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Wallace Stevens was born
Wallace Stevens was born in Reading,Pennsylvania -
Modernism Begins
Literary Modernism has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America. Modernism is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional styles of poetry and verse. Modernists experimented with literary form and expression, adhering to the modernist maxim to "Make it new." The modernist literary movement was driven by a desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their time. -
Forms of Modernism
Juxtaposition, irony, comparisons, and satire are important elements found in modernist writing. Modernist authors use impressionism and other devices to emphasize the subjectivity of reality, and they see omniscient narration and fixed narrative points of view as providing a false sense of objectivity. -
Themes of Mondernism
For the first-time reader, modernist writing can seem frustrating to understand because of the use of a fragmented style and a lack of conciseness. Furthermore the plot, characters and themes of the text are not always presented in a linear way. The goal of modernist literature is also not particularly focused on catering to one particular audience in a formal way. In addition modernist literature often forcefully opposes, or gives an alternative opinion, on a social concept. Common concerns of -
T.S. Eliot was Very Important
T.S. Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright and literary critic, arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. -
Ezra Pound Heads off to College
He studied literature and languages in college and in 1908 left for Europe, where he published several successful books of poetry. Pound advanced a "modern" movement in English and American literature. His pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy during World War II led to his arrest and confinement until 1958. -
Pound's First Book
In 1908, with just $80 in his pocket, he set sail for Europe, and landed in Venice brimming with confidence that he would soon make a name for himself in the world of poetry. With his own money, Pound paid for the publication of his first book of poems, "A Lume Spento." -
T.S. Elliot's Debut
The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement -
Pound's Reviews from Others
Pound wrote numerous reviews and critiques for a variety of publications, such as New Age, the Egoist, and Poetry. As his friend T.S. Eliot would later note, "During a crucial decade in the history of modern literature, approximately 1912–1922, Pound was the most influential and in some ways the best critic in England or America." -
What Eliot's Poems Were About
His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-World-War-I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. -
The Confusion of Stevens Writing in Anecdote of the Jar
In the poem, Anecdote of the Jar, Stevens portrays the complex relationship of human to nature through confusion of who is greater than whom, how they depend on each other, the connection between the two, and the form the poem is written in. Stevens forces the reader to feel the confusion and chaos present between the jar (a symbol for humans) and nature. This relationship can be felt and read through the form the poem is written in. -
Wallace Stevens Wasn't Just a Poet.
If he was not writing in the 1920s, he was steadily advancing in business. After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he had been hired as a bonding lawyer for an insurance firm in 1908, and by 1914 was hired as the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Co. of St. Louis. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would -
First Book Published
His first book Harmonium was published in 1923 by the distinguished firm of Alfred A. Knopf. Though he was always much admired by his contemporaries ("There is a man whose work," Hart Crane wrote of him in 1919, "makes most the rest of us quail"), Stevens felt that the reviews of his 1923 book were less than they should be, and discouraged, wrote nothing through the 1920s. For a second edition of Harmonium, published in 1931, he added only eight new poems. -
Daughter Born Due to His First Book
They had one daughter, Holly Bight, born in 1924, conceived on a leisurely ocean voyage California via the Panama Canal that they took to celebrate the publication of his first book. -
Ernest Hemmingway - The Sun Also Rises
The New York Times wrote in 1926 of Hemingway's first novel, "No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame." -
Themes of Hemmingway's Writing
The popularity of Hemingway's work to a great extent is based on the themes, which according to scholar Frederic Svoboda are love, war, wilderness and loss, all of which are strongly evident in the body of work. -
Sunday Mornings Analysis
"Sunday Morning" offers one of Stevens's first substitutes for Christianity: natural religion, or paganism. Stevens said very little about this poem after writing it, other than to note in 1928 that "the poem is simply an expression of paganism" and later, in 1944, to indicate that Hi Simons was correct in assuming that the poem suggests "a naturalistic religion as a substitute for supernaturalism". -
Hemmingways's Proof of Modernism
Henry Louis Gates believes Hemingway's style was fundamentally shaped "in reaction to [his] experience of world war". After World War I, he and other modernists "lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization," by reacting against the elaborate style of 19th century writers and by creating a style "in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least very little—is stated explicitly." -
Stevens Dies
He died at the age of seventy-six in Hartford, Connecticut -
The Snowman is one of the Best
Commentator Jay Keyser says Stevens wrote the best short poem in the English language, "The Snow Man." Stevens marries what the poem is about with the way that it is built.