Publisher's Synopsis
In Wallace Stevens' Experimental Language, Beverly Maeder uses an innovative rhetorical and philosophical approach to examine Stevens' linguistic exploration. She studies in detail both well-known and neglected, more cryptic poems, in which Stevens plays with the disruptive development of metaphor, the ostentatious positioning of prepositions and prefixes, and the ruthless use of copular verbs. Maeder argues that these strategies allow Stevens' more radical poems to lay bare the artifice of the English language. Like Stevens' own work, this book is neither systematic nor exhaustive but intriguingly experimental.
