You sit back now just relax now lyrics
This poem from another of America’s greatest modernist poets looks to the stars for its subject – and, specifically, the constellations. William Carlos Williams, ‘ Peace on Earth’. Subjective personal experience appears objectively real.Ĩ. Of course, seems is the key word, but Stevens doesn’t use it: for him, or for the book-reader in the poem, the world was calm. The house in which this solitary reader reads their book is quiet, and the whole world seems calm. ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’ is a lyric poem reflecting on an experience that will be familiar to many readers of poetry (and readers of this blog): reading late into the night. It’s also about how the act of reading, the quiet of the house, and the solitariness of the house-dweller intersect. This poem is about the intersection of different sensory experience, and how their combination creates a particular mood or moment. Stevens is one of the great American modernist poets of the twentieth century. Wallace Stevens, ‘ The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’. Philip Larkin was an admirer, praising her ‘steely stoicism’.ħ. She went on to influence a range of later poets, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ford Madox Ford, and Elizabeth Jennings. Goblin Market and Other Poems was the first collection of her poetry to be published, and it was the book that brought her to public attention. It ran simply: ‘Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator.’ She composed her first poem while still a very young girl she dictated it to her mother. She was the younger sister (by two years) of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. For night has come and the great calm has ceased,Īnother poem about the pleasant calm of the late evening as the day ends, giving way to night.Ĭhristina Rossetti (1830-94) was one of the Victorian era’s greatest and most influential poets.