The “New Romantic” Tendency In Wallace Stevens'War Poetics

Wallace Stevens,a modern American poet,composed a considerable number of war poems during the two world wars and the postwar decade,but was not regarded as an important war poet by both the Parnassus and the academia.A notable characteristic of his war poetry is that,when concerning the reality of war,an aesthetic tendency is unconventionally presented.This dissertation attempts to focus on this aesthetic tendency,arguing that the poetic value and complexity of Stevens' war poetry are still underestimated — the poetic value coexists with the political one,essentially correlated with the “new romanticism”,a poetic concept Stevens raised around the Second World War.His war poetry can be interpreted as a conscious experiment,examining whether certain poetic principles derived from the romantic tradition may survive in the postwar age.Since around the 1990 s,when a group of scholars under the influence of the new historicism started on the relative research subject,the majority of existing researches adopted the method of “historical criticism” or “ideological criticism”,with the purpose to prove the political essence,as well as the willingness to shoulder wartime responsibilities conveyed in Stevens' war poems.These researches have largely reached a consensus on Stevens' self-contradiction — his war poetry is both“historical” and “non-historical”.On the one hand,Stevens did show concerns for the historical events;on the other hand,when referring to the realistic scenes of war,Stevens repeatedly deviated from the historical theme itself to a “personalized” or“aestheticized” way of writing.Stevens' war poetics is “new romantic” in essence.To a large extent,it deviates from the “realistic” tradition of war literature,weakening the negative aspect of the wars.Instead,it is more of a poetic dialogue between Stevens and his romantic predecessors,represented by William Wordsworth,Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.Through these dialogues,Stevens attempted to reconstruct the principles of romantic poetics in the context of modern warfare.The main body of this dissertation is divided into three chapters.Chapter One discusses how Stevens' war poetry responds to the romantic,especially the Wordsworthian view on the “nature”.To Stevens,a “naturalness” exists on the battlefield,and between the war and the nature there is an implicit homology.With the concept “natural man” put forward by Harold Bloom in his research on Wordsworth,this chapter points out that,from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second World War,the “soldier” Stevens portrayed is a Wordsworthian“natural man”.Contrary to the “economic man” or the “social man”,the “natural man” integrates with the nature to an extreme extent and becomes part of the natural circulation.The “soldiers” who participated in the war should have been distant from Wordsworth's “natural man”,typically embodied in the elderly and the children,but Stevens intentionally separated the soldier from his social identity,endowing him with a “naturalness”.Around the poem “Lettres d'un Soldat” composed at the beginning of World War I,I attempt to interpret how and why the event of “the death of a soldier”is regarded as a natural process,and the special aesthetic effect it brings forth.In“Credences of Summer” and “The Auroras of Autumn”,created shortly after the Second World War ended,and under the nuclear crisis,several variations of the imagery of soldiers as “natural man” are further presented.The soldier's naturalness rewrites the romantic pursuit of the “transcendental” — in the wartime context,the nature is no longer with a supreme significance,but is rebuilt into an aesthetic of uncertainty,between sublimity and nihility,or in other words,between transcendence and non-transcendence.Chapter Two explores the dialogue between the “musicality” in Stevens' war poetry and the romantic poetics.In his war poems,Stevens employs numerous musical elements,with two major characteristics—firstly,the “musicality” refers to neither the rhyme scheme or rhythms of poetry,nor the natural music,but the presentation of “artificial music”(instrument music);secondly,music and silence are dialectically blended.This chapter defines Stevens' poetic view on war as a “silent musicality” and points out that the musicality in his war poems can still be traced back to the romantic tradition,especially to the wartime creations of Whitman.But Stevens transcends Whitman,in that the blending of “musicality” and “silence”constitutes a self-contradiction.If the “silence” is an embodiment of the modern warfare that is inexpressible,the intervention of the Whitmanian marching music implies a return from “unwritable” to “writable”.From another perspective,the“silent musicality” in the war poems also symbolizes the unity between the ephemeral and the eternal,which corresponds to the imagination of the eternity of life and art in the romantic poetics.Chapter Three focuses on how Stevens successfully made the two distinctive poetic genres,the “war poetry” and “meta-poetry” into one,which can also be considered as part of his “new romantic” poetics.A number of important poems composed around the end of the Second World War simultaneously concern the war and the creation of poetry.Previous studies have from time to time mentioned the“meta-poetic” aspect of Stevens,but without adequate elaborations.This chapter points out that the “meta-poetry” on war is Stevens' ambitious innovation in poetic genre,the fundamental purpose of which is to prove the necessity and possibility of the coexistence of “war” and “art”.Through the close reading of the two long poems“Notes towards a Supreme Fiction” and “Ethétique du Mal”,it is pointed out that in this unique genre,with more consciousness than before,Stevens reconstructed the romantic poetics — on the one hand,he concentrated on the subjectivity of artist through building the figure of “soldier-poet”;on the other hand,he redefined the“sublime” in the context of the modern war.In a word,the essence of the association between the war with the romantic poetics lies in a similar pursuit of “infinity” that Stevens discovered both in the empirical war and the transcendental pursuit in romanticism.A self-contradictory structure is always employed.And the principles of Stevens' “new romantic”tendency in his war poetry mainly include: firstly,to construct an intermediate state between “sublimity” and “nihility”;secondly,to demonstrate a kind of infinite time and space in poetry,transcending the boundaries of individual life;thirdly,to build up an authorial subjectivity based on the “soldier-poet” image,and thus to realize the balance and integration between war and art.This research aims to reveal the uniqueness of Stevens' war poetics,as well as his reconstruction of the romantic tradition in the modern age.Confronted with the tendency of “anti-romanticism” or “objectivism” in modernist poetics,Stevens' rediscovery of “romanticism” can be regarded as an exceptional case in modernism,and is worth further exploring.In addition,the combination of “war” and“romanticism” is also unique.In the majority of the studies on romanticism,the war was rarely mentioned,and even fewer author employs the war to directly make poetic responses to the important concepts of the romantic masters such as the “sublime”.It is of innovative significance to relate the creation of war poetry with the poet's romantic tendency in poetics.