Poetry and poetics after Wallace Stevens

"As the figure of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) becomes so entrenched in the Modernist canon that he serves as a major reference point for poets and critics alike, the time has come to investigate poetry and poetics after him. The ambiguity of the preposition is intentional: while after may refer neutrally to chronological sequence, it also implies ways of aesthetically modeling poetry on a predecessor. Likewise, the general heading of poetry and poetics allows the sixteen contributors to this volume to range far and wide in terms of poetics (from postwar formalists to poets associated with various strands of Postmodernism, Language poetry, even Confessional poetry), ethnic identities (with a diverse selection of poets of color), nationalities (including the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and several English poets), or language (sidestepping into French and Czech poetry). Besides offering a rich harvest of concrete case studies, Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens also reconsiders possibilities for talking about poetic influence. How can we define and refine the ways in which we establish links between earlier and later poems? At what level of abstraction do such links exist? What have we learned from debates about competing poetic eras and traditions? How is our understanding of an older writer reshaped by engaging with later ones? And what are we perhaps not paying attention to -- aesthetically, but also politically, historically, thematically -- when we relate contemporary poetry to someone as idiosyncratic as Stevens? "--

"This collection of essays examines the different lines that may be drawn between the work of Wallace Stevens and a wide range of poetry from the second half of the twentieth century up to the present moment"--

Introduction. After Stevens / Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb -- Frost or Stevens? Servants of two masters / Bonnie Costello -- The strands of modernism : Stevens beside the seaside / Lee M. Jenkins -- Hearing Stevens in Sylvia Plath / Bart Eeckhout -- Moving the "moo" from Stevensian blank verse : Elizabeth Bishop's use of prose / Angus Cleghorm -- Henri Michaux's Elsewhere through the lens of Stevens' poetic theory / Axel Nesme -- Stevens across the Iron Curtain / Justin Quinn -- Stevens and Seamus Heaney / George S. Lensing -- The not so noble rider : Stevens, Oppen, Glück / Edward Raff -- The Stevens wars / Al Filreis -- Stevens' musical legacy : the "huge, high harmony" / Lisa Goldfarb -- "Ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds" : Stevens, Sue Howe, and the souls of the Labadie Tract / Joan Richardson -- How John Ashbery modified Stevens' uses of "as" / Charles Altieri -- Silly to be serious : lateness and the question of late style in Stevens and A.R. Ammons / Juliette Utard -- Unanticipated readers / Lisa M. Steinman -- "This song is for my foe" : Olive Senior and Terrance Haynes rewrite Stevens / Rachel Galvin -- "The California fruit of the ideal" : Stevens and Robert Hass…