Wallace Stevens and the Temporalities of Inception and Embodiment

Beginning with Wallace Stevens’s reimagining of the Promethean origins of man (depicted in The Metamorphoses) in “The Rock,” the chapter argues that this poem’s imagining of origin makes manifest ways his thinking about embodiment and temporality has shifted since the early poems—since, for example, “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Sunday Morning,” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” These early poems can be read to assert the body’s power to transcend itself, paradoxically by dwelling on its desiring and ephemeral nature; they assert the body’s power to transcend human finitude by coupling it with the capacity for sensuous evocation in poetic language. Detailed readings of these poems spell out the complications of this assertion. By “The Rock,” Stevens’s figures have taken on an arid abstraction: Their concrete immediacy often seems in inverse relation to their possible visualization, and the claim of a poetic power of transcendence is difficult to distinguish from the radical destitution of meaning voided in a pure material presence. The earlier poems’ concern with embodiment has been transposed to a more primal drama of inception: the coming into being of the poem and the poetic voice, prior to persons, forms, or meanings.