Wallace Stevens’ Redemptive Poetics: A Religious Poet’s Piety to Poetic Thinking and the Authentic Language of the Necessary Angel
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Lin, Chih-Wei
Abstract
This present work of study attempts to explore the possibility of Wallace Stevens’ redemptive poetics. Stevens tells us: “Poetry is a means of redemption” (“Adagia” 903; “Materia Poetica” 917). It is my wish to pursue the concept of redemptive poetry alongside Stevens’ ideas of “the great poem of the earth” (“Imagination as Value” 730) and the “practicable earthly paradise” (731). Nominally the subject of this study is Stevens’ poetry. But it is my hope that the present work will prove relevant in a more universal sense, insofar as it addresses themes concerning language, being, the earth, human society, God, poetry, and redemption.
Chapter One: A Religious Poet’s Politics of a Poeticized God discusses Stevens as a religious poet and the form his God must take. It relates Stevens’ religiosity to the politics of his poeticized God. What is new in this account is that it formulates a systematic study of the motif of religion in previous scholarships and argues that the politics of Stevens’ poeticized God is not only a socio-political one but also an aesthetic-political one. It redeems us from our previous conception of what God is and rebuilds a religious relation with the world we live in.
Chapter Two: Redemptive Poetics and the Piety to Poetic Thinking deals with the motifs of “piety” and poetic thinking as a way of building in Wallace Stevens, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It begins by arguing that Stevens writes poetry because it is part of his piety to poetic thinking. What is new in this chapter is that it reveals the overlapping parallels and the striking similarities among these thinkers: They all think that philosophical thoughts should be written down in a poetic composition and that poetry provides a transcendent way of seeing things and redeems us from the limits of our language.
Chapter Three: The Great Poem of the Earth as a Means of Redemption explores the possibility of poetry as a means of redemption through Stevens’ great poem of the earth. The earth discussed here refers to nature. The theories of ecological discourse show that Stevens’ poetry has tried to solve the problem of man’s alienation from nature and to redeem nature from its muteness before the emergence of ecological discourses. It contends that there is an inherent proto-ecofeminist consciousness in Stevens’ poetry that redeems us from the male discourse of rational sciences that have feminized and colonized nature.
The discourse of Chapter Four: The Authentic Language of the Necessary Angel benefits from Walter Benjamin’s conception of the language of God and Heidegger’s philosophy of poetry as authentic speech. My account argues that poetry for Stevens translates the poetic character of nature. The necessary angel needs to translate the language of nature and that of God, as the imagination, into the language of the countrymen. This chapter shows that by speaking poetry, the language of God the imagination, we come to know what to do and how to live.
Chapter Five: The Knowledge of Poetry as Technē discusses the motif of poetic knowledge in Stevens. The poetic knowledge for Stevens is the magnificent cause of being. It can form a new reality. For poetry to become a means of redemption, the knowledge of poetry must become technē. Poetry as technē reinforces its characteristics of revealing and making known. This chapter benefits from Heidegger’s questioning concerning technology. What is new in this chapter is that it appropriates Heidegger’s theory of technē to strengthen Stevens’ poetry as a mode of revealing and knowing.
Subjects
華勒斯史蒂文斯
救贖詩學
土地的崇高之詩
宗教詩人
必然天使
對詩性思維的虔誠
真實語言
Type
thesis
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