This poet describes the evening star as a “young emerald” whose light allows those who “know the ultimate Plato” to tranquilize the “torments of confusion.” For 10 points each:
[10h] Name this poet of “Homunculus et la Belle Étoile.” He calls Venus a “furious star” burning in “the high west” in a poem that states, “I wish that I might be a thinking stone.”
ANSWER: Wallace Stevens (The poem is “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle.”)
[10e] Stevens’s “Martial Cadenza,” a poem about this war, wonders what the evening star has to do with “the blank skies over England” and “the German camps” it lit. Randall Jarrell’s “Ball Turret Gunner” dies in this war.
ANSWER: World War II [or Second World War or WWII or World War 2]
[10m] A poem set in this state, where Stevens spent most of his life, says the evening star is “wholly an inner light.” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” describes a figure who “rode over” this state in a “glass coach.”
ANSWER: Connecticut [or CT] (The first poem is “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.”)
<American Literature>