Invective against Swans

"Invective Against Swans" from Wallace Stevens' Harmonium seems to be an insult poem slamming swans, of all things, calling them ganders and saying that the chilly chariots of their bodies aren't suited to the heroic high flying that the soul undertakes. David Herd plausibly locates the insult at a more abstract level. "One of the tasks Modernist poets set themselves, probably the chief task," he writes, "was to resuscitate the all but clapped-... more

Author:

Publishing

Author

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for an insurance company in Connecticut. His best-known poems include "Anecdote...
top ↑

We can also tell you Invective against Swans is a…

If you know more about Invective against Swans, you can add more facts here »

Similar topics in Freebase

  • Doctor of Geneva

    "The Doctor of Geneva" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). The poem was first published in 1921, so it is free of copyright. The doctor of Geneva, perhaps a doctor like John Calvin used to plumbing the depths of religious doctrine, is shaken by his encounter...
  • The Plot Against the Giant

    "The Plot Against the Giant" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1917, so it is in the public domain. Stevens was called "the Giant" in his Harvard days, and he confessed in an interview a year before his death that "[i]n my younger days I...
  • In the Carolinas

    "In the Carolinas", the third poem in Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium, experiments with a dramatic shift from languid meditation to a startling image of an aspic nipple, the aspish nipple of mother nature, and joltingly italicized first-person expressions of subjective response.
  • Another Weeping Woman

    "Another Weeping Woman" is a poem in Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. This poem tells of a woman who is grieving for someone who has died. The triumvirate of imagination, world, and reality is at work. Reality then has its special Stevensian meaning as the world's "being", its...
  • Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges

    Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierge is a poem in Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1915 in the magazine Rogue, so it is in the public domain. Butell characterizes it as one of the first two poems (the other is "Tea") to ...
  • Peter Quince at the Clavier

    "Peter Quince at the Clavier" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. The poem was first published in 1915 in the "little magazine" Others: A Magazine of the New Verse (New York), edited by Alfred Kreymborg. It is a "musical" allusion to the Biblical story of Susanna, a...
  • The Ordinary Women

    The Ordinary Women is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. Opinion is divided about whether the poem expresses Stevens' distaste for romanticism in art, a "mordant satire...of all the things that other poems hold sacred"; or whether the poem is about "the refreshment that...
  • The Snow Man

    "The Snow Man" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1921 and is in the public domain. John Serio reports that Jay Keyser, in a broadcast on National Public Radio, declared "The Snow Man" to be "the best short poem in the English language bar...
  • Ploughing on Sunday

    Ploughing on Sunday is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1919 and is therefore in the public domain. Interpretations of this poem have been both strictly metaphorical and philosophical. At one extreme is the suggestion that the poem is...
  • Infanta Marina

    Infanta Marina is a poem in Wallace Stevens' Harmonium about a seaside princess. Helen Vendler (in Words Chosen Out Of Desire) presents the poem as a "double scherzo" on 'her' in the possessive sense and on 'of' in its partitive and possessive sense. of the motions of her wrist of her thought of...

You can help improve this topic by adding more facts here

Edit this topic
Edit and Show details

Add or delete facts, download data in JSON or RDF formats, and explore topic metadata.

Freebase Logo
What is Freebase?

Freebase is a huge collection of facts, built by people like you. Freebase connects facts in ways other sites can't, giving you new ways to explore millions of subjects.
You can help improve it!

Freebase Attribution

Freebase data is free for use under the CC-BY license.

The original description for Invective against Swans was automatically generated from Wikipedia.org licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
[1]
Learn more about Freebase licensing and attribution