Wallace Stevens and the Seasons

A fruitful pairing of literary and biographical interpretation, Wallace Stevens and the Seasons follows Stevens's poetry through the lens of its dominant metaphor—the seasons of nature—and illuminates the poet's personal life experiences reflected there. From Stevens's first collection, Harmonium (1923), to his last poems written shortly before his death in 1955, George S. Lensing offers clear and detailed examination of his seasonal poetry, including extensive discussions of "Autumn Refrain," "The Snow Man," "The World as Meditation," and "Credences of Summer." Drawing upon a vast knowledge of Stevens, Lensing argues that his pastoral poetry of the seasons assuaged a profound and persistent personal loneliness. An important scholarly assessment of a major twentieth-century modernist, Wallace Stevens and the Seasons also serves as an appealing introduction to Stevens for the general reader.