Beyond the Chilly Chariots: A Contemplation of Nothingness in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Ph.D. Candidate, English Department, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran.

2 Assistant Professor, English Department, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran.

3 Assistant Professor, English Department, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran

Abstract

This paper deals with Wallace Stevens’s first collection of poetry, Harmonium, in light of Heidegger’s philosophy, with a particular emphasis on Da-sein as the place of negativity. The focus is particularly on Heidegger’s later philosophy, where he defines Man as the juncture where the four constitutive elements (earth, sky, divinities, and mortals) converge to let Da-sein appear as the futural authentic animal whose Being matters to him as his distinctive mark. Stevens’s poetry in Harmonium displays an experimental development along the same lines. The collection consists of poems dealing with the effect that the prospects of death and finitude have on its protagonists. Stevens achieves authentic protagonists who accept the nihilating power of death in order to save themselves from any form of social, poetic, and philosophical closure. This is significant because Stevens conceives a creative potential that not only runs counter to the romantic nostalgia for a return to an innocent past, but also openly embraces the idea of finitude as the only way out of any logocentric and metaphysical forms of thinking. This study, therefore, aims to show how in Harmonium Stevens poetizes an endless creative power that sets upon reproducing the non-closure associated with nihilation and nothingness.

Keywords

References

Ackerman, R. D. “Stevens’ Skepticism: From Romantic Irony to Deconstruction”. Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 22, No. 4, Winter 1983, pp. 551-567.
Altieri, Charles. “Stevens and the Crisis of the European Philosophy”. Wallace Stevens Across the Atlantic, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 61-78.  
Beehler, Michael T. “Meteoric Poetry: Wallace Stevens’ ‘Description Without Place’”. Criticism, Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer 1977, pp. 241-259.
Cook, Eleanor. A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007.
Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. New York, Routledge, 2005.
Eeckhout, Bart. Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing. University of Missouri Press, 2002.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York, Harper & Raw, 1962.
---. Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine”. Indiana, Indiana University Press, 2014.
---. Pathmarks. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
---. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York, Harper & Row Publishers, 2001.
---. “What Is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings. New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1993, pp. 93-110.
Kostova, Raina. “Deleuzian Underpinnings: The Affective Emergence of Stevens’ Concept of a Supreme Fiction”. The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 33-55.
Kronick G, Joseph. “Large White Man Reading Stevens’ Genealogy of the Giant”. The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3/4, Fall 1983, pp. 89-98.
Madden, Benjamin. “What’s So Ordinary about Stevens’ ‘The Ordinary Women’?”. The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 9-22.
Miller, J. Hillis. “Wallace Stevens”. Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens. Edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese. Boston, G.K. Hall &Co., 1988, pp. 81-83.
Mitchell, J. Andrew. The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2015.
Simpson, Hannah. “‘Where / Do I begin and end?’: Circular Imagery in the Revolutionary Poetics of Stevens and Yeats”. The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol 42, No. 1, Spring 2018, pp. 46-61.
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York, Library of America, 1997.
---. Letters of Wallace Stevens. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, INC., 1981.  
---. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, INC., 1971.
---. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and Imagination. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, INC., 1951.
Watts, Michael. The Philosophy of Heidegger. Durham, Acumen, 2011.
Ziarek, Krzysztof. “Without Human Meaning: Stevens, Heidegger and the Foreignness of Poetry”. Wallace Stevens Across the Atlantic, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 79-94.

Files

History

  • Receive Date: 07 November 2021
  • Revise Date: 16 June 2022
  • Accept Date: 30 April 2023

Share

How to cite

Statistics