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Voices & Visions

Wallace Stevens

Stevens's flamboyant verbal technique and philosophical vision of American life are beautifully illustrated by archival footage.

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The hero of Wallace Stevens’s poetry is the human imagination. Like Emily Dickinson’s, Stevens’s sedate and uneventful outer life concealed a lush and adventurous inner one. Such adventures were for Stevens not an escape from reality but a journey toward a new reality. Although Stevens was no philosopher–he was a bold and brilliant poet–he explored the workings of the human mind with a precision philosophers might envy.

Additional Resources

Academy of American Poets

Listen to Stevens read “The Idea of Order at Key West.” In addition, this site contains a biography, a bibliography, and some of Stevens’s most well-known poems.

Wallace Stevens Resources

From a priest’s letter about Stevens’s alleged deathbed conversion to Catholicism to excerpts from Stevens’s correspondence with his Cuban friend Jose Rodriguez Feo, University of Pennsylvania Professor Alan Filreis’s site contains fascinating material about the poet and his work.

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