Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic

Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic PDF Author: B. Eeckhout
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230583849
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
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.

Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic

Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic PDF Author: B. Eeckhout
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230583849
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
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.

The Whole Harmonium

The Whole Harmonium PDF Author: Paul Mariani
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451624387
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
"A perceptive, insightful biography of perhaps the most important American poet of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens, by an accomplished biographer and poet who traces Stevens's lifelong artistic quest"--

The Modern Dilemma

The Modern Dilemma PDF Author: Leon Surette
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 077353363X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Leon Surette's new study of T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, The Modern Dilemma, challenges the received view that Stevens' poetry expresses a Humanist world view, and - more surprisingly - documents Eliot's early Humanist phase when Eliot and his bride shared Bertrand Russell's tiny London flat, and later rented a country house together (1914-17). Eliot's poetry of that time - up to The Waste Land is seen to reflect his Humanist phase, closed by his conversion, poetically documented in Ash Wednesday. Where Eliot's poetry is dominated by cultural, religious and philosophical angst, Stevens' is bright, witty, and playful - and commonly dismissed as superficial. The Modern Dilemma challenges this view, demonstrating the seriousness of Stevens' life-long engagement with the modern dilemma of disbelief, and also that, like Eliot, he rejected the Humanist resolution, characterized by Russell in "The Free Man's Worship" as man worshiping "at the shrine that his own hands have built." The study proceeds by juxtaposing the two poets' responses in poetry and prose to the same texts and events: Marianne Moore's poetry; the Great War; Humanists and anti-Humanists; the Franco-Mexican Humanist, Ramon Fernandez; Pure Poetry; and finally the gathering war clouds in the late 'thirties. The strategy is to put the two men in juxtaposition so as to highlight the differences and similarities of their responses to the same issues or the same works. Among the issues under examination is the nature and status of poetry, religious belief or disbelief, and political engagement or the lack thereof.

The Way the World Works

The Way the World Works PDF Author: Nicholson Baker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 141658398X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Nicholson Baker, who “writes like no one else in America” (Newsweek), here assembles his best short pieces from the last fifteen years. The Way the World Works, Baker’s second nonfiction collection, ranges over the map of life to examine what troubles us, what eases our pain, and what brings us joy. Baker moves from political controversy to the intimacy of his own life, from forgotten heroes of pacifism to airplane wings, telephones, paper mills, David Remnick, Joseph Pulitzer, the OED, and the manufacture of the Venetian gondola. He writes about kite string and about the moment he met his wife, and he surveys our fascination with video games while attempting to beat his teenage son at Modern Warfare 2. In a celebrated essay on Wikipedia, Baker describes his efforts to stem the tide of encyclopedic deletionism; in another, he charts the rise of e-readers; in a third he chronicles his Freedom of Information lawsuit against the San Francisco Public Library. Through all these pieces, many written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The American Scholar, Baker shines the light of an inexpugnable curiosity. The Way the World Works is a keen-minded, generous-spirited compendium by a modern American master.

Restless Secularism

Restless Secularism PDF Author: Matthew Mutter
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300227965
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
A scholarly and deeply sensitive study that explores how religion and secularism are tightly interwoven in the major works of modernist literature Matthew Mutter provides a broad survey of modernist literature, examining key works against a background of philosophy, theology, intellectual and social history, while tracing the relationship of modernism’s secular imagination to the religious cultures that both preceded and shaped it. Mutter’s provocative study demonstrates how, despite their explicit desire to purify secular life of its religious residues, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and other literary modernists consistently found themselves entangled in the religious legacies they disavowed.

