Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose

by Wallace Stevens, Joan Richardson (Editor), Frank Kermode (Editor)

Wallace Stevens' unique voice combined meditative speculation and what he called the "essential gaudiness of poetry" in a body of work of astonishing profusion and exuberance. Now, for the first time, the works of America's supreme poet of the imagination are collected in one authoritative volume.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Literature, Fiction, Classics, Philosophy, American

1030 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1997

About the author

Wallace 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.

Reviews

[Mark David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The reviews of this book (on this site) are rather curious. They range from typically over the top effusions to one delightful review which squanders its contention that Stevens has inexplicably been canonized by taking altogether too long to come to that conclusion. Any book that warrants so much attention cannot be convincingly rated at one star.

But, of course, neither the pros nor cons quite get it right. Stevens is not a poet to hug to one's chest while trilling delighted arpeggios of vacuous glee. Nor is he a poet one can easily dismiss. Certainly there are moments when his poems seem like little more than music set to a curiously old-fashioned beat. Then there are poems like the oddly mournful Emperor of Ice Cream, or the logically anti-logical Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird which challenge any reader to just try to toss them by the wayside. For me the modern myth-making of Sunday Morning and Ideas of Order at Key West are by now rather rapped into my subconscious, and I doubt I could ever set them aside no matter what heresies of sentimentality hold them in my fancy.

I suppose the truly supreme fictions of poetry are those notions that force us into this stock market game of the literary canons — and the thought that our voices should be spent on thumbing works up and down rather than testing our minds against their echoing voices — as "when wakened birds Before they fly, test the reality Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings."

Perhaps I should stop there, but the humbling reality of any poet is that life as we live it does not have its stanzas and endings so sweetly circumscribed. The frustration of Stevens, as with any poet, no matter the infinite evasions of as, is that when we leave the charmed circle, we find ourselves dropped back into the prosaic world, trying desperately to hold on to the cerulean clouds. The genius of Stevens, I suppose — lawyer, business man, sportsman, that he was — is that he knew this better than most — and wrote toward these cluttered worlds of prosey where-with-alls, not away from them.

[Mattia Ravasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Library of America is not a cheap publishing house, but their editions are worth every penny you pay for them.
Stevens is an incredibly enigmatic poet you'll spend hours trying to figure out. Sometimes you'll crack his works, sometimes you won't, sometimes you will and you won't like what you find, but if you are not obsessed with getting 100% of what's going on in what you read (an unhealthy obsession in any serious reader) then he can be rewarding in a mysterious, even magical way. There's something enchanting in the hours of boundless reverie you can get from a title like "Invective Against Swans."

[Katya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stevens is that rare - maybe singular - author who seems to have practised absolute creative autonomy and still made it into the mainstream canon. His imagery is flamboyant, magical, dizzying, and at first glance, entirely out of left field. Yes, there is his philosophy, his themes, his humour and his gravitas - and they all come together on a wild word ride.

The literary references do come through for those in-the-know. But the power punch is the same as his achilles heel - the daring of a big dreamer to spin his universe out of very brightly coloured thread.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 5 out of 5]

There seems to be some disputation as to precisely what Stevens was 'doing' but from this collection at least it seems fairly clear to me. His fundamental fixation is the imagination, which in his early days led to very pure romantic whimsies expressed in a loose but very even language; as he developed this notion, he began to develop this 'pure imagination', and contemplate the way in which politics, war, etc could be conceivably reconstructed through associative dreaming alone; this culminated into his very attractive last couple collections with their long poems and abstract fancy, such as Auroras of Autumn or Esthetique du Mal, practically psychedelic or even supernatural in their depictions of inverted worlds and the poetry within poetry ... it reminds me of a comment Rilke made of Trakl, that "his experience moves as if in reflections and fills the whole room, which is inaccesible like a room in a mirror", visions extremely simple&grounded and yet with a totally surreal quality, like the mystic apparitions of The Waste Land sans the existential-cultural-religious meta-drama. In that sense, he is a 'realist' in what he describes but his feeling of this real world is entirely romantic (as Stevens himself describes it), and he's mostly unconnected with positive philosophical doctrines outside of incidental coincidences with his own constructive project.

