''The Auroras of Autumn'' is a 1950 book of poetry by
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 compa ...
. The book of poems contains the long poem of 10 cantos by Stevens of the same name.
Contents
The book features a collection of poems containing also the 1948 Stevens long poem of the same name, whose title refers to the
Aurora Borealis
An aurora (plural: auroras or aurorae), also commonly known as the polar lights, is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly seen in high-latitude regions (around the Arctic and Antarctic). Auroras display dynamic patterns of bri ...
, or the "Northern Lights", in the fall. The book collects 32 Stevens poems written between 1947 and 1950, and was his last collection before his 1954 ''Collected Poems''.
The long poem in the book which is titled "The Auroras of Autumn" is a 240-line poem divided into ten cantos of 24 lines each. It is considered one of Stevens' more challenging and "difficult" works, and a 20th-century example of the English
Romantic tradition. According to critic Harold Bloom, it is Stevens' only major poem "in which he allows himself to enter in his proper person, as a kind of dramatic figure." On this reading, the poem comes to an early climax at the end of canto VI, where Stevens describes a tension between his own imagination and a disintegrative and elusive reality, his subject:
Another notable poem in the book is ''The Owl in the Sarcophagus'', an
elegy
An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to ''The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy'', "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometime ...
for Stevens' best friend, Henry Church.
[.]
Awards
It won the 1951
National Book Award for Poetry
The National Book Award for Poetry is one of five annual National Book Awards, which are given by the National Book Foundation to recognize outstanding literary work by US citizens. They are awards "by writers to writers". .
["National Book Awards – 1951"]
National Book Foundation
The National Book Foundation (NBF) is an American nonprofit organization established, "to raise the cultural appreciation of great writing in America". Established in 1989 by National Book Awards, Inc.,Edwin McDowell. "Book Notes: 'The Joy Luc ...
. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
(With acceptance speech by Stevens and essay by Katie Peterson from the Awards 60-year anniversary publication.)
Notes
References
* Beckett, Lucy. ''Wallace Stevens'' (Cambridge University Press, 1974).
External links
Review of ''The Auroras of Autumn'' in ''The New York Times''(September 10, 1950)
focusing on the poem The Auroras of Autumn (part of
Open Yale Courses
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).
1950 poetry books
American poetry collections
Poetry by Wallace Stevens
Alfred A. Knopf books
National Book Award for Poetry winning works
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