Human Voices Wake Us

Wallace Stevens: 11 Essential Poems


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An episode from 2/19/24: Tonight, I read eleven essential poems by the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). All of them can be found in his Collected Poems. I also read from his letters, and the essay about Stevens at The Poetry Foundation. The poems are:

  • Anecdote of the Jar
  • The Snow Man
  • Six Significant Landscapes
  • Anecdote of Men by the Thousand
  • How to Live. What to Do
  • Gallant Château
  • Bouquet of Belle Scavoir
  • The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain
  • The Planet on the Table
  • Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
  • The Idea of Order at Key West (read by Stevens)
  • The biographies of Stevens that I mention are the two-volumes by Joan Richardson, and The Whole of Harmonium, by Paul Mariani. The 1988 documentary on Stevens, part of the Voices and Visions series, is also a great introduction.

    You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.

    Email me at [email protected].

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