It’s been a quieter few months on the Dragon Phoenix Wine Blog as Edward has put the finishing touches to a major study of the work of 20th Century American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).

Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction will be published by Cambridge University Press in August and is the culmination of almost a decade’s research based, in part, on an original Ph.D. dissertation and subsequent research trips to the US supported by the British Academy and British Association for American Studies in 2007.

Stevens is perhaps best known for poems such as ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, his long doctrinal poem ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ and his late lyrics, such as ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’. So what’s the connection with wine?

Stevens was something of a wine lover, especially of the wines of Burgundy and one of the book’s chapters is entitled ‘Food, Wine and the Idealist ‘I” (the ‘I’ is a special case of the first person speaker in several of Stevens’ 1940s poems).

The book proffers a long reading of perhaps Stevens’ most baffling gastronomic poem ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’, a text whose relationship with Burgundy and with Occupied France of 1942 is both ingenious and has previously remained tough for Stevens scholarship to decipher.

Part of the book’s argument is that Stevens’ embrace of an abstract aesthetic was not confined merely to poetic or artistic concerns, but involved his everyday imagination, interests and needs, including a love of the finer things in life, with wine being no exception (for initials reviews from Charles Altieri and J. Hillis Miller please click here).

This is, after all, the poet who wrote in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’:

We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango
Chutney. Then the Canon Aspirin declaimed
Of his sister, in what a sensible ecstasy

She lived in her house. She had two daughters, one
Of four, and one of seven, whom she dressed
The way a painter of pauvred color paints.

The study follows on from a joint project entitled Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pictured above.

Watch this space for updates on our combined wine writing, most recently in Decanter and The World of Fine Wine Magazine. We also have highlights from the 2009 tasting season in Beijing, plus some special Featured Tastings and up-to-date coverage of what’s been happening in China’s capital and further a field.

Posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at 2:56 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.