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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 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 .
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.
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.
Harmonium is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens. His first book at the age of forty-four, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1,500 copies. This collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines (" Life Is Motion ") to several hundred (" The Comedian as the Letter C ") (see the footnotes [ 1 ...
Robert Buttel sees the poem as a specimen of Stevens' "grotesque strain" and wryly observes that "it would be difficult to find a more unique funeral procession in literature". [1] He credits William Carlos Williams for improving the line "Within our bellies, we her chariot." from the original "Within our bellies, as a chariot." [2]
About this poem Stevens wrote that it was "simply an expression of paganism". [3] Helen Vendler in the Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens summarized the poem as Stevens's search for "a systematic truth that could replace the Christianity of his churchgoing childhood." For Vendler, the stratagem which Stevens employs in attempting to ...
Stevens began writing the poem in December 1936, not long after his completion of the poetry collection Owl's Clover in the spring of that year. [4] The Man With the Blue Guitar became one of his most successful long poems, [4] and William Carlos Williams wrote at the time that he considered it one of Stevens's best works. [5]