...) dares to take that leap. The test cases for introducing improvisation as a useful tool are Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and Langston Hughes. First, however, Wallace defines it: “In its mostbasic form, improvisation involves the reshuffling, revising, and recreation...

..., and Contemporary Discourse (Iowa), both outside the purview of our era, examine the rhetorical ter- rain of contemporary “new” or “experimental” poetry as a development of modernist stylistic and philosophical concerns. Hoover discusses Jorie Graham in relation to Wallace Stevens. Kinnehan shows how poets...

... of Warren, Tate, and Davidson. Books on Frost’s poetry reread him in context. Even Wallace Stevens is viewed through the critical lens of social and geographical location, and he and Auden are also located within a poststructuralist reading that revises their relationship to culture. While many...

... an understanding of modernism even further away from referen- tiality or connection with audience. Tischler’s position may not be more convincing, but it is certainly more enjoyable. v Wallace Stevens Critics working in an ecological groove are well represented in this year’s work on Stevens. Costello’s...

... below.) Natalie Gerber sets out to disentangle competing claims regard- ing sound among Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost in Beyond Meaning: Di erent Fates of Some Modern- ist Poets Investments of Belief in Sound, pp. in Ben Glaser and Jonathan Culler, ed., Critical...

... and Wallace Stevens, have accounted for approximately (allowing for multiple-author studies) three books per year; Robert Frost was the subject of two books per year, and Marianne Moore, H.D., and W. H. Auden one book. This year is unusual because there is no book from an American publisher exclusively...

... to the 1940s ii  Wallace Stevens The year was an especially good one for readers of Stevens, and for two reasons. First, both Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens (Princeton) by the major Stevens scholar Eleanor Cook and Cambridge Companion to Wal- lace Stevens appeared. Second, alongside...

... attention is paid to the lives and works of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, especially Langston Hughes, and two biographies of Edna St. Vincent Millay shed light on that charismatic poet’s personality and career. Gender issues remain a popular focus, as does...

... Will Be’: Darwinism, Pragmatist Thinking, and Modernist Poetry,” pp. 127–47 in America’s Darwin, argues that Darwinism influenced John Dewey’s aesthetic theory, which in turn affected the modernist poetry of Williams and Wallace Stevens. Schaeffer emphasizes the “processual” and “relational” dimensions...

... world as constituted entirely of forces of attraction and repulsion, explosive energies, electrical fields, and a tiny number of distinct types of particle.” Pointing to the physics metaphors in Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” a passing statement in Wallace Stevens’s “Imagination and Value...

... collection of the correspondence among Sigmund Freud, H.D., Winifred Bryher, and the members of their ‘‘circle Critics continue to pay a good deal of attention to Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, while interest in H.D., Marianne Moore, and Robert Penn Warren is definitely waxing. Callaloo celebrates...

... writers reflects the widespread integration of formalist close readings with ques- tions of cultural history. The year’s work includes a new biography of Robert Frost’s connection to feminine sentimental and regional tradi- tions, and a study of Wallace Stevens’s experimental poetics. Two figures from...

... that issues raised during the American Revolution continue to resonate in American poetry, often in unexpected ways. His analysis of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, for example, positions them on opposite sides of the fence. Williams partakes of the volatile, radical spirit...

..., and the Turning World (Cornell). Costello exam- ines the work of American painter Joseph Cornell, best known for his three-dimensional collages, and three poets: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. The idea of using the concept of the “still life” as a way into the poetry seems...

...- ers and readers. Even though Steen concentrates exclusively on negative emotions, he emphasizes exaltation in his subtitle to signal the poten- tial for hope. He addresses the work of Wallace Stevens in two chapters, which I cover in the relevant section below. Two recent studies address the impact...

... contradictions of their historical moment. She aims to unseat Pound as the definer of an era, or to suggest how the Objectivists, and not just Pound, Eliot, or Wallace Stevens, worked to define their era’s culture and to influence the way subsequent generations responded to it. This is an erudite book...

... been in discussing recent work on any other poet. E√orts to construct Bishop as a political poet continue apace: she is now well on her way to becoming a political progressive with a social conscience, and even on racial matters critics have become generously understanding toward her. Steven Gould...

... James’s place within the modernist movement—has been advanced by editor David McWhirter’s important new anthology and by guest editor Glen MacLeod’s issue of the Wallace Stevens Journal, devoted exclusively to the relationship between the novelist and the poet. For theorists James remains a key...

... almost as much pressure on the idea of the exclusively modern as it does on the uniquely Ameri- can. While 2005 offers, perhaps for these reasons, comparatively few single-author studies—albeit some memorable ones on W. H. Auden and Christianity, Wallace Stevens and philosophy, and most surpris...

... A special issue of the Wallace Stevens Journal (26, ii [Fall 2002 ‘‘Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound is devoted to a reconsideration, 20 years on, of Marjorie Perlo√ ’s influential essay ‘‘Pound/Stevens: Whose Era Ably edited and introduced by Glen Mac- Leod, the volume features full-dress versions...