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Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
When Opus Posthumous first appeared in 1957, it was an appropriate capstone to the career of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. It included many poems missing from Stevens's Collected Poems, along with Stevens's characteristically inventive prose and pieces for the theater.
Now Milton J. Bates, the author of the acclaimed Wallace A Mythology of Self, has edited and revised Opus Posthumous to correct the previous edition's errors and to incorporate material that has come to light since original publication. A third of the poems and essays in this edition are new to the volume. The resulting book is an invaluable literary document whose language and insights are fresh, startling, and eloquent.
Now Milton J. Bates, the author of the acclaimed Wallace A Mythology of Self, has edited and revised Opus Posthumous to correct the previous edition's errors and to incorporate material that has come to light since original publication. A third of the poems and essays in this edition are new to the volume. The resulting book is an invaluable literary document whose language and insights are fresh, startling, and eloquent.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1957
15 people are currently reading
233 people want to read
About the author
Wallace Stevens
201 books496 followersWallace Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine) was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius.
Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel; after a long courtship, he married her in 1909. In 1913, the young couple rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie.
A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.
After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he was hired on January 13, 1908 as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company. By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain for the rest of his life.
Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel; after a long courtship, he married her in 1909. In 1913, the young couple rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie.
A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.
After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he was hired on January 13, 1908 as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company. By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain for the rest of his life.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 25, 2016
Poems in this book were published after his death. They were not included in other works. Here are a few I liked:
Blanche McCarthy
by Wallace Stevens
Look in the terrible mirror of the sky
And not in this dead glass, which can reflect
Only the surfaces - the bending arm,
The leaning shoulder and the searching eye.
Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
Oh, bend against the invisible; and lean
To symbols of descending night; and search
The glare of revelations going by!
Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
See how the absent moon waits in the glade
Of your dark self, and how the wings of stars,
Upward, from unimagined coverts, fly.
Of Mere Being
by Wallace Stevens
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
My favorite part was a collection of his aphorisms. Here are some samples:
In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality.
All poetry is experimental poetry.
The poet must put the same degree of intentness into his poetry as, for example, the traveller into his adventure, the painter into his painting.
To read a poem should be an experience, like experiencing an act.
Money is a kind of poetry.
It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem.
One does not write for any reader except one.
Every man dies his own death.
A poet looks at the world somewhat as a man looks at a woman.
The world is the only thing fit to think about.
Poetry is the sum of its attributes.
Poetry is the scholar's art.
When one is young everything is physical; when one is old everything is psychic.
The tongue is an eye.
A poem is a pheasant.
Reality is a vacuum.
The body is the great poem.
The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man's happiness.
God is a postulate of the ego.
Literature is based not on life but on propositions about life, of which this is one.
God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).
Loss of faith is growth.
Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.
Ignorance is one of the sources of poetry.
Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush.
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens called "The Emperor of Ice Cream" his favorite. It "wears a deliberately commonplace costume,and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it."
When Stevens received the National Book Award for poetry in 1951, he heard some people complain if any of the writers were as good as Sir Walter Scott. But WS believed "It is not a question of comparative goodness." Modern poetry is always different.
WS: "Inability to see much point to the life of an ordinary man. The chances are an ordinary man himself sees very little point to it."
Much of the book was not interesting except for those who are interested in finding out all they can about the author, which is why I read it.
Blanche McCarthy
by Wallace Stevens
Look in the terrible mirror of the sky
And not in this dead glass, which can reflect
Only the surfaces - the bending arm,
The leaning shoulder and the searching eye.
Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
Oh, bend against the invisible; and lean
To symbols of descending night; and search
The glare of revelations going by!
Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
See how the absent moon waits in the glade
Of your dark self, and how the wings of stars,
Upward, from unimagined coverts, fly.
Of Mere Being
by Wallace Stevens
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
My favorite part was a collection of his aphorisms. Here are some samples:
In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality.
All poetry is experimental poetry.
The poet must put the same degree of intentness into his poetry as, for example, the traveller into his adventure, the painter into his painting.
To read a poem should be an experience, like experiencing an act.
Money is a kind of poetry.
It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem.
One does not write for any reader except one.
Every man dies his own death.
A poet looks at the world somewhat as a man looks at a woman.
The world is the only thing fit to think about.
Poetry is the sum of its attributes.
Poetry is the scholar's art.
When one is young everything is physical; when one is old everything is psychic.
The tongue is an eye.
A poem is a pheasant.
Reality is a vacuum.
The body is the great poem.
The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man's happiness.
God is a postulate of the ego.
