Heather McHugh: The Stuff of Language as Packed by Wallace Stevens (July 2009)

Heather McHugh reflects on the metaphor of a poem as a container, and on the ways such a vehicle can convey something larger than itself.  Drawing on prose by Wittgenstein and on poems by William Dickey and Rilke, McHugh devotes the majority of her lecture to Wallace Stevens; she explores how poems such as “Poetry is a Destructive Force,” “Jumbo,” “Imago,” and “The Immense Dew of Florida” are designed to be exceeded by what they contain.