Call
for Papers
Wallace Stevens and Henry
James
A Special Issue of
The Wallace Stevens Journal
When Henry James died in 1916, Wallace Stevens was
thirty-five years old and writing the poems that would be collected in Harmonium. Stevens was surely aware of
“The Master,” whose footsteps he followed in Cambridge
and New York,
but there is little record of his interest in James and there has not been much
scholarly discussion of the relations between these two writers. We know
Stevens read James’s Washington Square
and “The Madonna of the Future” while living in New York in 1909. Daniel Fogel
(WSJrnl S’84) has argued that “Peter Quince at
the Clavier” reflects Stevens’s reading of James’s
late introduction to Shakespeare’s The
Tempest. Roy Harvey Pearce (in his Gesta Humanorum) contends that “Chocorua
to Its Neighbor” was inspired by a passage about Mt. Chocorua
in James’s The American Scene. In a
letter of 1945 to José Rodríguez Feo,
Stevens quoted (from F. O. Matthiessen’s Henry James: The
Major Phase) what he called “a precious sentence in Henry James”:
“To live in the world of creation—to get into it
and stay in it—to frequent it and haunt it—to think intensely and fruitfully—to woo combinations and inspirations
into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation—this is the
only thing.” (Letters 509)
In his essay
“The Relations between Poetry and Painting” (1951), he quotes James again: “It is art . . . which makes life, makes
interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the
force and beauty of its process” (NA 169).
What do Stevens and Henry James have
in common? How might we characterize the relations between them? Some possible
terms of comparison/contrast might include: the imagination, aestheticism,
idealism, romanticism, abstraction, pragmatism, the real, the feminine, the
unspoken, the theater, the American landscape, French literature, European
culture in general, modernism, the visual arts.
Please send all inquiries and papers to glen.macleod@uconn.edu
Deadline for submissions:
September 1, 2009
