Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, and the Way of the Dandy
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Proquest Dissertations
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON THE POETIC OF GAIETY: WALLACE STEVENS’S THEORIES OF THE IMAGINATION A THESIS SUBMITTED IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY CHARTUREE TINGSABADH UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON LONDON: SEPTEMBER, 1994 ProQuest Number: 10017166 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10017166 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT This thesis examines Stevens’s evolving Modernist poetic: his thinking, both in poems and in explanatory prose, about the nature of poetic creativity, about the uses of language, and about the cultural function and value of poetry (what he called its ‘gaiety’). The method adopted is two-fold: 1) an examination of the ways in which Stevens transformed Romantic and Symbolist poetic tradition, incorporating (often in a significantly modified form) concepts developed by Valéry, Mauron, Focillon, Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Planck; 2) an assessment of the consequences of that incorporation for a critical understanding of poems written during each stage of his career. The thesis will trace the process by which concept becomes figure in the making of the poem, and is then reconceptualized in the act of reading. -
April 2005 Updrafts
Chaparral from the California Federation of Chaparral Poets, Inc. serving Californiaupdr poets for over 60 yearsaftsVolume 66, No. 3 • April, 2005 President Ted Kooser is Pulitzer Prize Winner James Shuman, PSJ 2005 has been a busy year for Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. On April 7, the Pulitzer commit- First Vice President tee announced that his Delights & Shadows had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And, Jeremy Shuman, PSJ later in the week, he accepted appointment to serve a second term as Poet Laureate. Second Vice President While many previous Poets Laureate have also Katharine Wilson, RF Winners of the Pulitzer Prize receive a $10,000 award. Third Vice President been winners of the Pulitzer, not since 1947 has the Pegasus Buchanan, Tw prize been won by the sitting laureate. In that year, A professor of English at the University of Ne- braska-Lincoln, Kooser’s award-winning book, De- Fourth Vice President Robert Lowell won— and at the time the position Eric Donald, Or was known as the Consultant in Poetry to the Li- lights & Shadows, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2004. Treasurer brary of Congress. It was not until 1986 that the po- Ursula Gibson, Tw sition became known as the Poet Laureate Consult- “I’m thrilled by this,” Kooser said shortly after Recording Secretary ant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. the announcement. “ It’s something every poet dreams Lee Collins, Tw The 89th annual prizes in Journalism, Letters, of. There are so many gifted poets in this country, Corresponding Secretary Drama and Music were announced by Columbia Uni- and so many marvelous collections published each Dorothy Marshall, Tw versity. -
Writers' Correspondence Not Yet Entered Into the Repository June 2016 Maine State Library
Maine State Library Maine State Documents Maine Writers Correspondence Maine State Library Special Collections June 2016 Writers' Correspondence Not Yet Entered Into the Repository June 2016 Maine State Library Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalmaine.com/maine_writers_correspondence Recommended Citation Maine State Library, "Writers' Correspondence Not Yet Entered Into the Repository June 2016" (2016). Maine Writers Correspondence. 847. http://digitalmaine.com/maine_writers_correspondence/847 This Text is brought to you for free and open access by the Maine State Library Special Collections at Maine State Documents. It has been accepted for inclusion in Maine Writers Correspondence by an authorized administrator of Maine State Documents. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Maine Writer’s Correspondence Project Files not yet Digitized For more information or to obtain the contents of any of these folders please contact the Maine State Library referencedesk @ Maine.gov Entries include a typed letter of correspondence from the Maine State Adelaide V. Finch Library Entries include a brief biography, typed letters on personal and literary stationery, a card with the image of a covered bridge a short distance from potato houses, newspaper clippings, and a leaflet from the 1956 State of Adelbert M. Jakeman Maine Writers' Conference. Entries include a publisher advertisement clipping, a typed biography, a newspaper clipping of Bushnell's obituary with her photographic image, and Adelyn Bushnell a typed biographical letter Entries include brief biographical information and a typed biographical Agnes Cope Foote letter on Tory Row Bookshop, Cambridge, Massachusetts, stationery Entries include typed letters of correspondence from the Maine State Albert E. -
James Merrill: a Postmodern Poet? Yes & No (With a New Poem by James Merrill)
ANDREA MARIANI James Merrill: A Postmodern Poet? Yes & No (With a New Poem by James Merrill) Scripts for the Pageant, so far the most extraordinary and contro versial of Merrill's texts, which was published in 1980 as the third part of his monumental poem The Changing Light at Sandover, is itself divided into three sections: "Yes," "&," and "No." 1 The reader, however much puzzled by the heterogeneity of Merrill's materials and linguistic strategies, cannot but acknowledge the final message of the "pageant": men, their lives, science, poetry, the "supernatural" powers which acted in order to dictate hundreds of ambiguous and contradictory truths, all belong to a universe which is both positive and negative: Yes and no came to be especially telling, the more I realized how important it was—not only for the poem but for my mental bal ance—to remain of two minds about everything that was happening. One didn't want to be merely skeptical or merely credulous. 2 In his amazement, the "chosen" poet is forced to see and, at the same time, is frightened by what he sees; "therefore, singing, he tells" (Heidegger 505). Ten years before the publication of the trilogy, Merrill was already aware of the full implication of this dualism; in an interview with David Kalstone based on a discussion of the poem "Yannina" (Divine Comedies, FF9 327-31), he concludes: People are always asking, Was it real? Did it happen? . As if a yes-or no answer would settle the question. Was it really Yannina I went to? Was my companion real or imaginary? I can only say yes and no to questions like this. -
The Yale University Jean Toomer Papers
The Yale University Jean Toomer papers http://webtext.library.yale.edu/xml2html/beinecke.TOOMER.con.html The Jean Toomer Papers contain correspondence; multiple drafts of unpublished books, essays, and other writings; and personal papers documenting the life of Jean Toomer. The papers span the years 1898-1963, but the bulk of the material dates from 1920-1954. Unfortunately, few manuscripts from Toomer's Harlem Renaissance period are preserved. Instead the papers are primarily drafts of his later, philosophical writings. Related papers written by his first wife, Margery Latimer, and transcripts of lectures given by his spiritual mentor, Georges Gurdjieff, as well as typescript drafts of Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson can also be found in the collection. The Jean Toomer Papers were donated to The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library by Marjorie Content Toomer in 1980 and transferred to Yale in 1985-88 from Fisk University, where they had been on deposit since 1962. Most of the papers were stamped, numbered, labelled, and annotated with dates and names at Fisk University. Most drafts in the collection were written on highly acidic paper and are in poor condition. Preservation photocopies have been made of all fragile correspondence, notes, and final drafts. Newspaper clippings have also been copied. Series I,Correspondence (Boxes 1-10) is divided into two sections: Jean Toomer and Margery Latimer Toomer. The correspondence of Jean Toomer includes letters from Margery Latimer Toomer, as well as letters to and from Marjorie Content Toomer. Correspondence from his mother, Nina Pinchback Toomer, contains a transcript of her letter to Nathan Toomer in 1897 asking for a divorce (Box 8, folder 262). -
I. the Metler of NOTHINGNESS 2. Samuel French Morse, Quoted By
Notes I. THE METlER OF NOTHINGNESS 1. My title alludes to a phrase in 'Seventy Years Later" (CP 525-6), the whole of which late poem is suggestively relevant to this chapler. Sources of quotations from Stevens's published writings will be given in the running lext, using the abbreviations already described. 2. Samuel French Morse, quoted by Peter Brazeau in his Parts of a World: Wallacr Stevens Rt'IIJembi'rrd (New York: J{andom House, 1983), p. 152. Subsequent references to this book wil! be incorporated in Ihe running h.'xl as (Brazeau, p. -), 3. WI' Dream of Honour: John Berryman '5 Letters to his Mother, ed. I{ichard J. Kelly (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1988), p. 207;'So Long? Stevens' can be found in the collection His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), p. 148. 4. Thomas C. Grey, The Wallace Stevws Case: Law alld the Practice af Paetry (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University I'ress, 1991), p. 12. 5. Pound's remarks about Stevens date from 1933, and are quoted by Alan Filreis in Modernism from RiXI1t to Left: Wal/ace Stevells, the Tllirties & Literary Radicalism (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 147. 6. John Timberman Newcomb, Wallace StePt'lls alld Literary Callons (Jackson & London: University Press of Mi5Sis$ippi, 1992), pp. 3--4. 7. Henry James, HllwtilOrne, ed. Tony Tanner (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 55, 56. 8. D.H. Lawrence, Stlldies ill Classic Amrricall Literatllff! (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 70. [n citing Sacvan Bcrcovitch, I am thinki ng principally o f The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic COllstruction af America (New York & London: Routledge, 1993). -
