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Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)
Category: American Literature Born: October 2, 1879
Reading, Pennsylvania, United States Died: August 2, 1955
Hartford, Connecticut, United States
Related authors:
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden
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| 10/4/1937 |
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Wallace Stevens & his Blue Guitar
On this day in 1937 Wallace Stevens published his fourth book of poetry, The Man with the Blue Guitar. Stevens was halfway through his poetry-writing career at this point -- halfway between the early complaints that his poems were "a glittering edifice of icicles," and the Pulitzer in 1955, the year of his death. |
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Academy of American Poets
Find a "Anecdote of the Jar," "Bantams in Pine-Woods," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "Metaphors of a Magnifico," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."
"His first book of poems, Harmonium, published in 1923, exhibited the influence of both the English Romantics and the French symbolists, an inclination to aesthetic philosophy, and a wholly original style and sensibility: exotic, whimsical, infused with the light and color of an Impressionist painting. More than any other modern poet, Stevens was concerned with the transformative power of the imagination. Composing poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings, Stevens continued to spend his days behind a desk at the office, and led a quiet, uneventful life. Though now considered one of the major American poets of the century, he did not receive widespread recognition until the publication of his Collected Poems, just a year before his death." |  | Internet Public Library
Find links to biographies and literary criticism and analysis. | | Modern American Poetry
Features a biography, recollections of the author by friends and acquaintances (including José RodrÃguez Feo, Robert DeVore, and Richard Wilbur), excerpts from his letters, links, and interpretation and analysis of poems including "Sunday Morning," "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and many other poems. Highly recommended.
"Capturing so exuberantly yet so flawlessly the mind at play with an extravagance most often associated with youthful pleasure, with the sheer delights of the sensual body, Stevens preferred to mask his very great sensual satisfactions by suggesting that his doings were in fact all a highly proper set of speculations on 'the imagination.' (His prose essays were useful allies in this strategy.) But the sheer verve of local moments, the sumptuous texture of outstanding passages, simply dissolves as pretense the notion that a philosophical enterprise might be underway. Few poets have so fully enjoyed not just their indulgence in their own language but also the game that elaborately insists no such indulgence is occurring." | | The Wallace Stevens Page
An ecclectic assortment of documents on topics including the author's alleged deathbed conversion, his New York Times obituary, excerpts from correspondence with Jose Rodriguez Feo, reviews of scholarly works about Stevens, and more. | |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
Natasha D'Schommer
, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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