Books & the Arts; August 26, 2009; A Music of Austerity: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens A Music of Austerity: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens In his best poems, Wallace Stevens makes deprivation feel ...

In 1923 Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) published “Harmonium,” his first book of poetry. And now, a hundred years later, it’s worth returning to that volume, trying to understand what the poet was seeking ...

Most of Wallace Stevens’s poetry I don’t understand. Some of it I do understand. The best of his poems are so mysterious and beautiful that they quietly overwhelm me.

His best poem, as enemies of Wallace Stevens know only too well, was “The Ultimate Poem is Abstract.” I won’t bother quoting from it. You wouldn’t understand. No one does.

I went looking for traces of Wallace Stevens. They’re hard to find, even though he spent 39 years in Hartford, from 1916 to his death in 1955, and is considered by many to equal Mark Twain in ...

The imagery is difficult,” he said, adding that some of Stevens’ best-known poems, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and “The Snow Man,” “are almost like riddles.” Stevens published several additional poetry ...

Poetry in America. Emperor of Ice Cream, Motive for Metaphor. 5/6/2024 | 25m 43s Video has Closed Captions | CC. Murray Bartlett, Laurie Santos, and more guests join Elisa New to read Wallace Stevens.

For me, Stevens's poetry has never ceased to do that. My copy of the Collected Poems cost £5 – not a small amount for a student in the 1970s. It was perhaps the best £5 I have ever spent.

Mariani — a prolific literary biographer — might argue that Stevens’s poetry was his life, that outside his work as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., he really only ...