Monday, July 25, 2016

The correctness of romantic effusions …

… First Known When Lost: River.

I am one of those who believes that Stevens wrote his most moving, most human (and his best) poetry in the last five years of his life, between the publication of The Auroras of Autumn in September of 1950 and his death on August 2, 1955, at the age of 74. … Mind you, Stevens's essential theme never changed from beginning to end: the belief that the back-and-forth between the Imagination and Reality is the central element of what it means to be human.
I am inclined to agree, though I think that back-and-forth had to do with faith, the search for it and, ultimately, the experience of it.

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