On Extended Wings

On Extended Wings PDF Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674634367
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Though Wallace Stevens' shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. She proposes that Stevens development as a poet can best be seen, not in description--which must be repetitive--of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles.

On Extended Wings

On Extended Wings PDF Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674634367
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Though Wallace Stevens' shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. She proposes that Stevens development as a poet can best be seen, not in description--which must be repetitive--of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles.

On Form

On Form PDF Author: Angela Leighton
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199551936
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
'On Form' assesses both the legacy of Victorian aestheticism and the nature of the literary. It tracks the development of the world 'form' since the Romantics and offers readings of, among others, Tennyson, Yeats and Plath. Original readings of poetry are combined with a powerful argument about the nature of aesthetic pleasure.

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens PDF Author: Robert Buttel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400853818
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Honoring the centennial of Stevens' birth, this volume presents original essays by many of Stevens' best-known critics. Also included are 128 previously unpublished lines that appear in the poet's From the Journal of Crispin" (an early version of "The Comedian as the Letter C"); three endings composed for "A Collect of Philosophy"; the complete Adagia entries from Stevens' notebooks; and thirteen letters to business associate Wilson E. Taylor. Originally published in 1980. 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.

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens PDF Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674945753
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
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."

Making the Poem

Making the Poem PDF Author: George S. Lensing
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807168955
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Over sixty years after his death, Wallace Stevens remains one of the major figures of American modernist poetry, celebrated for his masterful style, formal rigor, and aesthetic investigations of the natural, political, and metaphysical worlds. In Making the Poem, noted Stevens scholar George S. Lensing explores the poet’s progress in the creation of his body of work, considering its development, composition, and reception. Drawing on little-known sources and nuanced readings of Stevens’ texts, Lensing expands the customary view of the poet’s creative approaches. This wide-ranging study extends from the origins and overlapping themes of well-known poems through the social and political backgrounds that marked Stevens’ work to the prosodic and musical elements central to his style. Making the Poem features a dynamic new reading of the important early poem “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”—viewing it alongside his wife Elsie’s journal describing the sea voyage that inspired the poem—and an extensive, multiperspective treatment of the widely anthologized “The Idea of Order at Key West,” as well as a careful excavation of the poem “Mozart, 1935” in the context of the U.S. Great Depression. Lensing concludes with a discussion of the gradual (and sometimes reluctant) recognition Stevens’ work received from poets and critics in Great Britain and Ireland. Stemming from decades of research and writing, Making the Poem: Stevens’ Approaches presents a holistic view of his creative achievements and a wealth of new material for readers to draw upon in their future encounters with the poetry of Wallace Stevens.

Late Stevens

Late Stevens PDF Author: B. J. Leggett
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807166189
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
“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.

On extended wings: Wallace Stevens' longer poems

On extended wings: Wallace Stevens' longer poems PDF Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Web of Friendship

The Web of Friendship PDF Author: Robin G. Schulze
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472105786
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Traces the ways in which two important poets shaped and reshaped each other's work

Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens

Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens PDF Author: Eleanor Cook
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400859662
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
In the first full-length study of Wallace Stevens's word-play, Eleanor Cook focuses on Stevens's skillful play with grammar, etymology, allusion, and other elements of poetry, and suggests ways in which this play offers a method of approaching his work. At the same time, this book is a general study of Stevens's poetry, moving from his earliest to his latest work, and includes close readings of three of his remarkable long poems--Esthetique du Mal, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. The chronological arrangement enables readers to follow Stevens's increasing skill and changing thought in three areas of his "poetry of the earth": the poetry of place, the poetry of eros, and the poetry of belief. Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens shows how, in setting words at play and in conflict, Stevens could upset the usual relations of rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic, and thus the book contributes to the current debate about logical and a-logical uses of language. Cook also places Stevens within the larger context of Western literature, hearing how he speaks to Milton, Keats, and Wordsworth; to such American forebears as Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson; and to T. S. Eliot, his contemporary. Originally published in 1988. 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.

Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds

Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds PDF Author: Cary Wolfe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022668802X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
The poems of Wallace Stevens teem with birds: grackles, warblers, doves, swans, nightingales, owls, peacocks, and one famous blackbird who summons thirteen ways of looking. What do Stevens’s evocations of birds, and his poems more generally, tell us about the relationship between human and nonhuman? In this book, the noted theorist of posthumanism Cary Wolfe argues for a philosophical and theoretical reinvention of ecological poetics, using Stevens as a test case. Stevens, Wolfe argues, is an ecological poet in the sense that his places, worlds, and environments are co-created by the life forms that inhabit them. Wolfe argues for a “nonrepresentational” conception of ecopoetics, showing how Stevens’s poems reward study alongside theories of system, environment, and observation derived from a multitude of sources, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Niklas Luhmann to Jacques Derrida and Stuart Kauffman. Ecological Poetics is an ambitious interdisciplinary undertaking involving literary criticism, contemporary philosophy, and theoretical biology.