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3 - Stevens in the 1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2007

John N. Serio
Affiliation:
Clarkson University, New York
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Summary

Play the present

- “Mozart, 1935”

Wallace Stevens ended his promising career as a poet once he published Harmonium in 1923. He had been a semi-active member of the New York avant-garde scene in the 1910s and early 1920s, and had helped Harriet Monroe's modernist venue Poetry get underway by publishing there several poems perfectly befitting the modernist mode. The poems in Harmonium are at turns luscious, sparely ironic, cubistic, rhetorically anti-rhetorical, post-Christian, and minimally meditative; several are brilliant verse exercises in modernist language philosophy. But it is said - no one really knows for certain - that his family and business lives finally held more interest for him than poetry. His was a brief career. Perhaps its implosion was predicted, even necessitated, by the irony and insularity of the poems.

The narrative above is wrong, of course, but it is not an unreasonable story one might have told about Wallace Stevens at the beginning of the 1930s.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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  • Stevens in the 1930s
  • Edited by John N. Serio, Clarkson University, New York
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens
  • Online publication: 28 May 2007
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL052184956X.004
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  • Stevens in the 1930s
  • Edited by John N. Serio, Clarkson University, New York
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens
  • Online publication: 28 May 2007
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL052184956X.004
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Stevens in the 1930s
  • Edited by John N. Serio, Clarkson University, New York
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens
  • Online publication: 28 May 2007
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL052184956X.004
Available formats
×