Celebrate Wallace Stevens Week

Yesterday, the literary blog Big Other launched “Wallace Stevens Week.” In coming days, the blog will feature commentary by a number of critics and poets, including an interview with Eleanor Cook (author of the Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens) and a post on the “maddening, funny and bizarre” titles of Stevens’s poems.

The interview with James Longenbach, a poet in his own right and the author of Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, mentions that Stevens offered the following quote from Henry James as advice to young writers:

To live in the world of creation—to get into it and stay in it—to frequent it and haunt it—to think intensely and fruitfully—to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation—this is the only thing.

In the video below, the inimitable Harold Bloom recites one of his favorite poems, Stevens’s “Tea at the Palace of Hoon.”



Related LOA volumes: Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose