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Author: Eleanor Cook Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400859662 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 342
Book Description
In the first full-length study of Wallace Stevens's word-play, Eleanor Cook focuses on Stevens's skillful play with grammar, etymology, allusion, and other elements of poetry, and suggests ways in which this play offers a method of approaching his work. At the same time, this book is a general study of Stevens's poetry, moving from his earliest to his latest work, and includes close readings of three of his remarkable long poems--Esthetique du Mal, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. The chronological arrangement enables readers to follow Stevens's increasing skill and changing thought in three areas of his "poetry of the earth": the poetry of place, the poetry of eros, and the poetry of belief. Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens shows how, in setting words at play and in conflict, Stevens could upset the usual relations of rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic, and thus the book contributes to the current debate about logical and a-logical uses of language. Cook also places Stevens within the larger context of Western literature, hearing how he speaks to Milton, Keats, and Wordsworth; to such American forebears as Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson; and to T. S. Eliot, his contemporary. Originally published in 1988. 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.
Author: Eleanor Cook Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400859662 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 342
Book Description
In the first full-length study of Wallace Stevens's word-play, Eleanor Cook focuses on Stevens's skillful play with grammar, etymology, allusion, and other elements of poetry, and suggests ways in which this play offers a method of approaching his work. At the same time, this book is a general study of Stevens's poetry, moving from his earliest to his latest work, and includes close readings of three of his remarkable long poems--Esthetique du Mal, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. The chronological arrangement enables readers to follow Stevens's increasing skill and changing thought in three areas of his "poetry of the earth": the poetry of place, the poetry of eros, and the poetry of belief. Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens shows how, in setting words at play and in conflict, Stevens could upset the usual relations of rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic, and thus the book contributes to the current debate about logical and a-logical uses of language. Cook also places Stevens within the larger context of Western literature, hearing how he speaks to Milton, Keats, and Wordsworth; to such American forebears as Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson; and to T. S. Eliot, his contemporary. Originally published in 1988. 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.
Author: Eleanor Cook Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400827647 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 371
Book Description
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.
Author: Louis A. Renza Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 9780807127551 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
Throughout the history of the United States, a commitment to both democratic political ideals and to capitalist realities has made privacy a persistently controversial issue. Only rarely, however, has privacy attracted the attention of American literary criticism. In his ingeniously argued new study, Louis A. Renza extends the idea of privacy beyond the received wisdom of its popular legal and psychological conceptions and, iconoclastically, beyond its conception in postmodern literary theory to show that the public-private paradigm has import for American literary texts past and present. It is a truism of cultural studies that the interior space of imagination is socially constructed and thus that the private is ineluctably political. But Renza shows, through a brilliantly original analysis of works by Edgar Allan Poe and Wallace Stevens, that as an effect of reading and writing, a real or “radical” privacy continually resists appropriation. In admirably close readings of Poe’s tales, his long essay Eureka, and Stevens’s Harmonium poems, Renza demonstrates that both writers ground the concept of privacy in the possibility of multiple interpretations of their texts. Neither Poe nor Stevens resists meaning or sense, but by thematically engaging in their work the inescapable public/private dichotomy of artistic creation, they create a highly personal idiom that, like Poe’s “purloined letter,” allows them to “hide in plain sight” and in that way to finesse public constructions of meaning. Thus, surprisingly, privacy can always be conceived as something more than what current social-cultural codes urge us to believe. The poetics Renza compellingly elucidates does not deny the insights of current theory but offers a refreshing alternative that allows for the “radical” autonomy of authorship without resorting to vague elitist claims of individual genius. His thoughtful readings are a major contribution to traditional Poe and Stevens scholarship, and his challenging thesis will provoke new investigations into the privacy issue in American literature as a whole.
Author: Jahan Ramazani Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226703401 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 436
Book Description
Through readings of elegies, self-elegies, war poems and the blues, this book covers a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. It is grounded in genre theory and in the psychoanalysis of mourning.
