The Auroras of Autumn is a 1950 book of poetry by Wallace Stevens. The book of poems contains the long poem of 10 cantos by Stevens of the same name. The book features a collection of poems containing also the 1948 Stevens long poem of the same name, whose title refers to the Aurora Borealis, or the "Northern Lights", in the fall. The book collects 32 Stevens poems written between 1947 and 1950, and was his last collection before his 1954 Collected Poems. The long poem in the book which is titled "The Auroras of Autumn" is a 240-line poem divided into ten cantos of 24 lines each. It is considered one of Stevens' more challenging and "difficult"[3] works, and a 20th-century example of the English Romantic tradition. According to critic Harold Bloom, it is Stevens' only major poem "in which he allows himself to enter in his proper person, as a kind of dramatic figure." On this reading, the poem comes to an early climax at the end of canto VI, where Stevens describes a tension between his own imagination and a disintegrative and elusive reality, his subject: This is nothing until in a single man contained, Nothing until this named thing nameless is And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house On flames. The scholar of one candle sees An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame Of everything he is. And he feels afraid. Another notable poem in the book is The Owl in the Sarcophagus, an elegy for Stevens' best friend, Henry Church. It won the 1951 National Book Award for Poetry.
Author
Wallace Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine) was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius. Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel; after a long courtship, he married her in 1909. In 1913, the young couple rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems. After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he was hired on January 13, 1908 as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company. By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain for the rest of his life.
