How to Live, What to Do is an indispensable introduction to and
guide through the work of a poet equal in power and sensibility to
Shakespeare and Milton. Like them, Stevens shaped a new language,
fashioning an instrument adequate to describing a completely
changed environment of fact, extending perception through his poems
to align what Emerson called our "axis of vision" with the universe
as it came to be understood during his lifetime, 1879-1955, a span
shared with Albert Einstein. Projecting his own imagination into
spacetime as "a priest of the invisible," persistently cultivating
his cosmic consciousness through reading, keeping abreast of the
latest discoveries of Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Louis de
Broglie, and others, Stevens pushed the boundaries of language into
the exotic territories of relativity and quantum mechanics while at
the same time honoring the continuing human need for belief in some
larger order. His work records how to live, what to do in this
strange new world of experience, seeing what was always seen but
never seen before. Joan Richardson, author of the standard
two-volume critical biography of Stevens and coeditor with Frank
Kermode of the Library of America edition of the Collected Poetry
and Prose, offers concise, lucid captures of Stevens's development
and achievement. Over the ten years of researching her Stevens
biography, Richardson read all that he read, as well as his
complete correspondence, journals, and notebooks. She weaves the
details drawn from this deep involvement into the background of
American cultural history of the period. This fabric is further
enlivened by her preparation in philosophy and the sciences,
creating in these thirteen panels a contemporary version of a
medieval tapestry sequence, with Stevens in the place of the
unicorn, as it were, holding our attention and eliciting, as
necessary angel, individual solutions to the riddles of our
existence on this planet spinning and hissing around its cooling
star at 18.5 miles per second.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
