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Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.
The literary scholar Beverly Maeder writing for the Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens speaks of the importance the author placed upon linguistic structure in many of his poems. In this instance, Stevens is experimenting with the application of the verb 'to be' in its many forms and conjugations throughout the 13 cantos of the poem.
The book features a collection of poems containing also the 1948 Stevens long poem of the same name, whose title refers to the aurora borealis, or the "Northern Lights", in the fall. [1] The book collects 32 Stevens poems written between 1947 and 1950, and was his last collection before his 1954 Collected Poems .
These are poems predominantly from the first book of poems written by the American poet Wallace Stevens and first published in 1923. The second edition of the book was published a decade later. It is not a full list of his poems.
The Wallace Stevens Journal has been published by the Wallace Stevens Society since 1979 [9] and its editor, John N. Serio, has collected some of the journal's essays in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens. An audiobook of his complete public domain poems was completed by Librivox in 2007.
For Stevens modern poetry lifted the poet and the reader out of the doldrums of daily life into a brilliant if temporary moment of intense life. For the reader to participate in this aesthetic experience, he or she needed to engage actively in making sense out of the poem.
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The poem's message is fairly simple. Stevens believed that poetry and literature in general had the ability to excite and inspire. He believed that the imagination was an overlooked tool with the innate capability of distinguishing a mundane life (i.e. the lives of those who wore 'white night gowns' to bed) from an exciting and fulfilling one.