Hammer Langdon Cv18.Pdf
LANGDON HAMMER Department of English [email protected] Yale University jamesmerrillweb.com New Haven CT 06520-8302 yale.edu bio page USA EDUCATION Ph.D., English Language and Literature, Yale University B.A., English Major, summa cum laude, Yale University ACADEMIC APPOINTMENT Niel Gray, Jr., Professor of English and American Studies, Yale University Appointments in the English Department at Yale: Lecturer Convertible, 1987; Assistant Professor, 1989; Associate Professor with tenure, 1996; Professor, 2001; Department Chair, 2005-fall 2008, Acting Department Chair, fall 2011 and fall 2013, Department Chair, 2014-17 and 2017-19 PUBLICATIONS Books In progress: Elizabeth Bishop: Life & Works, A Critical Biography (under contract to Farrar Straus Giroux) The Oxford History of Poetry in English (Oxford UP), 18 volumes, Patrick Cheney general editor; LH coordinating editor for Volumes 10-12 on American Poetry, and editor for Volume 12 The Oxford History of American Poetry Since 1939 The Selected Letters of James Merrill, edited by LH, J. D. McClatchy, and Stephen Yenser (under contract to Alfred A. Knopf) Published: James Merrill: Poems, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, selected and edited with a foreword by LH (Penguin RandomHouse, 2017), 256 pp James Merrill: Life and Art (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 944 pp, 32 pp images, and jamesmerrillweb.com, a website companion with more images, bibliography, documents, linked reviews, and blog Winner, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography, 2016. Finalist for the Poetry 2 Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, 2015. Named a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year, 2015” (two nominations, November 25). New York Times, “Top Books of 2015” (December 11). -
COVER Web.Indd
Poetic Patriarch The singular Richard Wilbur displays a “Mozartean felicity” with verse. During the extended World War II battle of Monte Cassino, Richard Wilbur spent a lot of time in a foxhole. The Germans had pinned down his army division in a valley, firing their 88s from the hills above. “As Waugh said, a lot of war is just waiting around,” says Wilbur, who used that waiting time to read Edgar Allan Poe, among others, and to write poems. Years later, he observed that if there were no atheists in foxholes, there were plenty of poets. “Poems were a way of putting your world in order, a bit,” he explains. Wilbur, A.M. ’47, JF ’50, sent one of those battlefield poems to Wilbur’s Collected Poems 1943-2004, critic Adam Kirsch ’97 wrote, his wife, Charlee, who showed it to a friend who was an editor at “No other twentieth-century American poet, with the possible the Saturday Evening Post. The magazine immediately published it. exception of James Merrill, demonstrates such a Mozartean fe- Wilbur mailed many more poems home; when he left the army, licity in the writing of verse. This is partly a matter of formal he had $400, a wife and daughter to support, and a stack of mastery: Wilbur has written the best blank verse of any Ameri- wartime poetry. On the GI Bill, he enrolled in a Harvard doctoral can poet since Frost.” program in English literature. “I figured I’d become a great scholar of Europe in the seventeenth century,” he recalls. The Near the fairgrounds in the western Massachusetts town stack of poems, joined by others that he continued to write, grew of Cummington, a gently winding country road leads to the in a desk drawer. -
PDF on the Website At
THE NEW SCHOOL Continuing Education Spring 2014 Register online at www.newschool.edu/ceregistration THE NEW SCHOOL FOR PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT HOW TO REGISTER HOW TO USE THIS CATALOG This catalog lists course offerings for the Spring 2014 term. The catalog includes several features designed to help you Registration for spring courses opens December 9 and remains use it effectively. open throughout the term. Early registration online or by fax, telephone, or mail is strongly encouraged, as courses may fill or Finding a Subject be canceled because of insufficient enrollment. See pages 69–71 for more information about procedures and deadlines, or call General subjects are listed in the Table of Contents on page 81. 212.229.5690. The registrar is located at 72 Fifth Avenue For more information about any course, contact the department or (corner of 13th Street), lower level, for in-person registration. program; telephone numbers are found on the first page of each general subject area. Note: In person registration is closed September 2, November 28–29, and all Saturdays and Sundays. Register online or by fax Interpreting the Course Description when the office is closed; registrations will be processed the next A chart on page 82 breaks down the format of the course working day. descriptions and explains the different elements. Online You can register through a secure online connection with payment USEFUL CONTACT INFORMATION by credit card. Go to www.newschool.edu/ceregistration and follow the instructions. Register at least three days before your course General Information ..................... [email protected] begins. You will receive an email confirming that your registration has 212.229.5615 been received. -
