Product Description

This definitive poetry collection, originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens on his 75th birthday, contains:

- "Harmonium"
- "Ideas of Order"
- "The Man With the Blue Guitar"
- "Parts of the World"
- "Transport Summer"
- "The Auroras of Autumn"
- "The Rock"
... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

One of the Fathers of American Poetry
There is nothing I can write here to either enhance or detract from the status of Wallace Stevens. Reading this book was more an act of reverence than anything else, to find out what so many of the poets I love and respect are talking about first hand. I was surprised to discover that most of the poems by Stevens that are widely know and quoted are in his first book, the first hundred pages of this five hundred page books. But reading on, I discovered the Stevens of the sound bite type quotations I'm constantly running into. This is the poem working out his larger philosophical concerns in greater and greater detail. Sometimes it was hard going, like reading the works of a 12th century Scholastic; but it was always worth it. He always had a clear point. This is a must read. It shoudn't necessarily be the first collected/selected/complete anthology you should read, but it should be definitely there among the others.

A Reading of "Domination Of Black"
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2VMZK22ES51HF Wallace Stevens is really two poets, or rather, he is a poet slowly turning into a turgid metaphysician as one reads through this collection.The best of his poetry is in the earliest book here, Harmonium, with some other fine ones in the second book, Ideas of Order. - I notice that almost all the five star reviews cite and quote poems exclusively from these two early books as opposed to the four following ones and the section of poems entitled "The Rock" at the end.

The poem I read here is - naturally - from the earliest book, Harmonium.It is haunting, Imagistic and disquieting.It is Stevens at his best.

an exquisite enclopadeic and imaginative mind
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind--

--from William Carlos Williams's
Spring and All (1923)

Looking at Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510)'s Birth Of Venus (ca. 1482), one can actually feel the fresh and fragrant breeze, the golden light, the bounty; the Italian painter is approaching 40 when he paints this. Reading Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)'s "The Paltry Nude Starts On A Spring Voyage" from Harmonium (1923), one senses a mind utterly quirky, brisk, assured; the American poet is in his early 40's.

The greatest American poet of the 20th Century
Wallace Stevens is my favorite poet. This collection was prepared late in his life and is in a sense definitive, though the excellent Library of America collection is to be preferred as including a number of additional 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.

This is OK but there are better Stevens Collections
This collection lacks 22 poems which appeared in "The Palm at the End of the Mind", Holly Stevens carefully edited selection highly approved of by Harold Bloom.Missing are "Of Mere Being", "A Child Asleep in Its Own Life" and "For an Old Woman in a Wig" to name but three.It leaves out the added lines of "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad".It lacks an index of first lines.If you're going to buy a book of Stevens' poems spend the extra $10 and get the magnificent Library of America "Collected Poetry and Prose" which contains EVERYTHING, is a huge bargain and will keep you occupied for the rest of your life.Or possibly get Holly Stevens "The Palm at the End of the Mind" which eliminates a lot of lesser poems which could confuse a newcomer to Stevens.The Vintage people have thrown this together without much thought.It's better than nothing, but the other two books I have named are the one's to get. ... Read more

Product Description
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.Amazon.com Review
Born in Pennsylvania in 1879, Wallace Stevens spent his adult life working in the rigorously non-poetic insurance business. Yet his poetry, most of which he wrote after his 50th birthday, is anything but mundane. Rather, Stevens stuffed his work with the brilliant bric-a-brac of a dozen cultures, celebrating (for example) the "dark Brazilians in their cafes,/Musing immaculate, pampean dits" or the way "that old Chinese/Sat tittivating by their mountain pools/Or in the Yangtse studied out their beards." Stevens wasn't, however, a simple collector of souvenirs. A magpie with a mission, he used the peculiar music of his poetry to investigate grand philosophical dilemmas. What was the distinction between appearance and reality? Does an aesthetic artifact such as a poem bring us any closer to the real? (He seemed to answer the latter question, at least provisionally, by declaring that "the poem is the cry of its occasion/Part of the res itself and not about it.") The Collected Poetry & Prose brings together all of Stevens's published books, including such classic poems as "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "SundayMorning," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." There's also a generous sampling of his essays, speeches, letters, and miscellaneous prose. These riches confirm the enormous reach of Stevens's imagination, but they also remind us that for all his internationalism, he remained very much a product of his native soil. As he confessed in a 1948 letter, "I like to hold on to anything that seems to have a definite American past even though the American trees may be growing by the side of queer Parthenons set, say, in the neighborhood of Niagara Falls." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

