Wallace Stevens

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Wallace Stevens (born October 2, 1879 in Reading , Pennsylvania , † August 2, 1955 in Hartford , Connecticut ) was an American poet and essayist .

Life

Stevens studied law at Harvard University from 1897 to 1900 . After the bachelor's degree , he moved to New York City . Here he worked for a while as a journalist and finished his studies in 1903. During his studies he published several poems for the first time in the college magazine The Harvard Advocate . In 1904 he met Elsie Kachel - the couple married in 1909. After his admission as a lawyer, he worked for various law firms from 1904 to 1907. In 1908 he started a job as legal counsel for a Missouri insurance company . In 1914, Stevens became the vice president for the New York offices. In the same year, Harriet Monroe published four poems by Stevens in the poetry magazine Poetry .

After a company merger , Stevens moved from New York to Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. in Hartford , Connecticut in 1916 . He was a member of the avant-garde circle around Walter Arensberg , where he a. a. Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams met. His first volume of poetry, Harmonium , which appeared in 1923, received little attention: The publication of TS Eliot's The Waste Land the year before had reduced the public's sensitivity to further innovations. Because of this disappointment, Stevens avoided further publications for the remainder of the 1920s. In 1924 his daughter Holly Stevens was born, who was to publish her father's works posthumously . In 1934, Stevens was named vice president of insurance. In the 1930s he joined the avant-garde circle around the couple Barbara and Henry Church. It was not until the 1940s that his lyrical work found acceptance; he has now received several awards, including two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize . In 1946 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Although Stevens was fascinated by Europe all his life and regularly ordered programs with European art and delicacies from around the world, he only left the United States for short stays in Canada and Cuba.

Wallace Stevens is considered one of the greatest poets in the United States and has influenced many later poets, including John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop .

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For the statements evaluating the work, individual references would be required as to the secondary literature in which the reader can find this. A bibliography with 24 titles does not replace this.

Of the first collection of poems, Harmonium , published in 1923 and containing some of his mostly anthologized poems, only one hundred copies of the first edition were sold. Stevens' importance was not recognized until the poet was already old. Nonetheless, his very first publication proves the outstanding knowledge of modern art , which, in addition to influences from Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson , English Romanticism (especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth ) and French symbolism (here especially Paul Valéry and Stéphane Mallarmé ) as well as impressionism in painting. The Armory Show , which in New York in 1913 made newer European art (especially Paul Cézanne , Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp ) accessible to the American public for the first time, can be seen as a key experience for Stevens' poetry. Many of his early poems read as varied meditations on Duchamp's act of going down a flight of stairs .

Between 1935 and 1945, Stevens took increasingly conservative positions that led to controversy with communist writers. At the same time he made a turn from early Imagism and Impressionism to Symbolism with increasingly solid image systems. His ideas about order (against chaos), about the heroic poet (against the masses or the average person), about women and African-Americans, and his repeated award of a romantically grounded, comprehensive imagination that creates a world, shaped the volumes of poetry from 1935 to 1942 It was not only in Esthétique du Mal (1945) that a turning point towards a preoccupation with war, suffering and violence was indicated and thus a turning away from the idea of ​​a superman in the succession of Friedrich Nietzsche .

His late work after 1945 retained the resolute atheism of harmonium and more radically transfigured poetry as the successor to religion. Poetry is necessary because people have to believe in something, and poetry is necessary like angels. The imagination continues to reign supremely until the late poems according to Auroras of Autumn (1950), where thoughts of an end to the power of the imagination appear and a closer reference to the everyday world becomes open. The irony and rhetorical virtuosity of the earlier poems recede. Some late meditations have existential tones, and their colloquial simplicity rudiments of postmodern poetry , such as by John Ashbery .

Stevens' impressive imagery, which often reaches the limits of comprehensibility, and his highly artificial, cerebral language allow him to transform contemporary philosophical problems into concise metaphors and to find experimental solutions to them, always on the level of the image. A large part of his poems thrives on the juxtaposition of the alienation , loneliness of modern man and the direct aesthetic experience from which art and contemplation of nature can emerge.

