Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Comparative Literature

Advisor

André Aciman

Committee Members

John Brenkman

Giancarlo Lombardi

Subject Categories

European Languages and Societies | French and Francophone Literature | German Literature | Italian Literature | Literature in English, British Isles | Literature in English, North America | Spanish Literature

Keywords

poetry, literary criticism, modernism, Paul Valéry, Wallace Stevens

Abstract

This dissertation compares the poetic, critical, and epistolary oeuvres of Paul Valéry and Wallace Stevens and the influence of the former on the latter. Valéry famously advocated for the pursuit of “poésie pure” (“pure poetry”) and influenced Stevens especially in this way, though both of them concluded it was not achievable. I establish an approximation of a critical framework based on the work of the following critics and scholars: Wendy Lesser, Wendy Steiner, Anthony Cuda, Michael Clune, Paul Bové, and Liesl Olson. Harold Bloom’s passionate advocacy and deep, sustained engagement with Stevens and his work strongly influenced my choice to undertake this project. Among the nineteenth-century influences on these two, I focus most on Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Walter Pater. Roughly from Bloom’s era, the other critics whose concepts and considerations I engage here are Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, and Kenneth Burke. One main thesis is that both of these two were more shaped by their emotional, embodied, sensuous experiences than is commonly thought, contra the popular conception of them as cold formalists. Their lifelong engagement with visual art, architecture, and music is evidence of this, and they both viewed poetry in conjunction and dialogue with these arts. I explore the tension between two of Bloom’s views of poetry—that it is an “achieved anxiety” and an idiosyncratic expression of one’s suffering—across their two oeuvres. These two likewise represent for me a modernism more resonant with what Steiner calls an “aesthetics of reciprocity,” of which she considers Pierre Bonnard also a kindred spirit and practitioner. They were both also profoundly influenced by Romanticism, but their choice to write largely metrical poetry in an age of more obvious forms of experimentation sets them apart from those writing in free verse, confessionally, and so on; they were both fascinated and delighted by measure and other prosodic aspects and effects of language. As an admirer of Jorge Guillén’s work, I discuss Valéry influence on him, as well as Valéry’s correspondence with André Gide for many years. I carefully consider how an attention to their prose works and essays deepens and enriches one’s understanding of and pleasure derived from their poetry. Their achievement and contribution to the full spectrum of modernism, twentieth-century literature, and world literature generally remains underrated, and my dissertation is a slight contribution to rectifying this error.

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