This at least I derived from reading these beautiful poems; to my eye, though, his essays present a somewhat reductive view of his own work (mainly The Necessary Angel; his youthful articles tend to be inconsistent aside from trumpeting his love of the imagination). Stevens seems apparently to disregard the spectral quality of his creations and instead emphasizes a primarily phenomenological description of the imagination, and describes its value in very ambiguous terms that reduces to a typically 19th-century "pleasing consolation for life". True as this may be for him, I see behind this a sort of German Romanticism, particularly that of Hoelderlin, that is, the arch-romantic attempt to poetize in a totally free way which speaks as much to the individual Eudaimon as to the greater&deeper societal connections we share, although Stevens wisely avoids the Germanic sort of metahistorical baggage that gets connected to this purity.

This would seem analogous to Stevens' totally distinctive use of language, despite the fact that he always wrote very indifferently on the subject of poetical language -- the fancy of the imagination is for Stevens' poems as much linguistic as sensual, and I'd say that the uniqueness of effect derives precisely from this strange&free use of language, plain-spoken with intermittent spats of lyricality, cliches destroyed&inverted, slight distortions of eloquent diction. It's Hoelderlinian, or at least incidentally so, in the sense that this precise&quasi-natural dictum represents some sort of attempt at a totally liberated tongue that bears with it the full capacity of lofty scope (as opposed to, say, his friend Carlos Williams, whose 'purity' is roughly limited to the raw image). His capacity for imagination and sensitivity, thus, derives from this linguistic sensibility, and the exciting part is that he shows this happening in real time as his poetry increasingly takes place directly in imagination and poetry itself (read, for example, some of the poems in Auroras of Autumn or Transport to Summer to see what I mean).

You may say that I'm too eager to apply Germanic ideas to anything; perhaps true, but it's also true that all the great Romantics have always had some of the German idealist in them somewhere. Of course, I only write this all in lieu of anything else to contribute to these very special, beautiful poems. In any event, I'm not sure I'd recommending reading all of the collected miscellaney in here, but for the complete poems and The Necessary Angel this is definitely the volume to get.

[Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stevens is often allusive, sometimes seeming elusive when in fact precise to the point of obscurity for those not prepared to follow. Consider the poetic range between "The Comedian as the Letter C" and "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock". An erudite actuary? Try doing this at home! Non, nous ne sommes pas tous des artistes.

These poems are all suffused with beauty, a kind of reverence for the imagination and the search for the vanishing point where what is might meet what might be. Glints of gold in hard ore.

My $0.02, anyway.

[Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wallace Stevens is my favorite poet. This Library of America collection is to be preferred as a source of his writing: it includes a number of additional poems relative to his Collected Poems (including the controversial long poem "Owl's Clover"), as well as alternate versions of some poems, juvenilia, and also Stevens's essays.

Stevens is known, it seems to me, in two separate ways. In the popular sense, he is known for a series of remarkable early poems, in most cases not terribly long, notable for striking images and quite beautiful prosody. Of these poems the most famous is surely "Sunday Morning" -- other examples are "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", "Peter Quince at the Clavier", "Sea Surface Full of Clouds", "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon", "The Emperor of Ice Cream", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Of Modern Poetry". The great bulk of these come from his first collection, Harmonium, and indeed from the first edition of Harmonium, published in 1923. These were certainly my favorite among his poems on first reading. And they remain favorites.

But his critical reputation rests strikingly on a completely different set of poems, all later than those mentioned above. (Though it must be acknowledged that at least "Sunday Morning" and "The Idea of Order at Key West" as well as two early long poems, "The Comedian as the Letter C" and "The Monocle de Mon Oncle", are in general highly regarded critically. And that most of his early work is certainly treated with respect.)

