Author: Anca Rosu
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817358862
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
Demonstrates that Wallace Stevens's experimentation with sound is not only essential to his poetics but also profoundly linked to the pragmatist ideas that informed his way of thinking about language.
Author: Simon Critchley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134251068
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
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: Daniel Tompsett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415507588
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
This book studies Wallace Stevens and pre-Socratic philosophy, showing how concepts that animate Stevens' poetry parallel concepts and techniques found in the poetic works of Parmenides, Empedocles, and Xenophanes, and in the fragments of Heraclitus. Tompsett traces the transition of pre-Socratic ideas into poetry and philosophy of the post-Kantian period, assessing the impact that the mythologies associated with pre-Socratism have had on structures of metaphysical thought that are still found in poetry and philosophy today. This transition is treated as becoming increasingly important as poetic and philosophic forms have progressively taken on the existential burden of our post-theological age. Tompsett argues that Stevens' poetry attempts to 'play' its audience into an ontological ground in an effort to show that his 'reduction of metaphysics' is not dry philosophical imposition, but is enacted by our encounter with the poems themselves. Through an analysis of the language and form of Stevens' poems, Tompsett uncovers the mythology his poetry shares with certain pre-Socratics and with Greek tragedy. This shows how such mythic rhythms are apparent within the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and how these rhythms release a poetic understanding of the violence of a 'reduction of metaphysics.'
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Author: Lisa Goldfarb
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1782845976
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
The book studies the impact of Stevensian and Valeryan poetics, and symbolist poetics more broadly, on a range of Anglo-American poets in untypical fashion. Pairing poets who are not usually studied in their relation to one another reveals mutuality and dissimilitude. Chapter I looks at Stevens and Valery from the vantage point of the senses as opposed to the more usual lens of their similar cerebral or philosophical temperaments. Although critics have largely and justifiably seen Stevens and Eliot in oppositional terms (Stevens proclaims them dead opposites), Lisa Goldfarb asks what happens when we look at them from the vantage point of their mutual interest in creating a musical poetics. Auden is principally known for his distaste for the symbolists and their magical poetics, yet he reserves special praise for Valery and considers him as his poetic mentor; Chapter III studies their poetics side-by-side. With Stevens and Audens mutual appreciation of Valery as a starting point, Chapter IV turns to a closer comparative study of Auden and Stevens, two poets who have traditionally been seen as operating in distinct poetic spheres. While Elizabeth Bishop famously eludes categorization in terms of poetic school or affiliation, a fifth chapter addresses her poetic music in relation to French symbolist poetics, one of the many poetic schools she admired. A sixth and final chapter examines Stevens musical legacy, in large part derived from the symbolists, and addresses the work of a range of modern and contemporary poets, with a final section devoted to the work of contemporary poet, Susan Howe.
Author: George S. Lensing
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807168963
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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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.
Author: Bart Eeckhout
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031070321
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Wallace Stevens’s musicality is so profound that scholars have only begun to grasp his ties to the art of music or the music of his own poetry. In this study, two long-time specialists present a polyphonic composition in which they pursue various interlocking perspectives. Their case studies demonstrate how music as a temporal art form may affect a poetic of ephemerality, sensuous experience, and affective intensification. Such a poetic, they argue, invites flexible interpretations that respond to poetry as an art of textual performance. How did Stevens enact the relation between music and memory? How can we hear his verse as a form of melody-making? What was specific to his ways of recording birdsong? Have we been missing the latent music of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Claude Debussy in particular poems? What were the musical poetics he shared with Igor Stravinsky? And how is our experience of the late poetry transformed when we listen to a musical setting by Ned Rorem? The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens will appeal to experts in the poet’s work, students of Modernism in the arts, and a wider audience fascinated by the dynamics of exchange between music and poetry.
Author: Tom Jones
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748656189
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
The first study of poetic language from a historical and philosophical perspectiveIn a series of 12 chapters, exemplary poems - by Walter Ralegh, John Milton,William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, W. S. Graham, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and Thomas A. Clark - are read alongside theoretical discussions of poetic language. The discussions provide a jargon-free account of a wide range of historical and contemporary schools of thought about poetic language, and an organised, coherent critique of those schools (including analytical philosophy, cognitive poetics, structuralism and post-structuralism). Via close readings of poems from 1600 to the present readers are taken through a wide range of styles including modernist, experimental and innovative poetries. Paired chapters within a chronological structure allow lecturers and students to approach the material in a variety of ways (by individual chapters, paired historical periods) that are appropriate to different courses.
Author: Charles Bernstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195355075
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
Close Listening brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been surprisingly slight. This volume, featuring work by critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe, is the first comprehensive introduction to the ways in which twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. From the performance styles of individual poets and types of poetry to the relation of sound to meaning, from historical and social approaches to poetry readings to new imaginations of prosody, the entries gathered here investigate a compelling range of topics for anyone interested in poetry. Taken together, these essays encourage new forms of "close listenings"--not only to the printed text of poems but also to tapes, performances, and other expressions of the sounded and visualized word. The time is right for such a volume: with readings, spoken word events, and the Web gaining an increasing audience for poetry, Close Listening opens a number of new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry.
Author: Carole Bourne-Taylor
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039114092
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 744
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Book Description
From the first stirrings of modernism to contemporary poetics, the modernist aesthetic project could be described as a form of phenomenological reduction that attempts to return to the invisible and unsayable foundations of human perception and expression, prior to objective points of view and scientific notions. It is this aspect of modernism that this book brings to the fore. The essays presented here bring into focus the contemporary face of ongoing debates about phenomenology and modernism. The contributors forcefully underline the intertwining of modernism and phenomenology and the extent to which the latter offers a clue to the former. The book presents the viewpoints of a range of internationally distinguished critics and scholars, with diverse but closely related essays covering a wide range of fields, including literature, architecture, philosophy and musicology. The collection addresses critical questions regarding the relationship between phenomenology and modernism, with reference to thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Michel Henry and Paul Ricoeur. By examining the contemporary philosophical debates, this cross-disciplinary body of research reveals the pervasive and far-reaching influence of phenomenology, which emerges as a heuristic method to articulate modernist aesthetic concerns.
