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“That Which Is Always Beginning”: Stevens's Poetry of Affirmation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Steven Shaviro
Steven Shaviro*
Affiliation:
University of WashingtonSeattle
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Abstract

Wallace Steven's later poetry traces the multiple investments of desire that impel a world in perpetual metamorphosis. The works from “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” onward constitute an unlimited and ceaselessly repeated affirmation of difference, heterogeneity, and change. The evanescent movements of this poetry can never be reduced to sameness or self-identity, but they produce partial and temporary fixities of subjectivity and signification as local effects. Steven's radical perspectivism and his rejection of concepts of identity and substance work to subvert traditional dualisms of subject and object, language and world, and assertion and denial. But this work of displacement is never merely negative and destructive. Stevens's later poetry celebrates what Nietzsche calls “the eternal joy of becoming,” and in so doing it exceeds the limits of Western humanist thought.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 100 , Issue 2 , March 1985 , pp. 220 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1985

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References

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