Gathered Beneath the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community

by Justin Quinn

Writers as diverse as Harold Bloom, Adrienne Rich, and R.S. Thomas have acknowledged that Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is one of the central poets of the twentieth century. In this book Justin Quinn offers a fundamental reassessment of Stevens's work and the connection it makes between nature, community, and art. Quinn engages with the recent wave of historicist criticism, and displays the shortcomings of this approach, not only for a reading of Stevens, but also for literature in general. Stevens's thoughts about ideology are informed at every turn by the natural world, as though he wanted to make ideology answerable to the metamorphoses sweeping through the sky and the landscape extending around, and thus becomes political poetry in the best and deepest sense, one that speaks intimately with its reader without forgoing wider public panoramas. This is a timely, important, and original contribution to the critical debate on Wallace Stevens's poetry. ""[A] superb, highly recommended study.""-Choice

157 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2002