Il mondo come meditazione. Ultime poesie 1950-1955

by Wallace Stevens, Massimo Bacigalupo (Editor)

In questo volume sono raccolte tutte le poesie che Wallace Stevens ha scritto negli ultimi sei anni di vita. Si tratta, probabilmente, del punto più alto raggiunto nella sua vicenda intellettuale e stilistica da uno dei maestri della poesia americana. Stevens è capace - come forse nessun altro nel Novecento - di conciliare densità e trasparenza, di cogliere l'essenza delle cose dietro e attraverso la loro vivida varietà e concretezza. In questi versi, come scrive Massimo Bacigalupo nella sua introduzione, "egli tocca dei punti nevralgici della nostra esistenza (...) Come in altre opere di poesia a suo modo pura, ad esempio nei sonetti di Shakespeare, il mondo diventa retorica ma poi la retorica della lingua più rigogliosa esemplificata torna a toccare il mondo. L'originalità e la potenza e l'umiltà artigianale di Stevens non sono seconde a nessun poeta della tradizione che egli rinnovò facendone tabula rasa".

Genres: Poetry

244 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Wallace Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine) was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius.

Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel; after a long courtship, he married her in 1909. In 1913, the young couple rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie.
A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.

After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he was hired on January 13, 1908 as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company. By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

Reviews

[sumerkidestate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meditazioni paesaggistiche sulla poesia.
(la quinta stellina la tolgo a me stessa per averlo trovato meraviglioso ma nel complesso troppo difficile)

July Mountain

We live in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches,
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano, and in speech,
As in a page of poetry-
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos,
The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together.


Montagna a luglio

Viviamo in una costellazione
Di chiazze e schizzi,
Non in un mondo unico,
In cose dette bene in musica,
Al pianoforte e con parole,
Come in una pagina di poesia:
Pensatori senza pensieri conclusivi
In un cosmo sempre incipiente,
Così come, quando scaliamo un monte,
Il Vermont si combina d'improvviso.

[Alessandro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incomprensibile, ma ha un che di intimamente straziante.

[Simone Subliminalpop · Rating 5 out of 5]

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