Transport to Summer


Book Description




A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens


Book Description

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 Her annotations, which include both previously unpublished scholarship and interpretive remarks, will benefit beginners and specialists alike.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.




Wallace Stevens


Book Description

Offers authoritative readings of the major long poems and sequences, exploring their relationship to one another and to the works of Stevens' precursors.




Wallace Stevens


Book Description

This detailed critical study of Wallace Stevens identifies the major concerns of his poetry. Lucy Beckett presents Stevens as a contemplative poet, engaged on a long enquiry into the nature of the relationship between the creative imagination and the world it illuminates and recreates.




Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone


Book Description

"Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone represents the definitive work on origins as they appear in Stevens's poetry. Author Thomas Francis Lombardi, a poet himself, traces Stevens's originary influences - place, family, tradition, the feminine, ethnic heritage, and religious roots - against the cosmopolitan influences of Cambridge and New York and demonstrates the extent to which Stevens's formative and early adult years shaped his entire life and influenced the grand sweep of his poetry." "That influence spread itself across Stevens's entire canon, from the early verse through Harmonium, Ideas of Order, Parts of a World, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer, The Auroras of Autumn, The Rock, and finally Opus Posthumous. Though Lombardi acknowledges the importance of the global presence in Stevens's poetry, he argues that the hallmark of the poet's vision is the presence of his Pennsylvania provincialism and the increasing significance he attached to his roots as he grew older." "Stevens's life epitomized a personal and irresistible rite of passage toward origins, a universal odyssey that sensitive people undertake over the course of their lives - the ethnocentric pull toward the native experience. That attraction to his native soil would inform much of the content of his poetry. To this end, he wished to be one with his ancestors for the reason of experiencing a sense of identity with the provincial past, not in spite of, but because of it. Without an adequate understanding of this relationship, no in-depth comprehension of Stevens's poetry seems possible."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved




Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic Philosophy


Book Description

This book studies Wallace Stevens and pre-Socratic philosophy, showing how concepts that animate Stevens’ poetry parallel concepts and techniques found in the poetic works of Parmenides, Empedocles, and Xenophanes, and in the fragments of Heraclitus. Tompsett traces the transition of pre-Socratic ideas into poetry and philosophy of the post-Kantian period, assessing the impact that the mythologies associated with pre-Socratism have had on structures of metaphysical thought that are still found in poetry and philosophy today. This transition is treated as becoming increasingly important as poetic and philosophic forms have progressively taken on the existential burden of our post-theological age. Tompsett argues that Stevens’ poetry attempts to ‘play’ its audience into an ontological ground in an effort to show that his ‘reduction of metaphysics’ is not dry philosophical imposition, but is enacted by our encounter with the poems themselves. Through an analysis of the language and form of Stevens’ poems, Tompsett uncovers the mythology his poetry shares with certain pre-Socratics and with Greek tragedy. This shows how such mythic rhythms are apparent within the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and how these rhythms release a poetic understanding of the violence of a ‘reduction of metaphysics.’




Wallace Stevens


Book Description

'This distinguished book sets forth the Stevens that we will be reading for at least the next three decades: a Stevens in close touch with political and social conditions, a Stevens whose poetry arises from the texture of his times.'-Louis Martz




Poetry and the Fate of the Senses


Book Description

What is the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry? How does poetry carry on the long tradition of making experience and suffering understood by others? With Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart traces the path of the aesthetic in search of an explanation for the role of poetry in culture. Herself an acclaimed poet, Stewart not only brings the intelligence of a critic to the question of poetry, but the insight of a practitioner as well. Her new study includes close discussions of poems by Stevens, Hopkins, Keats, Hardy, Bishop, and Traherne, of the sense of vertigo in Baroque and Romantic works, and of the rich tradition of nocturnes in visual, musical, and verbal art. Ultimately, she argues that poetry can counter the denigration of the senses in contemporary life and can expand our imagination of the range of human expression. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses won the 2004 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, administered for the Truman Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. It also won the Phi Beta Kappa Society's 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism.




Wallace Stevens


Book Description

This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.




Wallace Stevens


Book Description

In Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth, George S. Lensing examines Stevens’ gradual emergence and development as a poet, tracing his life from his formative years in Pennsylvania to his careers as a lawyer for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. Lensing draws extensively upon previously unpublished material from the Stevens archive at the Huntington Library, which contains letters, early drafts of poems, and notebooks. Two notebooks,Schemata and From Pieces of Paper, are here reproduced in full. The study is divided into three sections. In the first, Lensing examines the years before the publication of Sevens’ first volume of poetry, paying special attention to the forces that hindered and enhanced his progress toward modernity. In the second, we see Stevens in the exercise of his craft. Lensing discusses the influence of the Romantics on the verse Stevens wrote as an undergraduate at Harvard; his interest in Oriental art, Cubism, and Fauvism; his anticipation of Imagism; and his imitation of certain French Symbolists. Sources of the epigraphs to Stevens’ poems are identified fully for the first time, suggesting the role of Stevens’ vast reading upon his poetry. Also considered is Stevens’ voluminous correspondence with people from all over the world, some of whom he never met personally. These letters helped rescue Stevens from the insularity of his business life and aided in the making of his poems. The final section treats the critical responses to Stevens’ poetry by such people as Harriet Monroe, editor and founder of Poetry, who was the first important reader and publisher of his work. Attention is also given to Stevens’ explications of his poems. Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth is a comprehensive examination of Stevens’ live and work. This study provides abundant new material, which will be of value to scholars and to those readers who are drawn to Stevens’ poetry.




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