Tony Sharpe explores the symbiotic and antagonistic relations between Stevens's literary life and his working life as insurance executive, outlining the personal, historical and publishing contexts that shaped his writing career, and suggesting how awareness of these contexts throws new light on the poems. In this appreciative but not uncritical study, Sharpe tries to see the man behind the mandarin, whilst remaining alert to the challengingly sumptuous austerities of one of America's most significant poets.
This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
Wallace Stevens, who died in 1955, was one of the most original, prolific, serious, and rewarding of twentieth-century American poets. This is a detailed critical study of his poetry, identifying its concerns, from the point of view of a convinced admirer. Lucy Beckett presents Sevens as a contemplative poet, engaged on a long enquiry into the nature of the relationship between the creative imagination and the world it illuminates and recreates. Steven's achievement is seen as one of the great monuments in English of the endeavour to find and sustain a connection between poetry and belief.
In this volume, seven renowned critics present different views of Wallace Stevens' place in the evolution of Modernist poetry. The essays offer a fresh scrutiny of the poet's work and influence, re-examining the critical consensus that has developed since Stevens first gained the attention of critics in the fifties. The collection traces both the development of Modernist poetics and Stevens' place in it, from the poet's relation to such contemporaries as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore to his influence on current writers such as John Ashbery and Robert Duncan. The contributions examine the cultural influences, or 'context', from which Stevens emerges: the Symbolist and Imagist traditions, the social and political context of the war years, and contemporary movements in the visual arts. Finally, two essays investigate the influence of Stevens on later poets.
Honoring the centennial of Stevens' birth, this volume presents original essays by many of Stevens' best-known critics. Also included are 128 previously unpublished lines that appear in the poet's From the Journal of Crispin" (an early version of "The Comedian as the Letter C"); three endings composed for "A Collect of Philosophy"; the complete Adagia entries from Stevens' notebooks; and thirteen letters to business associate Wilson E. Taylor. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The search for a substitute for religion, Adalaide Kirby Morris argues, occupies Stevens' poetic energy from his earliest to his latest work. It emerges in his patterns of speech, in his symbols, and in his poetic forms; it encompasses a critique of Christianity, often wryly humorous and sometimes bitterly satiric; and it results in a theory of poetry that becomes a mystical theology. At the center of this mystical theology, the author finds, is the conviction that God and the imagination arc one. The study concludes that poetry provides for Stevens a sanction, a solace, a form of order, a source of delight, and a means of redemption through which men arc saved, and natural fact is transformed into divine force. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The years between 1900 and 1915 were a crucial period in Wallace Stevens' poetic career. But until Robert Buttel was given access to 30 manuscript poems written during this time, these years constituted the largest gap in our knowledge of Stevens' artistic development. These poems, as well as those printed in the Harvard Advocate, are presented in a sequence which allows the reader to view the changes in Stevens' art during this period. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Honoring the centennial of Stevens' birth, this volume presents original essays by many of Stevens' best-known critics. Also included are 128 previously unpublished lines that appear in the poet's From the Journal of Crispin" (an early version of "The Comedian as the Letter C"); three endings composed for "A Collect of Philosophy"; the complete Adagia entries from Stevens' notebooks; and thirteen letters to business associate Wilson E. Taylor. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The search for a substitute for religion, Adalaide Kirby Morris argues, occupies Stevens' poetic energy from his earliest to his latest work. It emerges in his patterns of speech, in his symbols, and in his poetic forms; it encompasses a critique of Christianity, often wryly humorous and sometimes bitterly satiric; and it results in a theory of poetry that becomes a mystical theology. At the center of this mystical theology, the author finds, is the conviction that God and the imagination arc one. The study concludes that poetry provides for Stevens a sanction, a solace, a form of order, a source of delight, and a means of redemption through which men arc saved, and natural fact is transformed into divine force. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The years between 1900 and 1915 were a crucial period in Wallace Stevens' poetic career. But until Robert Buttel was given access to 30 manuscript poems written during this time, these years constituted the largest gap in our knowledge of Stevens' artistic development. These poems, as well as those printed in the Harvard Advocate, are presented in a sequence which allows the reader to view the changes in Stevens' art during this period. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Wallace Stevens' complex poetry often eludes the grasp of the most tenacious reader. This critical text attempts an intensive reading of the most obscure verses through the hermeneutical lens of psychoanalytic criticism. Using Lacanian theory, the book corroborates the suspicion of various critics regarding Stevens' psychical health, examining the nature of its crisis and the cause. Avoiding intentional fallacy, the work concentrates on Stevens' language itself, revealing a use of symbols that characterize neurosis, thus shifting criticism from the poet's person to his text. A useful work for university students, scholars, and teachers alike.
This dazzling book is at once an indispensable guide to Stevens's poetic canon and a significant addition to the literature on the American Romantic movement. It gives authoritative readings of the major long poems and sequences of Stevens and deals at length with the important shorter works as well, showing their complex relations both to one another and to the work of Stevens's precursors, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Emerson, and Whitman. No other book on Stevens is as ambitious or comprehensive as this one: everyone who writes on Stevens will have to take it into account. The product of twenty years of meditating, thinking, and writing about Stevens, this truly remarkable book is a brilliant extension of Bloom's theories of literary interpretation.
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.
This book presents for the first time a thorough study of the imagery in Wallace Stevens's poetry and the patterns which these images form. Heretofore, most discussions of Stevens's work presupposed an understanding of the difficult and bizarre surface imagery and dealt mainly with broad generalizations which often left the student of Stevens's poems unsatisfied. The brilliant surface of the poems, the detailed imagery of specific passages, is here examined clearly and systematically. The images, indexed at the back of the book, are examined in four natural groups: Figures of the Mind, of Disorder, of Order, and of Change. The last half of the book is concerned with close analyses of some longer poems of Stevens's using the information gleaned from the "anatomy" of the first half.
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens is the definitive collection from the man Harold Bloom has called "the best and most representative American poet." Originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens's seventy-fifth birthday, the book was rushed into print for the occasion and contained scores of errors. These have now been corrected in one place for the first time by Stevens scholars John N. Serio and Christopher Beyers, based on original editions and manuscripts. The Collected Poems is the one volume that Stevens intended to contain all the poems he wished to preserve, presented in the way he wanted. An essential collection for all readers of poetry, it is an enduring monument to his dazzling achievement.
Originally published in 1980. Wallace Stevens: The Making of the Poem emphasizes the ideas that Wallace Stevens embeds in his poetry, providing the first study to provide an intellectual biography of Stevens. It examines Stevens' naturalism, his ideas of the self, and the imagination, among other topics. The concepts that emerge from long reading of the poetry of Stevens are slight and basic, but these concepts do accord, even if they never emerge into a coherent philosophy. The accordance is probably a result of Stevens' preference for naturalistic thought.