Author: Edward Ragg Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139489992 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Edward Ragg's study was the first to examine the role of abstraction throughout the work of Wallace Stevens. By tracing the poet's interest in abstraction from Harmonium through to his later works, Ragg argues that Stevens only fully appreciated and refined this interest within his later career. Ragg's detailed close-readings highlight the poet's absorption of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century painting, as well as the examples of philosophers and other poets' work. Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction will appeal to those studying Stevens as well as anyone interested in the relations between poetry and painting. This valuable study embraces revealing philosophical and artistic perspectives, analyzing Stevens' place within and resistance to Modernist debates concerning literature, painting, representation and 'the imagination'.
Author: James Longenbach Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0195070224 Category : Literature and society Languages : en Pages : 353
Book Description
'This distinguished book sets forth the Stevens that we will be reading for at least the next three decades: a Stevens in close touch with political and social conditions, a Stevens whose poetry arises from the texture of his times.'-Louis Martz
Author: Bart Eeckhout Publisher: University of Missouri Press ISBN: 0826262694 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 317
Book Description
Often considered America's greatest twentieth-century poet, Wallace Stevens is without a doubt the Anglo-modernist poet whose work has been most scrutinized from a philosophical perspective. Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing both synthesizes and extends the critical understanding of Stevens's poetry in this respect. Arguing that a concern with the establishment and transgression of limits goes to the heart of this poet's work, Bart Eeckhout traces both the limits of Stevens's poetry and the limits of writing as they are explored by that poetry. Stevens's work has been interpreted so variously and contradictorily that critics must first address the question of limits to the poetry's signifying potential before they can attempt to deepen our appreciation of it. In the first half of this book, the limits of appropriating and contextualizing Stevens's "The Snow Man," in particular, are investigated. Eeckhout does not undertake this reading with the negative purpose of disputing earlier interpretations but with the more positive intention of identifying the intrinsic qualities of the poetry that have been responsible for the remarkable amount of critical attention it has received.
Author: Stefan Holander Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135914001 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 251
Book Description
This study examines Wallace Stevens' ideas and practice of poetic language with a focus on the 1930s, an era in which Stevens persistently thematized a keenly felt pressure for the possible social involvement and political utility of poetic language. The argument suggests how mutually implicated elements of his poetry such as diction, prosody and metaphor are relied on to signify or enact aesthetic closure; both in the negative terms of expressive impotence and unethical isolation and the positive ones of imaginative and linguistic change. In this respect, the study deals closely with the epistemologically and ethically fraught issue of the ambiguous and volatile role of non-semantic elements and linguistic difficulty in Stevens' language. Assuming that these facets are not exclusive to this period but receive a very clear, and therefore instructive, formulation in it, the discussion outlines some of Stevens' most central tropes for poetic creativity at this stage of his career, suggesting ways in which they came to form part of his later discourse on poetic functionality, when polemical concepts for the imagination, such as "evasion" and "escapism," became central. Stevens' prosody is discussed from within an eclectic analytical framework in which cumulative rhythmics is complemented by traditional metrics as a way of doing justice to his rich, varied and cognitively volatile use of verse language. The expressive potency of prosodic patterning is understood both as an effect of its resistance to semantic interpretation and by assuming a formal drive to interpret them in relation to the semantic and metaphoric staging of individual poems. A poem, in turn, is understood both as a strategic, stylistically deviant response to the challenges of a particular historical moment, and as an attempt to communicate through creating a sense of linguistic resistance and otherness.
Author: Eleanor Cook
Author: Eleanor Cook
Author: Eleanor Cook
Author: Eleanor Cook
Author: Louis A. Renza
Author: Jahan Ramazani
Author: Edward Ragg
Author: Bart Eeckhout
Author: James Longenbach
Author: Bart Eeckhout
Author: Stefan Holander