The Wallace Stevens Case: Law and the Practice of Poetry

Thomas C. Grey

Published by Harvard University Press 1991

The Wallace Stevens Case

Law and the Practice of Poetry

Thomas C. Grey

https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674284029

Overview
Contents

About this book

Wallace Stevens was not only one of America's outstanding modernist poets but also a successful insurance lawyer--a fact that continues to intrigue many readers. Though Stevens tried hard to separate his poetry from his profession, legal theorist Thomas Grey shows that he did not ultimately succeed. After stressing how little connection appears on the surface between the two parts of Stevens's life, Grey argues that in its pragmatic account of human reasoning, the poetry distinctively illuminates the workings of the law.

In this important extension of the recent law-and-literature movement, Grey reveals Stevens as a philosophical poet and implicitly a pragmatist legal theorist, who illustrates how human thought proceeds through "assertion, qualification, and qualified reassertion," and how reason and passion fuse together in the act of interpretation. Above all, Stevens's poetry proves a liberating antidote to the binary logic that is characteristic of legal theory: one side of a case is right, the other wrong; conduct is either lawful or unlawful.

At the same time as he discovers in Stevens a pragmatist philosopher of law, Grey offers a strikingly new perspective on the poetry itself. In the poems that develop Stevens's "reality-imagination complex"--poems often criticized as remote, apolitical, and hermetic--Grey finds a body of work that not only captivates the reader but also provides a unique instrument for scrutinizing the thought processes of lawyers and judges in their exercise of social power.

Author / Editor information

Grey Thomas :

Thomas C. Grey is Nelson Bowman Sweitzer and Marie B. Sweitzer Professor of Law, Stanford Law School.

Reviews

This lucid and insightful study of the poetry of Wallace Stevens by Stanford Law Professor Thomas Grey demonstrates that a lawyer can enrich our understanding of poetry and a poet enrich our understanding of jurisprudence.

The book was a great help to me in thinking about Stevens--a poet whom I don't know as well as I'd like, whom I often don't understand, whom I've never been able to read much of at a time, and whose poems I've never been able to hear as the products of a single voice. Grey helps one see them as such products-particularly by telling you when he thinks the voice goes off key, as in the 'Major Man' poems. Thanks to Grey, I feel prepared to go back to Stevens's poems and to read them with fewer guards up, with less suspicion and more sympathy. The book sketches a convincing picture of Stevens's motives and conflicts. Its last chapter, 'The Colors of the Mind,' finishes off the sketch with bravura and conviction.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
I An Occupation, an Exercise, a Work Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	10
II The Unpeopled World Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	22
III Fat Cat, Ghostly Rabbit Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
IV Steel against Intimation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	52
V A Change Not Quite Completed Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	68
VI The Colors of the Mind Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	114
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
Credits Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	151

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Edition: Reprint 2014
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 155
Keywords: LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General; LITERARY CRITICISM / General; Law and literature -- United States.; Stevens, Wallace, 1879-1955 -- Criticism and interpretation.; Stevens, Wallace, 1879-1955 -- Knowledge -- Law.

eBook

Published: October 1, 2013
ISBN: 9780674284029

Hardcover

Published: February 5, 1991
ISBN: 9780674284012