Going the Distance

Building on his Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark (CH, Sep'93), Jarraway (Univ. of Ottawa) uses Stevens's poetry in this book's introduction to illustrate the "distance" of this book's title, that is, the space between the culturally defined self and the empowered dissident self. Discussions focus on early works as five modernist writers struggle for self-authorization. He stresses the influence of William James for Gertrude Stein's "Three Lives" and "Tender Buttons" and John Dewey for William Carlos Williams's poems, especially "Spring and All." In Langston Hughes's "Montage of a Dream Deferred," Harlem as a "distanciated image of darkness and mystery" accompanies an assessment of Hughes's sexuality. Final chapters discuss poet Frank O'Hara's queer perversities and camp during the homophobic late 1950s and Elizabeth Bishop's silence about her lesbianism and the importance to her very selfhood of a happy childhood in Canada precipitated by separation from her mentally ill mother.