Download Free Wallace Stevens Poetry As Life Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Wallace Stevens Poetry As Life and write the review.

Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life delves into every phase of Stevens' life--from his childhood in Pennsylvania, his years at Harvard, and his short stay in New York to his life-long choice of a home in Hartford, Connecticut, and a career in the insurance business. The importance of Stevens' relationship to his father is stressed, and also the contribution to his growth of Santayana, Bergson, Pater, and Pascal, among others. His deep feeling for things French, and his unusual appreciation of painting are also assessed, as they relate to the development of his finely tempered artistry and special conception of art.
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).
Collected Poetry and Prose.
In Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth, George S. Lensing examines Stevens’ gradual emergence and development as a poet, tracing his life from his formative years in Pennsylvania to his careers as a lawyer for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. Lensing draws extensively upon previously unpublished material from the Stevens archive at the Huntington Library, which contains letters, early drafts of poems, and notebooks. Two notebooks,Schemata and From Pieces of Paper, are here reproduced in full. The study is divided into three sections. In the first, Lensing examines the years before the publication of Sevens’ first volume of poetry, paying special attention to the forces that hindered and enhanced his progress toward modernity. In the second, we see Stevens in the exercise of his craft. Lensing discusses the influence of the Romantics on the verse Stevens wrote as an undergraduate at Harvard; his interest in Oriental art, Cubism, and Fauvism; his anticipation of Imagism; and his imitation of certain French Symbolists. Sources of the epigraphs to Stevens’ poems are identified fully for the first time, suggesting the role of Stevens’ vast reading upon his poetry. Also considered is Stevens’ voluminous correspondence with people from all over the world, some of whom he never met personally. These letters helped rescue Stevens from the insularity of his business life and aided in the making of his poems. The final section treats the critical responses to Stevens’ poetry by such people as Harriet Monroe, editor and founder of Poetry, who was the first important reader and publisher of his work. Attention is also given to Stevens’ explications of his poems. Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth is a comprehensive examination of Stevens’ live and work. This study provides abundant new material, which will be of value to scholars and to those readers who are drawn to Stevens’ poetry.
A collection of seventy-six poems inspired by poet Wallace Steven's life and work, written by a variety of modern poets.
A beautiful new edition—the first in nearly twenty years—of the work of Wallace Stevens, a founding father of contemporary American poetry, with a dazzling range of work that is at once emotional and intellectual. As John N. Serio reminds us in his elegant introduction, Stevens has written more persuasively than any other poet about the significance of poetry itself in everyday life: “The imagination—frequently synonymous with the act of the mind, or poetry, for Stevens—is what gives life its savor, its sanction, its sacred quality.” This rich and thorough selection—published in the 130th anniversary year of Stevens’s birth—carries us from the explosion of Harmonium in 1923 to the maturity of The Auroras of Autumn in 1950 and the magisterial Collected Poems published by Knopf in 1954. To be drawn in once more by “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” to name only a few, is to experience again the mystery of a poet who calls us to a higher music and to a deeper understanding of our vast and inarticulate interior world. This essential volume for all readers of poetry reminds us of Stevens’s nearly unparalleled contribution to the art form and his unending ability to puzzle, fascinate, and delight us.
Wallace Stevens is one of the major poets of the twentieth century, and also among the most challenging. His poems can be dazzling in their verbal brilliance. They are often shot through with lavish imagery and wit, informed by a lawyer's logic, and disarmingly unexpected: a singing jackrabbit, the seductive Nanzia Nunzio. They also spoke--and still speak--to contemporary concerns. Though his work is popular and his readership continues to grow, many readers encountering it are baffled by such rich and strange poetry. Eleanor Cook, a leading critic of poetry and expert on Stevens, gives us here the essential reader's guide to this important American poet. Cook goes through each of Stevens's poems in his six major collections as well as his later lyrics, in chronological order. For each poem she provides an introductory head note and a series of annotations on difficult phrases and references, illuminating for us just why and how Stevens was a master at his art. Her annotations, which include both previously unpublished scholarship and interpretive remarks, will benefit beginners and specialists alike. Cook also provides a brief biography of Stevens, and offers a detailed appendix on how to read modern poetry. A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens is an indispensable resource and the perfect companion to The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, first published in 1954 in honor of Stevens's seventy-fifth birthday, as well as to the 1997 collection Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose.
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.