Peter Quince At The Clavier
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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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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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Platonism
Platonism is the philosophy of Plato and philosophical systems closely derived from it, though contemporary platonists do not necessarily accept all of the doctrines of Plato. Platonism had a profound effect on Western thought. Platonism at least affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to exist in a third realm distinct from both the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism." Philosophers who affirm the existence of abstract objects are sometimes called platonists; those who deny their existence are sometimes called nominalists. The terms "platonism" and "nominalism" have established senses in the history of philosophy, where they denote positions that have little to do with the modern notion of an abstract object. In this connection, it is essential to bear in mind that modern platonists (with a small 'p') need not accept any of the doctrines of Plato, just as modern nominalists need not accept ...
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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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1915 Poems
Events Below, the events of World War I have the "WWI" prefix. January *January – British physicist Sir Joseph Larmor publishes his observations on "The Influence of Local Atmospheric Cooling on Astronomical Refraction". *January 1 ** WWI: British Royal Navy battleship HMS Formidable (1898), HMS ''Formidable'' is sunk off Lyme Regis, Dorset, England, by an Imperial German Navy U-boat, with the loss of 547 crew. **Battle of Broken Hill: A train ambush near Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia, is carried out by two men (claiming to be in support of the Ottoman Empire) who are killed, together with 4 civilians. * January 5 – Joseph E. Carberry sets an altitude record of , carrying Capt. Benjamin Delahauf Foulois as a passenger, in a fixed-wing aircraft. * January 12 ** The United States House of Representatives rejects a proposal to give women the right to vote. ** ''A Fool There Was (1915 film), A Fool There Was'' premières in the United States, starring Theda Bar ...
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Gerald Berg
Gerald is a male Germanic given name meaning "rule of the spear" from the prefix ''ger-'' ("spear") and suffix ''-wald'' ("rule"). Variants include the English given name Jerrold, the feminine nickname Jeri and the Welsh language Gerallt and Irish language Gearalt. Gerald is less common as a surname. The name is also found in French as Gérald. Geraldine is the feminine equivalent. Given name People with the name Gerald include: Politicians * Gerald Boland, Ireland's longest-serving Minister for Justice * Gerald Ford, 38th President of the United States * Gerald Gardiner, Baron Gardiner, Lord Chancellor from 1964 to 1970 * Gerald Häfner, German MEP * Gerald Klug, Austrian politician * Gerald Lascelles (other), several people * Gerald Nabarro, British Conservative politician * Gerald S. McGowan, US Ambassador to Portugal * Gerald Wellesley, 7th Duke of Wellington, British diplomat, soldier, and architect Sports * Gerald Asamoah, Ghanaian-born German football player ...
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Dominick Argento
Dominick Argento (October 27, 1927 – February 20, 2019) was an American composer known for his lyric operatic and choral music. Among his best known pieces are the operas '' Postcard from Morocco'', '' Miss Havisham's Fire'', ''The Masque of Angels'', and '' The Aspern Papers.'' He also is known for the song cycles ''Six Elizabethan Songs'' and ''From the Diary of Virginia Woolf''; the latter earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975. In a predominantly tonal context, his music freely combines tonality, atonality and a lyrical use of twelve-tone writing. None of Argento's music approaches the experimental, stringent ''avant-garde'' fashions of the post-World War II era.Saya, Virginia. "Dominick Argento," ''Grove Music Online'', ed. L. Macy. (Accessed 15 December 2006). As a student in the 1950s, Argento divided his time between the United States and Italy, and his music is greatly influenced by both his instructors in the United States and his personal affection for Italy ...
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The Merchant Of Venice
''The Merchant of Venice'' is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. A merchant in Venice named Antonio defaults on a large loan provided by a Jewish moneylender, Shylock. Although classified as a comedy in the First Folio and sharing certain aspects with Shakespeare's other romantic comedies, the play is most remembered for its dramatic scenes, and it is best known for the character Shylock and his famous demand for a " pound of flesh" in retribution. The play contains two famous speeches, that of Shylock, "Hath not a Jew eyes?" on the subject of humanity, and that of Portia on " the quality of mercy". Debate exists on whether the play is anti-Semitic, with Shylock's insistence on his legal right to the pound of flesh being in opposition to Shylock's seemingly universal plea for the rights of all people suffering discrimination. Characters * Antonio – a prominent merchant of Venice in a melancholic mood. * Bassanio â ...
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Imagism
Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is sometimes viewed as "a succession of creative moments" rather than a continuous or sustained period of development. The French academic René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".Taupin, René (1929). ''L'Influence du symbolism francais sur la poesie Americaine (de 1910 a 1920)''. Paris: Champion. Translation (1985) by William Pratt and Anne Rich. New York: AMS. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of Romantic and Victorian poetry. In contrast to the contemporary Georgian poets, who were generally content to work within that tra ...
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Paradox
A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion. A paradox usually involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time. They result in "persistent contradiction between interdependent elements" leading to a lasting "unity of opposites". In logic, many paradoxes exist that are known to be invalid arguments, yet are nevertheless valuable in promoting critical thinking, while other paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions that were assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One example is Russell's paradox, which questions whether a "list of all lists that do not contain themselves" would include itself, and showed that attempts to found set theory on the identification ...
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Theory Of Forms
The theory of Forms or theory of Ideas is a philosophical theory, fuzzy concept, or world-view, attributed to Plato, that the physical world is not as real or true as timeless, absolute, unchangeable ideas. According to this theory, ideas in this sense, often capitalized and translated as "Ideas" or "Forms", are the non-physical essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations. Plato speaks of these entities only through the characters (primarily Socrates) of his dialogues who sometimes suggests that these Forms are the only objects of study that can provide knowledge. The theory itself is contested from within Plato's dialogues, and it is a general point of controversy in philosophy. Nonetheless, the theory is considered to be a classical solution to the problem of universals. The early Greek concept of form precedes attested philosophical usage and is represented by a number of words mainly having to do with vision, sight, and ap ...
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Universals
In metaphysics, a universal is what particular things have in common, namely characteristics or qualities. In other words, universals are repeatable or recurrent entities that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things. For example, suppose there are two chairs in a room, each of which is green. These two chairs both share the quality of " chairness", as well as greenness or the quality of being green; in other words, they share a "universal". There are three major kinds of qualities or characteristics: types or kinds (e.g. mammal), properties (e.g. short, strong), and relations (e.g. father of, next to). These are all different types of universals. Paradigmatically, universals are '' abstract'' (e.g. humanity), whereas particulars are ''concrete'' (e.g. the personhood of Socrates). However, universals are not necessarily abstract and particulars are not necessarily concrete. For example, one might hold that numbers are particular yet abstract objects. Likew ...
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Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, Et Les Unze Mille Vierges
"Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges" is a poem in Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, ''Harmonium''. It was first published in 1915 in the magazine ''Rogue'', so it is in the public domain. Butell characterizes it as one of the first two poems (the other is "Tea") to "successfully combine wit and elegance". They are the earliest poems to be collected later in ''Harmonium.'' Interpretation The poem describes a woman and her prayer ceremony in a garden, and the Lord's religiously unorthodox response. If the "true subject" of the poem is an erotic moment, the "poetry of the subject" is a delicate poetic bouquet.(For more on this distinction see " Le Monocle de Mon Oncle".) Or one might follow Joan Richardson in viewing it as a record of Stevens's relationship with his wife, Elsie, disguised as a mock-medieval legend to "throw anyone who might be curious completely off the scentElsie did not like the poem's "mocking spirit", and one editor, Harriet Mo ...
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