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Lot 168

STEVENS (WALLACE)

22 November 2011, 10:30 GMT
London, New Bond Street

£300 - £4,000

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STEVENS (WALLACE)

Typed letter signed, to Henry Leffert, Professor of English at the City College of New York, announcing that the title of his paper will be 'A Collect of Philosophy' ("...I note your directions and shall turn up at the time and place appointed..."); with original envelope, one page, headed paper, very slight splitting at folds, 4to, Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, Hartford, Connecticut, 19 November 1951

Footnotes

WALLACE STEVENS LECTURES ON POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY: 'A Collect of Philosophy' was given as the William Vaughan Moody Lecture at the University of Chicago that month. Having been rejected by Paul Weiss for The Review of Metaphysics, it was published in Opus Posthumous, edited by Samuel French (1957), and in the Library of America edition of Collected Poetry and Prose (1997). It has become something of a locus classicus for students of Stevens's work, and opens: 'It is often the case that the concepts of philosophy are poetic. I thought, therefore, that you might like to consider the poetic nature of at least a few philosophic ideas. I have in mind ideas that are inherently poetic, as, for example, the concept of the infinity of the world. But when I wrote to Jean Wahl, who is both a poet and a philosopher, about ideas that are inherently poetic, he said immediately that no ideas are inherently poetic, that the poetic nature of any idea depends on the mind through which it passes'.

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