Steel against intimation–the sharp flash, Where you yourself were not quite yourself, Of things that would never be quite expressed, The obscure moon lighting an obscure world ![]() The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, In the same way, you were happy in spring, The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves Now I’m going to read “The Motive for Metaphor,” a poem about the tensions between reality and imagination. Stevens’s poems often also focus on what reality is and how we separate or mix it with our image of the world, which is influenced and formed by our imagination. Another example is his poem, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” This could be called his ars poetica - a poem which talks about why we write poetry, how we do it, and what poetry really is. “The Motive for Metaphor” is only one of the many poems in which Stevens talks about writing poetry. He didn’t publish his first collection of poetry, “Harmonium,” until he was 43 years old! Wallace Stevens won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award for Poetry for his books “The Auroras of Autumn” and “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens,” the Frost Medal, and only after he died did he receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The two had a daughter named Holly Stevens. Some of his most well-known poems are the haunting, “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “The Snow Man,” and, one of my personal favorites, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” which is based off of Picasso’s painting, “The Old Guitarist.” Wallace Stevens went to Harvard and then the New York Law School, from which he graduated with a law degree. He was both a lawyer and an insurance executive, but above all, he was an amazing poet. Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania. Today, I’ll be reading “The Motive for Metaphor,” by Wallace Stevens, which is a poem about poetry itself. Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. 6 : "The Motive for Metaphor" by Wallace Stevens
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