Literature is based not on life but on propositions about life, of which this is one.
God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).
Loss of faith is growth.
Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.
Ignorance is one of the sources of poetry.
Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush.
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens called "The Emperor of Ice Cream" his favorite. It "wears a deliberately commonplace costume,and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it."
When Stevens received the National Book Award for poetry in 1951, he heard some people complain if any of the writers were as good as Sir Walter Scott. But WS believed "It is not a question of comparative goodness." Modern poetry is always different.
WS: "Inability to see much point to the life of an ordinary man. The chances are an ordinary man himself sees very little point to it."
Much of the book was not interesting except for those who are interested in finding out all they can about the author, which is why I read it.
June 26, 2009
simply awesome. i pick this book up and open it randomly whenever i need to reset my perspective on life. always works.
January 19, 2018
the play Carlos Among the Candles and the 'aphorisms' highlight this posthumous publication
December 15, 2014
This was actually my first experience with Stevens. I came by him from a poet friend of mine who admired him and given his being a contemporary with writers such as Crane, Pound, and Williams, I wanted to take a look; with this collection being the first one I came across at a used bookstore.
As far as this book goes, I found it a bit wanting. Some of the poems in this collection are real gems, but others seem purely academic and lacking vitality. As a poet though, I felt that his strongest piece was actually the play "Carlos among the Candles." As a scholar he also had some rather strong aphorisms in a time when such things are simply not written anymore. To speak of the poetry though, I would have to say that his style is very reminiscent of Apollinaire (which would justify my friend’s fondness for Stevens given that Apollinaire is probably his (my friends) greatest influence in his own writing). The problem is, Apollinaire was only, in my opinion, marginally revolutionary in poetics. For his time it was and is incredible work and he is a poet whom I highly admire, but this style by Stevens’ time had been far transcended. It’s almost as if Stevens attempted to assimilate the American Whitman tradition with an early avant-garde writer (one also thinks of Nerval) in his own composition. Due to this the actual form becomes anticipated before the poem and only churns out one significant piece out of a dozen in which his vision matches the execution. That’s not to say he didn’t contribute to American letters, for he definitely deserves his place in the opus of American poets, but I don’t attribute nearly as much esteem to him as I would someone like Hart Crane or even (despite my own reservations in admitting this) T.S. Eliot.
The worst part though, and which was what made me take this book down an extra star, was his essays. His personal one’s are insightful, as well as the short pieces used as addendum to editions of other books. But his attempts at aesthetic theory were painful. It’s almost as if he was particularly trying to “keep up” with Eliot and venture into things that he even admits in the essays themselves are out of his expertise. His modesty between the philosopher and the poet is digestible, but he only comes to these conclusion through hearsay. He references philosophies of art and phenomenology by quoting them out of books which merely summarize the aesthetic theories and so through his progression he completely diverges from the initial passion that inaugurated the work to a resignation of his own ill formed conception by concluding his work with simply agreeing with the one or two other critics he cites – all of whom rely primarily on Mallarmé and so really tells us nothing new about poetry for almost 100 years of advancement (almost to his discredit, given that this is his posthumous work and constitutes a reflection on his own ars poetica in a way that, for me, took some of the value away from his own works).
Regardless, as with any book, it is well worth the read. It is of value for its exemplifying Stevens’ output, while at the same time giving an almost biographical take on himself as a writer. For the generation of poets in which he belonged that inaugurated the “Death of the Author” one does get to see both author and reader, and so overall it works well for a meditation on the postmodern transformation of literature – with poetry being one of the only untarnished area (except for maybe in theatre and dance) of the arts in which one can still experience/feel the philosophical and social transformations of the literary world in which we now live.
As far as this book goes, I found it a bit wanting. Some of the poems in this collection are real gems, but others seem purely academic and lacking vitality. As a poet though, I felt that his strongest piece was actually the play "Carlos among the Candles." As a scholar he also had some rather strong aphorisms in a time when such things are simply not written anymore. To speak of the poetry though, I would have to say that his style is very reminiscent of Apollinaire (which would justify my friend’s fondness for Stevens given that Apollinaire is probably his (my friends) greatest influence in his own writing). The problem is, Apollinaire was only, in my opinion, marginally revolutionary in poetics. For his time it was and is incredible work and he is a poet whom I highly admire, but this style by Stevens’ time had been far transcended. It’s almost as if Stevens attempted to assimilate the American Whitman tradition with an early avant-garde writer (one also thinks of Nerval) in his own composition. Due to this the actual form becomes anticipated before the poem and only churns out one significant piece out of a dozen in which his vision matches the execution. That’s not to say he didn’t contribute to American letters, for he definitely deserves his place in the opus of American poets, but I don’t attribute nearly as much esteem to him as I would someone like Hart Crane or even (despite my own reservations in admitting this) T.S. Eliot.
