Offers authoritative readings of the major long poems and sequences, exploring their relationship to one another and to the works of Stevens' precursors.

In recent years Nietzsche has emerged as a presiding genius of our intellectual epoch. Although scholars have noted the influence of Nietzsche's thought on Wallace Stevens, the publication of Early Stevens establishes, for the first time, the extent to which Nietzsche pervades Steven's early work. Concentrating on poems published between 1915 and 1935--but moving occasionally into later poems, as well as letters and essays--B.J. Leggett draws together texts of Stevens and Nietzsche to produce new and surprising readings of the poet's early work. For instance, "Peter Quince at the Clavier" is read in the light of Nietzsche's discussion of Apollonian and Dionysian art in The Birth of Tragedy; Stevens' early poems on religion, including principally "Sunday Morning," are seen through the perspective of Nietzsche's doctrines of the transvaluation of values, genealogy, and the innocence of becoming; Stevens' notions of femininity, virility, and poetry are examined in relation to Nietzsche's texts on gender and creativity. This intertextual critique reveals previously undisclosed ideologies operating at the margins of Stevens' work, enabling Leggett to read aspects of the poetry that have until now been unreadable. Early Stevens also considers such issues as Stevens' perspectivism, his aphoristic style, the Nietzschean epistemology of his poems of order, and the implications of notions of art, untruth, fiction, and interpretation in both Stevens and Nietzsche. Though many critics have discussed the concept of intertextuality, few have attempted a truly intertextual reading of a particular poet. Early Stevens is an exemplary model of such a reading, marking a significant advance in both the form and substance of our understanding of this quintessential modern poet.

Demonstrates that Wallace Stevens's experimentation with sound is not only essential to his poetics but also profoundly linked to the pragmatist ideas that informed his way of thinking about language.

The conversation presented to the reader in the following pages is a condensed, reordered, and partly rewritten transcript of a series of tape-recorded interviews between Elliott Carter and myself that took place at intervals over the period from 1968-1970. - Foreword.

Elliott Carter (1908-2012) was the foremost composer of classical music in America during the second half of the 20th century. Over the course of a career that spanned seven decades, he consistently produced works that critics hailed as creatively daring, intellectually demanding, and emotionally complex. Distancing himself from the various "schools" and movements that grew and waned in popularity during the postwar era, Carter cultivated a deeply personal musical style that he developed and refined up until the very end of his life. This book of the composer springs from author David Schiff's life-long interest in Elliott Carter's music and his close personal connection with the composer which spanned over forty years. This critical overview of Carter's life and work explores aspects of the composer's life about which he was usually reticent--and occasionally misleading--such as his complicated relationships with Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Nicolas Nabokov, and his own parents. Schiff's study of Carter's complete oeuvre--from his politically charged Depression-era ballets to the deeply personal and reflective late works--is based on extensive study of the composer's personal sketches and letters. Featuring an in-depth look at the legacy project of Carter's final decade, seven settings of American modernist poetry by E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, this newest addition to the Master Musicians Series paints with a fine brush the story of America's foremost composer of the second half of the twentieth century.

Green Thoughts, Green Shades is a strikingly original book, the first and only of its kind. Edited and introduced by noted seventeenth-century scholar Jonathan Post, it enlists the analytic and verbal power of some of today's most celebrated poets to illuminate from the inside out a number of the greatest lyric poets writing in English during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Written by people who spend much of their time thinking in verse and about verse, these original essays herald the return of the early modern lyric as crucial to understanding the present moment of poetry in the United States. This work provides fascinating insights into what today's poets find of special interest in their forebears. In addition, these discussions shed light on the contributors' own poetry and offer compelling clues to how the poetry of the past continues to inform that of the present.

