Wallace Stevens' Experimental Language

This work uses an innovative rhetorical and philosophical approach to examine Wallace Stevens' linguistic exploration. The author 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. She argues that these strategies allow Stevens' more radical poems to lay bare the artifice of the English language.