Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a richly imaginative life that he expressed in his poems. The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times and as the creator of a poetry that continues to shape how we understand and define ourselves. A lawyer who rose to become an insurance-company vice president, Stevens composed brilliant poems on long walks to work and at other stolen moments. His first book of poems, Harmonium, published when he was forty-four, drew on his profound understanding of Modernism to create a distinctive and inimitable American idiom. Over time he became acquainted with peers such as Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, but his personal style remained unique. The complexity of Stevens's poetry rests on emotional, philosophical, and linguistic tensions that thread their way intricately through his poems. And while he can be challenging to understand, Stevens has proven time and again to be one of the most richly rewarding poets to read.

Description: In Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected and Revised Poems, Paul Mariani revisits forty years of writing poems, including revising many of his earlier lyrics, to shape his latest volume into a life lived and lived again over the past seven decades. The eight sections--or cantos--each composed of twelve poems, cover roughly a decade apiece and contour Mariani's search for answers to the constant interplay of the felt presence of the Mystery we call God as it plays with the modern imagination. Mariani's background is Catholic and broadly classic, and warmly embraces all aspects of Christianity and Judaism and the world even beyond those. The Poiema Poetry Series Poems are windows into worlds; windows into beauty, goodness, and truth; windows into understandings that won't twist themselves into tidy dogmatic statements; windows into experiences. We can do more than merely peer into such windows; with a little effort we can fling open the casements, and leap over the sills into the heart of these worlds. We are also led into familiar places of hurt, confusion, and disappointment, but we arrive in the poet's company. Poetry is a partnership between poet and reader, seeking together to gain something of value--to get at something important. Ephesians 2:10 says, ""We are God's workmanship . . ."" poiema in Greek--the thing that has been made, the masterpiece, the poem. The Poiema Poetry Series presents the work of gifted poets who take Christian faith seriously, and demonstrate in whose image we have been made through their creativity and craftsmanship. These poets are recent participants in the ancient tradition of David, Asaph, Isaiah, and John the Revelator. The thread can be followed through the centuries--through the diverse poetic visions of Dante, Bernard of Clairvaux, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Hopkins, Eliot, R.S. Thomas, and Denise Levertov--down to the poet whose work is in your hand. With the selection of this volume you are entering this enduring tradition, and as a reader contributing to it. --D.S. Martin, Series Editor About the Contributor(s): Paul Mariani is the author of seven collections of poetry as well as several biographies and works of prose, including Deaths and Transfigurations: Poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, and God and the Imagination: On Poets, Poetry, and the Ineffable. Of his many honors, Mariani has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

From the day Paul Mariani arrives at Eastern Point Retreat House to take part in the five-hundred-year-old Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, he realizes that his expectations and assumptions about who he is, what he knows, and what he believes are about to change radically. In this profound memoir Mariani blends a brief life of St. Ignatius and meditations on the life of Jesus with the day-to-day unfolding of thirty days of silence at the retreat house. His journey of introspection, self-revelation, and spiritual renewal leads him to a new understanding of his relationship with God and of what it truly means to put others before oneself.

Here, in his fifth book, Paul Mariani uses the trope of the wheel to chart the kinds of losses we all face in living: deaths and separations, lost loves, lost friends, lost happiness. The wheel of fortune, a ferris wheel ridden with a friend now dead, Dante's paradisal wheel, the wheel of the morning sun, by turns call up Hart Crane and Wilfrid Owen, Stevens and Williams, Whitman and Hopkins.

"Thorough and just. . . . Quietly, surely in touch with itsdistinguished subject."—Richard Wilbur

Robert Lowell's poetry radically altered the American literarylandscape, combining as it did family drama and an apocalyptic view of the history of our times. He won three Pulitzer Prizesand two National Book Awards for poetry. Married three times,always to writers, he had his dark side, suffering from cripplingbouts of manic depression and alcoholism.

Using hundreds of Lowell's unpublished manuscripts and letters,and dozens of interviews, Paul Mariani has given us a balanced,passionate, and readable life, capturing the man, his age, andhis place in literary history.

"[Mariani's] vigorous narrative style sparkles with rich details. . . . These pages bring out the sheer interestingness of Lowell's mindas it is encountered in letters, prose reflections, and in a lifetimes of poems."—William Pritchard

Paul Mariani has spent fifty years writing poetry that celebrates the vibrant sacramentality of life in the twilight of Modernity, and writing the lives of some of our greatest modern poets. This is a life-spanning collection of his prose explorations of what it means to be a person of wonder and imagination.