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.
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.
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.