I think it's fair to say that "late Stevens" begins with "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction", perhaps his most highly regarded work. Of course the terms "late" and "early" are odd applied to Stevens. His first successful poems appeared in 1915 (including "Sunday Morning"), when he was 36. He was 44 when the first edition of Harmonium came out. That's pretty late for "early"! And by the 1942 publication of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" he was 63. Indeed, his production from 1942 through his death in 1955 was remarkable: two major collections each with several long poems as well as at least another full collection worth of late poems, some included in this _Collected Poems_ but quite a few more not collected until after his death.

What to say about late Stevens? The most obvious adjective is "austere". But that doesn't always apply -- he could also be quite playful. However, there is never the lushness of a "Sunday Morning" or "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" in the late works. The sentences tend to extraordinary length, but the internal rhythms are involving. The poems are all quite philosophical, much concerned with the importance of poetry, the nature of reality versus perceptions of reality, and, perhaps more simply, with growing old. (A Stevens theme, to be sure, that can be traced at least back to "The Monocle de Mon Oncle".)

So: Stevens is an impossibly wonderful, remarkable, poet, either early or late. His lush and imagist early work remains a delight, and his philosophically involving late work rewards rereading and concentration. He is a poet to whom you can return again and again, and he will always be new.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

came home to the fragile christmas lights strung across the front of the house at a quarter to midnight. coughing. and coughing. the smell of the street is all dead leaves and squash. i pulled the plug and opened the door to two shelves of library of america books, a rectangle of black with a line of red, white and blue. banville's the sea is destroying me. i am nothing but memories. these tiny nothing in particular moments with my mother and father. my brothers and sister. i'm flying to buffalo to spend a few days with her before her surgery. and i am nothing but memories. of winter sleds. and soggy mittens hung on a radiator to dry. she is an afghan and a rocking chair. she is a scarf. and i am one thousand miles away. entering a tiny house and pulling the plug and setting down my coat. and keys. coughing. and settling down to the quiet. flipping on a weak light against the dark. to a row of books. and pulling down wallace stevens. to his later poems. to his last poems. to july mountain.

we live in a constellation
of patches and of pitches,
not in a single world,
in things said well in music,
on the piano, and in speech,
as in a page of poetry –
thinkers without final thoughts
in an always incipient cosmos,
the way, when we climb a mountain,
vermont throws itself together.

you cant help but turn the light off. sit there for a minute. the end beginning. you know. the end beginning and stepping back, settling down. it all comes together. your mother again. she is the photograph of a young girl smiling in a clotheslined backyard in the buffalo of her youth. a sunshine of a smile and her parents serious next to her. i imagine them thinking about bills. and laundry. of their little girl and her future. could they imagine her as a mug of hot chocolate. or a hot breakfast before school. could they see her as the hand that was held while walking one foot on the curb the other in the street. could they see her on a canadian beach paperback in hand and yelling "not so far" to us swimming in lake erie. there they are. preserved there on my old oak table, the last image before the light leaves and i'm off down the hall to bed.

[William Patterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no doubt this is the book I would take to the desert island. It is a companion for life. Stevens is the poet whose voice most splendors me, makes me frigid, gets me goosey. Stevens is outrageous. He makes Eliot read like a deluded undergrad, he makes Williams come off as a blasé exhibitionist. He makes truth in words effortless like no other poet I have ever read. People sometimes dismiss him as "too abstract" or "too philosophical" or "too much about ideas" and those people are out of their minds. He has only as much erudition as he has strange, quivering images. He has only as many ideas as he has thirst for mangos. I do not deny that he can take a small effort to get into, but it is small, and Stevens is as large as the keys are west. I'll say this-I think there are two possible ways to get into Stevens. 1. read Harmonium straight through, all the way, as if it were a novel. Doing so, you will see it as a sequence, and watch the images recur, morph and self-reference. Some poems will serve as minor interludes, which they are, and these you might have not appreciated if you saw them in some anthology. In sequence, and then after, you will cherish them for their profoundly irresponsible brilliance. In anthologies, Stevens is cherrypicked for his most traditional poems, but the books as a whole reveal many shades of this most colorful feathered peacock. 2. Read the long late poems and stick with them. It may seem diffuse or random at first but they reveal logic, fury and repose like no one but the great Keats has otherwise been capable of.

