Audiobook · read by volunteers
Collected Public Domain Poems of Wallace Stevens, Volume 1
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
Read by Alan Davis Drake (1945-2010) · 54 chapters · 1 h 07
About the book
Wallace Stevens trained as a lawyer, spent his career in insurance and wrote some of the most original American poetry of the twentieth century. This first volume gathers poems from before 1923, the years in which he was finding his voice. Here are small, startling pieces such as the Anecdote of the Jar, the Anecdote of Canna and the Anecdote of Men by the Thousand, in which an everyday object or scene becomes a window onto large questions about imagination and reality. The language is playful, musical and strange. Alan Davis Drake reads all fifty-four poems in about an hour, a compact introduction to a poet who rewards close attention and repeated listening. Wry and unpredictable, these poems are meant to be savoured one at a time.
Introduction
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was an American poet who spent most of his working life at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut, where he eventually became a vice-president. He led a quiet life, pursuing poetry and correspondence in the hours outside the office, and he did not publish his first collection, Harmonium, until 1923, when he was in his forties. Later he received the Pulitzer Prize for his collected poems.
The poems in this volume were written before 1923 and belong to the period when Stevens was working out his central subjects: the relationship between the mind and the world, the power of imagination to shape experience and the pleasures of language for its own sake. Many of them are short and enigmatic, and they combine comic touches with real philosophical depth. Their titles are often as intriguing as the poems themselves.
This recording contains fifty-four poems, each in its own section, and lasts about an hour. It is read by a single LibriVox volunteer, Alan Davis Drake. The collection is a good place to begin with Stevens, because the pieces are brief and varied, and you can listen to a few at a time or all at once. Poetry lovers will find a modern master at his most inventive, and newcomers will discover that difficult poems can also be a great deal of fun. Hearing them read aloud is a good way to catch their humour and their sound.
Public domain
Wallace Stevens died in 1955: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text