Louvre

The Louvre Museum of Paris, France, is the world's largest museum that sees over nine million visitors annually. The Louvre was declared a public museum and "a place for bringing together monuments of all the sciences and arts" by the National Constituent Assembly in 1791, after 100 years of housing the Academie Royal. [1] The museum plays a small but significant role in Wallace Stevens' poems "Prelude to Objects" and "Connoisseur of Chaos" of Parts of a World (1942) by serving as a friendly reminder that the museum is not the place for common man "[t]o go . . . to behold himself." [2] Instead, man may look to common objects, such as in the "Study of Two Pears" or "The Glass of Water," two poems that immediately follow "Prelude to Objects" in the collection, or he may look to "things chalked / On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see." [2]
==Notes==
1. Louvre
2. Steven in Kermode and Richardson 179, 195.
==References==
Louvre
Kermode, Frank, and Joan Richardson, eds. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1997. Print.
Stevens, Wallace. "Connoisseur of Chaos." Kermode and Richardson 194-5.
---. "Prelude to Objects." Kermode and Richardson 179-80.