Title: Notations of the wild
First published: 1997
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.
Subjects: Natural history, Ecology in literature, Knowledge, Wilderness areas in literature, Nature in literature, Stevens, wallace, 1879-1955, Poetry, history and criticism, Knowledge and learning
People: Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
LC classification: PS3537.T4753 Z83 1997