In this study Daniel R. Schwarz argues that the narrative and representational aspects of Stevens's poetry have been neglected in favour of readings that stress his word play and rhetoricity. Schwarz shows how Stevens's concept of representation is deeply influenced by modern painters such as Picasso and Duchamp. He shows that Stevens's poetry needs to be understood in terms of a number of major contexts: the American tradition of Emerson and Whitman, the Romantic movement, and the Modernist tradition.

DANIEL R. SCHWARZ

Acknowledgements - Reading Wallace Stevens: Rhetoric and Representation - 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird': Stevens's Cubist Narrative - 'Spiritually Inquisitive Images': Stevens's Lyric Sequence about the Poetic Process - Defining the Figure of Capable Imagination: 'The Idea of Order at Key West', 'Asides on the Oboe', and Related Poems - The Narrative Impulse in Stevens's Poetry: 'Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks' and 'Mrs Alfred Uruguay' - Theory as Praxis: The Man with the Blue Guitar - The Quest for Unity: Notes toward a Supreme Fiction - Stevens's Late Lyrics: 'His Actual Candle Blazed with Artifice' - Bibliography - Index