Abstract:

This dissertation examines Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop through an emerging discourse of contingency poetics. My first chapter explores "contingency" as a key concept in recent criticism of modernism and American poetics. While contingency used to connote the epistemological uncertainties occasioned by secular modernity, in recent years, it has come to mean "alterity." I argue that this shift occurred as certain of the avant-garde positioned themselves against a modernism seen as anxious over a loss of foundations and eager to reinstitute them in complex symbolic and formal structures. The avant-garde revalues contingency not as a source of anxiety but as that to which art should open. The resultant poetics asserts that an ethical response to contingency necessitates rejecting traditional forms in favor of disjunctive poetic techniques that allow the fragile alterity of experience to slip the nets of normative meanings and writerly control. This discourse describes that control as a shameful act, a will to mastery. I trace the roots of this ethical poetics to William Carlos Williams, who enjoins poets to reject tradition and embrace organic forms in the name of "reality." I argue that while Bishop and Stevens share Williams's concern about the politics of mastery, they question the link he forged between politics and form.

Rather than respond to contingency by attempting to see and record the alterity of things, Bishop and Stevens theorize the contingency of language and reception. Stevens's poems of the 30s and 40s figure poetry as received material, de-authorizing "technique" and "form" as sites in which textual possibility will or won't be found. Bishop's prose fables of the 30s allegorize the possibility that a work's meanings have little to do with authorial intentions. In her poetry, Bishop dramatizes the mind's suspect tendency to make likenesses out of what it doesn't understand. Like Stevens, she proposes that the mind's inclination to interpret cannot be overcome in order to "leave room for contingency," as is the mandate of an avant-garde obsessed by lyric shame. Both poets suggest that it is our inevitable tendency to interpret contingency, an impulse better explored than denied.