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The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens

10 best books like The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens (Paul Mariani): Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, Collected Poems, 1943-2004, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, Pity the Beautiful: Poems, John Donne: The Reformed Soul, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, Young Eliot: A Biography

Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
AuthorLeo Damrosch
ISBN0300164998
Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became...
Collected Poems, 1943-2004
AuthorRichard Wilbur
ISBN0156030799
With a distinguished career spanning more than sixty years, Richard Wilbur stands as one of America's preeminent men of letters. Collected Poems 1943-2004 is the comprehensive collection of Wilbur's astonishing, timeless work. It will serve as the most referenced trove of this beloved poet's best...
T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life
AuthorLyndall Gordon
ISBN0393320936
In this "nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection" (The New Yorker), Gordon captures Eliot's "complex spiritual and artistic history . . . with tact, diligence, and subtlety" (Boston Globe). Drawing on recently discovered letters, she addresses in full...
Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography
AuthorStanley Plumly
ISBN0393065731
Posthumous Keats is the result of Stanley Plumly's twenty years of reflection on the enduring afterlife of one of England's greatest Romanticists. John Keats's famous epitaph—"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water"—helped cement his reputation as the archetype of the genius cut off before...
Pity the Beautiful: Poems
AuthorDana Gioia
ISBN1555976131
The long-awaited fourth collection by one of America's foremost poets

 

O Lord of indirection and ellipses,
ignore our prayers. Deliver us from distraction.
Slow our heartbeat to a cricket's call.
  --from “Prophecy”
 

Pity the Beautiful is...
John Donne: The Reformed Soul
AuthorJohn Stubbs
ISBN0393062600
Metamorphosing from scholar to buccaneer, from outcast to establishment figure, John Donne emerged as one of the greatest English poets, concentrating the paradoxes of his age within his own crises of desire and devotion. Following Donne from Plague-ridden streets to palaces, from the taverns...
Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet
AuthorChristian Wiman
ISBN1556592604
“Blazing high style” is how The New York Times describes the prose of Christian Wiman, the young editor who transformed Poetry, the country’s oldest literary magazine.Ambition and Survival is a collection of stirring personal essays and critical prose on a wide range of subjects: reading...
Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert
AuthorJohn Drury
ISBN1846142482
For the first time, John Drury convincingly integrates the life and poetry of George Herbert, giving us in Music at Midnight the definitive biography of the man behind some of the most famous poems in the English Language.

'Love bade me welcome . . .'

'Teach me my God and King . . .'


George...
Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame
AuthorBenita Eisler
ISBN0679740856
In this masterful portrait of the poet who dazzled an era and prefigured the modern age of celebrity, noted biographer Benita Eisler offers a fuller and more complex vision than we have yet been afforded of George Gordon, Lord Byron.

Eisler reexamines his poetic achievement in the context...
Young Eliot: A Biography
AuthorRobert Crawford
ISBN0374279446
A groundbreaking new biography of one of the twentieth century’s most important poets

On the fiftieth anniversary of the death of T. S. Eliot, Robert Crawford presents us with the first volume of a definitive biography of this poetic genius. Young Eliot traces the life of the twentieth century’s...
Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
AuthorMichael Gorra
ISBN0871404087
Henry James (1843 1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James 's masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady...
The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets
AuthorDavid Lehman
ISBN0385495331
A landmark work of cultural history that tells the story of how four young poets, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, reinvented literature and turned New York into the art capital of the world.

Greenwich Village, New York, circa 1951. Every night, at a rundown tavern...
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834
AuthorRichard Holmes
ISBN0375708383
Richard Holmes's Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, the long-awaited second volume, chronicles the last thirty years of his career (1804-1834), a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage foundered, his opium...
Turner: The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J. M. W. Turner
AuthorFranny Moyle
ISBN0670922692
The extraordinary life of J. M. W. Turner, one of Britain's most admired, misunderstood and celebrated artists J. M. W. Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life: the tragic committal of his...
Walt Whitman: A Life
AuthorJustin Kaplan
ISBN0060535113
“Whitman emerges from this biography alive and kicking—hugely human, enormously attractive.”  —Newsweek

A moving, penetrating, sharply focused portrait of America’s greatest poet—his genius, his passions, his androgynous sensibility—an exuberant life entwined...
Rimbaud: A Biography
AuthorGraham Robb
Unknown beyond the avant-garde at the time of his death, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) has been one of the most destructive and liberating influences on twentieth-century culture. During his lifetime he was a bourgeois-baiting visionary, and the list of his known crimes is longer than the list of his...
Domestic Work: Poems
AuthorNatasha Trethewey
ISBN1555973094
Winner of the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award

In this widely celebrated debut collection of poems, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken...
New Selected Poems
AuthorMark Strand
ISBN0307262979
More than twenty-five years after the appearance of his first Selected Poems, we at last have a magnificent new gathering of Mark Strand’s work, one that spans and celebrates his entire remarkable career to date. From Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964) through the wonderful middle work that includes...
Selected Poems
AuthorWallace Stevens
ISBN0375711732
Wallace Stevens' poetry is non-easy,
which likely is why to most readers,
even those of poetry, these poems
are regarded less highly than by more
academically inclined aficionados
of the art form, who are apt to rank
the man similarly to others such as
T.S. Eliot, Ezra...
Walt Whitman's America
AuthorDavid S. Reynolds
ISBN0679767096
In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural...
Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson
AuthorAdam Sisman
ISBN0142001759
James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson is the most celebrated of all biographies, acknowledged as one of the greatest and most entertaining books in the English language. Yet Boswell himself has generally been considered little more than an idiot and condemned by posterity as a lecher and drunk....
Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita
AuthorRobert Roper
ISBN0802743633
The author of the immortal Lolita and Pale Fire, born to an eminent Russian family, conjures the apotheosis of the high modernist artist: cultured, refined--as European as they come. But Vladimir Nabokov, who came to America fleeing the Nazis, came to think of his time here as the richest of his life....
Kafka: The Years of Insight
AuthorReiner Stach
ISBN0691147515
This volume of Reiner Stach's acclaimed and definitive biography of Franz Kafka tells the story of the final years of the writer's life, from 1916 to 1924 - a period during which the world Kafka had known came to an end. Stach's riveting narrative, which reflects the latest findings about Kafka's life...
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