Perkins teaches American literature and film and has published several essays on American and British authors. In the following essay, Perkins examines Stevens's unique employment of the literary motif carpe diem in this poem.
Carpe diem, a Latin phrase from Horace's Odes, translates into "seize the day." The phrase became a common literary motif, especially in lyric poetry and in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English love poetry. The most famous poems that incorporate this motif include Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen, Andrew Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress," Edward Fitzgerald's "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," and Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time." Modern writers have also employed the motif, most notably Henry James in The Ambassadors and "the Beast in the Jungle," and obviously Saul Bellow in Seize the Day.
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