Fall 2000 the Wallace Stevens Journal
The Wallace Stevens Journal Special Issue: Stevens in Late 20th-Century Culture A Publication of The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Volume 24 Number 2 Fall 2000 The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 24 Number 2 Fall 2000 Special Issue: Stevens in Late 20th-Century Culture Edited by Angus Cleghorn Contents Charles Baxter, August Kleinzahler, Adrienne Rich: Contemporary Stevensians and the Problem of “Other Lives” —Stephen Burt 115 Mark Strand’s Inventions of Farewell —Christopher R. Miller 135 Wallace Stevens, Armand Schwerner, and “The The” —Norman Finkelstein 151 Wallace Stevens and A. R. Ammons as Men on the Dump —Gyorgyi Voros 161 Wallace Stevens’ “Second Selves”and the Nostalgia of Discursiveness —Willard Spiegelman 176 Wallace Stevens’ Influence on the Construction of Gay Masculinity by the Cuban Orígenes Group —Eric Keenaghan 187 The Theoretical Afterlife of Wallace Stevens —Anca Rosu 208 Poems 221 Reviews 225 News and Comments 228 Cover Art from “The Man on the Dump” Charcoal drawing by Alexis W. Serio The Wallace Stevens Journal EDITOR John N. Serio POETRY EDITOR ART EDITOR BOOK REVIEW EDITOR H. L. Hix Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS EDITORIAL BOARD Thomas O. Hodgson Milton J. Bates A. Walton Litz Maureen Kravec Jacqueline V. Brogan James Longenbach Hope Steele Robert Buttel Glen MacLeod Eleanor Cook Marjorie Perloff TECHNICAL ASSISTANTS Alan Filreis Joan Richardson Richard Austin B. J. Leggett Melita Schaum Claudette J. VanEss George S. Lensing Lisa M. Steinman The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. PRESIDENT ADVISORY BOARD John N. Serio Milton J. Bates Joseph Duemer Owen E. Brady Kathryn Jacobi Robert Buttel George S. -
6 X 10.Long New.P65
Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19086-2 - Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction Edward Ragg Index More information Index abstraction Stevens’ embracing of 4, 77, 87, 97, 182, autotelic abstraction 213 184–5 and the bourgeois 5, 97, 107, 148, 162, 165, in Stevens’ later career 2–3, 99, 185, 209 167, 203, 231 Stevens’ modifying of 5, 11, 143, 165, 166, ‘cool’ and ‘warm’ abstraction 2, 5, 20, 24, 172, 174, 229 25, 167, 205, 213, 230 and textual speakers 4, 27, 55, 58, 60, 63, and domesticity 5, 25, 146, 210, 216, 218, 66–76, 77, 86, 87, 90, 95, 97, 98, 109, 220, 221, 223, 225, 229 110, 111, 112, 114, 118, 119, 121, 126, 127, expressions of 4, 25, 28, 210 131, 134, 135, 156, 229, See also idealist ‘I’ and gastronomy. See gastronomy and time 91, 102, 189–98 as generalization 18, 19, 23 and the visual 19, 26–7, 60, 76, 86, 94, 95–7 and the habitual 83, 94, 133, 227 Aestheticism 7 as human task 8, 26, 132, 179, 205, 229 Alcestis Press, The 31, 36, 49, 55, 56, 155 and idealism. See philosophy for ‘idealism’ Altieri, Charles 6, 23, 26–7, 28, 80, 134, 142 and inhumanity 8, 138, 203 Arensberg, Walter 218 and mediation 76, 94, 98, 134, 163, 170, 172, Ariadne 126, 127–9 174, 180, 183, 199 Armory Show, The 209, 212 and mental processes 5 Arnold, Matthew 80, 81 and metaphor 103, 176–8, 185–203 Arp, Jean 213–14 misunderstandings concerning 4, 9, 133 art and art-collecting. -
'Bordeaux to Yucatan': Stevens's French Connections Tony Sharpe
‘Bordeaux to Yucatan’: Stevens’s French Connections Tony Sharpe Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug… (CPP 53)1 I suppose that most Stevens aficionados know these lines by heart; and as the beginning of what is probably his most anthologised poem, they are likely also to be familiar to a broader readership. Familiarity may not breed contempt, in this instance, but it might desensitise us to what remains surprising about the opening of ‘Sunday Morning’. Stevens’s catalogue, starting with a pluralised abstract noun, ‘complacencies’, moving to more particularised items in a scene that still has about it a potential for being generalised (we all know, the inference seems to be, what it is to yield to that leisurely coffee, those oranges, that sun-warmed chair), then unexpectedly culminates in a specific that combines abstract with concrete, ‘the green freedom of a cockatoo/ Upon a rug’. This, as Keats said of his Grecian Urn, teases us into thought: is this exotic bird a released parrot or a figure in the carpet, and if the latter, in what sense is it free, and in what sense can its ‘freedom’ be ‘green’? If we think it is an actual cockatoo, then ‘green’ could be a transferred epithet, albeit one which retains some strangeness, by assigning colour to an abstract noun. All these items listed serve, we learn, to counteract ‘The holy hush of ancient sacrifice’: and so the poem goes on to explore the implications of its title.