The The: Stevens's Neighborliness

This chapter argues that Stevens’s poetry relates to other people in the manner of a neighbour. It argues that Stevens’ post-theological positionality places him in a particularly modern tradition of re-thinking what it means to live alongside others as a neighbour in a secular ecology. It draws from a number of thinkers of neighbourliness: Freud, Zizek, Eric Santner, and Kierkegaard. The chapter also argue that Stevens’s poems enact formal neighbourhoods, deriving sense and aesthetic pleasure from the side-by-side relations that characterise their elements.