Meeting: TBD
Instructor: Riley Soles
Perhaps no other poet has left behind such a rigorous and exhaustive (and beautiful) interrogation of the relationship between mind and reality. This course will read the collected works of Wallace Stevens, focusing on the development of his depiction of the imagination. We will pay particular attention to his notions of the “first idea” and the “supreme fiction,” as well as to the roles of the poet and poetry itself as they evolve throughout his oeuvre. Consideration will also be given to the poets (and artists) who most influenced Stevens, to poetic contemporaries such as Eliot and Frost, and to his own connection to major trends in both Romanticism and Modernism. We will also trace the spiritual contours of Stevens’s work against the background of a larger 20th century critique of religion and even loss of religion, and ask whether Stevens was primarily a secular or, despite himself, religious poet… or if such a distinction itself proves false.