Notations of the wild
Subtitle: ecology in the poetry of Wallace Stevens
By: Gyorgyi Voros.
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Iowa City
Language: eng
Number of pages: 195
Subjects: Stevens, Wallace, 1879-1955 -- Knowledge -- Natural history.; Wilderness areas in literature.; Ecology in literature.; Nature in literature.
Description: In the summer of 1903, just before he turned twenty-four, Wallace Stevens joined a six-week hunting expedition to the wilderness of British Columbia.

The adventure profoundly influenced his conceptions of language and silence, his symbolic geography, and his sensibilities toward wild nature as nonhuman "other." The rugged western mountains came to represent that promontory of experience - "green's green apogee" - against which Stevens would measure the reality of all his later perceptions and conceptions and by which he would judge the purpose and value of works of the human imagination.

Notations of the Wild views his poetry as a radical reimagining of the nature/culture dialectic and a reinstatement of its forgotten term - Nature.

Gyorgyi Voros focuses on three governing metaphors in Stevens' poems - Nature as house, Nature as body, and Nature as self. She argues that Stevens' youthful wilderness experience yielded his primary subject - the relationship between human beings and nonhuman nature - and that it spurred his shift from a romantic to a phenomenological understanding of nature.

Most important, it prompted him to reject his culture's narrow humanism in favor of a singular vision that in today's terms would be deemed ecological.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [185]-190) and indexes.