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Wallace Stevens: A Poet's Growth
by George S. LensingIn Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth, George S. Lensing examines Stevens’ gradual emergence and development as a poet, tracing his life from his formative years in Pennsylvania to his careers as a lawyer for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. Lensing draws extensively upon previously unpublished material from the Stevens archive at the Huntington Library, which contains letters, early drafts of poems, and notebooks. Two notebooks,Schemata and From Pieces of Paper, are here reproduced in full. The study is divided into three sections. In the first, Lensing examines the years before the publication of Sevens’ first volume of poetry, paying special attention to the forces that hindered and enhanced his progress toward modernity. In the second, we see Stevens in the exercise of his craft. Lensing discusses the influence of the Romantics on the verse Stevens wrote as an undergraduate at Harvard; his interest in Oriental art, Cubism, and Fauvism; his anticipation of Imagism; and his imitation of certain French Symbolists. Sources of the epigraphs to Stevens’ poems are identified fully for the first time, suggesting the role of Stevens’ vast reading upon his poetry. Also considered is Stevens’ voluminous correspondence with people from all over the world, some of whom he never met personally. These letters helped rescue Stevens from the insularity of his business life and aided in the making of his poems. The final section treats the critical responses to Stevens’ poetry by such people as Harriet Monroe, editor and founder of Poetry, who was the first important reader and publisher of his work. Attention is also given to Stevens’ explications of his poems. Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth is a comprehensive examination of Stevens’ live and work. This study provides abundant new material, which will be of value to scholars and to those readers who are drawn to Stevens’ poetry.
Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire
by Helen H. VendlerThe chapters in this book, except for the first, were originally delivered in 1982 as the Hodges Lectures at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Wallace Stevens among Others
by David R. JarrawayIn Wallace Stevens among Others David Jarraway explores the extraordinary achievement of Wallace Stevens, but in contexts that are not usually thought about in connection with Stevens's work - gay literature, contemporary fiction, Hollywood film, and avant-garde architecture, among others. <P><P> By viewing the poet among these "other" contexts, Jarraway considers the nature of self-reflection and pays special attention to the discrediting of self-presence as the principle of identity in American writing - a theme that reflects American authors' abiding concern for subjectivities that engage the world from spaces of distance and difference. By returning to the work of Stevens, Jarraway seeks to refurbish this preoccupation by linking it to the literary theory of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose work applies to American writers from Melville and Whitman to Fitzgerald and Cummings. Jarraway forges the link between Deleuze and Stevens by drawing out the female subjectivity found in each writer's work to rethink the more static masculinist premises of being. <P> Informed by a deep knowledge of and fluency with the work of Stevens and Deleuze, Jarraway uses these writers as a means of entry into American literature and culture, Wallace Stevens among Others is a sophisticated analysis that will open new directions for future scholarship.
Wallace Stevens among Others: Diva-Dames, Deleuze, and American Culture
by David R. JarrawayIn Wallace Stevens among Others, David Jarraway explores the extraordinary achievement of Wallace Stevens, but in contexts that are not usually thought about in connection with Stevens's work - gay literature, contemporary fiction, Hollywood film, and avant-garde architecture, among others. By viewing the poet among these "other" contexts, Jarraway considers the nature of self-reflection and pays special attention to the discrediting of self-presence as the principle of identity in American writing - a theme that reflects American authors’ abiding concern for subjectivities that engage the world from spaces of distance and difference. By returning to the work of Stevens, Jarraway seeks to refurbish this preoccupation by linking it to the literary theory of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose work applies to American writers from Melville and Whitman to Fitzgerald and Cummings. Jarraway forges the link between Deleuze and Stevens by drawing out the female subjectivity found in each writer’s work to rethink the more static masculinist premises of being. Informed by a deep knowledge of and fluency with the work of Stevens and Deleuze, Jarraway uses these writers as a means of entry into American literature and culture, Wallace Stevens among Others is a sophisticated analysis that will open new directions for future scholarship.
Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)
by Ian TanThis 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.
Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic Philosophy: Metaphysics and the Play of Violence (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)
by Daniel TompsettThis book studies Wallace Stevens and pre-Socratic philosophy, showing how concepts that animate Stevens’ poetry parallel concepts and techniques found in the poetic works of Parmenides, Empedocles, and Xenophanes, and in the fragments of Heraclitus. Tompsett traces the transition of pre-Socratic ideas into poetry and philosophy of the post-Kantian period, assessing the impact that the mythologies associated with pre-Socratism have had on structures of metaphysical thought that are still found in poetry and philosophy today. This transition is treated as becoming increasingly important as poetic and philosophic forms have progressively taken on the existential burden of our post-theological age. Tompsett argues that Stevens’ poetry attempts to ‘play’ its audience into an ontological ground in an effort to show that his ‘reduction of metaphysics’ is not dry philosophical imposition, but is enacted by our encounter with the poems themselves. Through an analysis of the language and form of Stevens’ poems, Tompsett uncovers the mythology his poetry shares with certain pre-Socratics and with Greek tragedy. This shows how such mythic rhythms are apparent within the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and how these rhythms release a poetic understanding of the violence of a ‘reduction of metaphysics.’
Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction
by Edward RaggEdward Ragg's study is 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'.
Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel: Order, Form, and Creative Un-Doing (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature)
by Ian TanWallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel is a major contribution to the study of the literary influence of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens’s lifelong poetic quest for order and the championing of the creative affordances of the imagination finds compelling articulation in the positioning of the Irish novel as a response to larger legacies of Anglo-American modernism, and how aesthetic re-imagining can be possible in the aftermath of the destruction of certainties and literary tradition heralded by postmodern practice and metatextual consciousness. It is this book’s argument that intertextual influences flowing from Stevens’s poetry towards the vitality of the novelistic imagination enact robust dialectical exchanges between existential chaos and artistic order, contemporary form and poetic precursors. Through readings of novels by important contemporary Irish novelists John Banville, Colum McCann, Ed O’Loughlin, Iris Murdoch, and Emma Donoghue, this book contemporizes Stevens’s literary influence with refence to novelistic style, themes, and thematic preoccupations that stake the claim for the international status of the contemporary Irish novel as it shapes a new understanding of “world literature” as exchange between national languages, cultures, and alternative formulations of aesthetic modernity as continuing project.
Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy
by Gül Bilge HanWallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy presents a rethinking of modernist claims to autonomy by focusing on the work of Wallace Stevens, one of the most renowned poets of the twentieth century. By showing how multiple socio-political currents underlie and motivate Stevens' version of autonomy, the book challenges the commonly received accounts of the term as art and literature's escape from the world. It provides new and close readings of Stevens' work including poems from different stages of the poet's career. It re-energizes a tradition of historicist readings of Stevens from the 1980s and 1990s. The study of Stevens' work in this book is developed in constant dialogue with current studies in modernism and aesthetic theory, particularly those offered by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. The book explores the question of autonomy in Stevens' exploration of the aesthetic and social domains, and the vexed issue of his poetry's relation to philosophical thinking.
Wallace Stevens and the Realities of Poetic Language (Studies in Major Literary Authors)
by Stefan HolanderThis 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.
Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism: Wallace Stevens, New York, And Modernism (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature #24)
by Bart Eeckhout Lisa GoldfarbThis unique essay collection considers the impact of New York on the life and works of Wallace Stevens. Stevens lived in New York from 1900 to 1916, working briefly as a journalist, going to law school, laboriously starting up a career as a lawyer, getting engaged and married, gradually mixing with local avant-garde circles, and eventually emerging as one of the most exciting and surprising voices in modern poetry. Although he then left the city for a job in Hartford, Stevens never saw himself as a Hartford poet and kept gravitating toward New York for nearly all things that mattered to him privately and poetically: visits to galleries and museums, theatrical and musical performances, intellectual and artistic gatherings, shopping sprees and gastronomical indulgences. Recent criticism of the poet has sought to understand how Stevens interacted with the literary, artistic, and cultural forces of his time to forge his inimitable aesthetic, with its peculiar mix of post-romantic responses to nature and a metropolitan cosmopolitanism. This volume deepens our understanding of the multiple ways in which New York and its various aesthetic attractions figured in Stevens’ life, both at a biographical and poetic level.
Wally: The Life of a Punny Bunny
by Molly ProttasA playful book of puns from the Instagram megastar rabbit, @wally_and_molly.Described as a cross between a poodle and a pom-pom, Wally is an English angora rabbit with giant, wing-like ears, fluffy bellbottom paws, and a twinkling smile. His owner Molly brought him home on New Year&’s Day in 2015. Since then, he has become a veritable Internet sensation thanks not only to his adorable stature, but also to his humorous voice. In WALLY, you'll learn about his thoughts, feelings, and hobbies, offering witty puns on a number of topics from riding a "chew chew train" to singing "carrot-oke" and showing off his &“furrow-cious&” dance moves. Photography that highlights his sweet personality is paired with a simple yet fun design to make this book irresistible for kids and adults alike.
Wally Walrus: Vowel Combinations Ai, Au, Aw (Let's Read Together ®)
by Barbara deRubertisLet&’s Read Together books merge rhyme and vowel sounds in delightfully zany stories kids will want to read again and again. Each of the 15 books in this classic series by award-winning author/educator Barbara deRubertis will give your child a jumpstart on reading success."Story lines are silly and inventive, and recall Dr. Seuss&’s Cat in the Hat for the building of rhythm and rhyming words." —School Library JournalWally Walrus is scared of bully Squawky Hawk…until Wally wins him over in a spectacular way! (This easy-to-read story features the "ai," "au, and "aw" vowel combinations.)
Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity
by DOMINIC JANES AND GARY WALLERWalsingham was medieval England's most important shrine to the Virgin Mary and a popular pilgrimage site. Following its modern revival it is also well known today. For nearly a thousand years, it has been the subject of, or referred to in, music, poetry and novels (by for instance Langland, Erasmus, Sidney, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Eliot and Lowell). But only in the last twenty years or so has it received serious scholarly attention. This volume represents the first collection of multi-disciplinary essays on Walsingham's broader cultural significance. Contributors to this book focus on the hitherto neglected issue of Walsingham's cultural impact: the literary, historical, art historical and sociological significance that Walsingham has had for over six hundred years. The collection's essays consider connections between landscape and the sacred, the body and sexuality and Walsingham's place in literature, music and, more broadly, especially since the Reformation, in the construction of cultural memory. The historical range of the essays includes Walsingham's rise to prominence in the later Middle Ages, its destruction during the English Reformation, and the presence of uncanny echoes and traces in early modern English culture, including poems, ballads, music and some of the plays of Shakespeare. Contributions also examine the cultural dynamics of the remarkable revival of Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage and as a cultural icon in the Victorian and modern periods. Hitherto, scholarship on Walsingham has been almost entirely confined to the history of religion. In contrast, contributors to this volume include internationally known scholars from literature, cultural studies, history, sociology, anthropology and musicology as well as theology.
Walt Whitman
by Milton HindusThis set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
Walt Whitman: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
by Linda Wagner-MartinWalt Whitman: A Literary Life highlights two major influences on Whitman’s poetry and life: the American Civil War and his economic condition. Linda Wagner-Martin performs a close reading of many of Whitman’s poems, particularly his Civil War work (in Drum-Taps) and those poems written during the last twenty years of his life. Wagner-Martin’s study also emphasizes the near-poverty that Whitman experienced. Starting with his early career as a printer and journalist, the book moves to the publication of Leaves of Grass, and his cultivation of the persona of the “working-class” writer. In addition to establishing Whitman’s attention to the Civil War through journalism and memoirs, the book takes the approach of following Whitman’s life through his poems. Utilizing contemporary perspectives on class, Wagner-Martin provides a new reading of Whitman’s economic situation. This is an accessibly written synthesis of Whitman’s publication history bringing attention to under-studied aspects of his writing.
Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems
by Walt WhitmanIn 1855 Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, the work that defined him as one of America's most influential voices and that he added to throughout his life. A collection of astonishing originality and intensity, it spoke of politics, sexual emancipation, and what it meant to be an American. From the joyful "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric" to the elegiac "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," Whitman's art fuses oratory, journalism, and song in a vivid celebration of humanity. Containing all Whitman's known poetic work, this edition reprints the final, or "deathbed," edition of Leaves of Grass (1891-92). Earlier versions of many poems are also given, including the 1855 "Song of Myself." Features a completely new--and fuller--introduction discussing the development of Whitman's poetic career, his influence on later American poets, and his impact on the American cultural sensibility Includes chronology, updated suggestions for further reading, and extensive notes. Edited, with an introduction and notes by Francis Murphy.
Walt Whitman and British Socialism: ‘The Love of Comrades’ (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature)
by Kirsten HarrisThis is the first sustained examination of Walt Whitman’s influence on British socialism. Harris combines a contextual historical study of Whitman’s reception with focused close readings of a variety of poems, books, articles, letters and speeches. She calls attention to Whitman’s own demand for the reader to ‘himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay’, linking Whitman’s general comments about active reading to specific cases of his fin de siècle British socialist readership. These include the editorial aims behind the Whitman selections published by William Michael Rossetti, Ernest Rhys, and W. T. Stead and the ways that Whitman was interpreted and appropriated in a wide range of grassroots texts produced by individuals or groups who responded to Whitman and his poetry publicly in socialist circles. Harris makes full use of material from the C. F. Sixsmith and J. W. Wallace and the Bolton Whitman Fellowship collections at John Rylands, the Edward Carpenter collection in the Sheffield Archives, and the Archives of Swan Sonnenschein & Co. at the University of Reading. Much of this archive material – little of which is currently available in digital form – is discussed here in full for the first time. Accordingly, this study will appeal to those with interest in the archival history of nineteenth-century literary culture, as well as the connections to be made between literary and political culture of this era more generally.
Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America's Poet During the Lost Years of 1860-1862
by Ted GenowaysTed Genoways reconstructs those forgotten years--locating Whitman directly through unpublished letters and never-before-seen manuscripts, as well as mapping his associations through rare period newspapers and magazines in which he published.
Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet during the Lost Years of 1860-1862
by Ted GenowaysShortly after the third edition of Leaves of Grass was published, in 1860, Walt Whitman seemed to drop off the literary map, not to emerge again until his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg two and a half years later. Past critics have tended to read this silence as evidence of Whitman's indifference to the Civil War during its critical early months. In this penetrating, original, and beautifully written book, Ted Genoways reconstructs those forgotten years—locating Whitman directly through unpublished letters and never-before-seen manuscripts, as well as mapping his associations through rare period newspapers and magazines in which he published. Genoways's account fills a major gap in Whitman's biography and debunks the myth that Whitman was unaffected by the country's march to war. Instead, Walt Whitman and the Civil War reveals the poet's active participation in the early Civil War period and elucidates his shock at the horrors of war months before his legendary journey to Fredericksburg, correcting in part the poet's famous assertion that the "real war will never get in the books."
Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity
by David Haven BlakeThis book tells the story of how an obscure Brooklyn poet, better known for his political journalism than verse, immersed himself in the culture of celebrity that was then emerging in the United States. Hoping to redress the mounting divisions in his country, he declared that the poet would become the center of American civic life, that he would command more power and sway than the political representatives he expected to supersede. As Whitman imagined it, the story of celebrity would be the story of democracy. He hoped that the nation's narrow political institutions would undergo an extraordinary transformation once they encountered the populist power embodied in the poet's fame.
Walt Whitman in Context (Literature in Context)
by Joanna Levin Edward WhitleyWalt Whitman is a poet of contexts. His poetic practice was one of observing, absorbing, and then reflecting the world around him. Walt Whitman in Context provides brief, provocative explorations of thirty-eight different contexts - geographic, literary, cultural, and political - through which to engage Whitman's life and work. Written by distinguished scholars of Whitman and nineteenth-century American literature and culture, this collection synthesizes scholarly and historical sources and brings together new readings and original research.
Walt Whitman Speaks: A Library of America Special Publication
by Walt WhitmanFor the Whitman bicentennial, a delightful keepsake edition of the incomparable wisdom of America's greatest poet, distilled from his fascinating late-in-life conversations with Horace Traubel.Toward the end of his life, Walt Whitman was visited almost daily at his home in Camden, New Jersey, by the young poet and social reformer Horace Traubel. After each visit, Traubel meticulously recorded their conversation, transcribing with such sensitivity that Whitman’s friend John Burroughs remarked that he felt he could almost hear the poet breathing. In Walt Whitman Speaks, acclaimed author Brenda Wineapple draws from Traubel’s extensive interviews an extraordinary gathering of Whitman’s observations that conveys the core of his ethos and vision. Here is Whitman the sage, champion of expansiveness and human freedom. Here, too, is the poet’s more personal side—his vivid memories of Thoreau, Emerson, and Lincoln, his literary judgments on writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy, and his expressions of hope in the democratic promise of the nation he loved. The result is a keepsake edition to touch the soul, capturing the distilled wisdom of America’s greatest poet.
Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography
by David S. ReynoldsEmphasizes how his times (1820s through 1890s) influenced his poetry and how he sought to influence a nation through his writing.
Walt Whitman's Language Experiment
by James Perrin WarrenCombining intellectual history with literary analysis, this study of Whitman's language experiment from 1855 to 1892 offers a refreshing new look at his theory of language especially the English language in America—as an expression of a "national spirit" and relates that theory to the language and style of Whitman's major poems and essays. Whitman viewed American English as the most expressive, poetic language that ever existed, and he used his studies of historical linguistics to corroborate that view. Part 1 explicates the theory of language that Whitman developed in his linguistic notebooks, unpublished manuscripts, fugitive essays, and two chapters of the popular book Rambles Among Words. The diction and syntax of the 1855–1856 editions of Leaves of Grass are analyzed to show how Whitman's overwhelming interest in language theories resulted in the "language experiment" of the poems. Part 2 examines the ways in which Whitman's view of language as an expression of the constantly evolving spirit of America subtly shifted to a more cumulative, backward-looking vision of linguistic and spiritual change. Analysis of the diction, syntax, and organization of the last four editions of Leaves of Grass reveals how this shift in vision affected the style of Whitman's poetry and prose from 1860 to 1892. Whitman's groundbreaking poetic style, the author concludes, was a direct consequence of his view of language and the human spirit as dynamic, progressivist, and actively changing within a temporal world. Conversely, Whitman's experiments in both prose and poetry helped confirm his view of linguistic and spiritual evolution.