![]() The form is sometimes referred to as verse drama, but Stevens reworked it a bit after his win “to have the play a play and not merely a poem” (Murphy 132).Īs a playwright in the UNO graduate MFA program, I find this quite intriguing, although not a total surprise. For example, the line breaks would not be such in the dialogue for the usual play format. Maureen Kravec noted, the play evinces “the early modernist fascination with chinoiserie.” (Kravec 310) The layout of the play on the page is interesting, in that it presents an amalgamated version of a play and a poem. This was a direct result of Stevens’ brush with Tao, The Way, or The Path, that which encourages the artist to develop a “wide and keen observation, eventually to find in enrichment of the spirit, the secret of the rhythm of nature.” (Sze 18) His first national recognition as a poet was winning Poetry magazine’s 1916 contest, and a $100 for his play, “Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise,” a story woven around three Chinamen fixing tea in the Pennsylvania woods (Murphy 132). WALLACE STEVENS took to heart Kakuzo Okakura’s question, “When will the West understand, or try to understand, the East?” Okakura’s 1906 treatise on the Chan Buddhist and/or Zen infused tea ceremony, “The Book of Tea,” fell into Stevens’ hands by way of his Harvard acquaintances, Walter Bynner and Arther D.
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