The Poet as Experiencer: Wallace Stevens and Nonhuman Intelligence

Abstract

In The Poet as Experiencer: Wallace Stevens and Nonhuman Intelligence, Adam Staley Groves approaches Stevens, not merely as poet–thinker but rather as experiencer and theorist of what is today called “the phenomenon” (UFOs). Challenging both Stevens scholarship and our broader understanding of poetic consciousness, the book presents a radical appraisal of Stevens’s oeuvre as an extended, coded testimony of contact with nonhuman intelligence. Drawing from journals, uncollected poems, and landmark works such as Harmonium and The Necessary Angel, Groves argues that Stevens’s poetic evolution mirrors the psychological and spiritual trajectory of an experiencer grappling with anomalous phenomena long before cognitive frameworks for such were culturally available.

From moths and owls to missing time and the ethics of the imagination, Groves reads Stevens’s work as a sustained effort to reckon with anomalous phenomena whose language has not yet come. Through careful textual analysis and historical correlation, Groves positions the poet within a lineage that includes Coleridge, Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, who are recast not only as theorists of the imagination but as precursors to a modern metaphysical crisis now resurfacing through the contemporary discourse on UFOs and UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). Integrating rigorous literary scholarship with insights from ufology, psychology, and metaphysical philosophy, Groves investigates Stevens’s use of abstraction, the ethics of poetic imagination, and the emergence of the “true subject” as a form of ontological rupture. In doing so, the book bridges the hermetic with the historical, and the poetic with the paranormal.