Another important topic is the collision of imagination and reality , of consciousness and the real world. Both areas are not thought of in stark antithesis. Rather, Stevens discovers that reality, too, is a function and product of the imagination, which is sometimes lost, so to speak, and blocks access to the imagination. It becomes the task of the poet to make reality fluctuate so that its origin in the human mind becomes conscious again. It is not enough if this resurrection is unique; rather, it has to be recreated again and again by changing the perspective of poetic language on reality. Occasionally Stevens makes use of religious imagery for this; However, the focus of interest is the knowledge that religion can also become a one-sided reality and prevent access to transcendence .

Stevens' early poetry is heavily influenced by the philosopher and poet George Santayana , with whom he exchanged poems. With To an Old Philosopher in Rome he sets a lyrical monument to him.

Many of Stevens' terms have become proverbial in American literary studies , especially in Harold Bloom's school . Without Stevens' knowledge one will not understand allusions to a "capable imagination", a "necessary angel" or the "jar in Tennessee". In more recent studies, the metaphysics-critical aspect of Stevens' poetry is emphasized, which in parts seems to anticipate postmodernism.

Catalog raisonné

Volumes of poetry

  • Harmonium (1923)
  • Ideas of Order (1935)
  • Owl's Clover (1936)
  • The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
  • Parts of the World (1942)
  • Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (1942)
  • Esthétique du Mal (1945)
  • Three Academic Pieces (1947)
  • Transport to Summer (1947)
  • A Primitive Like an Orb (1948)
  • The Auroras of Autumn (1950)
  • Collected Poems (1954) (For this he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 )
  • Opus Posthumous (1957)
  • The Palm at the End of the Mind (1967)

Essay writing

  • The Necessary Angel (1951)

In German translation

Books
  • Parts of a world. Selected poems. Jung und Jung Verlag, Salzburg 2014. From the American English by Rainer G. Schmidt . ISBN 978-3-99027-050-9 . (bilingual edition)
  • The expansion of everything visible. Poems. Mattes Verlag, Heidelberg 2013. Ed. U. Translated by Klaus Martens. ISBN 978-3-86809-072-7 .
  • Wide awake, on the verge of sleep . Poems. Hanser, Munich 2011. Ed. Joachim Sartorius . Translated by Joachim Sartorius, Karin Graf, Hans Magnus Enzensberger , Durs Grünbein a . a. ISBN 978-3-446-23755-1 . (bilingual edition)
  • The man with the blue guitar . Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 1995. Translated by Karin Graf, Hans Magnus Enzensberger .
  • Adagia . Residenz, Salzburg 1993. Translated by Karin Graf, Joachim Sartorius .
  • The poems of our climate . Poems. Translated by Klaus Martens. Göttingen, Altaquito 1987.
  • People made from words . English-German edition. Edited by Klaus-Dieter Sommer. People and World, Berlin 1983.
  • The planet on the table . Poems and Adagia in English and German. Edited by Kurt H Hansen. Claassen, Hamburg 1961 a. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1981.
Magazines
  • Poems (The snow man. Bantam taps in the fir forests. The ice cream emperor. The idea of ​​order near Key West. The poems of our climate. Botanist on an alp (No. 1). A native like a round. Puella Parvula. To one ancient philosophers in Rome. Prologues to the possible. The world as meditation. A mythology reflects its region). In: Akzente 1985, pp. 20-34. Klaus Martens
  • Connecticut . ibid. 35-36
  • Klaus Martens: Someone builds a world: Wallace Stevens . ibid. 37-49
  • The poems of our climate . Altaquito, Göttingen, 1987 (Contains: Man carries an object. The poems of our climate. The snow man. Puella Parvula. The man with the throat ailment. The ice cream emperor. Botanist on an alp (No. 1). Bantam cocks in fir forests. Madame La Fleurie. The Idea of ​​Order in Key West). Translator: Klaus Martens
  • Poems and prose (Sunday morning. The death of a soldier. Gubbinal. Tea in the Palais of Hond. Mrs. Alfred Uruguay. Certain sound phenomena. Somnambulisms. Extraordinary references. The sound creations. Page from a story. A normal evening in New Haven. The poem, Discovering thinking. Stands empty in the park. The simple meaning of things. First warmth. From mere being. While you leave the room) in: Akzente , Vol. 44, H. 2, 1997, p. 126– 158. Translated by Klaus Martens.
  • The figure of the boy as a male poet. ibid. 133-135
  • About poetry. ibid. 142 - 146