The worst part though, and which was what made me take this book down an extra star, was his essays. His personal one’s are insightful, as well as the short pieces used as addendum to editions of other books. But his attempts at aesthetic theory were painful. It’s almost as if he was particularly trying to “keep up” with Eliot and venture into things that he even admits in the essays themselves are out of his expertise. His modesty between the philosopher and the poet is digestible, but he only comes to these conclusion through hearsay. He references philosophies of art and phenomenology by quoting them out of books which merely summarize the aesthetic theories and so through his progression he completely diverges from the initial passion that inaugurated the work to a resignation of his own ill formed conception by concluding his work with simply agreeing with the one or two other critics he cites – all of whom rely primarily on Mallarmé and so really tells us nothing new about poetry for almost 100 years of advancement (almost to his discredit, given that this is his posthumous work and constitutes a reflection on his own ars poetica in a way that, for me, took some of the value away from his own works).
Regardless, as with any book, it is well worth the read. It is of value for its exemplifying Stevens’ output, while at the same time giving an almost biographical take on himself as a writer. For the generation of poets in which he belonged that inaugurated the “Death of the Author” one does get to see both author and reader, and so overall it works well for a meditation on the postmodern transformation of literature – with poetry being one of the only untarnished area (except for maybe in theatre and dance) of the arts in which one can still experience/feel the philosophical and social transformations of the literary world in which we now live.
July 5, 2022
Acquired 1994
From one of the used book stores in Montreal, Quebec
From one of the used book stores in Montreal, Quebec
April 14, 2017
This volume of poems, plays, aphorisms and other essays gathers a multitude of Stevens’ writings. While there doesn’t appear to be anything that logically holds the collection together, it does highlight Stevens’ prodigious output and immense literary talent.
My favorite portions of this book are his poems as well as collection of what could only be called maxims. The poems highlight what make Stevens great:
I found the plays overall forgettable. There are moments of literary prowess, but in general I was left cold by the themes of the plays. The only memorable lines in my opinion are the opening of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise:
His Adagia contain a lot of the mundane – statements in search of the profound but falling short. There are a few notable exceptions, however:
Continuing this theme, I found his essays mainly written on topics for which I had little interest. There are a few interesting quotes that give insight into the mind of an artist in his time.
From A Note on Martha Champion:
From Jacket Statement From “Ideas of Order":
The collection, overall, is a fantastic insight into the workings of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.
See my other reviews here!
My favorite portions of this book are his poems as well as collection of what could only be called maxims. The poems highlight what make Stevens great:
All Things Imagined Are of Earth Compact…All things imagined are of earth compact,
Strange beast and bird, strange creatures all;
Strange minds of men, unwilling slaves to fact:
Struggling with desperate clouds, they still proclaim
The rushing pearl, the whirling black,
Clearly, in well-remembered word and name.
Even the dead, when they return, return
Not as those dead, concealed away;
But their old persons move again, and burn. (13)
From the Journal of CrispinThere is a monotonous babbling in our dreams
That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs
Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not
The oncoming fantasies of better birth. (59)
From Secret ManThe man of autumn,
Behind its melancholy mask,
Will laugh in the brown grass,
Will shout from the tower’s rim. (68)
I found the plays overall forgettable. There are moments of literary prowess, but in general I was left cold by the themes of the plays. The only memorable lines in my opinion are the opening of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise:
All you need,
To find poetry,
Is to look for it with a lantern. (149)
His Adagia contain a lot of the mundane – statements in search of the profound but falling short. There are a few notable exceptions, however:
All history is modern history. (192)
Man is an eternal sophomore. (195)
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur. (195)
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good. (201)
Continuing this theme, I found his essays mainly written on topics for which I had little interest. There are a few interesting quotes that give insight into the mind of an artist in his time.
From A Note on Martha Champion:
Youngish artists have a way of being melancholy. It may be that this is merely a symptom of the distress they feel at the absence of definition. They have no very distinct outline either of themselves or of the abstractions that bedevil them. They are, in short, likely to be a bit baffled. (215)
From Jacket Statement From “Ideas of Order":
The more realistic life may be, the more it needs the stimulus of the imagination. (223)
The collection, overall, is a fantastic insight into the workings of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.
See my other reviews here!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews