Wallace Stevens and the Seasons
Title | Wallace Stevens and the Seasons PDF eBook |
Author | George S. Lensing |
Publisher | LSU Press |
Total Pages | 412 |
Release | 2004-04-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780807129722 |
This fruitful pairing of literary and biographical interpretation follows Wallace Stevens’s poetry through the lens of its dominant metaphor—the seasons of nature—and illuminates the poet’s personal life experiences reflected there. From Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium (1923), to his last poems written shortly before his death in 1955, George S. Lensing offers clear and detailed examination of Stevens’s seasonal poetry, including extensive discussions of “Autumn Refrain,” “The Snow Man,” “The World as Meditation,” and “Credences of Summer.” Drawing upon a vast knowledge of the poet, Lensing argues that Stevens’s pastoral poetry of the seasons assuaged a profound and persistent personal loneliness. An important scholarly assessment of a major twentieth-century modernist, Wallace Stevens and the Seasons also serves as an appealing introduction to Stevens.
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose (LOA #96)
Title | Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose (LOA #96) PDF eBook |
Author | Wallace Stevens |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 1064 |
Release | 1997-10 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN |
Collected Poetry and Prose.
Things Merely Are
Title | Things Merely Are PDF eBook |
Author | Simon Critchley |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 152 |
Release | 2005-02-18 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1134251068 |
This book is an invitation to read poetry. Simon Critchley argues that poetry enlarges life with a range of observation, power of expression and attention to language that eclipses any other medium. In a rich engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Critchley reveals that poetry also contains deep and important philosophical insight. Above all, he agues for a 'poetic epistemology' that enables us to think afresh the philosophical problem of the relation between mind and world, and ultimately to cast the problem away. Drawing astutely on Kant, the German and English Romantics and Heidegger, Critchley argues that through its descriptions of particular things and their stubborn plainness - whether water, guitars, trees, or cats - poetry evokes the 'mereness' of things. It is this experience, he shows, that provokes the mood of calm and releases the imaginative insight we need to press back against the pressure of reality. Critchley also argues that this calm defines the cinematic eye of Terrence Malick, whose work is discussed at the end of the book.
Wallace Stevens in Context
Title | Wallace Stevens in Context PDF eBook |
Author | Glen MacLeod |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 672 |
Release | 2016-12-22 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 110821052X |
This book aims to provide an in-depth introduction to the multifaceted life and times of Wallace Stevens, who is generally considered one of the great twentieth-century American poets. In thirty-six short essays, an international team of distinguished scholars have created a comprehensive overview of Stevens' life and the world of his poetry. Individual chapters relate Stevens to important contexts such as the large Western movements of romanticism and modernism; particular American and European philosophical traditions; contemporary and later poets; the professional realms of law and insurance; the parallel art forms of painting, music, and theater; his publication history, critical reception, and his international reputation. Other chapters address topics of current interest such as war, politics, religion, race and the feminine. Informed by the latest developments in the field, but written in clear, jargon-free prose, Wallace Stevens in Context is an indispensable introduction to this great modern poet.
The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens
Title | The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens PDF eBook |
Author | John N. Serio |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 200 |
Release | 2007-01-18 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1139827545 |
Wallace Stevens is a major American poet and a central figure in modernist studies and twentieth-century poetry. This Companion introduces students to his work. An international team of distinguished contributors presents a unified picture of Stevens' poetic achievement. The Introduction explains why Stevens is among the world's great poets and offers specific guidance on how to read and appreciate his poetry. A brief biographical sketch anchors Stevens in the real world and illuminates important personal and intellectual influences. The essays following chart Stevens' poetic career and his affinities with both earlier and contemporary writers, artists, and philosophers. Other essays introduce students to the peculiarity and distinctiveness of Stevens' voice and style. They explain prominent themes in his work and explore the nuances of his aesthetic theory. With a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading, this Companion provides all the information a student or scholar of Stevens will need.
A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens
Title | A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens PDF eBook |
Author | Eleanor Cook |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Total Pages | 371 |
Release | 2009-03-09 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 1400827647 |
Wallace Stevens is one of the major poets of the twentieth century, and also among the most challenging. His poems can be dazzling in their verbal brilliance. They are often shot through with lavish imagery and wit, informed by a lawyer's logic, and disarmingly unexpected: a singing jackrabbit, the seductive Nanzia Nunzio. They also spoke--and still speak--to contemporary concerns. Though his work is popular and his readership continues to grow, many readers encountering it are baffled by such rich and strange poetry. Eleanor Cook, a leading critic of poetry and expert on Stevens, gives us here the essential reader's guide to this important American poet. Cook goes through each of Stevens's poems in his six major collections as well as his later lyrics, in chronological order. For each poem she provides an introductory head note and a series of annotations on difficult phrases and references, illuminating for us just why and how Stevens was a master at his art. Her annotations, which include both previously unpublished scholarship and interpretive remarks, will benefit beginners and specialists alike. Cook also provides a brief biography of Stevens, and offers a detailed appendix on how to read modern poetry. A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens is an indispensable resource and the perfect companion to The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, first published in 1954 in honor of Stevens's seventy-fifth birthday, as well as to the 1997 collection Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose.
The Whole Harmonium
Title | The Whole Harmonium PDF eBook |
Author | Paul Mariani |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Total Pages | 504 |
Release | 2016-04-05 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 1451624395 |
An “incandescent….redefining biography of a major poet whose reputation continues to ascend” (Booklist, starred review)—Wallace Stevens, perhaps the most important American poet of the twentieth century. Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a richly imaginative life that he expressed in his poems. “A biography that is both deliciously readable and profoundly knowledgeable” (Library Journal, starred review), The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times and as the creator of a poetry that continues to shape how we understand and define ourselves. A lawyer who rose to become an insurance-company vice president, Stevens composed brilliant poems on long walks to work and at other stolen moments. He endured an increasingly unhappy marriage, and yet he had his Dionysian side, reveling in long fishing (and drinking) trips to the sun-drenched tropics of Key West. He was at once both the Connecticut businessman and the hidalgo lover of all things Latin. His first book of poems, Harmonium, published when he was forty-four, drew on his profound understanding of Modernism to create a distinctive and inimitable American idiom. Over time he became acquainted with peers such as Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, but his personal style remained unique. The complexity of Stevens’s poetry rests on emotional, philosophical, and linguistic tensions that thread their way intricately through his poems, both early and late. And while he can be challenging to understand, Stevens has proven time and again to be one of the most richly rewarding poets to read. Biographer and poet Paul Mariani’s The Whole Harmonium “is an excellent, superb, thrilling story of a mind….unpacking poems in language that is nearly as eloquent as the poet’s, and as clear as faithfulness allows” (The New Yorker).