This chapter centers on early American Pragmatist philosophers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, and the abundance of essays they produced, outlining the fundamental tenets of pragmatism. From the beginning, the Pragmatists showed a special affinity for the essay. This genre of writing proved to be the perfect vehicle not simply to fashion and explore provisional truths but to drive home the case that truth is inherently provisional. James and other pragmatists saw thinking as a mode of action in the world, quite different from the standard dualism that separates “mind” from “matter.” Just as the noun essay calls to mind the verb form – to essay, attempt, or try – so pragmatism was for James less a philosophical position or ideology than a method or practice. For James and Dewey in particular, pragmatism helped explain how we use ideas and beliefs to achieve our aims and how we modify and adapt those ideas and beliefs as we test them in the contexts of our daily living and engagement with others. The chapter dwells on the most important pragmatist essays and shows the many ways these influenced later pragmatist-oriented philosophers, even up to today.

The genteel tradition, inspired by British essayists, thrived in the United States in the early twentieth century up until the 1930s. George Santayana coined the term in 1911 to describe a group of New England intellectuals who, through their essays, acted as cultural gatekeepers, defining the standards of moral behavior and the rules of good literature. This chapter traces a genealogy between European genteel essayists and their American counterparts, focusing particularly authors such as Charles S. Brooks, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Louise Imogen Guiney, Gail Hamilton, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Agnes Repplier, George William Curtis, Donald Grant Mitchell, and Charles Dudley Warner. Much of the genteel essayists’ privileged Anglo, upper-middle-class, Christian values and sought to defend "high culture" against its perceived enemies: industrialism, immigration, capitalism, and class polarization. The chapter closes with a presentation of Black genteel essayistic writing and reflects on how the genteel tradition should be understood today, as a more critical eye is turned toward writers of the past whose ideals do not align with contemporary social and political sensibilities.

What happens when, with the knowledge and insights gained from queer studies and relevant biographical and historical scholarship, one tries to resituate Stevens not only within the aesthetic circles that may be drawn around his work but also and especially within the social circles in which he moved during his lifetime, and the poetic circles of those who have been attracted to his writings? To diversify the types of scholarship presented in The New Wallace Stevens Studies, Eeckhout’s chapter tilts more toward the biographical than other chapters do. From the new modernist studies, its investigation derives an interest in social networks at the expense of a narrow focus on self-reliant individuals; from queer studies, it borrows a fundamentally querying spirit about sexual identities and desires. Eeckhout offers a bird’s-eye survey of Stevens’s most significant queer precursors, contemporaries, and heirs, paying particular attention to the latter two groups. As case studies, he singles out Stevens’s friendships with George Santayana and José Rodríguez Feo, in which not-knowing played a central role, and the attractiveness of his licensing the fictive imagination to poets such as James Merrill and Richard Howard.