Abstract/Summary

Until recently, scholarship has struggled to situate Wallace Stevens within ecocritical discussions. This thesis seeks to re-examine Stevens’s poetry in its engagement with what we now recognise as ecocritical methodologies, in order to suggest that our scholarly understanding of Stevens needs some reorientation. With a predominate focus on language, sound, and voice, I explore how Stevens’s ecopoetics seek to expose and give agency to the voices of nonhuman entities across his work. Throughout, the thesis acknowledges previous critical grounding of Stevens’s work and philosophy around the relationship between imagination and reality, whilst critiquing claims that this perspective is the only lens by which Stevens’s work may be read. By analysing a range of Stevens’s works, inclusive of poetry, prose, and letters, I show Stevens’s ecological consciousness to be key to the genesis and development of a poetics that enables the more-than-human world to speak. Using a historical approach, I seek to locate his ecopoetics across key areas of influence upon his work: Romanticism, Modernism, and contemporary ecopoetics. From these readings, I align Stevens’s ecopoetics to both first-wave and second-wave ecocriticism, using close reading of a selection of Stevens’s work to clarify some of the key entanglements present within the field. As ecocriticism develops and broadens its focus, it is essential that the field calls for new perspectives on established texts. Ecocritical reformulations such as these allow scholarship to maintain currency within a changing world and invites new ways of understanding our current situation within the ecological crisis.