The Decomposer’s Art: Ideas of Music in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

This comprehensive study of the ideas of music in Wallace Stevens’ poetry rereads Stevens as a poet whose compositional strategies assimilate musical forms and performative programs. The decomposer is the poet of qualification, who constantly explores the validity of developing variation as the best means for creating art not limited by system or medium. As both subject and strategy for poetry, music becomes Stevens’ most frequently used figure connecting his art to the rhythms of modern life. Thus, to disregard Stevens’ ideas of music is to misread the text.