| The Auroras of Autumn | |
| Author: | Wallace Stevens |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Poetry |
| Publisher: | Alfred A. Knopf |
| Pub Date: | September 1950 |
| Media Type: | |
| Preceded By: | Transport to Summer |
| Followed By: | Collected Poems |
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.[1] The book collects 32 Stevens poems written between 1947 and 1950, and was his last collection before his 1954 Collected Poems.[2]
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.[4] 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."[5] 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:
Another notable poem in the book is "The Owl in the Sarcophagus", an elegy for Stevens' best friend, Henry Church.[6]
It won the 1951 National Book Award for Poetry.[7]