Wallace Stevens and Oriental culture

This dissertation focuses on the influence of Oriental culture in Wallace Stevens's poetry and thought. In the introductory part (Chapters 1–3), I first survey the critical history in Stevens scholarship pertinent to this topic, and then argue, on the basis of my examination, that some important aspects of Oriental influence on Stevens have so far been overlooked in the current Stevens scholarship. To follow up this argument, Chapters 4 and 5 explore Stevens's poetry, prose, and life in order to provide a substantial amount of evidence. Chapter 4 concentrates on the discussion of Stevens's “anecdote poems” and the Eastern koan, which eventually leads to a comparison of Eastern exemplary cases (respectively from language, religion, and poetics) with Stevens's particular poems, so as to provide evidence of Oriental culture's reverberations in Stevens's writings. Chapter 5 examines Stevens's “Affair of Places,” with a special focus on exploring how the physical settings of Stevens's poetry are modulated by his interest in Eastern landscapes. In studying landscape motif in Stevens's poems, I also investigate Stevens's Oriental art collections as well as his personal library, reading habits and museum visits in the hope of tracking this kind of particular Oriental influence in Stevens's poetry. In addition, this chapter also involves some discussion of the relationship between poetry and painting, a topic that once fascinated Stevens, and now sheds light upon the focused subject of this chapter. In the last chapter, Chapter 6, I conclude my study by briefly bringing in the issue of philosophy—both personal philosophy and philosophical history—in relation to Stevens's multi-faceted poetry, in the hope of orientating my study in Stevens scholarship. For I believe that, at a level deeper than what we realize today, Stevens was profoundly influenced by certain classical Oriental thoughts, such as the twofold world outlook and the idea of change, both of which are jewels of the Oriental wisdom.