Background
Susan Stewart was born on March 15, 1952 in York, York Country, Pennsylvania, United States.
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, United States
In 1973 Susan Stewart received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Dickinson College.
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
In 1975 Susan Stewart obtained a master of Arts degree in poetry from the Johns Hopkins University.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
In 1978 Susan Stewart gained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania.
(Examining palindromes, children's rhymes, puns, anagrams,...)
Examining palindromes, children's rhymes, puns, anagrams, code languages, and other texts, Susan Stewart explores the labyrinthine relationships between common sense and nonsense ― and presents an original contribution to the fields of folklore, literary theory, anthropology, and sociology by analyzing nonsense within an expansive context of the social manufacture of order and disorder.
https://www.amazon.com/Nonsense-Aspects-Intertextuality-Folklore-Literature/dp/0801839815/?tag=2022091-20
1979
(Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb wed...)
Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and nostalgia: this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing, a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of the world. This highly original book draws on insights from semiotics and from psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist criticism. Addressing the relations of language to experience, the body to scale, and narratives to objects, Susan Stewart looks at the "miniature" as a metaphor for interiority and at the "gigantic" as an exaggeration of aspects of the exterior. In the final part of her essay Stewart examines the ways in which the "souvenir" and the "collection" are objects mediating experience in time and space.
https://www.amazon.com/Longing-Narratives-Miniature-Gigantic-Collection/dp/0822313669/?tag=2022091-20
1984
(From the origins of modern copyright in early eighteenth-...)
From the origins of modern copyright in early eighteenth-century culture to the efforts to represent nature and death in postmodern fiction, this book explores a series of problems regarding the containment of representation. Stewart focuses on specific cases of "crimes of writing"—the forgeries of George Psalmanazar; the production of "fakelore"; the "ballad scandals" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the imposture of Thomas Chatterton; and contemporary legislation regarding graffiti and pornography. She emphasizes the issues that arise once language is seen as a matter of property, and authorship is viewed as a matter of originality. Finally, Stewart demonstrates that crimes of writing are delineated by the law because they specifically undermine the status of the law itself: the crimes illuminate the irreducible fact that law is written and therefore subject to temporality and interpretation.
https://www.amazon.com/Crimes-Writing-Problems-Containment-Representation/dp/0822315459/?tag=2022091-20
1991
(Susan Stewart plumbs human history in an attempt to artic...)
Susan Stewart plumbs human history in an attempt to articulate the way language, memory, and art join in evoking consciousness. The Forest is about violence and memory: the violence we do to our surroundings and to ourselves; and the propensity of the human mind to exploit and rationalize in its longing for truth.
https://www.amazon.com/Forest-Phoenix-Poets-Susan-Stewart/dp/0226774104/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(Based on the conviction that only translators who write p...)
Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. Under the general editorship of Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, each volume includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions, and a glossary of the mythical and geographical references in the play. In Andromache, Euripides challenges our concept of tragic character as he transforms our expectations of tragic structure. Through its subtly varied metrics, the play develops an increasingly complex plot and concludes with a simultaneous realization of realism and supernaturalism. Susan Stewart is a translator of this book.
https://www.amazon.com/Andromache-Greek-Tragedy-New-Translations/dp/0195125614/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(Scipone was an Italian painter and poet of the late 1920s...)
Scipone was an Italian painter and poet of the late 1920s. Collected here are a sampling of his writings and drawings, published together for the first time. Susan Stewart is a translator of this book.
https://www.amazon.com/Scipione-Poems-prose/dp/8881583291/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(What is the role of the senses in the creation and recept...)
What is the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry? How does poetry carry on the long tradition of making experience and suffering understood by others? With Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart traces the path of the aesthetic in search of an explanation for the role of poetry in our culture. The task of poetry, she tells us, is to counter the loneliness of the mind, or to help it glean, out of the darkness of solitude, the outline of others. Poetry, she contends, makes tangible, visible, and audible the contours of our shared humanity. It sustains and transforms the threshold between individual and social existence. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses includes close discussions of poems by Stevens, Hopkins, Keats, Hardy, Bishop, and Traherne, of the sense of vertigo in Baroque and Romantic works, and of the rich tradition of nocturnes in visual, musical, and verbal art. Ultimately, Stewart explores the pivotal role of poetry in contemporary culture. She argues that poetry can counter the denigration of the senses and can expand our imagination of the range of human expression.
https://www.amazon.com/Poetry-Fate-Senses-Susan-Stewart/dp/0226774147/?tag=2022091-20
2002
(In her long-awaited fourth book of poetry, Susan Stewart ...)
In her long-awaited fourth book of poetry, Susan Stewart gives us a series of splendid, numinous poems about truths learned with the mind but set free through the senses. Modeled on the seventeenth-century practice of century forms, or books of one hundred pages, Columbarium expresses the bond between the living and the dead in voices of parent to child, lover to beloved, and mortal to the gods. The book arrives as a meditative gift from one of our most respected poet-critics.
https://www.amazon.com/Columbarium-Phoenix-Poets-Stewart-2005-09-26/dp/B01FIXNDFM/?tag=2022091-20
2003
(Gathering most of Stewart's writing on contemporary art —...)
