The Emperor of Ice-Cream (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Wallace Stevens
- First Published: 1923
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry
- Subjects: Self-discovery
The Poem
“The Emperor of Ice-Cream” is a short but intensely compacted poem of sixteen lines, divided into two stanzas. The title reflects the irony and complexity of the poem as a whole, perhaps suggesting that humans are no more resistant to death than ice cream is to the sun. The poem is filled with the visual imagery, wordplay, humor, and thematic tension common to Wallace Stevens’s poetry.
The poem is written in the third person, seemingly by someone who is assembling a group of people both to create and to attend a wake (it is common in some cultures to have...
[The entire page is 1429 words long]
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