Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is about the poetry of Wallace Stevens. We begin with a contrast between Pound Stevens and its sequel in 20th-century literary criticism, as well as a consideration of the role played by social prejudice in Pound and Eliot on one hand and Stevens on the other. Then we discuss Stevens’s biography, a passionate inner life lived solely in poetry. We read three short early poems for what they tell us about the proper and improper uses of imagination in Stevens, and then consider his classic “Sunday Morning” for its attempt to replace religion with artistic imagination. We go on to his greater statements on the power of the poetic imagination to re-shape reality as against both totalizing religion and totalizing politics in “The Idea of Order at Key West” and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the episode, the remainder of the American literature sequence, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and whatever awaits us in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
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