Wallace Stevens Journal

IT HAS BEEN twenty-three years since the publication of John N. Serio and B. J. Leggett’s invaluable volume of essays, Teaching Wallace Stevens. Many of us who teach Stevens today “cut our teeth” on that volume, finding there reassurance about the difficulty of the task and useful, experiential advice coming from veteran Stevensians. When, in the fall of 2015, we considered possible topics for upcoming panels, along with fellow Society officers Natalie Gerber and Bart Eeckhout, the idea of revisiting the subject of teaching Stevens was among the first that sprang to our collective minds. After all, much had changed in university culture and Stevens studies since the publication of that landmark book, and we were curious how those changes might have affected the ways professors approach Stevens in the classroom. Was the teaching of Stevens done exclusively in English and Comparative Literature departments? How might changes in technology and reading habits have affected students’ responses to the poet? And, with the rapid globalization of our world and international dimension of the profession, how might growing contact between universities in the US and abroad have altered the ways in which Stevens enters the classroom and the kinds of classrooms he enters? These were some of the questions that spurred the American Literature Association panel that, in turn, inspired us to cast a wider net for a special Journal issue on the subject of teaching Stevens in 2017.

The ALA panel in May 2016 began to provide some answers to our questions, and produced a lively conversation among the attendees. The presentations (by Charles Altieri, Bart Eeckhout, Lisa Goldfarb, Edward Ragg, and Juliette Utard, with Glen MacLeod as chair) confirmed that teaching Stevens still poses formidable challenges, with a few of us echoing Milton Bates’s exclamation in his 1994 essay that the prospect “still strikes terror into my heart” (17). That any teacher of Stevens needs to grapple with the way his poems “resist the intelligence almost successfully” (CPP 910) was clear from the variety of ways each of us discussed teaching methods that allow for multiple interpretations. At the same time, we agreed that building frameworks that guide students to “move” in sync with the way the poems unfurl in language was crucial in our teaching. Our panel surely reflected the growing international dimension of Stevens scholarship and teaching, and the different contexts in which Stevens is taught, for three of [End Page 153] the five panelists focused on their experiences in various cultural contexts abroad: Bart Eeckhout in Belgium, Edward Ragg in China, and Juliette Utard in France. Attendees also helped to shape the conversation, with Marjorie Perloff asking the pointed question of how to teach Stevens’s largely neglected poem “Like Decorations,” and the problems of race evident in this text and other poems that punctuate his oeuvre.

The current special issue aims to build on the conversations that began on that glorious May afternoon in San Francisco. The essays gathered here reinforce the global context of our panel discussions, for in addition to contributions by Eeckhout, Ragg, and Utard, new essays address teaching Stevens in four other countries: Minda Rae Amiran writes about her teaching experiences in the Israeli context, Gül Bilge Han and Paul Schreiber discuss Stevens in the Swedish classroom, Irene Ramalho Santos recalls the time she was teaching Stevens in Portugal, and Daniel Xerri tells a lively story about teaching Stevens in Malta. Surely, our initial sense that globalization has changed the arena for teaching Stevens is evidenced in these international testimonies.

Stevens’s growing international reputation is not the only difference in the teaching terrain since the 1990s. Essays here also confirm that teaching Stevens happens not only in traditional literature departments, but stretches into different university environments: in schools of interdisciplinary studies (Lisa Goldfarb) and in classrooms of interdisciplinary science (David Waters). It has long been the case, too, that Stevens is taught in poetry workshops. In order to address this well-established context, we have also included a few reflections by poets. Rachel Hadas, James Longenbach, and Lisa Steinman widen the scope of the issue to teaching...