Wallace Stevens was not only one of America's outstanding
modernist poets but also a successful insurance lawyer--a fact that
continues to intrigue many readers. Though Stevens tried hard to
separate his poetry from his profession, legal theorist Thomas Grey
shows that he did not ultimately succeed. After stressing how
little connection appears on the surface between the two parts of
Stevens's life, Grey argues that in its pragmatic account of human
reasoning, the poetry distinctively illuminates the workings of the
law.
In this important extension of the recent law-and-literature
movement, Grey reveals Stevens as a philosophical poet and
implicitly a pragmatist legal theorist, who illustrates how human
thought proceeds through "assertion, qualification, and qualified
reassertion," and how reason and passion fuse together in the act
of interpretation. Above all, Stevens's poetry proves a liberating
antidote to the binary logic that is characteristic of legal
theory: one side of a case is right, the other wrong; conduct is
either lawful or unlawful.
At the same time as he discovers in Stevens a pragmatist
philosopher of law, Grey offers a strikingly new perspective on the
poetry itself. In the poems that develop Stevens's
"reality-imagination complex"--poems often criticized as remote,
apolitical, and hermetic--Grey finds a body of work that not only
captivates the reader but also provides a unique instrument for
scrutinizing the thought processes of lawyers and judges in their
exercise of social power.
General
Imprint: |
Harvard University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
February 1991 |
First published: |
February 1991 |
Authors: |
Thomas Grey
|
Dimensions: |
234 x 156 x 11mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover - Sewn / Cloth over boards
|
Pages: |
155 |
Edition: |
Reprint 2014 ed. |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-674-28401-2 |
Categories: |
Books >
Language & Literature >
Literature: texts >
Poetry texts & anthologies >
General
|
LSN: |
0-674-28401-1 |
Barcode: |
9780674284012 |
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