Wallace Stevens: Geleneksel modernist

Wallace Stevens wrote poetry and theorized almost entirely within a major modernist paradigm built around the question: how does one remake a poetry, and a culture, on the grounds of an exhausted tradition? In the name of renovation, modernist writers frequently become purveyors of the archaic, the obsolete, the ruin, the insufferably quaint. The archaic is part of the motivation for modernist writing. According to T.S. Eliot and Harold Bloom, the fresh individual talent joins the canon only through the complicated drama of violating the past, the tradition, most effectively and properly. Only the misfit is befitting. As the timeless desire to innovate, to break with tradition, modernism is one of the most traditional cultural impulses in art and social life. Such is the ironic, destructive and oddly conservative dialectic of tradition and modernism.Wallace Stevens was a destructive character, and as a destructive character he is one of the most traditional poets. Stevens was a poet who cleared ground for himself and his aesthetic projects?he was a radical, anarchistic poet?and also a poet who made culture and its continuance possible?he was a staunch conservative, a conserver. The funny thing is, his very radicalism is part and parcel of his conservatism.