Unexpected Affinities : Modern American Poetry and Symbolist Poetics

Unexpected Affinities studies the impact of Stevensian and Valeryan poetics, and symbolist poetics more broadly, on a range of Anglo-American poets in untypical fashion. Pairing poets who are not usually studied in their relation to one another reveals mutuality and dissimilitude. Chapter I looks at Stevens and Valery from the vantage point of the senses as opposed to the more usual lens of their similar cerebral or philosophical temperaments. Although critics have largely and justifiably seen Stevens and Eliot in oppositional terms, Lisa Goldfarb asks what happens when we look at them from the vantage point of their mutual interest in creating a musical poetics. Further chapters discuss Auden, Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and other contemporary poets.