The Wallace Stevens Society
Modern Language Association 2025 (New Orleans, January 9 – 12, 2025): “Wallace Stevens & Classicism.”
There’s Jove’s “mythy mind” in “Sunday Morning,” Penelope’s meditative compositions in “The World as Meditation,” “Aeneas” bearing his father “from / The ruins of the past” in the uncollected “Tradition,” and a call-out to “Classical mythology” in general as “The greatest piece of fiction” toward the end of Adagia. Stevens invokes “Plato’s ghost” and “Aristotle’s skeleton” in “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit”; he proposes and describes a “platonic person” in “The Pure Good of Theory”; he points to Plato and cites Socrates throughout his essays and letters. We find him freely, knowingly referring to Callimachus, Democritus, Parmenides, Sappho, Xenophon; to Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid. In a wartime note to Henry Church, he counts the writings of Boileau (late-17th-century translator of Longinus’s On the Sublime) as among “the obvious texts.” And then there’s that early imperative to “make a peristyle,” those many pediments, and all the sculpture.
Anticipating a special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal, we invite 300-to-500-word abstracts for presentations that address Stevens’s engagement with classical poetry and performance, architecture and other art, philosophy, theology, rhetoric, politics, or their later (e.g., Neoclassical) appreciations. We are open to all manner of proposals on the topic.
Please direct all inquiries and submissions (including a brief bio) to Andrew Osborn at aosborn@udallas.edu by Feb. 21, 2024.
