'A cure of the ground and of ourselves': The ecological poetry of Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens understood the crisis of modernism as humanity's disordered relationship to the natural world. This study reads Stevens's work as a modernist nature poetry that reimagines the Nature/Culture dialectic and seeks to reinstate its forgotten term--Nature. Stevens's term "reality" emphasizes the physical universe as non-human Other. The primary relationship articulated in the poems--between human beings and non-human nature--defines all other relationships in Stevens's poetry, including the poet's relationship to language.Two extra-literary discourses frame the discussion. Phenomenology, the science of human experience and perception, elucidates Stevens's grounding of language in the physical, the processive and the perceptual. Ecology, the science of interrelationships, interconnections and energy flow, provides an analogue for Stevens's poetic theory and practice. For Stevens, language is a natural force, part of the non-human Otherness of nature within which the individual dwells (in Heidegger's sense) and comes into expression.After contextualizing Stevens within American representations of nature, and examining the poet's early relationship to the landscapes of his youth, the dissertation examines Stevens's journey as a young man to the mountainous wilderness of British Columbia. The study postulates that the Canadian trip profoundly influenced Stevens's conceptions of language and silence, his symbolic geography and his sensibilities toward wild nature and it spurred Stevens's shift from a Romantic toward a phenomenological conception of nature.The dissertation reads the poetry as it is governed by three major metaphors: nature as house nature as body and nature as self. It examines the idea of oikos as it underlies Stevens's sense of the world as dwelling or household and language as the primary currency in the household economy. Since the human being's most intimate dwelling is the body, the study examines Stevens's pursuit of a physical poetry, the representation of sensory experience, and the evolution from tropes of seeing to tropes of hearing as the primary expression of bodily presence and participation in the world. Finally, the work discusses Stevens's representation of the continuum between self and world, particularly as that relation is expressed in his late lyrics.