[Trinity Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gosh, I could gush over this collection forever! I’d never encountered a Library of America edition of an author’s works before this Wallace Stevens one, but now I’m aching to get more!

So much good to say about this: the vast majority of this beautiful book is Stevens’ published books of poetry. I find him such an interesting literary figure because he got a bit of a late start to his literary career. He was well into his 40s by the time he published his first book of poems. Granted, he was a lawyer, but there’s something really inspiring to me about his trajectory.

Life stories aside, Wallace Stevens is a vivid, thoughtful poet who’s asking pretty big questions by way of very concrete, living images. There’s something especially touching and evocative to me about his interests in geography. He had a special love for Florida that I found fascinating, as it was my honeymoon spot and certainly occupies a unique place in the American political imagination.

The last compendium is a gorgeous collection of aphorisms, thoughts, revisions of thoughts from his notebooks. Excellent “writing on writing” work that made for really vibrant, hearty discussions on poetry writing practices in a theories of poetry class I took.

I feel like this is a wonderful book to sort of be “introduced” to poetry in a more deliberate way. So if that’s something you’re looking for, this is probably a great place to start.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wallace Stevens, on his birthday October 2
Sensuous, gorgeous poetry and puzzles of strange symbols like a private language or obfuscating code, Wallace Stevens combined in his art English Romanticism and French Symbolism like the performance of a highwire act.
His poetry is a stunning negotiation of balance between the forces of conservatism- here expressed as the literary tradition of Romantic Idealism represented by Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Blake, Charlotte Bronte, and Mary Shelley, and the revolutionizing force here represented by the Symbolists Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Valery, and Jarry.
Its an intriguing game between these two teams, each playing their side of the board with wit and skill; the more so as Wallace Stevens deploys their methods as a grand strategist, playing both black and white sides of a chess-like game, his organizational principles referential to Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.
His poetry includes the iconic Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, a classic teaching tool addressing multiple perspectives and relativity taught in every High School English program in America, the mission statement and toolset Ideas of Order at Key West in which interactions between objective reality and subjective experience are categorized by taxonomic hierarchy of orders of meaning, Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock which contrasts an old sailor dreaming in color with the monotone dreams of others referencing Coleridge's Kublai Khan as does the Wizard of Oz (sorry no rainbow or singing munchkins in this version), The Emperor of Ice Cream which interrogates its own identity as a self-reflective enigma, and the major poems in which he rejects Keats aesthetic and the Romantic work of projecting one's feelings onto nature and thus seizing ownership of it as if one were Adam naming the beasts, The Snow Man and Anecdote of the Jar.
Ranging from a sly comic genius to meditational reveries of philosophic intent to flamboyant poems that strut and posture like glorious vogue queens, his work is an art that is all about the tension between freedom and control.
The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination explores the balance of reason and imagination with fictive art as the fulcrum which allows humanity to survive perils and hardships. His views on the nature and function of creativity, dreams, visions, and especially storytelling are very close to my own; that among our personal and sociocultural adaptive mechanisms- the forces that drive us onward- are a primary dyad which encompasses the whole and makes politics readable as a subset of aesthetics.
Crucial to our survival are a conserving force, preserving that which has allowed us to survive thus far undamaged by time and change, holding fast our anchorages, and a revolutionary force, innovations which allow us to capitalize on chaos and dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs.
We need both working in complement to each other, a harmony of forces, to achieve an ideal person, government, or society, or indeed a poem, story, musical composition or work of visual art; one which is adaptable and survivable. Thus we abandon not our principles and values, while creating new meaning as history moves us forward.
A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reviews of this book are difficult: Stevens' is paradigmatic of high modernism and has many of the problems of the time period. You can focus on his idiosyncratic use of language, his problematic views on race, his intellectualism, and his cerebral focus. Stevens' use of imagery is both magical and alienating at once, and ones reaction to that often shapes ones reception of his brand of modernism. This book has so much of his poetry that rougher spots are clear and his idiosyncratic images show some of their themes. That, however, is actually what this book is for.

This collection, however, is the collected poetry and prose, and needs to be considered in that light. Including much of Stevens' prose gives insights into his thinking and aesthetics that may be harder to glean, particularly given Stevens' canonical status in modernist American poetry.

The Library of America addition is nice, well-edited, and a solid physical object that will probably last. Overall, this may be overwhelming to readers new to Stevens, but for fans and scholars, this volume is a sound place to start.

[carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to admit that it is difficult for me to discuss Stevens' poetry as ... well its poetry, and true poetry at that. There is a direct experience with the secular in life, the mundane, the material that imbues his work. God is dead in this world in a very real and nonreligious way. It's true a-theism, life in the absence of any divinity.

You have no sense the author is ridding himself of such things as belief or spirit. Instead it is almost a homecoming.

Moving through this is all there is, and yet, it is enough.

Because of that distance his work is more deeply spiritual for me.

By being grounded solidly in the real, in this world, he has oddly opened up space for another.

I cannot recommend Wallace Stevens enough. He is truly on my list of must-have books. There is great comfort there and great barrenness and somehow an oasis.

This particular edition is from the Library of America series. These books are not only excellent collections in their content, but the printing, the paper, the binding even, make these books a joy to own and read.

[Geoff Bartakovics · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't a review of Stevens, of course. He's simply a great poet and doesn't deserve to be rated using a star system.

Over Christmas holiday, in a fit of over-relaxation, I found a Harold Bloom lecture on iTunes University (under the Yale Lectures) section. He's doing a close reading of a Stevens poem. Though I'm not a huge Bloom close-reading fan, I was propelled to the NYPL to pick up this compilation to read along. A great Christmas 07 memory.

[Jacky Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning and magnificent. He really did put 'the whole of Harmonium' down on paper. Would highly recommend reading Stevens alongside Langdon Hammer's lectures (https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-310) as well as John Burnside's chapter in The Music of Time.

[Clayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite poet. A very nice edition.

[Allison Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read through the book, many poems and multiple times, but I will never be "finished."

[Nicola Augustyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wallace Stevens makes you think...

[Jimgosailing]

See additional (initial) notes under The Poetry of Wallace Stevens - for which I got the audiobook (which lists a only chapter numbers and doesn’t list the names of the poems…really?!?)

And there for notes on “The Emperor of Ice Cream” (p 50) which as part of the epigram for Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness, led me down this path. & more under Cook’s Readers Guide to…

And there for the (28?) poems in the audiobook.
(Not to be confused with the kindle text version with the same title but which contains a totally different collection of Stevens’s poetry)

Sorelle’s three favorites:
“Sunday Morning” (p 53)-especially 1st stanza
“She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights”


“Peter Quince at the Clavier” (p 72)-especially last stanza
“ the title implies that Shakespeare’s comic, rustic, Peter Quinn, maybe speaking, but the story is of Susanna and the elders. The point of view is far from simple. Stevens in some ways the subtlest of men, like to play the role of a bumbler, especially in matters of love. Peter Quinn is only one of several unexpected personae, such as Crispin the comedian in A Midsummer nights dream, Peter Quince solemnly directs a comical play within a play of two separated, lovers communicate through a chink in the wall until they finally meet, only to die. What can this comical play having common with the story of Susanna in the elders? One answer is: walls and private places, and their effects on love and lust, and death, too. As if this is not enough complication. Stevens begins by sounding as if his own persona is speaking: “just as my fingers on these keys /make music…” Whether Stevens ever played clavier except in fiction I do not know he did play a piano…. Steven’s poem refers only obliquely, in musical metaphors, to the famous trial of the Elders and their execution ( “Death’s ironic scraping,” “viol”). At the end, his language becomes Miltonic or biblical. his layering of voices and stories suggest a very complex response by a man to a woman’s beauty, ending with a dominant response of praise.
- from A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens, Biography


“The Snow Man” (p 8) - Sorelle: especially last stanza [Cook p 35]

[“‘The Snow Man’ is placed so that it makes a companion poem to ‘Domination of Black’ in a fine contrast of black versus white, night versus day, fire versus ice, past tense versus present…, haunting, memory versus purge memory, charm poem versus Riddle poem (‘Who am I?’ ‘A Snow Man’ with a truncated echo-rhyme, ‘Am I?’ ‘No Man’)*.
Not that this poem represents a domination of White: it is a poem written against any domination. As an artist���s exercise, it test how far sensation can be disassociated from emotion, e.g., How far (and why?) cold is associated with misery.
‘The Snow Man’ is remarkable as a one-sentence poem with shifting parallel phrases. The final memorable line is the culmination of much skillful repetition and internal rhyme. The entire poem is logically compact, and complicated by the a-logical play of paradox at the end.

