Innovation, Rebellion And Redemption

Wallace Stevens,one of the representative poets in the twentieth century,is noted for his “creation of a new style or ‘language’ for verse”,which fuses the elements of abstraction,ambiguity,sound,painting and the comic spirit.Transport to Summer,published in 1947,embodies Stevens’ poetic thought.Especially it includes “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” which has been designated by most critics as the zenith in his poetic oeuvre.Here comes the question: how does Stevens embody his modern poetic thought? Essentially,aesthetic modernity put forward by Calinescu could be the answer.He raises the existence of some point during the first half of the nineteenth century when modernity split into two types,one is the modernity of bourgeois civilization and the other is aesthetic modernity.Calinescu considers aesthetic modernity as the opposition to tradition,to the modernity of bourgeois civilization,and to itself.With the application of Calinescu’s aesthetic modernity,this thesis makes a tentative study of Transport to Summer by focusing on the opposition and innovation of poetic language and the thought of aesthetic redemption.In so doing,it attempts to argue that Stevens’ poetry reveals the characteristic of aesthetic modernity.This paper includes three parts: introduction,body and conclusion.The introduction part briefly presents Stevens’ life and his Transport to Summer and also overviews the researches on Stevens at home and abroad.The main part is divided into three chapters.The first chapter focuses on Stevens’ poetic innovation in Transport to Summer.In this collection,Stevens uses plenty of rhetorical devices,such as metaphor,analogy to show his new idea of resemblance.Besides,he keeps on making his form new in order to oppose to the traditional form.Then,Stevens also fuses the elements of painting,music and theater into the poetic creation.Chapter Two discusses the poet’s criticism on the crisis in modern society,such as the cruel war,obsession in mediocrity,excessive rationalization in Transport to Summer,and hence discloses Stevens’ opposition to the modernity represented by bourgeois civilization.The third chapter introduces Stevens’ poetic thought of “supreme fiction” in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” which embodies Stevens’ idea of aesthetic redemption.In the view of Stevens,to substitute religion for poetry must meet the following three conditions: “It Must be Abstract”,“It Must Change” and “It Must Give Pleasure”.And in the light of Max Weber,aesthetic functions as a kind of redemption after the decline of religion,which also identifies the traits of aesthetic modernity in Stevens’ poetry.The last part concludes that Stevens shows his innovation in Transport to Summer,his rebellion to the bourgeois civilization and his pursuit of aesthetic redemption,which fully display the characteristic of aesthetic modernity.