Marie Borroff, guest lecturing for Langdon Hammer's Modern Poetry course at Yale (ENGL 310), leads a close reading of Wallace Stevens's late poem The Auroras of Autumn. She works through the poem sequentially, opening with Stevens's mythology of the three serpents in section one and closing with the treatment of beauty in sections eight through ten. Borroff also discusses the shorter poem Gubbinal earlier in the session. Her argument centers on Stevens's persistent optimism, his conviction that imagination can strip death of its power, and how the poem's final sections embody a characteristically Stevensian peace in the face of mortality. Recorded in spring 2007 as part of Yale's Open Courses series, the lecture is built around line-by-line reading rather than biography, aimed at students already following the course's semester-long study of modern poetry.