literature

  • Klaus Martens: WS- Schnörkel in the signature of the Modern Akzente (magazine) , Volume 44, Issue 2, April 1997, pp. 159–174 ISBN 3-446-23174-9
  • Michel Benamou: Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.
  • Harold Bloom : Wallace Stevens. The Poems of Our Climate (1980)
  • Harold Bloom, "The Central Man: Emerson, Whitman, Wallace Stevens." Massachusetts Review 7 (1966), 23-42.
  • August John Cleghorn: "The Rhetorician's Touch" To Uncollected Wallace Stevens. San Francisco UP 1997.
  • Alan Filreis: Wallace Stevens and the Actual World. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
  • Alan Filreis: Modernism from Right to Left. Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, & Literary Radicalism. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.
  • Mark Halliday: Stevens and the Interpersonal. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
  • Fredric Jameson , "Wallace Stevens." New Orleans Review 11 (1984), 10-19.
  • David M. LaGuardia: Advance on Chaos. The Sanctifying Imagination of Wallace Stevens. Hanover, London: Brown UP, 1983.
  • BJ Legett: Early Stevens. The Nietzschean Intertext. Durham, London: Duke UP, 1992.
  • Frank Lentrichia: Ariel and the Police. Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.
  • James Longenbach: Wallace Stevens. The Plain Sense of Things. New York: 1991.
  • Klaus Martens: Negation, negativity and utopia in the work of Wallace Stevens. Frankfurt a. M .: Peter Lang, 1980.
  • Alden Lynn Nielsen: Reading Race. White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990.
  • Rajeev S. Patke: The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens. An Interpretative Study. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
  • Marjorie Perloff : Revolving in Crystal: The Supreme Fiction and the Impasse of Modernist Lyric . In: Wallace Stevens. The Poetics of Modernism. Cambridge etc .: Cambridge UP, 1985, 41-64.
  • Joan Richardson: Wallace Stevens. 2 vols. New York: W. Morrow, 1986, 1988.
  • Joseph N. Riddel: The Clairvoyant Eye. The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1965.
  • William Van O'Connor: The Shaping Spirit. Chicago: Regnery, 1950.
  • Jacqueline Vaught Brogan: Stevens and Simile. A Theory of Language. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986.
  • Jacqueline Vaught Brogan: “'Sister of the Minotaur' Sexism and Stevens.” In: Wallace Stevens and the Feminine. Ed. Melita foam. Tuscaloosa and London: The U of Alabama P, 1993: 3-22.
  • Helen Vendler: On Extended Wings. Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1969.
  • Paul Mariani: The whole harmonium: the life of Wallace Stevens , New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016, ISBN 978-1-4516-2437-3

Web links

Selected poems on poetry exhibits

German translation

Left

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members: Wallace Stevens. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 27, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Image on abcgallery.com
  3. ↑ Critical review of the translation Rainer G. Schmidt's see: Stefana Sabin : poetry as worldview , in NZZ , August 23, 2014 S. 27th
personal data
SURNAME Stevens, Wallace
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lyricist and essayist
DATE OF BIRTH October 2, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Reading , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH 2nd August 1955
Place of death Hartford , Connecticut