Chapter 5 - Transnationalism

Summary

Although Wallace Stevens did not travel extensively outside the United States, his poetry is deeply concerned with expanding the boundaries of the poetic imagination to reach beyond its domestic and local settings. The desire to develop a poetics that is capable of establishing new nodes of interconnection between near and far places and cultures is palpable throughout Stevens’s oeuvre. Han’s chapter outlines and explores this aspect of Stevens’s poetry in view of recent theoretical interventions in literary transnationalism and global modernism. It argues that the poet’s exploration of diverse cultural materials and settings interrogates, rather than simply asserts, the border-traversing capacities of the poetic imagination. Stevens’s vision of artistic mobility and travel both displays a transnational aesthetic sensibility and reveals its moments of implosion; it explores at once the possibilities and limits of the imagination’s worldly affiliations and global circuits. The poet’s impulse toward national and cultural border crossings is composed of complex responses to the literary-political currents of his epoch, which range from the specific context of American nativism in the 1920s to more general developments of globalization and the Cold War.