The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens's musicality is so profound that scholars have only begun to grasp his ties to the art of music or the music of his own poetry. In this study, two long-time specialists present a polyphonic composition in which they pursue various interlocking perspectives. Their case studies demonstrate how music as a temporal art form may affect a poetic of ephemerality, sensuous experience, and affective intensification. Such a poetic, they argue, invites flexible interpretations that respond to poetry as an art of textual performance. How did Stevens enact the relation between music and memory? How can we hear his verse as a form of melody-making? What was specific to his ways of recording birdsong? Have we been missing the latent music of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Claude Debussy in particular poems? What were the musical poetics he shared with Igor Stravinsky? And how is our experience of the late poetry transformed when we listen to a musical setting by Ned Rorem? The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens will appeal to experts in the poet's work, students of Modernism in the arts, and a wider audience fascinated by the dynamics of exchange between music and poetry.

Bart Eeckhout is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and has been Editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal since 2011. His books include Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (2002), five co-edited volumes on Stevens, and twelve co-edited thematic issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal. Most recently he co-edited The New Wallace Stevens Studies (2021). Eeckhout is a Member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.

Lisa Goldfarb is Professor at New York University's Gallatin School, USA, President of The Wallace Stevens Society, and Associate Editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal. She is the author of The Figure Concealed: Wallace Stevens, Music, and Valéryan Echoes (2011) and Unexpected Affinities: Modern American Poetry and Symbolist Poetics (2018), as well as co-editor of several edited collections on Stevens and special issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal. She has recently contributed a chapter, "Music of the Sea: Elizabeth Bishop and Symbolist Poetics," to Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of Literature (Palgrave 2019).