The Essential Collection
I find in Stevens a wonderful affirmation of the human. So much of his poetry, though at times dark and cryptic, abounds in wonderful assertions which are sincere in their grandiose implications. Just take this final stanza of 'Tea at the Palaz of Hoon' as evidence, and hopefully you will chant it aloud:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

The poem is both Emersonian and Whitmanian in formulation, and I suggest memorising it (it is only four stanzas) and chanting it to yourself at any melancholy moment of your life. This aspect of Stevens is built up even more beautifully in the much longer poem 'The Idea of Order at Key West'. Stevens' quest as poet is to aid us in finding outselves more truly and more strange. This, however, does take some effort on the reader's behalf, such as in a great stanza from 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction':

It must be visible or invisible,
Invisible or visible or both:
A seeing and unseeing in the eye.

Lines such as these only begin to unfold themselves for you if you engage with Stevens deeply. One way to do this is to read Stevens from his first book of poetry called 'Harmonium' right through to his last collection called 'The Rock'. Now this is one reason why the Library of America edition is particularly impressive. It contains all of Stevens' published poems in chronological order. This gives you the liberty to get a real feel for his transformation as a poet - and believe me, there are startling evolutions to be found, such as the one already mentioned, but more particularly when he reaches such heights as 'The Auroras of Autumn' and 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction'.

The virtues of this edition do not stop there, however, and once the poetry has finished up (all 600 pages of it) there are plays (they are very short) and a large selection of very illuminating prose, including essays by Stevens and a small selection of letters and journal entries. At over 1000 pages one would presume this book to be quite large and heavy, but the Library of America find a way to deliver well-made and light editions, which are never cumbersome to read or carry around with you. The paper is quite thin, but it is of good quality. As always it comes with a useful ribbon sewn into the spine, and these don't tend to fray at the end like they do in some other books (I'm looking at you, Everyman's Library). Even though Holly Stevens put out a great 'Collected Poems' of Stevens, this edition is easily the best for anyone with a real interest in the man.

The edition to own
This volume contains all the poems by the great poet, including unpublished ones. It also includes the Necessary Angel as well as miscellaneous prose such as speeches, interviews, magazine articles, a sample of his journals, notebooks as well as his letters. Most importantly, the text of the poems is far more accurate than that of Collected Poems by Alfred A. Knopf. It is an indispensable volume for all those seriously interested in Wallace Stevens.

My only slight complaint is that the notes are extremely terse, and do not annotate many important poems. They do, however, translate words and phrases in languages other than English. For more elaborate notes and glosses on Stevens's work, I recommend A Guide to Wallace Stevens by Eleanor Cook.

for lovers of poetry
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose is the best single collection of Stevens' work I have found yet. The inclusion of his essays as well as his verse provides deeper insight into the mind and life of this poet. If your're looking to give someone a gift of some substance, this volume is perfect. While larger in size than most volumes of poetry (it contains, after all, Stevens' published work), it is small enough to keep on the nightstand or beside one's chair. If you're on the fence about getting this, don't hestitate to buy it. You will not regret your choice.

One of the best LoA volumes
Stevens' Collected Prose and Poetry is essential for anyone interested in wonderful art and thought. It includes the entirety of his 1955 Collected Poems, all of his lovely essay volume The Necessary Angel, all of Opus Posthumous, early versions of Owl's Clover and The Comedian as the Letter C, many poems of his youth, diary entries, aphorisms...in short, all the Stevens you'll ever need.

