Beschreibung:
<jats:p>Wallace Stevens uses the alphabet as a code to validate the philosophical concerns of his poetry. The alphabet is “murderous” if it represents a sacred and sterile process that assumes a final dispensation as “heavenly script”; the alphabet is “fusky” if it represents an artistic act that continually mediates between the emptiness of things and the imagination to create poetic heavens on earth. Stevens often works with an abbreviated alphabet (ABC, XYZ, etc.) where the letters are “characters” who represent certain relations between the imagination and reality. An understanding of this code informs certain poems where letters play an explicit and major role, such as “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch,” “Connoisseur of Chaos,” and “The Comedian as the Letter C.” The alphabetical code also informs much of Stevens’ other work and accounts for many of the apparent difficulties of his poetry—the curious vocabulary, the fantastic characters, and the exotic topography of his poetic universe.</jats:p>