Wallace Stevens and Modern Art

Wallace Stevens and Modern Art PDF Author: Glen G. MacLeod
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300053609
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
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.

Wallace Stevens and Modern Art

Wallace Stevens and Modern Art PDF Author: Glen G. MacLeod
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300053609
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
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.

The Necessary Angel

The Necessary Angel PDF Author: Wallace Stevens
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307790665
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
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.

The Relations Between Poetry and Painting

The Relations Between Poetry and Painting PDF Author: Wallace Stevens
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 16

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Book Description


Wallace Stevens in Context

Wallace Stevens in Context PDF Author: Glen MacLeod
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110821052X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
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.

The Whole Harmonium

The Whole Harmonium PDF Author: Paul Mariani
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451624395
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
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).

How Poets See the World

How Poets See the World PDF Author: Willard Spiegelman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190291834
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, "irrelevant descriptions of nature" in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art, and make relevant poems out of their observations. This study deals with the crisp, elegant work of Charles Tomlinson, the swirling baroque poetry of Amy Clampitt, the metaphysical meditations of Charles Wright from a position in his backyard, the weather reports and landscapes of John Ashbery, and the "new way of looking" that Jorie Graham proposes to explore in her increasingly fragmented poems. All of these poets, plus others (Gary Snyder, Theodore Weiss, Irving Feldman, Richard Howard) who are dealt with more briefly, attend to what Wallace Stevens, in a memorable phrase, calls "the way things look each day." The ordinariness of daily reality is the beginning of the poets' own idiosyncratic, indeed unique, visions and styles.

The New Wallace Stevens Studies

The New Wallace Stevens Studies PDF Author: Bart Eeckhout
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108833292
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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

The Poetics of the Everyday

The Poetics of the Everyday PDF Author: Siobhan Phillips
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231149301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the quotidian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"--recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention. Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. She eloquently reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism. In Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual "middle way." In Bishop's work, she identifies the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a "ceremony" rather than a sentence, and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits. Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the issues that literature reflects and illuminates.

Transport to Summer

Transport to Summer PDF Author: Wallace Stevens
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description


Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens PDF Author: Wallace Stevens
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571237937
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
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.