“Such beauty transforming the dark”: Wallace Stevens’s Project in Frank Ormsby’s “Fireflies”

Abstract

Although Frank Ormsby’s poetry is associated with what Terry Eagleton has called tropes of irony and commitment, his 2009 collection Fireflies inclines, rather surprisingly, towards Wallace Stevens’s idea of imagination as a force impacting reality. Reading Ormsby’s volume against a selection of poems by Stevens unravels what appears to be a consistent affinity between the author of Harmonium and the Ulster-born poet. This affinity manifests itself, as the present paper aims to show, in the fact that in Fireflies, much like in Stevens, a form of perception of reality is delineated that is never to stagnate into an achieved balance.