Wallace Stevens and the crisis of reality : a study of the comedian as the letter C

Abstract EN

Wallace Steven (1879-1955) is one of America's major poets of the 20 Th centuries who perfected critical theories about modern poetry writing and its subjects.

Steven's style is distinctive as modern in its revelation of both linguistic and poetic experimentations.

This did not come to the poet as a side dish to writing modern poetry, but he was fully aware of what he was doing.

His theories concerning modern poetry are found everywhere in the titles, on the printed pages as well as in between the lines of his critical heritage.

Like almost all men of letters, Wallace Steven has his own view of a crisis which he has to confront daily.

That is reality which he tries his best to neutralize for his own sake.

The present paper explores through Stevens lengthy poem, The Comedian as the Letter C, the phases of this crisis and the ways the poet follows to deal with it in order to unravel its complexity.

The epic-hero-like protagonist of the poem, Crispin, sets out in a moral journey from presumably an old world in search of a new one.

Throughout the journey, the socio-cultural scenes of the poem appear antagonistic to Crispin who decides in return to convert them into a better reality.

At this stage, both poet and protagonist merge in the task of confronting reality.

The present paper is divided into three parts and a conclusion: part I introduces and pinpoints the nature of the crisis which Wallace Stevens finds embodied in harsh and intolerant American reality; Part II attempts to uncover how Stevens holds both poetic imagination and language to be of the most important tools that a good poet should use to fight away the nonchalance of reality ; Part III sheds light on the poet's creation of a mythical self through which he wishes to contain the diverse reality in order to re-adjust that self to it.

The conclusion sums up the findings of the paper.