ABSTRACT
In “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire famously declared: “Modernity is the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent, one half of art, the other half being the eternal and immutable” (553). 1 This is also the sense of modernity Wallace Stevens experienced firsthand during the six-teen years he spent in and around New York City, where he learned to give up certain poetic forms inadequate to his new perception of ephemerality: “Sonnets have their place, without mentioning names; but they can also be found tremendously out of place: in real life where things are quick, unac-countable, responsive” (SP 80).
