"The Essential Prose"?: Revisiting Stevens's Essays

ABSTRACT:Wallace Stevens's essays have often been dismissed as merely ancillary to his poetry and, albeit attentive to the articulation of a theory of the poetic imagination's relation to reality, less adept at even that endeavor than the poetry. Tracing critical responses from Tony Sharpe's to B. J. Leggett's, this introduction situates The Necessary Angel within a lineage of hybrid poetic-theoretical writing extending from Emerson to Ashbery. The articles in this special issue approach Stevens's prose not as failed criticism but as a creative medium negotiating the boundary between poetry and theory. Through renewed attention to its stylistic eccentricities, intertextual networks, and rhetorical experiments, the issue's four articles collectively propose that Stevens's prose exemplifies a distinctive American modernist mode of thought—essayistic in form but often poetic in impulse—that complicates traditional divisions between poetic making and critical reflection.