O Florida, Venereal Soil
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O Florida, Venereal Soil
"O Florida, Venereal Soil" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, '' Harmonium''. It was first published in the journal ''Dial'', volume 73, July 1922, and is therefore in the public domain. Buttel interprets the poem as continuous with Baudelaire's sense of the opposition between the corruptibility of the flesh and the perfection of an ideal world. The "few things for themselves" that Stevens lists in the first stanza are not philosophical generics like Aristotle's conception of what's worth doing for its own sake (philosophy) or Hobbes's list of appetitive desires that motivate all human beings. Stevens's list rather is highly specific and opaque to the reader whose imagination may not be piqued by buzzards, etc. One has to look beyond this opacity to whatever piques one's imagination, however quirky that may be to others. The same holds true for the "dreadful sundry of this world" listed in the second stanza. The poem is about Stevens's subjective response to Flo ...
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Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his ''Collected Poems'' in 1955. Stevens's first period of writing begins with the 1923 publication of ''Harmonium'', followed by a slightly revised and amended second edition in 1930. His second period occurred in the 11 years immediately preceding the publication of his ''Transport to Summer'', when Stevens had written three volumes of poems including ''Ideas of Order'', '' The Man with the Blue Guitar'', ''Parts of a World'', along with ''Transport to Summer''. His third and final period began with the publication of '' The Auroras of Autumn'' in the early 1950s, followed by the release of his ''Collected Poems'' in 1954, a year before his death. Stevens's best-known ...
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Harmonium (poetry Collection)
''Harmonium'' is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens. His first book at the age of forty-four, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. This collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines (" Life Is Motion") to several hundred ("The Comedian as the Letter C") (see the footnotesFrom the table of contents for ''Harmonium'' in Frank Kermode and Joan Richards, editors, ix–xi: * Earthy Anecdote * Invective Against Swans * In the Carolinas * The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage * The Plot Against the Giant * Infanta Marina * Domination of Black * The Snow Man * The Ordinary Women * The Load of Sugar-Cane * Le Monocle de Mon Oncle * Nuances of a Theme by Williams * Metaphors of a Magnifico * Ploughing on Sunday * Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges * Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores * Fabliau of Florida * The Doctor of Geneva * Another Weeping Woman * Homunculus et La Belle Etoile * The Comed ...
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Baudelaire
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (, ; ; 9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist and art critic. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticism inherited from Romantics, but are based on observations of real life. His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled ''Les Fleurs du mal'' (''The Flowers of Evil''), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrializing Paris during the mid-19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, among many others. He is credited with coining the term modernity (''modernité'') to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience. Marshall Berman has credited Baudelaire as being the first Modernist. Early life Baudelaire ...
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Florida
Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to the south by the Straits of Florida and Cuba; it is the only state that borders both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Spanning , Florida ranks 22nd in area among the 50 states, and with a population of over 21 million, it is the third-most populous. The state capital is Tallahassee, and the most populous city is Jacksonville. The Miami metropolitan area, with a population of almost 6.2 million, is the most populous urban area in Florida and the ninth-most populous in the United States; other urban conurbations with over one million people are Tampa Bay, Orlando, and Jacksonville. Various Native American groups have inhabited Florida for at least 14,000 years. In 1513, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León became the first k ...
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John Milton
John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem '' Paradise Lost'', written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and God's expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden. ''Paradise Lost'' is widely considered one of the greatest works of literature ever written, and it elevated Milton's widely-held reputation as one of history's greatest poets. He also served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell. Writing in English, Latin, and Italian, Milton achieved global fame and recognition during his lifetime; his celebrated ''Areopagitica'' (1644), written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of freedom of spe ...
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Samson Agonistes
''Samson Agonistes'' (from Greek Σαμσών ἀγωνιστής, "Samson the champion") is a tragic closet drama by John Milton. It appeared with the publication of Milton's '' Paradise Regained'' in 1671, as the title page of that volume states: "Paradise Regained / A Poem / In IV Books / To Which Is Added / Samson Agonistes". It is generally thought that ''Samson Agonistes'' was begun around the same time as ''Paradise Regained'' but was completed after the larger work, possibly very close to the date of publishing, but there is no certainty. Background Milton began plotting various subjects for tragedies in a notebook created in the 1640s. Many of the ideas dealt with the topic of Samson, and he gave them titles such as ''Samson pursophorus or Hybristes'' ("Samson the Firebrand, or Samson the Violent"), ''Samson marriing or in Ramath Lechi'', and ''Dagonalia'' (the unholy rites at which Samson performed his vindication of God). The title he chose emphasises Samson as a war ...
