Wallace Stevens And The Actual World

Author : Alan Filreis
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 389 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2014-07-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781400861705

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Wallace Stevens and the Actual World by Alan Filreis Pdf

The work of Wallace Stevens has been read most widely as poetry concerned with poetry, and not with the world in which it was created; deemed utterly singular, it seems to resist being read as the record of a life and times. In this critical biography Alan Filreis presents a detailed challenge to this exceptionalist view as he traces two major periods of Stevens's career from 1939 to 1955, the war years and the postwar years. Portraying Stevens as someone whose alternation between cultural comprehension and ignorance was itself characteristically American, Filreis examines the poet's impulse to disguise and compress the very fact of his debt to the actual world. By actual world Stevens meant historical conditions, often in order to impugn his own interest in such externalities as the last resort of a man whose famous interiority made him feel desperately irrelevant. In light of events ranging from the U.S. entry into World War II to the Cold War, Filreis shows how Stevens was driven to make a "close approach to reality" in an effort to reconcile his poetic language with a cultural language. "Wallace Stevens and the Actual World is not only an impressive feat of historical recovery and analysis, but also a pleasure to read. It will be useful to anyone interested in the relationship between American politics and literature during World War II and the Cold War."--Milton J. Bates, Marquette University Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author : Wallace Stevens,John Burnside
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 130 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0571237932

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Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens,John Burnside Pdf

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. Wallace Stevens was born in Pennsylvania in 1879. Harmonium, published in 1923, became a landmark in modern American poetry with its startling imagery and meditations on art, reality and imagination. It was followed by Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, Transport to Summer and The Necessary Angel. Stevens died in 1955.

Author : George S. Lensing
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2004-04-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0807129720

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Wallace Stevens and the Seasons by George S. Lensing Pdf

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.

Author : Wallace Stevens
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 1951
Category : American poetry
ISBN : UCAL:B4100559

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Transport to Summer by Wallace Stevens Pdf

Author : John N. Serio
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2007-01-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781139827546

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The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens by John N. Serio Pdf

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.

Author : Thomas F. Lombardi
Publisher : Susquehanna University Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0945636792

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Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone by Thomas F. Lombardi Pdf

"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

Author : T. Sharpe
Publisher : Springer
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 1999-11-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780230596313

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Wallace Stevens by T. Sharpe Pdf

Tony Sharpe explores the symbiotic and antagonistic relations between Stevens's literary life and his working life as insurance executive, outlining the personal, historical and publishing contexts that shaped his writing career, and suggesting how awareness of these contexts throws new light on the poems. In this appreciative but not uncritical study, Sharpe tries to see the man behind the mandarin, whilst remaining alert to the challengingly sumptuous austerities of one of America's most significant poets.

Author : Bart Eeckhout,Gül Bilge Han
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2021-07-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781108833295

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The New Wallace Stevens Studies by Bart Eeckhout,Gül Bilge Han Pdf

This book offers a wide-ranging display of innovative critical perspectives on the poetry of the American modernist Wallace Stevens.

Author : Jacqueline Vaught Brogan
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0820325198

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The Violence Within/the Violence Without by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan Pdf

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one of the leading poets of the twentieth century, continues to influence a wide range of poets writing today. However, an image persists of Stevens as an aesthete who was politically removed from his times and who also exhibited sexist and racist tendencies. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan offers careful readings from across the Stevens canon to demonstrate that, contrary to such enduring earlier assessments, Stevens's work over the years shows poetic and political changes that merge with his growing ethical concerns. Brogan traces Stevens's evolving poetic practices along three major lines that often intersected. She situates the beginnings of Stevens's development within his early resistance to the pressures of "reality" on the imagination, an artistic stand that pitted him against the "objective" poetry exemplified in the work of William Carlos Williams. Then, in the midst of Stevens's career, World War II moved him forward with new poetic responsibilities both to witness the current world and to guide readers into their future. The emergence of an almost feminist vision defines Stevens's third line of development. Finally, in addition to identifying these developmental stages, Brogan addresses the undercurrent of race throughout Stevens's work. According to Brogan, Stevens not only changed but matured over time. What began as an aesthetic "violence within," or a girding against such "violence without" as social unrest and war, rapidly evolved during Stevens's middle years into a set of perceptions and practices increasingly responsive to his times.

Author : Wallace Stevens
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2011-04-27
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780307790668

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The Necessary Angel by Wallace Stevens Pdf

In this collection of essays, consummate poet Wallace Stevens reflects upon his art. His aim is not to produce a work of criticism or philosophy, or a mere discussion of poetic technique. As he explains in his introduction, his ambition in these various pieces, published in different times and places, aimed higher than that, in the direction of disclosing "poetry itself, the naked poem, the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words." Stevens proves himself as eloquent and scintillating in prose as in poetry, as he both analyzes and demonstrates the essential act of repossessing reality through the imagination.

Author : Edward Ragg
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2010-07-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781139489997

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Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction by Edward Ragg Pdf

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'.

Author : B. Eeckhout,E. Ragg
Publisher : Springer
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2008-08-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780230583849

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Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic by B. Eeckhout,E. Ragg Pdf

In a unique collection of essays devoted to one of America's most significant twentieth-century poets, a group of international contributors considers the Transatlantic nature of Stevens' poetry, providing original accounts of how a poet wary of 'influence' created a poetics which continues to haunt contermporary verse.

Author : B. J. Leggett
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2005-07-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0807130575

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Late Stevens by B. J. Leggett Pdf

“If one no longer believes in God (as truth),” Wallace Stevens once wrote, “it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else. . . . I say that one's final belief must be in a fiction.” Stevens addressed the concept of a "supreme fiction" throughout much of his career, but many critics feel that his poems never realized that concept beyond a theoretical possibility. B. J. Leggett argues that Stevens did indeed achieve the supreme fiction in his often overlooked late poems. To share in the poet's vision, though, Leggett finds that readers must understand the ingenious intertext that runs through this culminating body of work. After three volumes of difficult and abstract poetry, Stevens in the last five years of his life reverted to a style that is refreshingly personal and accessible. Leggett gives close examination to The Rock, which is the closing section of Stevens's Collected Poems, and to the uncollected poems published as Opus Posthumous, supplying readers with the motifs, conventions, texts, and fictions—or intertext—on which these works' significance depends. He ultimately shows that there is a kind of master narrative in Stevens's late poems, one that is not always explicitly present but that is based on the supreme fiction. It is here that Stevens gives form to his belief. Leggett traces the development of this fiction and demonstrates how knowledge of its presence dramatically changes the reading of key poems. His discussion of Schopenhauer's influence on Stevens, together with rich analyses of major poems, challenges to conventional interpretations, and speculation on the direction Stevens's poetry might have taken had he lived longer, all make for provocative reading. Late Stevens is a book for anyone who thought they knew this poet.

Author : Patricia Rae
Publisher : Bucknell University Press
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0838753523

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The Practical Muse by Patricia Rae Pdf

Patricia Rae's study, while accepting Rorty's view that there is philosophical solidarity between pragmatism and modernism, rejects his interpretation of both as forms of dogmatic skepticism. If pragmatism and modernism coincide, Rae argues, the case of these three writers suggests that the intersection lies not in a rejection of "truthfulness to experience" but in a cautious respect for it.

Author : Wallace Stevens
Publisher : Knopf
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2011-02-08
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780375711732

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Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens Pdf

The first new selection of this acclaimed poet’s work in nearly twenty years—now in paperback—is a rich reminder to poetry readers of his lasting contribution and his unending ability to puzzle, fascinate, and delight us.