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Article: Wallace Stevens' Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute.(Review) (book review)
- Article from:
- ANQ
- Article date:
- June 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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MAEDER, Beverly. Wallace Stevens' Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute. New York: St. Martin's, 1999. ix, 257 pp. $45.00.
Many a pursuer of the "content" of Wallace Stevens's poetry has been stymied by the bad fit between its playful, fragmentary, ungrammatical language and the theories, or states of "being," it seems to suggest. The language seems to have a disconcerting shape dissociated from its meaning; in Stevens's words in "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "the mask is strange, however like" (Complete Poems 181). This intriguing new book does much to demystify the unsettling "strangeness" of Stevens's words, provoking us to consider that he was more ...