Wallace Stevens: 11 Essential Poems

Published: Feb. 20, 2024, 2:21 a.m.

An episode from 2/19/24: Tonight, I read eleven essential poems by the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). All of them can be found in his Collected Poems. I also read from his letters, and the essay about Stevens at The Poetry Foundation. The poems are:

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  • Anecdote of the Jar
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  • The Snow Man
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  • Six Significant Landscapes
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  • Anecdote of Men by the Thousand
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  • How to Live. What to Do
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  • Gallant Ch\xe2teau
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  • Bouquet of Belle Scavoir
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  • The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain
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  • The Planet on the Table
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  • Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
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  • The Idea of Order at Key West (read by Stevens)
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The biographies of Stevens that I mention are the two-volumes by Joan Richardson, and The Whole of Harmonium, by Paul Mariani. The 1988 documentary on Stevens, part of the Voices and Visions series, is also a great introduction.

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You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.

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Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

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