The Comedian as Wallace Stevens.

The article explores the comedy in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, paying attention to aspects of tone, diction and vocabulary. Topics discussed include ambiguity and peculiarity in the tone of Stevens' poetics to avoid accusations of dogmatic or doctrinaire writing and enable a gap between being serious and sounding serious, sense of joke played on through language, act of composition and rightness in words, and interplay of reality and imagination that underlies Stevens' use of language.