Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination PDF Download

Author: Michel Benamou
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400867231
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Michel Benamou's essays have established his reputation as a critical interpreter of Stevens' relation to the French poetic tradition. Mr. Benamou has now collected these essays in one volume, revising and expanding them, and has added a general introduction. He discusses, in turn, Stevens' affinities with and differences from Baudelaire, Laforgue, Mallarme, Apollinaire, the Impressionists, and the Cubists. Originally published in 1972. 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: Bart Eeckhout
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501313509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
As the figure of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) becomes so entrenched in the Modernist canon that he serves as a major reference point for poets and critics alike, the time has come to investigate poetry and poetics after him. The ambiguity of the preposition is intentional: while after may refer neutrally to chronological sequence, it also implies ways of aesthetically modeling poetry on a predecessor. Likewise, the general heading of poetry and poetics allows the sixteen contributors to this volume to range far and wide in terms of poetics (from postwar formalists to poets associated with various strands of Postmodernism, Language poetry, even Confessional poetry), ethnic identities (with a diverse selection of poets of color), nationalities (including the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and several English poets), or language (sidestepping into French and Czech poetry). Besides offering a rich harvest of concrete case studies, Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens also reconsiders possibilities for talking about poetic influence. How can we define and refine the ways in which we establish links between earlier and later poems? At what level of abstraction do such links exist? What have we learned from debates about competing poetic eras and traditions? How is our understanding of an older writer reshaped by engaging with later ones? And what are we perhaps not paying attention to-aesthetically, but also politically, historically, thematically-when we relate contemporary poetry to someone as idiosyncratic as Stevens?

Author: Stefan Holander
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113591401X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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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: Ian Tan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030992497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book is a unique contribution to scholarship of the poetics of Wallace Stevens, offering an analysis of the entire oeuvre of Stevens’s poetry using the philosophical framework of Martin Heidegger. Marking the first book-length engagement with a philosophical reading of Stevens, it uses Heidegger’s theories as a framework through which Stevens’s poetry can be read and shows how philosophy and literature can enter into a productive dialogue. It also makes a case for a Heideggerian reading of poetry, exploring his later philosophy with respect to his writing on art, language, and poetry. Taking Stevens’s repeated emphasis on the terms “being”, “consciousness”, “reality” and “truth” as its starting point, the book provides a new reading of Stevens with a philosopher who aligns poetic insight with a reconceptualization of the metaphysical significance of these concepts. It pursues the link between philosophy, American poetry as reflected through Stevens, and modernist poetics, looking from Stevens’s modernist techniques to broader European philosophical movements of the twentieth century.

Author: Thomas Jensen Hines
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838716137
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This is a study of the development of the middle and later poetry of Wallace Stevens that uses comparisons with the phenomenological methods of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger to clarify many of the difficulties in the poet's mature work.

Author: Gyorgyi Voros
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587292459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Focusing on three governing metaphors in Stevens's poems--Nature as house, body, and self--the author argues that Stevens's youthful wilderness experience yielded his primary poetic subject (the relationship between humans and nature) and shifted his understanding of nature from romantic to phenomenological. She draws on the extraliterary discourses of phenomenology and ecology, mapping the landscape of Stevens's career and canon. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Paul Mariani
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451624387
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
"A perceptive, insightful biography of perhaps the most important American poet of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens, by an accomplished biographer and poet who traces Stevens's lifelong artistic quest"--

Author: Patricia A. Parker
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140087064X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Defining "romance" as a form that simultaneously seeks and postpones a particular end, revelation, or object, Patricia Parker interprets its implications and transformations in the works of four major poets—Ariosto, Spenser, Milton, and Keats. In placing the texts within their literary and historical contexts, Professor Parker provides at once a literary history of romance as genre, a fresh reading of individual poems, and an exploration of the continuing romance of figurative language itself. Originally published in 1979. 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: Živilė Gimbutas
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761828457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The Riddle in the Poem is a study of the ramifications of riddles and riddle elements in the context of selected twentieth-century poetry. It includes works by Francis Ponge, Wallace Stevens, Richard Wilbur, Rainer M. Rilke, and Henrikas Radauskas. This book enlarges the scope of riddles as a "root of lyric" by connecting it with the folkloristic concept of "riddling," essentially a question and answer series, and by tracing the influence of the root in poetic methodology. The Riddle in the Poem may be defined as an attempt to advance the notion, which has been discussed in previous folkloristic and literary studies, which riddle as the root of lyric manifests itself in various ways.

Author: Anna Balakian
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9630538954
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 735

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Book Description
Edited by Anna Balakian, this volume marks the first attempt to discuss Symbolism in a full range of the literatures written in the European languages. The scope of these analyses, which explore Latin America, Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria as well as West European literatures, continues to make the volume a valuable reference today. As René Wellek suggests in his historiographic contribution, the fifty-one contributors not only make us think afresh about individual authors who are “giants,” but also draw us to reassess schools and movements in their local as well as international contexts. Reviewers comment that this “copious and intelligently structured” anthology, divided into eight parts, traces the conceptual bases and emergence of an international Symbolist movement, showing the spread of Symbolism to other national literatures from French sources, as well as the symbiotic transformations of Symbolism through appropriation and amalgamation with local literary trends. Several chapters deal with the relationships between literature and the other arts, pointing to Symbolism at work in painting, music, and theatre. Other chapters on the psychological aspects of the Symbolist method connect in interesting ways to a vision of metaphor and myth as virtually musical notation and an experimental emphasis on the play afforded by gaps between words. The volume is “a major contribution” to “the most significant exponents” and “essential themes” of Symbolism. The theoretical, historical, and typological sections of the volume help explain why the impact of this important movement of the fin-de-siècle is still felt today.