Links and Tools

Poems, Recordings, and Other Resources

• The Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens: a non-profit organization devoted to “preserving the literary arts and promoting the cultural legacy of Wallace Stevens.”
• Wallace Stevens at PennSound: all known recordings of Stevens reading his poetry.
• The Voices and Visions episode about Wallace Stevens: PBS documentary on Stevens now available at Annenberg Learner.
• Recording of Wallace Stevens reading “It Must Change”: introduced by Christina Davis, curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room (Harvard University).
• Poetry Foundation webpage for Wallace Stevens: contains a short biography, poems, articles by and about Stevens, as well as audio material and podcasts.
• Academy of American Poets webpage for Wallace Stevens: contains a short biography and a selection of poems.
• The University of Illinois’ Modern American Poetry page for Wallace Stevens: contains passages from criticism about Stevens, as well as a short biography, excerpts from letters, and poems.
• “Uneven Stevens”: podcast for the London Review of Books by Mark Ford and Seamus Perry about Stevens’ work.

Online Lectures about Wallace Stevens

• Marie Borroff at Open Yale Courses
• Al Filreis at the Kelly Writers House (University of Pennsylvania): Part 1 and Part 2
• Langdon Hammer at Open Yale Courses: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3
• Susan Howe and Joan Richardson at the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination
• Helen Vendler at the Art Institute of Chicago
• Helen Vendler at the Stanford Humanities Center
• Helen Vendler at the Woodberry Poetry Room (Harvard University)
• Excerpts from “Wallace Stevens, New York and Modernism” (Conference hosted by the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University)

Ronald Sukenick’s Wallace Stevens, Musing the Obscure: Readings, an Interpretation, and a Guide to the Collected Poetry (1967)

Originally published in 1967 by New York University, this indispensable guide to Wallace Stevens’s poetry is now available online.

Preface

A Stevens Chronology

Table of Contents

Abbreviations

I. Wallace Stevens: Theory and Practice

II. Readings

• “The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage”
• “Domination of Black”
• “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”
• “The Comedian as the Letter C”
• “On the Manner of Addressing Clouds”
• “Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb”
• “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”
• “Sunday Morning”
• “Bantams in Pine-Woods”
• “To the One of Fictive Music”
• “Peter Quince at the Clavier”
• “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
• “Anatomy of Monotony”
• “The Idea of Order at Key West”
• “Evening without Angels”
• “The Man with the Blue Guitar”
• “The Man on the Dump”
• “Connoisseur of Chaos”
• “The Sense of the Sleight-of-hand Man”
• “Of Modern Poetry”
• “Asides on the Oboe”
• “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas”
• “Dutch Graves in Bucks County”
• “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters”
• “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch”
• “Esthétique du Mal”
• “Man Carrying Thing”
• “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”
• “Large Red Man Reading”
• “The Solitude of Cataracts”
• “Saint John and the Back-Ache”
• “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”
• “Angel Surrounded by Paysans”
• “The Plain Sense of Things”
• “Looking across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly”
• “Long and Sluggish Lines”
• “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”
• “The Rock”
• “The River of Rivers in Connecticut”
• “The Course of a Particular”
• “Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination”
• “Solitaire under the Oaks”
• “Local Objects”
• “Artificial Populations”
• “A Clear Day and No Memories”
• “As You Leave the Room”
• “Of Mere Being”

III. “A Guide to Stevens’ Collected Poetry”

Visual Art Inspired by Wallace Stevens

• Joan Colbert’s “The Thirteen Ways” series: inspired by “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
• Oriole Feshbach’s “Luminations” series: inspired by “The Auroras of Autumn”
• David Hockney’s “The Blue Guitar” series: inspired by “The Man With the Blue Guitar”
• D.B. Johnson’s portrait of Wallace Stevens
• Fairfield Porter’s “Lizzie at the Table”: The American painter and art critic Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) considered Wallace Stevens a kindred spirit, reading and quoting from Stevens’ poetry and essays throughout his long career.  Porter’s Lizzie at the Table (1958), which includes as a still-life element the just-published Opus Posthumous, illustrates Stevens’ importance to the New York painters during the 1950s, when New York was replacing Paris as the center of the Western art world.
• Tennessee Williams’s “She Sang Beyond the Genius of the Sea”: painting by the famous playwright, inspired by “The Idea of Order at Key West”

Music Inspired by Wallace Stevens

• “A Mind of Winter” by George Benjamin (score): inspired by “The Snow Man”
• Three Songs by Michael Schachter (recordings): inspired by “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” “The Snow Man,” and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”

Plays and Other Dramatic Works Inspired by Wallace Stevens

• Things as They Are, a play by David Todd, directed by Anjanette Hall, with music by Ben Chasny, offers a staged reflection on Stevens’s life and works. It was produced by Playwrights Local in Cleveland, OH, in May 2017. One of the performances may be viewed here.