Death and Pleasure in Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream'

Authors

Thomas Dilworth, University of WindsorFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-14-2024

Publication Title

The Wallace Stevens Journal

Volume

34

First Page

144

Keywords

point of view, Freud, God, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, contents in containers, Venus’s pigeons/doves, perversion, fetishism, necrophilia, murder, Nero

Last Page

160

Abstract

Unconcerned with preparations for a wake or funeral, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ is a general statement about life and in particular pleasure, which the speaker enthusiastically endorses and celebrates in stanza one. A pervasive motif of contained pleasureables and the presence of a corpse in stanza two support the speaker’s implication that pleasure sometimes deviates from morality and sanity.

Comments

This is a revision of an essay published in The Wallace Stevens Journal 34:2 (Fall 2010), 144-60.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Dilworth, Thomas. (2024). Death and Pleasure in Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream'. The Wallace Stevens Journal, 34, 144-160.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/englishpub/84