Samuel Jay Keyser

Wallace Stevens: Form and Meaning in Four Poems.

It is a commonplace of literary criticism to observe that form and content in a poem are closely related. It is less common, however, to encounter explicit analyses of particular poems which support this commonplace. The analyses which follow will attempt to do this. Four poems by Wallace Stevens will be analyzed from a formal standpoint. Then an attempt will be made to show how the formal analysis is closely related to what the poem is about.1