A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens

by Eleanor Cook

Wallace Stevens is one of the major poets of the twentieth century, and also among the most challenging. His poems can be dazzling in their verbal brilliance. They are often shot through with lavish imagery and wit, informed by a lawyer's logic, and disarmingly a singing jackrabbit, the seductive Nanzia Nunzio. They also spoke--and still speak--to contemporary concerns. Though his work is popular and his readership continues to grow, many readers encountering it are baffled by such rich and strange poetry.
Eleanor Cook, a leading critic of poetry and expert on Stevens, gives us here the essential reader's guide to this important American poet. Cook goes through each of Stevens's poems in his six major collections as well as his later lyrics, in chronological order. For each poem she provides an introductory head note and a series of annotations on difficult phrases and references, illuminating for us just why and how Stevens was a master at his art. Her annotations, which include both previously unpublished scholarship and interpretive remarks, will benefit beginners and specialists alike. Cook also provides a brief biography of Stevens, and offers a detailed appendix on how to read modern poetry.

A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens is an indispensable resource and the perfect companion to The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens , first published in 1954 in honor of Stevens's seventy-fifth birthday, as well as to the 1997 collection Wallace Collected Poetry and Prose .

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Literary Fiction, Criticism, Nonfiction, Reference

368 pages, Hardcover

First published February 26, 2007

Reviews

[Adam]

Read the Intro and section on Harmonium, very helpful and informative. Not the flyover approach I was looking for, rather more detailed and in-depth companion to be read alongside the poems. More etymological than interpretive, offering keys rather than a blueprint.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

The biography section is incredibly good and to-the-point.

I wish Stevens had had more time to travel in Nature (as in page 8).

Tragic. As that would've been amazing.

[James Garber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good reference work to clue into Steven's poems. Short analyses of each of his poems.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book's highlight is the biography at the start, and the introductions to the various larger poems of Stevens'. The actual notes on the poems vary widely in applicability, and some unnecessarily belittle poems that the author didn't like; overall, Cook displays a command over Stevens' poetry, but too often inserts her own opinions, rather than merely guiding the reader and clarifying unclear parts of poems.

In our class, we used this book as an inspiration to create our own sorts of reading guides, both for Stevens and for other authors, and I thought it was a great way to dig deep into poems. All too often, we run across a niche word or reference in a text and just shrug and keep on reading, but this book helps you to slow down and actually appreciate the minutia of the poem. Also, it definitely beats googling things, what with the ever-present risk of going down wikipedia rabbit holes...

[Stuart Murden · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good book to read as an introduction to the work of Wallace Stevens. It's a biography cum commentary. An accessible way into the sometimes inaccessible language of Wallace.

[Jimgosailing]

So I didn’t know what to expect here, but have enjoyed the analysis and insights to the Stevens poems I’ve been reading, mostly it appears from Harmonium.

Some of my notes from this for individual poems can be found under The Poetry of Wallace Stevens or under Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose.

“Stevens engagement with poetry of the natural world and love poetry came together when he visited Florida, with which he had a virtual love affair…found…a climate of erotic force, crude and vital. It affected him like a woman of erotic force. At first, as in “Nomad Exquisite,” one force inspires another. But Florida’s sensuality could be excessive, ‘lasciviously tormenting, insatiable.’ Stevens spoke of eros ‘fluttering’ at the end of “Le Moncle de Mon Oncle.” Florida’s Eros did not flutter, and Stevens was drawn to it. It was time to say farewell to ‘seem’ and turn to actual being: ‘Let be be finale of seem’ (“The Emperor of Ice Cream”). Though this poem specifies no setting, Elizabeth Bishop thought it was set in Cuba.” (p 12)

“The Emperor of Ice Cream” - the entrancing, title, succinct, vignettes, and memorable refrain make this a favorite poem, much explicated, and sometimes overallegorized. It is centered on the corpse of an ordinary woman laid out on an inexpensive table and for her simple funeral arrangements…Ice cream, which is cold and tasty, informs death, which is cold and dumb….Stevens… spoke of it ‘deliberately commonplace costume’ that nonetheless has ‘something of the essential gaudiness of poetry’… Stevens spoke of the poem as ‘a respite from the imagination’: ‘Let us take life as we find it.’… see… the poem as essentially ‘about being as distinguished from seeming to be’ and not about ice-cream…’…Stevens… suggestion… ‘the final reality is not death, but life, as it is, without any pretenses. the roller of big cigars is the ordinary, laborious man; the wenches dawdling are women in their ordinary occupations; the boys are every-day children. No one is seduced. There are no parades. but overall a will dominates: the will of the extraordinary. The point of the poem is to isolate and make crisp the common place. The emperor as a symbol is the simple symbol of a physical good….to make people at a ball conscious of the excitement of reality….Seems like asking a good deal.

‘Concupiscent curds’: Stevens rightly preferred the French translation ‘des laits libidiness’ to ‘des crème dèlectables’…the phrase points to life’s concupiscence and, by the contrasts in the poem, to ‘life‘s destitution’; this Stevens added gave them ‘something more than a cheap luster’— a craftsman‘s firm judgment on his work.’

‘Let be be finale of seem. / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream’: resonating against Hamlet’s remarks, also on a corpse and a meal, ‘Your worm is your only emperor for diet,’ and then in turn his earlier ‘Seems, madam! Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’ (Hamlet Iv.Iii.22 and I.ii.76). Stevens called himself ‘poor Yorick’…and earlier said that the subject of death absorbed him.”