‘not to think’ : like being told not to think of an elephant.
‘same bare place’ : Emerson’s “bare common,” which elicits a different response, is often cited.
“Nothing himself“: how far can a writer become a pure record of sense effects, without self intervening? A snowman can do so. (CF Emerson, “I am nothing” [ibid].)
“The nothing that is”: note that this is not “nothingness,” a weighted philosophical and theological concept. One “nothing that is” is the word “nothing” on the page. on paradox of nothing see Stephen Booth, Shakespeare’s sonnets (1977).”
- from A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens

{*This reminds me of the word play in The Odyssey when Ulysses pokes out the eye of the Cyclops}

More:

“Domination of Black” (7) [Cook p 34]: on Stevens’s sense of the poem… a firelit room is filled with moving colors that evoke the colors of fallen leaves, and indirectly evoke the well-known troping of fallen leaves as spirits of the dead…the fireplace as a memory-place is central in many poems…, especially American ones. Steven turns away from conventional developments of this to topos with ‘Yes: but’ and with his repeated ‘against,’ which also questions kinds of againstness…. The ‘I’ sentences map the movement of the poem. the short lines work with some repeated end words and memorable use of repetition and of the rhyme ‘hemlocks’ - ‘peacock.’

‘Turn…turning’:the play on ‘turn,’ a favorite word for poets, includes (1) a descriptive use of colors turning into the room;(2) memories of leaves turning color; (3) the troping of leaves (‘trope’ means ‘turn’ etymologically); (4) turning leaves or pages of a book; (5) turnings of the end of the line (note placement in the line); And later (6) the turning of the earth and apparent turning of the planet planets.

‘striding’: so placed in the line that illicits ‘striding’ over the line end, i.e. endjambment, literally ‘walking’: CF Milton on Death, who comes ‘with horrid strides; Hell trembled as he strode’ ( PLII.576) and Wordsworth on the fearful peak that ‘Strode after me (1850 prelude capital I .385)

‘The cry of the peacocks’: their cry is loud, piercing, and primordial, falling in pitch at the end. The old bestiaries attribute it to the bird’s dismay over its ugly feet, Juno‘s punishment for the peacock’s vanity. Why peacocks and Hemlocks? Not just the rhyme, but because a peacock’s tail at rest actually looks like a hemlock bough, where the Evergreen needles lie flat, overlapping each other. when a peacock flies to or from low boughs, the long tail appears to sweep like a broom.

‘Planet gathered’: Stevens recorded in 1907 that the stars appeared ‘fearful… at night at sea.”

“Le Monocle de Mon Ocle” (10)

[river !! · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 - read for class (select poems only), felt like i learned a lot about poetry as a beginner poetry-enthusiast. good starter for me to dissect good poetry. predictable hit-or-miss relatability, but a well-organized collection

[Chloe · Rating 3 out of 5]

You did that hungry!! I loved it, every twist and turn caught me by surprise!! I can’t wait to read more of your books....

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Browsing poetry causes me to reflect that in terms of whether we like a piece of writing or not -- we require words to be earned.

PG wrote this essay:

http://paulgraham.com/talk.html

It conflates things as many people in the HN comments mentioned (talking can be complex too). But it gets at something very important. You cannot say the word 'heroic' unless you have earned it within the context that you are using it. That is, if there are other alternatives for that word in our big ass language, you cannot use the word without it seeming to be used in a lazy way.

If I use the word 'heroic' because someone has said that word in some dialogue in some story then of course I can use that word. That character has decided to use that word even though he or she hasn't necessarily earned use of it. Maybe we catch the character after a long dialogue and they do. Maybe not. But the reality is someone said that -- that's fine. But with the narrator or speaker (in poetry), it's less appealing.

What do we mean by 'earn'? We mean it's lazy to use it if there are other words you could use in its place. 'Heroic' is never earned if it is used within the first few sentences because unless you are in some sort of synopsis mode, you can't possibly have reason to use that word yet. Heroic is a composite word. It requires many details to even make sense. You can draw on the reader's previous sense of the word 'heroic' but that's rather lazy. You don't want to sling things together too much based on what the reader is bringing in -- because after all the reader is interested in what you have to say -- not a programming of their own connotations and memories. Not yet. That's only to be synthesized much later.

Instead of 'heroic', you really mean 'delighted'. Or smiling, etc. You mean visual things. Sensory things. And then eventually maybe you start with a small composite like 'confident' (which is actually a larger composite word than you might think but I digress).

This is how 'showing not telling' works. Or it's related. If you rate each word you use, and give it a value based on the number of other words that could be chosen that are more to the point, you will get a value of 'tell' within your paragraphs. A value of laziness. And so that's what you want to avoid.

As the paragraphs go on, you have more things shown to build on. But not in the beginning. Not if you want to be the writer that people assimilate with objective confidence in what you have to say.

And yes to PG's point, writing like you 'talk' does tend to avoid 'telling' or 'composite' words that haven't had reason to be composed yet.

* * *

Read more Stevens again tonight. I had ordered this book and his letters. His letters are quite the 'answer guide'.

Stevens wasn't a horrible person but his speakers are quite insensitive to their surroundings. Sometimes on purpose for some sort of self-reliant reason, as he does in 'Re-statement of Romance'. But often insensitively.

He has a wonderful movement in and around those conservative, insensitive qualities he has. And he had some inventiveness ('Comedian with the Letter C' is like Shakespeare's long running sexual jokes with himself -- this long running attempt to use the sound 'c' as much as possible.. what.. an idiot.. but it focused him.)

His ability to change gears between lines is sometimes really interesting like in 'Emperor'. And his grappling, moderately fierce grappling for the time (we seem much wiser than back then because our environment has improved I think at least socially).

He's good that way. He is a good example of how simple words can have great meaning if they are never allowed to become complicated -- especially for readers who are precocious.

But really he doesn't have very interesting ideas in the end. Just that he wants to talk about them. He was caught up with the depression of the weather and the amazing aspects of religion no longer being a source of Truth.

He is so caught up with trying to understand meaning that he loses sensitivity to and appreciation for nature basically. Frost at least got that.

But I suppose Stevens purposefully subverted that his whole life. The idea that context matters. He had an energy to subvert context. I think that's one of his contributions. Not sure what else.

But again that energy to subvert contexts in a smart way is so attractive for people seeking meaning. He was one of my favorite poets growing up.

Just my opinion but he could've used more groundedness in nature.

[H]

Incredible. I don't know how I missed this the first time around, or how the essays in The Necessary Angel didn't strike me much earlier.

From "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," 1.III:

The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning

And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural

And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration
Of what we feel from what we think, of thought
Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,

An elixir, and incantation, a pure power.
The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.

3.X:

How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;
How gladly with proper words the soldier dies,
If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.


From "The Rock," II:

The fiction of the leaves is the icon

Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness,
And the icon is the man.


From "Esthetique du Mal," XIII:

It may be that one life is a punishment
For another, as the son's life for the father's.
But that concerns the secondary characters.
It is a fragmentary tragedy
Within the universal whole. The son
And the father alike and equally are spent,
Each one, by the necessity of being
Himself, the unalterable necessity
Of being this unalterable animal.
This force of nature in action is the major
Tragedy. This is destiny unperplexed,
The happiest enemy.

XV:
And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stevens has written some of the most beautiful lines of blank verse poetry I've read. And some of his verse has a mystical concreteness of the best haikus. But I generally feel a coldness in his poetry and his metaphysics. His works seem dispassionate and coolly analytical, the topics are a bit too philosophical for my personal tastes.

Idea of Order at Key West is one of the best poems I’ve ever read, and I enjoy Sunday Morning, Peter Quince at the Clavier and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. But Le Monocle de Mon Oncle and Comedian as the Letter C leave me cold. His prose is stifling and uninteresting to me.

Here's what I've (re)read so far:

Harmonium (1923 edition) *** This collection contains some of Stevens’ most famous poems, including Sunday Morning, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, Peter Quince at the Clavier, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, Snow Man, and more. The oft-anthologized poems are the strongest of the book. But of the rest of the poems in the collection, very few made a strong impression on me. (01/14)

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's some pretty incredible poetry in here, but you've got to read it for the sound, first, and then worry about the meaning. Alas, when I write a paper on it I have to do the reverse. (Aside: They don't teach us, in English departments, to write about aesthetic effects of texts, so when we get to a point where we have the chance to analyze that, it's a lot harder than a simple close reading.)

Check out "Sunday Morning," one of the greatest poems ever, and "Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" for something more fun, but still movingly heroic. "Loneliness in Jersey City" too. I think Stevens actually agrees "that things are all right" even though the phrase ("They think that things are all right" (my emphasis)) sounds cynical. This comes from the fact that the reason they think things are all right is that the deer and the dachsund are one, which he's already established is the case at the beginning.

[Dr. Carl Ludwig Dorsch · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wallace Stevens, what's he done?
He can play the flitter-flad;
He can see the second sun
Spinning through the lordly cloud.

He's imagination's prince:
He can plink the skitter-bum;
How he rolls the vocables,
Brings the secret -- right in Here!

from "A Rouse for Stevens" by Theodore Roethke


W.H. Auden, writing in ‘A Tribute’ to Igor Stravinsky, quotes him (Stravinsky):

“I am not a mirror, struck by my mental functions. My interest passes entirely to the object, the thing made.”

The opposite might be said of Mr. Stevens, whose poetry apparently functioned as a mirror, who was much struck (at least superficially) by the workings of his own mind, and whose interest seemed to largely remain there on that surface.

I don’t know how Wallace Stevens’ work got into the canon. Perhaps it’s one of those “You had to be there” instances.

[Peter]

I have a question for readers of this book.

I recently bought the Library of America complete works of Wallace Stevens. In the version of "the man whose pharynx was bad" in that volume, the lines "perhaps if summer ever came to rest / lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressed / through days like oceans in obsidian horizons" are omitted.

An endnote says that these lines were included in the version of the poem published in The New Republic ten years before Harmonium, in 1921.

My question is : does the version in Harmonium have these lines? If not, why not? They are a fundamental part of the structure and meaning of the poem. How can the definitive version be the "wrong" one? There must be a story behind this.

Reflect, ponder, excogitate, reply.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be honest, I had never heard about this poet until I took a class on him in my final year of college. In general, I'm not a very big poetry fan but every once in a while I come across someone whose works do get to me. This was also the case for Wallace Stevens and my appreciation of his works even increased after I found out that he wrote poems inspired by William Butler Yeats. It might have been because of the academic environment and the enthusiasm with which my professor spoke of him, but the more I read about and from this author, the more I liked him and he has gained a spot in my "favourite poets" list.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course, this is some of the greatest poetry of the twentieth century. But it's also a wonderful edition. Not all of the Library of America volumes are of equal interest. Some (like the recent Philip K. Dick collection) are wasted opportunities that serve mostly to legitimate their authors. Others (like the Melville volumes) are useful compendiums, but not, in fact, the best editions available. That's not the case here. No other edition collects as many poems or makes as much of the prose available. Only the selection of letters leaves something to be desired.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have several editions of Stevens, but this is by far the best. Portable and complete. The Library of America makes very servicable books, with the ribbon bookmark and the powerful spine . . .

[Marty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stevens, arguably the most intriguing and difficult American poet simultaneously exists in whimsical and deeply philosophic realms. Difficult to interpret or explicate, Stephens poetry comes to me as a beautifully structured mental jungle gym.