Lecture 20 - Wallace Stevens (cont.) |
Marie Borroff guest-lectures on Wallace Stevens's late seasonal poem, "The Auroras of Autumn." The poem is considered sequentially, beginning with Stevens's mythology of the three serpents in section one and concluding with an examination of the beauty of the world, as Stevens conceives of it, in sections eight through ten. The poet's optimism and fundamental belief in the power of imagination to divest death of its power is repeatedly demonstrated. The poem's final sections are shown to exemplify characteristically Stevensian conceptions of peace and happiness in the face of death.
Wallace Stevens: "Asides on the Oboe," "Phosphor Reading by His Own Light," "The Motive for Metaphor," "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm," "The Auroras of Autumn"
Wallace Stevens, "Gubbinal," 1950;
"The Aurora's of Autumn," 1950
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens,
copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly
Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
Yale University 2008. Some rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated on this page or on the Open Yale Courses website, all content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0)