensions of Stevens' poetry of the Evening Star; (6) ultimate union, the telos of desire. The Coda to the dissertation shows the contrast between expression of the erotic element in Stevens' work and that of his contemporaries, and suggests Stevens' affinity with a line of English poetry that considerably predates the Romantics.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
