ABSTRACT: Wallace Stevens's poetics may be read fruitfully through the lens of Aristotelian ethics with an eye to their differences. Whereas Aristotle situates human flourishing in contemplative participation in the divine, Stevens reimagines virtuous happiness as inseparable from human embodiment, limitation, and even disability, positioning these conditions as fundamental rather than exceptional. By integrating deviation, weakness, and mortality into his vision of the divine, Stevens constructs a philosophical anthropology that treats disability as central to both human life and poetic creation.

ABSTRACT: Although Wallace Stevens seldom refers to Ovid in his written work, he repeatedly expresses interest in metamorphosis, and his poetry deserves to be considered within the tradition of metamorphosis inaugurated by Ovid. Focusing on the rhetorical tradition and the figures of speech, this essay shows the similarities between the two, using insights gleaned from Ovid to read poems by Stevens in a new way. The essay culminates in a reading of "Peter Quince at the Clavier" as a kind of Ovidian apotheosis set against a background of flux.