Radial Design in Wallace Stevens

Abstract

In some early Stevens poems there is evidence of a typographical pattern I call "radial design, " a device in which the poet selects a central unit (such as a word) and on both sides evenly arranges a pattern of other units. Radial design is no accident. One finds not only a definite historical consistency in the way the pattern develops but a lso a tight continuity between it and ideas about language and perception expressed in the poems themselves. Stevens' overall aim is to impose this fixed, spatial structure upon the sequential flow of a poem in order to suspend the representational function of its language and thus compel us to observe words as things in themselves.