Wallace Stevens and the “Irish Connection”: Tradition and the Search for Order

This chapter will examine the significance of Ireland as symbolic topography in the poetry of Stevens. Through analysis of selected letters and correspondences with the Irish poet and critic Thomas McGreevy, I demonstrate Stevens's poetic appropriation of Ireland as a locale which enacts the drama of the imagination's romance with reality, a dialectic central to Stevens’ lifelong conception of poetic potential. This “rage for order” will function as the interpretive framework through which the afterlife of Stevens's poetry is activated in the novels my book studies, and how the novels adopt Stevens's poetry in the context of contemporary literary concerns.