The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality [Paperback]

J. S. Leonard (Author)
J. S. LEONARD is an English professor at The Citadel.

C. E. Wharton (Author)
C. E. Wharton, now retired, taught philosophy at The Citadel.

An examination of Wallace Steven’s poetry and the philosophical assumptions that sustain and inform it, The Fluent Mundo reinterprets the poet’s views on imagination and reality, revealing a poetic world in which multiple dualities are resolved in the enigma and elegance of essential change.[An] unusually penetrating critique of the large and still-growing body of phenomenological criticism on Stevens.Leonard and Wharton have made an important contribution to Stevens studies and have exposed with great energy a critical area of hermeneutic inquiry which demands further elaboration.Leonard and Wharton's critique of the differing philosophical stances assigned to Stevens is carefully reasoned and impressively documented. . . . The book's potential value is great, since the philosophical content of Stevens' work remains important.Unquestionably the mundo outside each of us, as well as within, is fluent in the root sense; brilliantly described here is the way that Wallace Stevens drew his descriptions of "process" from Nietzsche and Cassier, regarded as his chief influences.