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Peter Quince At The Clavier
"Peter Quince at the Clavier" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, ''Harmonium''. The poem was first published in 1915 in the "little magazine" '' Others: A Magazine of the New Verse'' (New York), edited by Alfred Kreymborg. It is a "musical" allusion to the apocryphal story of Susanna, a beautiful young wife, bathing, spied upon and desired by the elders. The Peter Quince of the title is the character of one of the "mechanicals" in Shakespeare's '' A Midsummer Night's Dream''. Stevens' poem titles are not necessarily a reliable indicator of the meaning of his poems, but Milton Bates suggests that it serves as ironic stage direction, the image of "Shakespear's rude mechanical pressing the delicate keyboard with his thick fingers" expressing the poet's self-deprecation and betraying Stevens's discomfort with the role of "serious poet" in those early years. The poem is very sensual— Mark Halliday calls it Stevens' "most convincing expression of sexual desire". ( ...
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Infanta Marina
"Infanta Marina" is one of a group of collected poems in Wallace Stevens' '' Harmonium'', in this poem dealing with a seaside princess. Interpretation Helen Vendler (in ''Words Chosen Out of Desire'') presents the poem as a "double scherzo" on ''her'' in the possessive A possessive or ktetic form (abbreviated or ; from la, possessivus; grc, κτητικός, translit=ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction used to indicate a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict owne ... sense and on ''of'' in its partitive and possessive sense. The long sequence of possessive phrases Vendler refers to may be enumerated as: 'of the motions', 'of her wrist', 'of her thought', 'of the plumes', 'of this creature', 'of this evening', 'of sails', 'of her fan', 'of the sea', and 'of the evening'. This litany in sequence using the possessive form involving repeated ''of''s shows syntactically what the poem states semantically, Vendler proposes: the int ...
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The Ordinary Women
"The Ordinary Women" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, '' Harmonium''. Opinion is divided about whether the poem expresses Stevens' distaste for romanticism in art, a "mordant satire...of all the things that other poems hold sacred";Vendler, p. 72. or whether the poem is about "the refreshment that art, in its palace, gives to reality". In support of the ironic reading, the stanza that includes the inscrutable line "Ti-lill-o!" suggests insipid observers of vulgar soap-opera art. The surrounding stanzas find the women bathed in silly moonlight that "fubs the girandoles", leaning out from "the vapid haze of the window-bays", listening to a guitarist who drones on and on—the whole proceedings rendered "faintly or overtly repellent". Milton J. Bates speaks of the "Ti-lill-o" of titillation, the guitars as Hollywood fantasies, "beta b and gamma g" as a love scene between a boy and a girl, the women as leading humdrum and sexually unfulfilled lives. Stevens' use ...
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The Emperor Of Ice Cream
"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first collection of poetry, '' Harmonium''. It was first published in 1922, and is in the public domain. Stevens' biographer, Paul Mariani, identifies the poem as one of Stevens' personal favorites from the ''Harmonium'' collection. The poem "wears a deliberately commonplace costume", he wrote in a letter, "and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it". Structure and meaning The simple poetic structure is of two stanzas related by an identical closing verse in each stanza. The poem is only clarified in its allusion upon completion of the reading of the second stanza which identifies a "cold" and "dumb" body as common references to a dead body. In this case a dead body is being prepared for a funeral. According to the critic Helen Vendler, quoted by Austin Allen, the ice-cream in the poem is being prepared for serving at a funeral wake. The use of h ...
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1922 Poems
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American Poems
American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, people who self-identify their ancestry as "American" ** American English, the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States ** Native Americans in the United States, indigenous peoples of the United States * American, something of, from, or related to the Americas, also known as "America" ** Indigenous peoples of the Americas * American (word), for analysis and history of the meanings in various contexts Organizations * American Airlines, U.S.-based airline headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas * American Athletic Conference, an American college athletic conference * American Recordings (record label), a record label previously known as Def American * American University, in Washington, D.C. Sports teams Soccer * ...
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