Mind of Winter: Wallace Stevens, Meditation, and Literature (Critical Essays in Modern Literature)

By William W. Bevis

Book Overview

Bevis addresses the most puzzling and least studied aspect of Wallace Stevens poetry: detachment. Stevens detachment, often associated by readers with asceticism, bareness, or withdrawal, is one of the distinguishing and pervasive characteristics of Stevens poetic work. Bevis agues that this detachment is meditative and therefore experiential in origin. Moreover, the meditative Stevens of spare syntax and clear image is in constant tension with the romantic, imaginative Stevens of dazzling metaphors and exuberant flight. Indeed, for Bevis, Stevens is a poet not of imagination and reality, but of imagination and reality, but of imagination and meditation in relation to reality.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822935988
• ISBN13: 9780822935988
• Release Date: February 1989
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 9.5"