Wallace Stevens is considered as an unapologetically Romantic poet of imagination. His search for meaning in a universe without religion in "Sunday Morning" is likened to Crane's energetic quest for meaning and symbol. In "The Poems of Our Climate," Stevens's desire to reduce poetry to essential terms, and then his countering resistance to this impulse, are explored.
Wallace Stevens
What I'm reading...A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens
I love Wallace Stevens. I count The Man with the Blue Guitar and The Idea of Order at Key West as two of my favorite poems. They talk to me, as a writer. Stevens struck a chord with me very early; decades later, he's been a constant companion. Some of Stevens' poems seem impenetrable. That's never put me off; I always think of the last two lines from MacLeish's, Ars Poetica : A poem should not mean / But be whenever a poem leaves me wondering. I find out what I can, and what's necessary sticks with me.
Finding out much about Stevens work became much easier with Eleanor Cook's, Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens. Cook is a Stevens' expert; this work takes Stevens' poems in chronological order and provides annotations and references. It's wonderful; I can't thank Eleanor Cook enough!
A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens - Eleanor Cook (Princeton University Press)
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America) - Wallace Stevens
The Idea of Order at Key West -- by Wallace Stevens
in Poetry
This is one of my favorite poems. I read it out loud, quite often.
Wallace Stevens:
What I'm reading...
I start out my day with poetry. Wallace Stevens is always on hand. There is a richness there that constantly informs. I return, again and again, to his poem, The Idea of Order at Key West:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172206
I also love The Man with the Blue Guitar. Stevens helped me understand the way an artist sees the visible world and gives it a mixture of voice and silence in witnessing it.
I first encountered Stevens' poetry in an anthology that included three of his poems: The Man with the Blue Guitar, The Emperor of Ice Cream, and Anecdote of the Jar. I didn't know what to make of them, but I was intrigued. Several lines stayed with me, which is the way poetry works with me. So I read more of his poems and I continue to read and reread them and understand them in different ways. Just as rereading a novel at different times of your life brings forth a whole new book, poems keep renewing themselves, or I come to them new. Over the years, in some strange alchemy, the lines feel grafted to my bones. I like to read his poems out loud. The experience is something like listening to music you love with headphones on; by giving it voice the work becomes embodied. It's a different sort of concentration and it allows more of the poem to sink in.