• Poetics, Genre, and Style in Stevens's Letters
• Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb

THIS IS THE SECOND HALF of a double issue on Wallace Stevens's letters that has come out of a conference entitled "Sincerely Yours, Wallace Stevens," which we organized at The Huntington on September 20–21, 2019. Our cover shows a group picture of the conference organizers and speakers decorated with a few scribblings from a letter Stevens wrote to his friend Henry Church and that is to be found in The Huntington's library collection. At the bottom, Stevens assures us that he is still and always sincerely ours.

Not that he didn't have different ways of signing off. The stock phrase "Sincerely Yours" is merely one variant among many in the published letters. Because it became his habitual closing phrase in later years and is predominant in the final third of Holly's Letters of Wallace Stevens, we picked it to serve as our flag for the conference. Yet Stevens wouldn't have been such a lover of variations if he hadn't also sought to improvise alternative ways of saying goodbye to his correspondents. No tedious e-mail culture of preformatted "Best Regards" for him. And so we can take a dizzying delight in the list of at least thirty-five alternatives that, in our quick count, he used over the years: "Yours truly" / "Sincerely yrs" / "Affectionately" / "Your affectionate, troublesome, good-intentioned, nonsensical Wallace" / "With love" / "With much love" / "With very much love" / "Your" / "Your own" / "Very truly yours" / "Yours sincerely" / "Very sincerely yours" / "Yrs truly" / "Recevez, madame, etc." / "Always sincerely yours" / "Always yours" / "Yours very truly" / "With love for both of you" / "Sincerely" / "Love" / "Yours very sincerely" / "Cordially yours" / "Always most sincerely yours" / "Always with best wishes" / "Adios" / "Cordial salutes" / "Most sincerely yours" / "Greetings—and sincerely" / "Always very sincerely yours" / "Vraiment à vous" / "Always—vive le Bard" / "With my best to everyone, sincerely" / "With best wishes, always sincerely yours" / "Auf Wiedersehn!" / "Adieu for the present. Always sincerely."

We do have a reason for playing this little variational game at the outset of this second issue. As we explained in our introduction to the Fall 2020 issue, the seven essays presented there shared a strong historical and [End Page 1] biographical emphasis. By and large, they sought to relate Stevens to his correspondents and the world around him. This historicist angle has become a major aspect of scholarship on the poet ever since The Huntington facilitated archival research more than forty years ago. But such research has never ousted that other strand of Stevens criticism that is primarily hermeneutic and loves to focus on textual interpretation—indeed, in the best scholarship the two often go hand in hand. What brings the following six essays together is the desire to read Stevens's letters closely, both intrinsically as literary artifacts and in terms of the poetics they disclose. This is the kind of critical work that, arguably, has never been done before with quite the same collective, concentrated attention we bring to Stevens's letters here. Specific excerpts have of course been read very carefully as part of larger critical arguments, but their inclusion has usually been instrumental and supportive without the letters themselves becoming the central focus of attention.

That a lot of perceptive and acute textual interpretation already went on in the previous issue is illustrated by the delightful way Lisa Steinman's essay circled around an elliptical and aphoristic quotation from Stevens's letters that we're happy to borrow as a critical motto here: "Everything is complicated" (L 303). There is no better way to demonstrate such complexity than through Juliette Utard's panoramic opening essay, which unfolds the multidimensionality of "epistolary Stevens" and ideally prepares us for a nuanced reading of the letters' many intricacies—both those to which scholars have long gravitated and those they have tended to overlook. For her theoretical framework, Utard uses Jonathan Ellis's recent edited volume Letter Writing Among Poets—a source of inspiration for several contributors to this issue. This allows her to mount a defense of the value of letter writing as a literary genre and to embrace Stevens's correspondence fully...

• 史蒂文斯书信中的诗学，体裁和风格
• Bart Eeckhout和Lisa Goldfarb

这是关于华莱士·史蒂文斯（Wallace Stevens）信的第二期的第二期，这是我们于2019年9月20日至21日在亨廷顿组织的一次名为“ Sincerely Yours，Wallace Stevens”的会议上发表的。会议组织者和演讲者饰有史蒂文斯写给他的朋友亨利·丘奇（Henry Church）的信中的一些字样，这些都可以在亨廷顿图书馆的藏书中找到。在最底层，史蒂文斯向我们保证，他仍然永远是我们的真诚。

并不是说他没有不同的签字方式。股票短语“ Sincerely Yours”仅是已发布信件中的一个变体。因为它在后来的几年中成为了他惯常的闭幕词，并且在《霍莉·华莱士·史蒂文斯的来信》的最后三分之一中占主导地位，我们选择它作为会议的标志。但是，如果史蒂文斯也没有试图即兴创作与记者道别的替代方式，他就不会那么热衷于变化。对于他来说，没有预先格式化的“最佳问候”这样乏味的电子邮件文化。因此，我们可以从他多年来使用的至少35种替代方案中一览无余，这是他多年以来使用的：“您的真心” /“真诚的岁月” /“深情的” /“您的深情，麻烦的” ，好意，荒唐的华莱士” /“有爱” /“有很多爱” /“有很多爱” /“您的” /“您自己的” /“非常真正地属于您” /“您真诚地” /“非常真诚地”您的” /“是的” /“vive le Bard “ /”真诚地向所有人致以最真诚的祝福“ /”真诚地祝愿您，永远真诚地感谢您的祝福“ /” Auf Wiedersehn！“ /”现在的阿迪乌。永远真诚。”

在第二期开始时，我们确实有理由玩这种小型变体游戏。正如我们在2020年秋季刊的导言中所解释的那样，在那里发表的七篇论文具有很强的历史意义和[结束页1]传记重点。总的来说，他们试图使史蒂文斯与他的通讯员以及他周围的世界联系起来。自从亨廷顿四十多年前开始档案研究以来，这种历史主义角度就成为诗人学术研究的一个主要方面。但是，此类研究从未淘汰过史蒂文斯的其他批评派，这些批评派主要是诠释学，并且热衷于专注于文本解释-实际上，在最好的学术研究中，两者经常并驾齐驱。将以下六篇论文集中在一起的是，人们希望仔细阅读史蒂文斯的来信，本质上既是文学作品，又是他们所揭示的诗论。可以说，这是以前从未进行过的批判性工作，我们在这里对史蒂文斯的来信给予了同样的集体集中注意力。

上一期中已经进行了许多敏锐而敏锐的文本解释，这是丽莎·斯坦曼（Lisa Steinman）的文章以史蒂文斯的信中的椭圆和格言引述的令人愉快的方式盘旋的例证，我们很乐意在此借用一个批判的座右铭：复杂”（L 303）。没有比通过朱丽叶·乌塔德（Juliette Utard）的全景开篇文章更好地证明这种复杂性的方法了，该文章展现了“史蒂文斯书信”的多维性，并且理想地为我们准备了细致入微的阅读书信的许多复杂之处-学者们长期以来对它们的迷恋以及他们倾向于忽略的那些。对于她的理论框架，乌塔德使用乔纳森·埃利斯（Jonathan Ellis）最近编辑的《诗人之间的信写作》一书。-对此问题的一些贡献者的灵感之源。这使她能够捍卫写信作为一种文学体裁的价值，并完全接受史蒂文斯的书信。