Title: Wallace Stevens' Poetics
First published: 2000
Description: "Stevens' poetry undermines the safeguarded classifications people use to contain knowledge. Political labels were prominent in 1930s America, when Marxism led many writers to prioritize politics over aesthetics. Stevens' poetry employs rhetoric to show that art and state function through similar appeals, and that these forms of persuasion govern history. The long poem, Owl's Clover, responds to Depression ideologies by dramatizing the nominal barriers people construct to stem their fears.

This study also responds to critical misapprehension about Owl's Clover, and argues that the poem's rhetorical poetics are crucial to understanding Stevens' complete poetry as an ethical challenge to the destructive and rigidly repetitive routes of history."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Rhetoric, Poetics, Criticism and interpretation, English language, History, Poetry (poetic works by one author), Stevens, wallace, 1879-1955, English language, rhetoric
People: Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS3537.T4753 Z6228 2000