Introduction: The Pure Good of Theory

The introduction discusses how studies of Wallace Stevens have, from the beginning, intersected with developments in the field of literary theory, starting with the overlaps between the ‘theory explosion’ of the 1960s and canonical critical readings of Stevens. Through a reading of Stevens’s own poem ‘Theory’, from his first collection Harmonium, the introduction considers how theoretical readings of Stevens offer limitless ways of lending his poems new identities in new contexts as the very definition of theory.