By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Sunday Morning’ is one of Wallace Stevens’s most celebrated poems. It first appeared in 1915 in the magazine Poetry, although the fuller version was only published in Stevens’s landmark collection Harmonium in 1923. Yvor Winters, an influential critic of modernist poetry and a minor modernist in his own right, pronounced ‘Sunday Morning’ to be ‘the greatest American poem of the twentieth century’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry when it was published in 1955. Stevens’s poetry continues to be popular, but where should the relative novice, the reader yet to discover the joys of this great twentieth-century modernist poet, begin? This post is designed as an introduction to ten of Wallace Stevens’s greatest poems.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Snow Man’ by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was first published in 1921 in the magazine Poetry, and was reprinted in Stevens’s first collection Harmonium in 1923. It is one of Stevens’s most popular short poems. But what does it mean? In this post, we attempt to get to grips with ‘The Snow Man’, who he is, and how he should be analysed.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
How can one even attempt to offer an analysis of ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, one of the most baffling and elusive short poems of the twentieth century? Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) wrote ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ in 1918 and it was published a year later.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ may well qualify for the accolade of ‘most baffling poem of the entire twentieth century’. Written by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) and published in his 1923 volume Harmonium, the poem is reproduced below, along with a brief analysis of the poem’s meaning and language.