Luminous Traversing: Wallace Stevens and the American Sublime

As Wallace Stevens once wrote, a poem should be part of one's sense of life . This book provides a record of readerly and critical explorations of the poems and life of the American poet. The author reads Stevens's poems in the context of both the existing critical works and the commentaries provided by the poet himself (essays, letters, occasional notes and posthumous texts), and aims to prove that his artistic development was informed by two contradictory existential projects: teleological, based on Stevens's assumption of a higher self which in its turn helps to illuminate the meaning and dynamics of the actual existence, and critical, appearing at the very moment when one questions his or her identity and assumes life to be an open and unfinished process.

Jacek Gutorow is poet, literary critic and translator. He has published four critical books and six volumes of poems as well as translations of British and American poetry. His honors include the Ludwik Fryde Award (granted by the International Association of Critics) and the Polish Cultural Foundation Award. He lectures on British and American literature at the University of Opole (Poland).