Wallace Stevens And The Actual World

Author : Alan Filreis
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400861705
Total Pages : 389 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wallace Stevens and the Actual World written by Alan Filreis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Transport to Summer written by Wallace Stevens and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Wallace Stevens
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307790665
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Necessary Angel written by Wallace Stevens and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Simon Critchley
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134251068
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Things Merely Are written by Simon Critchley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-02-18 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Wallace Stevens
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780571237937
Total Pages : 130 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wallace Stevens written by Wallace Stevens and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Paul Mariani
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1451624395
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Whole Harmonium written by Paul Mariani and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).

Author : Eleanor Cook
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400827647
Total Pages : 371 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens written by Eleanor Cook and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-09 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : John N. Serio
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139827545
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens written by John N. Serio and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-18 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Helen Vendler
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674736567
Total Pages : 457 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-11 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Times Higher Education Book of the Week One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades’ worth of Helen Vendler’s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose—including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture—in a single volume. “It’s one of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn’t a fresh insight about a poet or poetry.” —Charles Simic, New York Review of Books “Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape—I might almost say ‘create’—our understanding of poetry in English.” —Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review “Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made...A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit.” —John Greening, Times Literary Supplement

Author : Edward Clarke
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780230357860
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Later Affluence of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens written by Edward Clarke and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying the later work of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, Edward Clarke unfolds their very last poems and considers the two poets' relations with western literature and tradition. This book shows how these two latecomers transform the ways in which we read earlier poets. Edward Clarke considers a concourse of poets that move toward the late work of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens. Sometimes encounters with predecessors are arranged by imitation or allusion, sometimes one poet is unconsciously influenced by another, and sometimes they meet by chance. This book surveys the later work of Yeats and Stevens through chapter length studies in order to unfold their very last poems, thereby following their relations with western literature and tradition, and showing how they transform our readings of earlier poets.