21. Wallace Stevens (cont.)

Modern Poetry (ENGL 310) with Langdon Hammer

The late poetry of Wallace Stevens is presented and analyzed. Stevens's conception of the poet as reader and the world as a text to be read and translated is considered in "Large Red Man Reading" and "The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain." The poet's preoccupation with natural cycles and sensory experience is exhibited in "The Plain Sense of Things." Finally, "A Primitive Like an Orb" is interpreted as Stevens's final vision of ceaseless change and transition in the world, in which the poet's verbal play participates.

00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction: Wallace Stevens's Late Poems
04:33 - Chapter 2. Wallace Stevens Poem: "Large Red Man Reading"
16:12 - Chapter 3. Wallace Stevens Poem: "The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain"
25:18 - Chapter 4. Wallace Stevens Poem: "The Plain Sense of Things"
29:37 - Chapter 5. Wallace Stevens Poem: "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself"
37:53 - Chapter 6. Wallace Stevens Poem: "A Primitive Like an Orb"

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://oyc.yale.edu

This course was recorded in Spring 2007.