Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Stevensian’ and the question of abstraction 1935–2009
- 1 The abstract impulse: from anecdote to ‘new romantic’ in Harmonium (1923) and Ideas of Order (1935)
- 2 The turn to abstraction: Owl's Clover (1936) and the ‘un-locatable’ speaker in The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)
- 3 The ‘in-visible’ abstract: Stevens' idealism from Coleridge to Merleau-Ponty
- 4 Abstract figures: the curious case of the idealist ‘I’
- 5 Abstract appetites: food, wine and the idealist ‘I’
- 6 The pure good of theory: a new abstract emphasis
- 7 Bourgeois abstraction: poetry, painting and the idea of mastery in late Stevens
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
1 - The abstract impulse: from anecdote to ‘new romantic’ in Harmonium (1923) and Ideas of Order (1935)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Stevensian’ and the question of abstraction 1935–2009
- 1 The abstract impulse: from anecdote to ‘new romantic’ in Harmonium (1923) and Ideas of Order (1935)
- 2 The turn to abstraction: Owl's Clover (1936) and the ‘un-locatable’ speaker in The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)
- 3 The ‘in-visible’ abstract: Stevens' idealism from Coleridge to Merleau-Ponty
- 4 Abstract figures: the curious case of the idealist ‘I’
- 5 Abstract appetites: food, wine and the idealist ‘I’
- 6 The pure good of theory: a new abstract emphasis
- 7 Bourgeois abstraction: poetry, painting and the idea of mastery in late Stevens
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
In January 1935, answering Ronald Lane Latimer's request for an inscribed copy of Harmonium, Stevens wrote:
I shall be very glad to inscribe HARMONIUM. Some time ago a most agreeable damsel called me up on the telephone to say that she was passing through Hartford and would I inscribe her copy of HARMONIUM. I told her that I wondered that she did not prefer to leave it without an inscription, since, so far as I knew, that was the only copy without an inscription in existence. But I find that I was, after all, mistaken.
Now, wouldn't it be much better just to paste this amusing anecdote in your copy?
Stevens had good reason to be ironic about his first book. The poet knew well that neither was Harmonium an autographed edition nor had his signature been in demand following its publication in September 1923. He could joke about ‘only one copy without an inscription in existence’ because, despite featuring in the little magazines, Stevens was not, like Byron, made famous overnight. Agreeable damsels flung themselves at his Romantic predecessor, but such advances were rare for Stevens. However, as so often in Stevens' correspondence, surface humour accentuates a deep-seated wit. Latimer was eagerly awaiting the manuscript of Stevens' second book Ideas of Order, and his request for an inscribed copy of Harmonium jostled the poet's nerves about his publishing prospects almost twelve years on.
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- Information
- Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction , pp. 30 - 54Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010