Romanticism & Contemporary Poetry & Poetics

Strange Affinities: A Partial Return to Wordsworthian Poetics After Modernism

Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley

Notes

¹"From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Logic of Post-Modernist Poetics." Since I am invoking my own past I should also evoke my own future since the readings and theory in this paper, but not the relation to romanticism will be coming out in my "Reading for Affect in the Lyric: From Modern to Contemporary."
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² Eliot has a more complex model of feeling linked to sensation and association rather than construction. I explore the issue of affect in Eliot in my "The Theory of Emotions in Eliot’s Poetics," forthcoming in a collection on Eliot edited by Cassandra Laity and Nancy Gish.
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³ In my Painterly Abstraction in Modern Poetry, pp. 342-55, I offer an elaborate discussion of three functions of the "as" in Stevens’s late poetry. One is the "as" of equivalence that links phenomena as occupying the same temporal or spatial framework: this happens as that happens. A second "as" is modal, connecting various qualities to each other: "this is as kind as I get." And the final "as" is aspectual. This "as" allows us to make distinctions among kinds of identifications or degrees of involvement: "he speaks by sight and insight, as they are." Hejinian adds a fourth function, the sense of "as" as "because." And she relies on a much plainer, less theatrical sense of these forces than does Stevens.
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