Beyond the Genius of the Sea: An Ecocritical Analysis of Wallace Stevens' Harmonium

Abstract

Existing ecocriticism focuses largely on the role of physical reality in literature, emphasising the accuracy at which existing environmental crises are portrayed in literary works. The poetry of Wallace Stevens, however, reveals how an appeal to and development of the imagination is valuable in shaping new ecocritical thinking and in contributing to the understanding of our relationship between the human and the non-human. Existing ecocritical scholarship has either disregarded the ecocritical value of Stevens or located his ecological engagement in the formal aspects of his poetry. Neglected in these examinations is the pivotal role of the imagination in shaping Stevens’ poetics and the ecocritical potential of his imaginative effort. In this thesis, I argue that Stevens’ poetry complicates clear distinctions between reality and the imagination and at the centre of his treatment of these concepts is the relationship of the individual, through the imagination, with the natural world.

This thesis examines Stevens’ first and intimately revealing collection of poetry Harmonium on the basis of close readings, which are compared and contrasted to Stevens’ essays and letters on poetry, as well as existing ecocritical and ecopoetic scholarship. The results of these examinations show how Stevens’ imagination shapes the natural world of Harmonium into a state of continuous movement and metamorphosis, which ultimately comes to resemble the processes of the human mind, revealing an interdependence between the human and the non-human at the heart of Stevens’ ecological engagement. Finally, the ecocritical value of Stevens’ imagination is determined in regard to existing ecocritical discourse. Stevens’ imagination ultimately reveals an interrelationship between the processes of the mind and the drift of the natural world, invaluable in establishing new ways of thinking about the environment and in imagining new ways of relating sustainably to our immediate surroundings.