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Literary Devices In Charles Stevens Poetry

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Maria Stan Assist. Lect. Dragoș Manea 19th Century American Literature 20th January 2016 PINE-TREES CRUSTED WITH SNOW AND THE EYE OF THE BLACKBIRD – THE OBSESSION OF FRACTALS IN WALLACE STEVENS’ POETRY Poetry is the supreme fiction, Madame, says Stevens in one of his early poems. The importance of imagination and its way of how it can manipulate the world as we know it (both physically and spiritually) has been both a main theme of poetry and a stylistic and structural way of writing since the British Romantics have pointed it, making possible for this spirit to survive and to call the British Romantic poets as a vital (McLane et. al, 264) and a source of energizing force in later twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry (idem). While …show more content…

The analysis model is simple – any piece of poetry contains a root-word which is the container of the text’s meaning and which repeats itself systematically at the level of the linguistic structural level of the poem; what is interesting is that these occurrences of the root-word are not random and seem to be organized hierarchically into a fractal model, which allows the analytical observation on the macrostructure – microstructure direction (Ifrim, 70). Even though Stevens is called among the last of the great Victorians (Serio, 89) because of the themes he lies upon (although I personally do not totally agree with this), both the structural constituents and the coherence of the pictures of his poetry are purely modernist. In The Snow Man, for example, written with effects on the sonic level (repeated end-words - snow in lines 3 and 13; wind in 8 and 11-, consonance - wind/winter; boughs/snow; ice/is), there is not going to be any obvious snow man during the lines of the poem, but it is merely …show more content…

The antiques called it solipsism (soles meaning alone and ipse meaning self), claiming that the own individuality is the only one which exists, the reality being nothing more than modal projections into one’s own personality, constructs of perception or intellect. Wallace Stevens calls it imagination. The snow man is, therefore, the listener, an inherent instance which does not need to be recalled into the poem, because Stevens already created the first step of perceiving this poem by the title of it. Stevens is being ludic with the reader - while image gets bigger and bigger with each verse, it is being created a jerky rhythm because of the cut-off landscapes: And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January

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