Wallace Stevens in the Hermetic tradition

Abstract

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) poetry was always reputable as a challenge to interpretation, coherent with the tradition of the modernism of Stéphane Mallarmé’s A throw of dice thanks to its obscurity and philosophical content. The aim of this work is to show how this parallel can elucidate some problems that round the interpretation of modern poetry, namely: the links between language and reality and the poetry part in knowledge. First of all there is an analysis of the meaning of the problem as it appears in Stéphane Mallarmé’s masterpiece. Afterwards, an attempt to demonstrate in some poems of the American author how the problem is formulated in other terms in his theory of poetry as Supreme Fiction. For these purposes the poems chosen were “Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird” and “The man with the blue guitar”, insofar they demonstrate two different forms of approaching the question.