Word: stevenses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Poetry, the late Wallace Stevens was fond of saying, is the one reality in an otherwise wholly imaginary world. Shortly before his death in 1955, he wrote a poetic summation of the poetic experience that serves well as an epitaph:
Stevens' poetry is almost untouched by social criticism, and he was perhaps too much of a poet of well-being to exert a full influence on a younger, more desperate generation. Instead, he was obsessed by the idea of order in the universe-perhaps because he was vice president...
In one of his best poems, "The Idea of Order at Key West," Stevens wrote of watching a girl on the beach amidst "the meaningless plungings of water and the wind":
In other words, man alone gives meaning to the life around him. This is not simple idealism. An enigma remains. And that is the necessary riddle of each man's mind, the confusion of his words, the haze of his vision. In a late period, when Stevens abandoned the...
But the enigma remains, and it is to the task of "reading it" that the editors of The Achievement of Wallace Stevens have collected 19 critical essays written over the four decades of Stevens' life as a poet. As a primer of Stevens, as it is also supposed to...