Through the poetry of Wallace Stevens has been studied from a variety of critical perspectives, most critics share the view that Stevens is a secular poet who refuses religious definitions of man and nature. His major subject, it is thought, is poetry, which in its broadest sense stands as synecdoche for the possibilities that inhere in the mind engaged in creating itself even as it creates its art. This study confirms that Stevens's major concern is indeed poetry, but it proposes that when Steven speaks of the peerless poem qualified by such epithets as "grand" or "central" or "ultimate" or "supreme," he is not referring to the objective artifact with which we commonly associate the term but is rather outlining the contours of the Hermetic transcendental Man encountered in the course of spiritual meditation. Accordingly, art, in Steven's view, is a secondary or "lesser" form eventually superseded by the soul metamorphosed into an image of deity - what Stevens called "pure poetry" or the "ultimate poem." Woodman traces the appearance of the Heavenly Man of spiritual alchemy in "Owl's Clover," Steven's longest poem, and in the figure of the hero, a major motif in Stevens's work from the thirties on. She then considers the alchemical tradition to clarify the uses Steven made of its symbolic system. Succeeding chapters consider the relation of the Hermetic Man to the "supreme fiction"; the spiritual reciprocity between imagination and reality - variations of the Hermetic doctrine of correspondence; the decreation and recreation of self and nature that constitute the metamorphic stages of Hermetic meditation; and the Hermetic theory of transcendental perception that lies at the core of Steven's account of human transformation. The final chapter turns to Steven's native Pennsylvania to suggest the means by which he may have encountered the Rosicrucian tradition (the corporate form of modern Hermetism) that appears to have profoundly influenced his creative life.

This title presents a record of the Cultural Olympiad sponsored project headed by Simon Armitage to carve specially commissioned poems into rocks in the landscape surrounding the Pennine Way. The book is filled with pictures accompanying the poems and accounts of the project.

This fruitful pairing of literary and biographical interpretation follows Wallace Stevens’s poetry through the lens of its dominant metaphor—the seasons of nature—and illuminates the poet’s personal life experiences reflected there. From Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium (1923), to his last poems written shortly before his death in 1955, George S. Lensing offers clear and detailed examination of Stevens’s seasonal poetry, including extensive discussions of “Autumn Refrain,” “The Snow Man,” “The World as Meditation,” and “Credences of Summer.” Drawing upon a vast knowledge of the poet, Lensing argues that Stevens’s pastoral poetry of the seasons assuaged a profound and persistent personal loneliness. An important scholarly assessment of a major twentieth-century modernist, Wallace Stevens and the Seasons also serves as an appealing introduction to Stevens.

Through mystery, literature reveals to us the Great Unknown. While we are absorbed by the matters at hand with the present enactment of our life, groping for clues to handle them, it is through literature that we discover the hidden strings underlying their networks. Hence our fascination with literature. But there is more. The creative act of the human being, its proper focus, holds the key to the Sezam of life: to the great metaphysical/ontopoietic questions which literature may disclose. First, it leads us to the sublimal grounds of transformation in the human soul, source of the specifically human significance of life (Analecta Husserliana, Volume III, XIX, XXIII, XXVII) Second, it leads us to the unveiling of the hidden workings of life in the twilight of knowing in a dialectic between The Visible and the Invisible, (Volume LXXV, 2002, Analecta Husserliana) down to the ontopoietic truth. (Volume LXXVI, 2002, Analecta Husserliana) This prying into the unknown which provokes the human being as he or she attempts to conquer, step by step, a space of existence, finds its culmination in the phenomenon of mystery as the subject of the present collection. Its formulation brings us to the greatest question of all: the enigmatic solidarity -in-distinctiveness of human cognition and existence. Papers are written by: Tony E. Afejuku, Gary Backhaus, Paul G. Beidler, Matthew J. Duffy, Raffaela Giovagnoli, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Matti Itkonen, Lawrence Kimmel, Catherine Malloy, Vladimir L. Marchenkov, Nancy Mardas, Howard Pearce, Bernadette Prochaska, Victor Gerald Rivas, M.J. Sahlani, Dennis Skocz, Jadwiga S. Smith, Mara Stafecka, Max Statkiewicz, Mariola Sulkowska, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Leon U. Weinman, Tim Weiss.

In this important new intervention, leading poet and critic John Wilkinson explores the material life of the lyric poem. How does the lyric – considered as an object, as an event – grapple with permanence and impermanence, the rhythms of change and the passing of time? Drawing on new insights from contemporary philosophy and object-oriented ontology, psychoanalysis and the visual arts, The Lyric in Its Times includes innovative and insightful new readings of work by a wide range of lyric poets, from Shakespeare, Blake and Shelley to Charles Baudelaire, Frank O'Hara and J.H. Prynne.

*A Fusion of Horizons* Unrolled Stone proposes to do nothing less than treat the Rolling Stones for the first time ever as a genuine cultural phenomenon worthy of what might be called ‘philosophical’ attention. The fundamental significance of this analysis acquires its incisive shape on the scaffolding of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Even though the focal point of the existential analytic employed focuses around the late Brian Jones, still the book is designed to situate the truth-claim of the Rolling Stones within the broader horizon of a universal radical uprootedness which constitutes the necessary point of departure for any serious reflection concerning the very meaning of existence in today’s belongingless historical epoch.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.