'A Total Double-Thing': A Re-evaluation of Phenomenology in Wallace Stevens

For more than 50 years there has been what one might call a phenomenological camp in Wallace Stevens scholarship. Unfortunately, many phenomenological readings of Stevens do not explore sufficiently the implications of Edmund Husserl's key concept of phenomenological reduction, thus missing the point of the intentionality of consciousness, the ‘starting-point and basis’ for phenomenological exploration. In arguing that intentionality, the pre-reflective involvement of consciousness and world, is the starting-point and basis of Stevens's early and late poetic concerns, this article automatically rules out the much discussed division between an ‘early’ Stevens who dichotomises mind and world, and a ‘late’ Stevens who re-engages with the world.