Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing

Often considered America’s great 20th-century poet, Wallace Stevens’s work as an Anglo-modernist poet has been scrutinized extensively from a philosophical perspective. Eeckhout synthesizes and extends the critical understanding of Stevens’s poetry in this respect by arguing that a concern with the establishment and transgression of limits goes to the heart of Stevens’s work. The author traces both the limits of his poetry and the limits of writing as they are explored by that poetry. In the first half of the text, the limits of appropriating and contextualizing Stevens’s
The Idea of Order at Key West
and
The Snow Man , among other works, are investigated. Eeckhout does not pursue the negative purpose of disputing earlier interpretations, but the more positive intention of identifying the intrinsic qualities of the poetry that have been responsible for the remarkable amount of critical attention it has received. Having identified the major sources of Stevens’s polysemy and of the seeming free-for-all of his critical afterlife, Eeckhout deals with most of the poet’s major works and proceeds to analyze some of the most important limits of writing explored by the poetry itself. These limits all revolve around the nexus of perception, thought and language - three experiental categories that go to the core dynamic out of which Stevens’s poetry is generated and to which it continually returns.