Cary Wolfe

"The poems of Wallace Stevens teem with birds: grackles, warblers, doves, swans, robins, nightingales, jays, owls, peacocks, the "bird with the coppery, keen claws," a "parakeet of parakeets," a "widow's bird," and one famous blackbird who summons thirteen ways of looking. What do Stevens's evocations of birds, and his poems more generally, tell us about the distance between human and non-human? In what ways can we read him as an ecological poet, and how would reading him this way change our idea of ecopoetics? In this book, the noted theorist of posthumanism Cary Wolfe reconceptualizes ecopoetics through a poet not often associated with the terms "ecology" and "environment." Stevens, Wolfe argues, is an ecological poet in a sense that reaches well beyond his poems' imagery. Stevens's poetry is well known for embodying the tension between a desire for "things as they are," without human mediation, and the supreme value of the imagination. Noting Stevens's refusal to resolve this tension, Wolfe shows how the poems reward study alongside theories of system and observation derived from a multitude of sources, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Niklas Luhmann. Stevens is ecopoetic in the sense that his places, worlds, and environments are generated by the life forms that inhabit them"--

Books like Ecological Poetics; Or, Wallace Stevens's Birds

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