Gathering most of Stewart's writing on contemporary art — long and short pieces first published in small magazines, museum and gallery publications, and edited collections — The Open Studio illuminates work ranging from the installation art of Ann Hamilton to the sculptures and watercolors of Thomas Schütte, the prints and animations of William Kentridge to the films of Tacita Dean. Stewart's essays are often the record of studio conversations with living artists and curators, and of the afterlife of those experiences in the solitude of her own study. Considering a wide variety of art forms, Stewart finds pathbreaking ways to explore them. Whether she is following central traditions of painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography, and printmaking or exploring the less well-known realms of portrait miniatures, collecting practices, doll-making, music boxes, and gardening, Stewart speaks to the creative process in general and to the relation between art and ethics.
https://www.amazon.com/Open-Studio-Essays-Art-Aesthetics/dp/0226774473/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(Red Rover is both the name of a children’s game and a for...)
Red Rover is both the name of a children’s game and a formless spirit, a god of release and permission, called upon in the course of that game. The “red rover” is also a thread of desire, and a clue to the forces of love and antipathy that shape our fate. In her most innovative work to date, award-winning poet and critic Susan Stewart remembers the antithetical forces — falling and rising, coming and going, circling and centering — revealed in such games and traces them out to many other cycles. Ranging among traditional, open, and newly-invented forms, and including a series of free translations of medieval dream visions and love poems, Red Rover begins as a historical meditation on our fall and grows into a song of praise for the green and turning world.
https://www.amazon.com/Rover-Phoenix-Poets-Stewart-2008-09-01/dp/B01HCA9D6C/?tag=2022091-20
2008
(Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making?...)
Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, and particularly the poet, a figure of freedom in Western culture? The MacArthur Award–winning poet and critic Susan Stewart ponders these questions in The Poet’s Freedom. Through a series of evocative essays, she not only argues that freedom is necessary to making and is itself something made, but also shows how artists give rules to their practices and model a self-determination that might serve in other spheres of work. Stewart traces the ideas of freedom and making through insightful readings of an array of Western philosophers and poets — Plato, Homer, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, Dante, and Coleridge are among her key sources. She begins by considering the theme of making in the Hebrew Scriptures, examining their accountof a god who creates the world and leaves humans free to rearrange and reform the materials of nature. She goes on to follow the force of moods, sounds, rhythms, images, metrical rules, rhetorical traditions, the traps of the passions, and the nature of language in the cycle of making and remaking. Throughout the book she weaves the insight that the freedom to reverse any act of artistic making is as essential as the freedom to create.
https://www.amazon.com/Poets-Freedom-Notebook-Making/dp/0226773876/?tag=2022091-20
2011
(Cinder: New and Selected Poems gathers for the first time...)
Cinder: New and Selected Poems gathers for the first time poetry from across Susan Stewart’s thirty-five-year career, including many extraordinary new poems. From brief songs to longer meditative sequences, and always with formal innovation and exquisite precision, Stewart evokes the innocence of childhood, the endangered mysteries of the natural world, and deeply felt perceptions, both acute and shared.
https://www.amazon.com/Cinder-Selected-Poems-Susan-Stewart/dp/1555977634/?tag=2022091-20
2017
critic educator translator author poet
Susan Stewart was born on March 15, 1952 in York, York Country, Pennsylvania, United States.
In 1973 Susan Stewart received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Dickinson College. In 1975 she obtained a master of Arts degree in poetry from the Johns Hopkins University. In 1978 Stewart gained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania.
From 1978 to 1981 Susan Stewart was an assistant professor at the Temple University, an associate professor from 1981 to 1985, and became a professor of English in 1985.
Among her books of poetry are Red Rover, The Forest, and Columbarium, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. She is the co-translator of works by Euripides and Scipione, and the author of several books that critically examine form, culture, aesthetics, representation, and poetry, including Crimes of Writing, Nonsense, The Open Studio, and Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which received both the Christian Gauss and Truman Capote awards for literary criticism in 2002.
Stewart often collaborates with artists and composers. Her song cycle, "Songs for Adam," commissioned by the Chicago Symphony with music by the composer James Primosch, had its world premiere with baritone Brian Mulligan and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), Sir Andrew Davis conducting, in October 2009. She also has worked with the Italian painter Sandro Chia, the Network for New Music, and, most often, the artist Ann Hamilton.
A former MacArthur Fellow, Stewart served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2005 to 2011. From 2009 to 2017, she was the Director of Princeton's Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. In 2013 she delivered the Finzi-Contini Lecture at Yale University and read her poetry at the Beinecke Library on the occasion of the Beinecke’s acquisition of the archive of her papers and manuscripts. In 2016 she delivered the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto. In 2016 - 2017, her long poem, Channel, appeared in The Paris Review and was part of an installation by Hamilton presented in Philadelphia and Minneapolis.
She is a member of the Associated Faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology and serves as the editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. She teaches the history of poetry, literary criticism, and aesthetics.
(Examining palindromes, children's rhymes, puns, anagrams,...)
1979(Gathering most of Stewart's writing on contemporary art —...)
2005(Based on the conviction that only translators who write p...)
2001(What is the role of the senses in the creation and recept...)
2002(Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb wed...)
1984(Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making?...)
2011(From the origins of modern copyright in early eighteenth-...)
1991(In her long-awaited fourth book of poetry, Susan Stewart ...)
2003(Cinder: New and Selected Poems gathers for the first time...)
2017(Red Rover is both the name of a children’s game and a for...)
2008(Susan Stewart plumbs human history in an attempt to artic...)
1995(Scipone was an Italian painter and poet of the late 1920s...)
2001(Susan Stewart's second collection of poetry.)
1987(This is a collection of poetry.)
1981