Abstract

In this dissertation, I have tried to offer an original commentary on the work of Stevens from within the framework of a modernist poetics. Stevens' poetry is thereby understood as a synthesis of the major trends of modernism. This integration is accomplished on the levels of style, biography and history. Stevens' style, as is shown, develops the idioms of expressionism, abstraction and surrealism into a unique and unified expression of a communicative poetics. On the level of biography, Stevens' poetry, as is shown in a discussion of its major personifications, achieves an integration of personal and public concerns in the realm of the symbolic. This symbolic dimension of an original self-understanding in language is intensified in Stevens' later work which explores the visionary and anticipatory character of poetry. History receives thereby a new and innovative expression as the renewal of our cultural and symbolic possibilities of communication