Seamus Heaney’s Regions

Seamus Heaney’s Regions PDF Author: Richard Rankin Russell
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268091811
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Regional voices from England, Ireland, and Scotland inspired Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel prize-winner, to become a poet, and his home region of Northern Ireland provided the subject matter for much of his poetry. In his work, Heaney explored, recorded, and preserved both the disappearing agrarian life of his origins and the dramatic rise of sectarianism and the subsequent outbreak of the Northern Irish “Troubles” beginning in the late 1960s. At the same time, Heaney consistently imagined a new region of Northern Ireland where the conflicts that have long beset it and, by extension, the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom might be synthesized and resolved. Finally, there is a third region Heaney committed himself to explore and map—the spirit region, that world beyond our ken. In Seamus Heaney’s Regions, Richard Rankin Russell argues that Heaney’s regions—the first, geographic, historical, political, cultural, linguistic; the second, a future where peace, even reconciliation, might one day flourish; the third, the life beyond this one—offer the best entrance into and a unified understanding of Heaney’s body of work in poetry, prose, translations, and drama. As Russell shows, Heaney believed in the power of ideas—and the texts representing them—to begin resolving historical divisions. For Russell, Heaney’s regionalist poetry contains a “Hegelian synthesis” view of history that imagines potential resolutions to the conflicts that have plagued Ireland and Northern Ireland for centuries. Drawing on extensive archival and primary material by the poet, Seamus Heaney’s Regions examines Heaney’s work from before his first published poetry volume, Death of a Naturalist in 1966, to his most recent volume, the elegiac Human Chain in 2010, to provide the most comprehensive treatment of the poet’s work to date.

The Columbia History of American Poetry

The Columbia History of American Poetry PDF Author: Jay Parini
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780585041544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 936

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Book Description
-- New York Times Book Review

The Dome and the Rock

The Dome and the Rock PDF Author: James Baird
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421436981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Originally published in 1968. In The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, James Baird traces the process of Wallace Steven's Grand Poem and the total structure that it accomplished in language. In the words of Professor Baird, "The full art of Stevens is organized with architectural precision. The shape of the mind becomes a building, the framework of which is founded in a willed symmetry of design." In The Dome and the Rock, James Baird exposes the capacity of Wallace Stevens to design his poetry in a manner similar to an architect, and he "reveals the craftsmanship of [Wallace's] acts as builder."

Modernism and Still Life

Modernism and Still Life PDF Author: Tobin Claudia Tobin
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474455158
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Explores the 'still life spirit' in modern painting, prose, dance, sculpture and poetryChallenges the conventional positioning of still life a 'minor' genre in art historyProposes a radical alternative to narratives of modernism that privilege speed and motion by revealing forms of stillness and still life at the heart of modern literature and visual cultureProvides the first study of still life to consider the genre across modern literature, visual cultures and danceUncovers connections and cultural exchange between networks of European and American artists including the Bloomsbury Group and Wallace StevensThe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the 'age of speed' but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It ranges widely in its material, taking Czanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris. Claudia Tobin reveals that at the heart of modern art were forms of stillness that were intimately bound up with movement: the still life emerges charged with animation, vibration and rhythm; an unstable medium, unexpectedly vital and well suited to the expression of modern concerns.

Unlikely Muse

Unlikely Muse PDF Author: Daniel Kornstein
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1449032974
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
This trail-blazing book explores previously uncharted aspects of law and literature, as well as the psychology, paradoxes and wonderful mystery of creativity. A study of artistic inspiration, Unlikely Muse examines and analyzes the lives and works of three very different writers who combine law, literature and imagination: nineteenth-century French novelist Honor de Balzac, modernist American poet Wallace Stevens, and controversial playwright-memoirist Lillian Hellman. From the literary careers of those three writers emerge two intertwined and exciting new themes. The first theme demonstrates unexpected synergy between law and literature. Opening original lines of inquiry, Unlikely Muse probes the possible relationship between legal training and artistic creativity. A surprisingly large number of great creative artists - writers (such as Balzac), poets (such as Stevens), painters (such as Matisse) and composers (such as Tchaikovsky) - studied or practiced law. This book asks whether such people became great creative artists because of or despite their legal background. Others, such as Hellman, had no legal training but wrote much about the law. This book sketches the intellectual atmosphere and biographical background that shaped these three writers' creative process, highlighting the impact of the law on their work. The second theme uses these same three writers to focus on the changing role of imagination in literature. From Balzac through Stevens to Hellman and beyond, the author traces imagination's arc from a positive artistic quality to something that is sometimes more controversial, perhaps deceitful, and negative. In the last few decades - ever since Hellman's memoirs were attacked as untrue - journalists, memoirists and other writers have palmed off works of fiction as non-fiction, often causing literary scandals. This book offers a new theory why this phenomenon is happening and how it should be regarded.