Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens is not, at first glance, the kind of person normally associated with poetry.  A corporate executive — he was chief counsel for one of America’s largest insurance companies — he fashioned a poetry that seems, at first, quite difficult and even obscure.  But that is only at first encounter: Stevens writes lyric poems, and his work is far more deeply concerned with his emotions than most critics acknowledge.  Poem after poem addresses the joy, or the despair, of everyday life: Stevens continually records ‘what he felt at what he saw.’  In addition, few poets in the entire history of Western literature have been as consumed by the importance of the imagination, and with the problematic relation between our minds and the world in which we walk and act, which seems so clearly to lie outside our individual selves.

 

To hear a discussion of Wallace Stevens’ poetry, click on the image above!

The poems which are presented in the MP3 Audio discussion are:

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
The Well-Dressed Man with the Beard
The Man Whose Pharnyx was Bad
Of Modern Poetry
Man Carrying Thing
Poems of our Climate
The Idea of Order at Key West

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