I was reminded of this poem, and Wallace Stevens in general, while writing about the 20 most anthologized modern American poems recently. It’s odd that I needed to be reminded of Stevens. His poems were always present in the anthologies of my school years, back in the last century, along with Frost (who I disliked … Continue reading The Emperor of Ice Cream
Here’s a list of poets and poems, along with the year they were written: OK, you probably already read the title of the post, so you know what they are. This list comes from an article I bookmarked this summer that intrigued me, and today I returned to it because I’m thinking a bit … Continue reading The Most Anthologized American Poems of the Modern Era
Edna St. Vincent Millay was another poet who offered little to the “New Criticism” critics who largely set the canon for the 20th Century, even though her career, which covered the first half of the 20th Century, ran almost exactly through the same time as Eliot, Frost, Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens, and … Continue reading Millay’s Sonnet 43
What a writer writes may come to mean something else to a reader, and what that reader thinks can change over time. Many years ago when I was a young student, I had a mixed reaction to the American poets of the first part of the 20th century. I liked some of things found in … Continue reading Stars Songs Faces
