Introduction

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents ix
3. Preface xi
4. Acknowledgments xv
5. Introduction 1
6. I. Harmonium
7. 1. Places, Common and Other: A Rhetoric of Beginning 25
8. 2. The Play and War of Venus: Love Poems and Florida Poems 52
9. 3. The Limits of Word-Play: The Comedian as the Letter C 73
10. 4. The Ludus of Allusion: Poems of Voice and Death 86
11. 5. Ways of Ending: Religious and Last Poems 99
12. II. Transition
13. 6. A Rhetoric of Beginning Again: Ideas of Order 117
14. 7. Concerning the Nature of Things: The Man with the Blue Guitar 135
15. 8. Against Synecdoche: Parts of a World 152
16. III. Transport to Summer
17. 9. Transport and the Metaphor Poems 171
18. 10. War and the Normal Sublime: Esthetique du Mal 189
19. 11. Notes toward a Supreme Fiction 214
20. IV. The Auroras and After
21. 12. Commonplace Apocalypse: An Ordinary Evening in New Haven 267
22. 13. Late Poems: Places, Common and Other 295
23. Index to Works by Wallace Stevens 315
24. General Index 318