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영어

The reader is implicitly inscribed in the text the writer creates. This paper explores the readership assumed in Steven’s poetry by critically examining his theories of poetic writing found in his essays and letters and a selection of his poems that metaphorically addresses the issue of the reader/audience. Stevens’ pure, and often abstract, poetry is marked by impenetrability, a natural result of the kind of writing he had intended to write. Stevens considered poetic art an act of the mind, a cognitive process enacting a mind thinking. It’s no accident that his poetry seems indifferent to his readers. His many self-reflexive poems about a mind describing itself are necessarily personal, not social, and Stevens wrote first and foremost for himself. When he did address a particular audience, it was as a prophetic or patriarchal figure addressing the privileged elite. And while he claimed art was something to be experienced rather than understood, his seemingly closed texts don’t leave much room for the reader to participate in the meaning-making process involved in the act of reading. If Stevens is one of greatest of modern poets, he was also the most asocial and apolitical of American poets when considered against the historical climate of the early twentieth century in which he was writing.