Public Domain Poems of Wallace Stevens: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Public Domain Poems of Wallace Stevens, credited to Wallace Stevens, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Complete Public Domain Poems of Wallace Stevens, Volume 1 of 2. Read by Alan Davis-Drake (1945 - 2010). A collection of Wallace Stevens poems written before 1923. Stevens trained to be a lawyer. Within eleven years after this series of poems were written, he was vice-president at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut. He continued to pursue a quiet life of poetry and correspondence and for the remainder of his life he nurtured his contemplative habit of observation and writing as he walked from home to work and back again. Few at Hartford knew of his world acclaim as a poet. While his major work is considered to have been written when he was much older, many of these early poems are firm classics in the American poetic canon, including: “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and many others. Stevens died of cancer in 1955, shortly after receiving that year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry. These poems originally appeared in a variety of magazines (Others, Secession, Rogue, The Soil, The Modern School, Broom, Contact, The New Republic, The Measure, The Little Review, The Dial, and particularly in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.) Nearly 70 of the 101 published poems were later collected in Stevens' first published collection of poems, HARMONIUM. (Summary by Alan Davis Drake)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Public Domain Poems of Wallace Stevens
• Author credits: Wallace Stevens
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 54
• Listed recording duration: 1:07:39

Catalogue topics

• poetry
• Alan Davis Drake
• Pulitzer Prize

Opening tracks: first 24 of 54

1. Anecdote of Canna — 1:00
2. Anecdote of Men by the Thousand — 1:18
3. Anecdote of the Jar — 1:05
4. Another Weeping Woman — 1:06
5. The Apostrophe to Vincentine — 1:42
6. Autumn — 0:52
7. Banal Sojourn — 1:32
8. Bantam in Pine-Woods — 1:20
9. The Bird with the Coppery Keen Claws — 1:36
10. Bowl — 0:54
11. Carnet de Voyage — 4:11
12. Cortege for Rosenbloom — 1:52
13. The Cuban Doctor — 0:52
14. The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician — 1:02
15. Depression Before Spring — 0:52
16. Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock — 1:02
17. Domination of Black — 1:33
18. Earthly Anecdote — 1:08
19. The Emperor of Ice Cream — 1:25
20. Explanation — 0:49
21. Exposition of the Contents of a Cab — 1:08
22. The Florist Wears Knee-Breeches — 1:01
23. Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs — 1:32
24. From a Junk — 0:51

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.