Rebecca Porte

The Late Sublime of Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was not the first to think about the apocalypse in verse—William Blake and W.B. Yeats come to mind as direct predecessors. My paper reads an apocalyptic bent in Stevens’s late verse, particularly that in “Parts of a World” and the “Auroras of Autumn.” The essay investigates a very small part of the following questions: what happens to the prophet-poet as the Enlightenment gives way to Romanticism, Romanticism to nineteenth century idiom and the nineteenth century to modernism and post-modernism? How do the wars of the twentieth century, with its devastating advances in destructive technology, affect English language poetry? An examination of the language of apocalypse in post-war Stevens, particularly his response to the atom bomb, might offer one answer. In wedding a sublime evolved from its Romantic counterpart to a distinctly modern world, Stevens plays the troubled visionary, attempting to impose a measurable end on the great and terrible (to use Yeats’s formulation) prospect of our measurable end. This mutually assured destruction may very well begin in the kind of manmade disaster that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Readers of Stevens often think of him as a poet of winter. In a sense this is exactly right. But, as a thread of inexplicable coldness in a warm house seeds the superstitious mind with rumors of ghosts, the specter of the atom bomb haunts Stevens’s late poetry with intimations of a more profound sort of chill—the threat of nuclear winter.

Rebecca Porte lives and reads in Ann Arbor, Michigan.