TROPIC AND SEMANTIC DISPLACEMENT AS MODERNIST COMPLEXITY IN WALLACE STEVENS’ POETRY

Abstract

The American symbolist Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is widely accepted as one of the most complicated poets of twentieth-century modernism. Due to his contribution to poetry through a genuinely innovative style that has inspired many, he has been recognized as one of the most notable and revered American poets. The present study aims to attempt a discussion on Stevens’ poetics by focusing on a number of poems that exemplify its semantic and linguistic complexity in terms of symbolic structures, imagery, and other tropic qualities. It limits itself to a number of poems that apparently accommodate Stevens’ favorite theme—the relationship between imagination and reality—and simultaneously reconstruct and deconstruct their own aesthetic delineations. Moreover, this study rests on the idea that Stevens’ body of work is itself deconstructive and that poststructuralist philosophy and deconstructionist criticism may come to aid when one attempts to demonstrate how those semantic and linguistic complexities become the coinages of modernist poems in their attempt to present themselves as organic and coherent entities, organized around a unifying principle.