This collection of essays offers a historical reappraisal of what musical modernism was, and what its potential for the present and future could be. It thus moves away from the binary oppositions that have beset twentieth-century music studies in the past, such as those between modernism and postmodernism, between conceptions of musical autonomy and of cultural contingency and between formalist-analytical and cultural-historical approaches. Focussing particularly on music from the 1970s to the 1990s, the volume assembles approaches from different perspectives to new music with a particular emphasis on a critical reassessment of the meaning and function of the legacy of musical modernism. The authors include scholars, musicologists and composers who combine culturally, socially, historically and aesthetically oriented approaches with analytical methods in imaginative ways.

This book boldly ventures to cross some traditional academic boundaries, offering an original, philosophically informed argument regarding the nature of language by reading and interpreting the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. So it is a work both in literary criticism and in philosophy. The approach is strongly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language and Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory, but the philosophical thought of other philosophers—notably Plato, Kant, Hegel, Emerson, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein—figures significantly in the reading and interpretation. The essence of the argument is that, despite its damaged condition (standardization, commodification, staleness), language is, as such, by virtue of its very existence, the bearer of a utopian or messianic promise of happiness. Moreover, it is argued that, by reconciling the two senses of sense (sensuous sense and intelligible sense), showing the sheer power of words to create fictional worlds and destroy what they have just created, and redeeming the revelatory power of words—above all, the power to turn the familiar into something no longer familiar, something astonishing or perplexing—the two writers in this study sustain our hope for a world of reconciled antagonisms and contradictions, evoking in the way they freely play with the sounds and meanings of words, some intimations of a world—our world here, this very world, not some heavenly world—in which the promise of happiness would be fulfilled and redeemed. In the first part of the book, reflecting on the poetry of Stevens, Kleinberg-Levin argues that the poet defies the correspondence theory of truth to enable words to be faithful to truth as transformative and revelatory—what Heidegger calls “unconcealment”, translating the Greek. He also argues that in the pleasure we get from the sensuous play of words, there is an anticipation of the promise of happiness that challenges the theological doctrine of an otherworldly happiness and makes the religious experience seem like a paltry substitute. In the second part of the book, Kleinberg-Levin shows how Nabokov inherits Mallarmé’s conception of literature, causing with his word-plays the sudden reduction of the fictional world he has just so compellingly created to its necessary conditions of materiality: white paper, ink, print on the page. We thus see the novel as a work of fiction, as mere semblance; we see its conditions of possibility, created and destroyed before our very eyes. But the pleasure in seeing words doing this, and the pleasure in their sensuous materiality, are intimations of the promise of happiness that language bears. Using a Kantian definition of modernism, according to which a work is modernist if it reveals and questions the inherited assumptions about its necessary conditions of possibility, these studies show how and why both Stevens and Nabokov are exemplars of literary modernism.

Michael Steinberg's 1996 volume The Symphony: A Reader's Guide received glowing reviews across America. It was hailed as "wonderfully clear...recommended warmly to music lovers on all levels" (Washington Post), "informed and thoughtful" (Chicago Tribune), and "composed by a master stylist" (San Francisco Chronicle). Seiji Ozawa wrote that "his beautiful and effortless prose speaks from the heart." Michael Tilson Thomas called The Symphony "an essential book for any concertgoer." Now comes the companion volume--The Concerto: A Listener's Guide. In this marvelous book, Steinberg discusses over 120 works, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach in the 1720s to John Adams in 1994. Readers will find here the heart of the standard repertory, among them Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, eighteen of Mozart's piano concertos, all the concertos of Beethoven and Brahms, and major works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Bruch, Dvora'k, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Elgar, Sibelius, Strauss, and Rachmaninoff. The book also provides luminous introductions to the achievement of twentieth-century masters such as Arnold Schoenberg, Be'la Barto'k, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev, Aaron Copland, and Elliott Carter. Steinberg examines the work of these musical giants with unflagging enthusiasm and bright style. He is a master of capturing the expressive, dramatic, and emotional values of the music and of conveying the historical and personal context in which these wondrous works were composed. His writing blends impeccable scholarship, deeply felt love of music, and entertaining whimsy. Here then is a superb journey through one of music's richest and most diverse forms, with Michael Steinberg along as host, guide, and the best of companions.