Life Burning In Mortal Halo: An Interpretation Of Wallace Stevens's Poetry In Light Of Nietzsche's "Dionysian-Apollonian Spirit"

As one of the most distinguished representative poets in the 20^th-century American literary world,Wallace Stevens is frequently deemed as a modernist poet whose works are with profound meanings difficult to comprehend.While a great number of researches and writings have been yielded successfully,and a considerable number of them focus upon his poetics reflected in his works,few literary critics and scholars have probed into his poetry of high modernism in light of Nietzsche's theory of the“Dionysian-Apollonian spirit”.Through a relatively panoramic view of Stevens's poetry,this research believes that much of Stevens's poetry is indeed his poetic expression of Nietzsche's artistically critical thinking of the“Dionysian-Apollonian spirit”.The research explores the core of Stevens's poetics in some of his representative poems,by incorporating the prototypical images in some of his oft-quoted poems,such as“Sunday morning”,“supreme fiction”and“the jar in Tennessee”,with the essential points of Nietzsche's theory of the“Dionysian-Apollonian spirit”:Hellenistic spirit of life affirmation and its interior intoxication-illusion structure.In this sense,it indicates that Stevens accomplishes his critical thinking of the meaning of human beings'lives and their existential“dilemma”in modern society through his aesthetic creation of poetry,and in giving birth to his poetics Stevens himself makes possible the“apocalypse”of Hellenistic art in human world.It is also aimed at proving that the beauty and power contained in poetry,from Wallace Stevens's perspective,is the ultimate salvation for human beings in getting free from their“spiritual wasteland”.