摘要：INTRODUCTION A reader well-versed in Wallace Stevens' poetry might be surprised to learn that Thomas Grey has devoted an entire book to the issue of Stevens' relevance for lawyers. This is not because lawyers and law schools resist the intrusion of nonlegal disciplines into the law school curriculum. With law-and-economics, critical legal studies, and law-and-literature well into their second generation, lawyers increasingly have come to recognize and even solicit the insights of nonlawyers into the law. The titles of Grey's own recent law review articles reflect a degree of the ecumenicalist spirit: "Serpents and Doves: A Note on Kantian Legal Theory"; 3 "The Malthusian Constitution"; 4 "The Constitution as Scripture." 5 But Wallace Stevens has never been thought to have much to add to this discourse. Although critics have been quick to uncover hidden meanings in his poems, almost all of these same critics have assumed that Stevens' lengthy career as a surety lawyer at the Hartford Casualty and Indemnity Company was irrelevant to his verse. 6 Richard Posner's pronouncement is characteristic: "Wallace Stevens was . . . a lawyer . . . but no one supposes that Stevens' poetry is about law." 7 The conventional assumption that Stevens's poetry was not "about law" purports to answer at least two distinct questions: 1) does Stevens' poetry tells us anything about the law?; and 2) did Stevens' legal career influence his poetry? Grey is most interested in what might be described as the poetry-law perspective, that is, ...
