Blue Order: Wallace Stevens's Jazz Experiments

Wallace Stevens, one of America's most recognizable modernist poets, separated himself from social, political, cultural, and even aesthetic milieus of the modernist era. His aloofness notwithstanding, modern tenets such as meditations on reality, debates about culture, and experimentation with music occur in Stevens's poetry. Critics often, and rightly, align the musical qualities of Stevens's verse with classical motifs. This article places the musicality of Stevens's poetry in a jazz context, and contends that poems from throughout his career - especially in Harmonium (1923) and Ideas of Order (1936) - contain jazz elements and can be read as jazz texts. Stevens employs linguistic repetitions, thematic variations, improvisatory flourishes, allusions, and wordplay that indicate the influence and presence of jazz, without ever mentioning the music by name. Ultimately, Stevens can be considered a poet who experimented with jazz, giving his work additional sonic and contextual resonance