Wallace Stevens used to be not just one in all America's amazing modernist poets but additionally a profitable coverage lawyer--a incontrovertible fact that keeps to intrigue many readers. even though Stevens attempted demanding to split his poetry from his career, felony theorist Thomas gray indicates that he didn't eventually be successful. After stressing how little connection appears to be like at the floor among the 2 elements of Stevens's existence, gray argues that during its pragmatic account of human reasoning, the poetry distinctively illuminates the workings of the legislations.
during this very important extension of the new law-and-literature flow, gray finds Stevens as a philosophical poet and implicitly a pragmatist criminal theorist, who illustrates how human suggestion proceeds via "assertion, qualification, and certified reassertion," and the way cause and keenness fuse jointly within the act of interpretation. principally, Stevens's poetry proves a releasing antidote to the binary good judgment that's attribute of felony thought: one part of a case is true, the opposite mistaken; behavior is both lawful or illegal.
whilst he discovers in Stevens a pragmatist thinker of legislation, gray bargains a strikingly new viewpoint at the poetry itself. within the poems that increase Stevens's "reality-imagination complex"--poems usually criticized as distant, apolitical, and hermetic--Grey unearths a physique of labor that not just captivates the reader but additionally offers a special device for scrutinizing the idea strategies of attorneys and judges of their workout of social strength.
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