Course taught by Postdoctoral Scholar, Lindsay Atnip.

“After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption”—so wrote Wallace Stevens in one of his aphoristic “Adagia.” A giant of modernist English poetry, Stevens grappled deeply and protractedly in both his poetry and prose with the particular character and problems of the modern situation—what he called “modern reality”—particularly the need, as he saw it, for a new “supreme fiction” giving meaning and purpose to human life, a fiction he sought to rediscover or recreate in and through (his) poetry. We will read widely from Stevens’ poems, essays and aphorisms with a view to comprehending and evaluating his poetics of modern reality and his theory of poetry.