Wallace Stevens' Poetry

Paper Summary:

This general overview of Wallace Stevens' work, introducing his individual volumes of poetry, book-by-book, highlights the major points of his poetics without the usual associative amalgam of theme, form, diction, imagery, symbolism and belief that complicates most surveys of his poetry. The paper explains that the volumes appeared as separate collections, but the Stevens criticism and scholarship invariably commingles them as if they were parts of a simultaneously generated whole. This book-by-book overview clarifies the poetic perspective and suggests revisiting his collections with a fresh modular approach.

From the Paper:

"Wallace Stevens' poetic development began with his apprentice poems published under pseudonyms in the Harvard Advocate at the turn of the century, but it was not until more than twenty years later that his elegant style and ambiguous motifs detonated into the flashy modernism of Harmonium (1923). The first change of style was drastic; he jettisoned the conventional sonnet, absorbed imagism, experimented with semi-open forms and, by liberating his style, he liberated also his sense of the bizarre, comical, and relentlessly aesthetic. Even between the brief lyrics and the deft prosody of the longer poems, Stevens' style invariably shifts to accommodate his tenets about the axis of imagination and reality. This overview looks at those shifts book-by-book."

More papers on Wallace Stevens' Poetry:

• Analytical Essay # 60895 : "The Poetry of Wallace Stevens"
• Analytical Essay # 25400 : "The Mythological World of Wallace Stevens"
• Analytical Essay # 46021 : "The Poetry of Wallace Stevens"

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