Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode focuses on Stevens鈥檚 doubled stance toward the apocalyptic past: his simultaneous use of and resistance to apocalyptic language, two contradictory forces that have generated two dominant and incompatible interpretations of his work. The book explores the often paradoxical roles of apocalyptic and antiapocalyptic rhetoric in modernist and postmodernist poetry and theory, particularly as these emerge in the poetry of Stevens and Jorie Graham.
This study begins with an examination of the textual and generic issues surrounding apocalypse, culminating in the idea of apocalyptic language as a form of 鈥渄iscursive mastery鈥 over the mayhem of events. Woodland provides an informative religious/historical discussion of apocalypse and, engaging with such critics as Parker, Derrida, and Fowler, sets forth the paradoxes and complexities that eventually challenge any clear dualities between apocalyptic and antiapocalyptic thinking.
Woodland then examines some of Stevens鈥檚 wartime essays and poems and describes Stevens鈥檚 efforts to salvage a sense of self and poetic vitality in a time of war, as well as his resistance to the possibility of cultural collapse. Woodland discusses the major postwar poems 鈥淐redences of Summer鈥 and 鈥淭he Auroras of Autumn鈥 in separate chapters, examining the interaction of (anti)apocalyptic modes with, respectively, pastoral and elegy.
The final chapter offers a perspective on Stevens鈥檚 place in literary history by examining the work of a contemporary poet, Jorie Graham, whose poetry quotes from Stevens鈥檚 oeuvre and shows other marks of his influence. Woodland focuses on Graham's 1997 collection The Errancy and shows that her antiapocalyptic poetry involves a very different attitude toward the possibility of a radical break with a particular cultural or aesthetic stance.
Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode, offering a new understanding of Stevens鈥檚 position in literary history, will greatly interest literary scholars and students.
鈥淭o read Stevens is inevitably to think about revelation, about apocalypse. But until now, no reader has sustained that thinking at the level the poetry demands. Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode is a rigorously argued, ground-breaking book.鈥濃擩ames Longenbach
