SEMINAR PROFILE

H16 -
Getting Real: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop

These three American Poets, among the greatest of the 20th century, rarely wrote love poems, but they all wrote many poems in which beauty, the imagination, or exalted states of consciousness unveil the real, and so invoke truths to guide thought and feeling. Neglecting the most popular topic of poems--romantic life--they all devoted their careers to another traditional role for the poet, the sage, the sounder of wisdom. And they all did so with as much wit as sobriety, as much tenderness as rigor. We will read selections from Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop's collection Geography III, and in the process see how these three New England poets revised the American inheritance of intellectual, emotional and spiritual questing left them by Whitman, Dickinson, and Robinson.

Scholar:

Theo Theoharis

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

12/3/2014, 12/12/2014, 12/19/2014

H16 -	Getting Real: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop

	These three American Poets, among the greatest of the 20th century, rarely wrote love poems, but they all wrote many poems in which beauty, the imagination, or exalted states of consciousness unveil the real, and so invoke truths to guide thought and feeling. Neglecting the most popular topic of poems--romantic life--they all devoted their careers to another traditional role for the poet, the sage, the sounder of wisdom. And they all did so with as much wit as sobriety, as much tenderness as rigor. We will read selections from Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop's collection Geography III, and in the process see how these three New England poets revised the American inheritance of intellectual, emotional and spiritual questing left them by Whitman, Dickinson, and Robinson.

		Scholar:	Theo Theoharis
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	12/3/2014, 12/12/2014, 12/19/2014