Jan 2, 2010
Wallace Stevens’ poetry has been called both “elegant” and “austere.” It has been criticized for “an air of sumptuousness, chic, expensiveness, ’conspicuous consumption,’” as well as for bleakness, abstractness, a lack of personal warmth. Neither of these criticisms, however, says much about Stevens, who, according to Northrop Frye, was a rhetorician and therefore expendable, but an essential poet.
Stevens’ first and perhaps most “elegant,” least “austere,” volume of poems, HARMONIUM, was unlike many first volumes...
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