The Whole Harmonium
The Life of Wallace Stevens
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An “incandescent….redefining biography of a major poet whose reputation continues to ascend” (Booklist, starred review)—Wallace Stevens, perhaps the most important American poet of the twentieth century.
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a richly imaginative life that he expressed in his poems. “A biography that is both deliciously readable and profoundly knowledgeable” (Library Journal, starred review), The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times and as the creator of a poetry that continues to shape how we understand and define ourselves.
A lawyer who rose to become an insurance-company vice president, Stevens composed brilliant poems on long walks to work and at other stolen moments. He endured an increasingly unhappy marriage, and yet he had his Dionysian side, reveling in long fishing (and drinking) trips to the sun-drenched tropics of Key West. He was at once both the Connecticut businessman and the hidalgo lover of all things Latin. His first book of poems, Harmonium, published when he was forty-four, drew on his profound understanding of Modernism to create a distinctive and inimitable American idiom. Over time he became acquainted with peers such as Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, but his personal style remained unique.
The complexity of Stevens’s poetry rests on emotional, philosophical, and linguistic tensions that thread their way intricately through his poems, both early and late. And while he can be challenging to understand, Stevens has proven time and again to be one of the most richly rewarding poets to read. Biographer and poet Paul Mariani’s The Whole Harmonium “is an excellent, superb, thrilling story of a mind….unpacking poems in language that is nearly as eloquent as the poet’s, and as clear as faithfulness allows” (The New Yorker).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mariani, a literary biographer (Gerard Manley Hopkins) and an English professor at Boston College, examines, insightfully but laboriously, the life and work of Wallace Stevens. Mariani views Stevens as one of the 20th century's most important poets, but acknowledges he remains an unfamiliar figure compared to contemporaries Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot. Going from Stevens's roots in Reading, Pa., to his time in Greenwich Village; Key West, Fla.; and Hartford, Conn., Mariani traces the path of an enigmatic author who was both a poet and an insurance executive, and who published his first collection, Harmonium, in 1923, when he was 44. In Mariani's view, Stevens's blend of radical modernism and individual conservativism added to the allure of his work. Mariani speculates on Stevens's sometimes difficult, contrary nature and on his lifelong search for meaning and the sublime. While Mariani's critical capacities prove strong in this finely wrought analysis, his dense, impressionistic, often florid language can make the going difficult.