Wallace Stevens: Poetry, Philosophy, and Figurative Language

This book is devoted to investigating the relationships and correspondences that hold between the poetry of Wallace Stevens and philosophy. Stevens used the aesthetically enhanced language of his poems to create inquiries into the nature of reality that parallel those conducted by philosophers. He also maintained poetry’s independence from philosophy. The first part of the book contains contributions that pursue various aspects of these parallels. Here, the authors explore the relations between Stevens’ poems and specific philosophical concepts or the thought of individual philosophers. The contributions in the second part narrow down the scope to the issues within the philosophy of language. This section concentrates on the role of metaphor and figurativeness in Stevens’ poetry.

Kacper Bartczak is Associate Professor of American Literature and Head of the Department of American Literature at the University of Lodz, Poland. He is author of a monograph on John Ashbery and a collection of essays in Polish on pragmatism and literary theory. Jakub Mácha is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He published a monograph on Ludwig Wittgenstein and edited a collection of essays on creativity of language.