Fifteen-minute poetry theater: Wallace Stevens seduced by conflict
Image by *clairity* via Flickr
Lots of fascinating reviews coming out about the poet Wallace Stevens with the recent release of his Selected Poems, edited by John N. Serio.
Wallace Stevens, Hartford insurance man with a difficult wife and difficult parents, had a secret life in which he turned his personal conflicts into seductions made out of words, sounds, ideas, descriptions.
Sounds so trite by contemporary standards for great escapes.
He was a sort of heartbreaking Walter Mitty, whose heroic fantasies played out as poems. Here are a few lines from Stevens’ Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction, called out in an excellent review by James Longenbach in The Nation:
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
via A Music of Austerity: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Page 2).
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- Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens (readerville.com)
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