Chapter 17 - Lyrical Ethics

Summary

In the concluding chapter, Skibsrud proposes to reactivate ethical questions implicit in Wallace Stevens’s work. Building on the work of scholars like Derek Attridge, William Waters, Rachel Cole, Mara Scanlon, and others, she argues for the lyric as an actual—rather than virtual—extension of subjectivity beyond a linear narrative frame. Skibsrud emphasizes Stevens’s interest in presenting poetry as an opportunity for engagement and interpretation, while simultaneously taking seriously his emphasis on the impasse of language and subjective perception. Through close readings of several poems taken from different moments in his career, this final chapter acts both as testament to and an argument for the capacity of lyric to express the nonlinear, fundamentally poetic, relation between language and truth, self and other.