Wallace Stevens in Context

Wallace Stevens in Context

Author: Glen MacLeod

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-12-22

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 110821052X

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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.


Wallace Stevens in Context

Wallace Stevens in Context

Author: Glen MacLeod

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-12-22

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781107110496

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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.


Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Author: James Longenbach

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0195070224

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'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


The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens

The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens

Author: John N. Serio

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-01-18

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1139827545

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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.


The Whole Harmonium

The Whole Harmonium

Author: Paul Mariani

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-04-05

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 1451624395

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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).


Wallace Stevens and Modern Art

Wallace Stevens and Modern Art

Author: Glen G. MacLeod

Publisher:

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 9780300053609

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It is well known that the poetry of Wallace Stevens reflected his interest in the visual arts, but until now no one has recognized the poet's close involvement with the art of his own era. In this book, Glen MacLeod shows how Stevens was engaged with contemporary art theory, artists, art dealers, and artworks, and argues that this interaction played a central role in his poetry, his poetic theory, and the unusual character of his poetic development. MacLeod demonstrates that Stevens' first book, Harmonium, reflects his involvement with New York Dada during the 1910s; that such major poems as "The Man with the Blue Guitar" and "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" record his interest in the rival doctrines of surrealism and abstraction during the 1930s and early 1940s; and that the highly abstract late poetry of The Auroras of Autumn parallels in surprising ways the contemporary Abstract Expressionist movement. Aspects of Stevens' poetry that have long troubled his critics - for example, his insistence that poetry must be abstract, his lack of interest in formal experimentation, and his personal "imagination-reality complex" - are clarified when they are seen in the context of his relation to avant-garde art. Stevens' awareness of contemporary issues in the art world helped to determine his subjects, his critical vocabulary, and the ways of thinking that he explored in both his poetry and his essays. In this light, his point of view seems less peculiar, more a part of the living critical discourse at the heart of American art and literature.


Mind of Winter

Mind of Winter

Author: William W. Bevis

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2004-06-25

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780822985112

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Bevis addresses the most puzzling and least studied aspect of Wallace Stevens’ poetry: detachment. Stevens’ detachment, often associated by readers with asceticism, bareness, or withdrawal, is one of the distinguishing and pervasive characteristics of Stevens’ poetic work. Bevis agues that this detachment is meditative and therefore experiential in origin. Moreover, the meditative Stevens of spare syntax and clear image is in constant tension with the romantic, imaginative Stevens of dazzling metaphors and exuberant flight. Indeed, for Bevis, Stevens is a poet not of imagination and reality, but of imagination and reality, but of imagination and meditation in relation to reality.


Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Author: Helen Vendler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 9780674945753

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In this graceful book, Helen Vendler brings her remarkable skills to bear on a number of Stevens' short poems. She shows us that this most intellectual of poets is in fact the most personal of poets; that his words are not devoted to epistemological questions alone but are also "words chosen out of desire."


Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction

Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction

Author: Edward Ragg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-07-15

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139489992

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Edward Ragg's study was the first to examine the role of abstraction throughout the work of Wallace Stevens. By tracing the poet's interest in abstraction from Harmonium through to his later works, Ragg argues that Stevens only fully appreciated and refined this interest within his later career. Ragg's detailed close-readings highlight the poet's absorption of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century painting, as well as the examples of philosophers and other poets' work. Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction will appeal to those studying Stevens as well as anyone interested in the relations between poetry and painting. This valuable study embraces revealing philosophical and artistic perspectives, analyzing Stevens' place within and resistance to Modernist debates concerning literature, painting, representation and 'the imagination'.