Which poem by Wallace Stevens begins with the line "Call the roller of big cigars"?

Question

Accepted Answer

The Emperor of Ice-Cream. The correct answer is "The Emperor of Ice-Cream." This 1922 poem is one of Stevens's most famous works, juxtaposing a funeral scene with the sensuous pleasure of ice cream to explore the relationship between life and death, reality and imagination. Stevens himself called it his favorite poem for its directness.

"Sunday Morning" is Stevens's philosophical meditation on mortality and the sufficiency of earthly beauty in place of religious belief. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is a sequence of thirteen short sections presenting different perspectives, a masterclass in imagistic precision. "The Idea of Order at Key West" explores the relationship between the human imagination and the natural world through a woman singing by the sea.

Stevens is an important modernist poet for the CLEP exam. Students should know his major poems and understand his central theme: the power of the imagination to create meaning in a godless world. His work is philosophically dense and uses lush, sensuous language to explore abstract ideas. His career as an insurance executive alongside his poetry is a notable biographical detail.

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