Introduction: The Lights of Norway and All That

Abstract

To situate the quintessential Modernist poet Wallace Stevens ‘across the Atlantic’, where the lights of Norway mysteriously travel, is to place him in a realm that is at once dynamic and open-ended. Our primary aim in putting together this book is to reconsider Stevens’ development as he responds to intermingling influences from two different continents. In particular, we want to explore the nature of a poetics that may be called ‘Transatlantic’ because it is neither precisely American nor European, but involves a larger complex of literary, artistic and cultural qualities. Indeed, Stevens’ poetry, as we see it, threatens to disappear from view when discussed in simple oppositional terms of its ‘American’ qualities or its assimilations and transformations of ‘European’ subject-matter. In the language of Stevens’ own lecture ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’, such amorphous notions as the ‘European’ and the ‘American’ are ultimately ‘too general to be serviceable’ (CPP 781). If either of these terms is to be rehabilitated in Stevens criticism, then it had better be in the reconstructed sense in which millions of Americans have implicitly defined themselves as ‘Transatlantic’: through preserving immigrant narratives, tracing genealogy (as Stevens did with his Dutch and German ancestry) or jostling different federal and state identities which seek to adapt European inheritances on American soil.

A long time you have been making the trip

From Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil,

Bringing the lights of Norway and all that.

‘Of Hartford in a Purple Light’