Wallace Stevens : the plain sense of things
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Wallace Stevens : the plain sense of things
Oxford University Press, 1991
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 307-330) and indexes
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
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ISBN 9780195068634
Description
Wallace Stevens the poet and Wallace Stevens the insurance executive: for more than one critical generation it has seemed as if these two men were unacquainted--that Stevens was a poet who existed only in the rarefied world of language. However, the idea that Stevens lived a double life, the author maintains, is misleading. This compelling book uncovers what Stevens liked to think of as his "ordinary" life, a life in which the demands of politics, economics, poetry, and everyday distractions coexisted, sometimes peacefully and sometimes not. Examining the full scope of Stevens's career (from the student-poet of the nineteenth century to the award-winning poet of the Cold War years), Longenbach reveals that Stevens was not only aware of events taking place around him, but often inspired by those events. The major achievements of Stevens's career are shown to coalesce around the major historical events of his lifetime (the Great Depression and two World Wars); but Longenbach also dwells on Stevens's two extended periods of poetic silence, exploring the crucial aspects of Steven's life that were not exclusively poetic. Longenbach demonstrates that through Stevens's work in surety law he was far more intimately acquainted with legal and economic concerns than most poets, and he consequently thought deeply about the strengths--and, equally important, the limitations--of poetry as a social product and force.
- Volume
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: pbk ISBN 9780195070224
Description
Most readers of Wallace Stevens wonder at his `double life'; the poet and the lawyer who worked in the insurance business. But Longenbach argues that Stevens lived no such double life. By examining a full range of Stevens' writing in the context of American political and intellectual history, Longenbach's book reveals for the first time a poet who was not only aware of events taking place around him but whose work was often inspired by those events. While the focus
is on Stevens, and the historical events and ideological debates around him, poets like Eliot, Williams, Marianne Moore, and Burke are also examined.
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