And you do need Stevens. Yes, he's 'hard', but the hardness is not opaque, a la Gertrude Stein. You may not always understand him but he always means SOMETHING, and something crucially correct, the key to which is probably found by rereading the work in question, or reading around in his other poems and prose--hence the special need for a volume like this one. His is a fairly coherent and remarkably advanced vision of life, of a complexity and relevance surpassed by those of very few artists and philosophers ever. Basically, if you possess life, and wish to inhabit that life as fully as possible, sounding its deepest depth and furthest limits, Stevens is one of the resources you'll need. There may be poets more masterful with language--though Stevens is staggering with language--but which has ever grasped better what resources the meeting of words and world can open up for us? Find Stevens, absorb Stevens, you'll find yourself somewhere I can hardly imagine. Best use of forty bucks I can think of.

The greatest poet of the 20th Century in a very complete collection
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. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (5)

Indispensable
Thank you, Dr.. Cook, for explicating America's best poet since Whitman.
Wallace Stevens was the quintessential Poet, an insurance executive who understood the impossible connection between Reality, Imagination, and the words we use to try to spell these out.
Sadly, without this Guide, Stevens goes right over our heads most of the time. We intuit the meaning, seeing through his crystal clear looking glass rather darkly. But we love his poetry just the same.
My only wish is that this Guide was four, five, or even ten times longer.

Indispensable Guide
No matter how learned you are, Wallace Stevens can be a challenge. This indispensable guide provides poem-by-poem analyses, clarifying unusual associations, digging up references peculiar to his time, translating phrases in other languages, etc. You will walk away with a deeper appreciation of his elegant diction and formidable formal technique. It is best as a companion to the Library of America edition, but also serves the Collected Poems well.

I do agree that the discussion on "How to Read Poetry" is slightly oblique. However, the short biography in front is illuminating.

One word of caution: This is not a book on literary criticism. You will not find a discussion of the larger meaning of influential poems such as "Sunday Morning", "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction", "The Auroras of Autumn", etc. For that, you would have to consult the Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens or specialized works by critics such as Helen Vendler or Harold Bloom.

A great help in reading and understanding the poetry of Stevens
Stevens is a poet of great beauty and great perplexity. One can love his Poetry tremendously without really understanding it. This is because of its music, its color, the magic of its language. Still the meaning- seeking creature reads, and wants to understand. Eleanor Cook may not provide an answer to every question the reader has, may not provide a full and complete reading to individual poems- but she will provide greater understanding of each poem, explanation of difficult phrases, and insight into the poems' relation to other Stevens' poems. Her book also has a short biography of Wallace Stevens, and a concluding section on 'How to Read Poetry' which also may be of use.
But the heart of it is her reading of the poems.
This book should be in the library of every reader and lover of the work of one of America's greatest poets.
Beauty is momentary in the mind, but this book tries to make it in the reading, immortal.

Excellent Commentary
Eleanor Cook's piece provides an easily accessible passage into some of Stevens' more opaque references. Her work covers each poem in Stevens' oeuvre and does an excellent job of tracing images, symbols, and themes throughout while referencing both earlier and later versions of those images, etc. I must agree with the previous reviewer that it does not go into great detail, though it is an excellent tool for any Stevens afficiando who is delving deep into his work.

At long last! A commentary on the complete Stevens
If you're like me, you've often wondered, "What on earth is he talking about?" when reading a Wallace Stevens poem. But then you've read on, enchanted by the language, rhythm, and strange juxtapositions. This book is the answer to your prayers. Though it doesn't go into great detail, it nonetheless comments on every poem in Stevens' "Collected Poems" and "Late Poems." For me Eleanor Cook's annotations provide a foothold into many lyrics that I previously found impenetrable, and her enthusiasm for poems that I had thought unremarkable has made me reconsider my first impressions. For instance, her brief notes on one of my favorites, "Landscape with Boat," pointed me to a much deeper poem on the same subject, "Mrs. Alfred Uruguay." And I had never cared much for "Domination of Black," but Cook made me see its spooky sublimity. She does this concisely, typically in half a page or less (longer, of course, for the long poems). Her essay at the end of the book, "How to Read Poetry, Including Stevens," is similarly perceptive--though a little oblique, as if she is getting at the mystery of Stevens' technique using his own methods. For Stevens fans, I cannot recommend this book too highly. All you need is the Library of America edition "Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose" and this gem of a book. ... Read more

Product Description
Discusses the difficult style of Wallace Stevens, looks at his major themes, and analyzes, in detail, several of his poems. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

I acquired the book principally because I was baffled by the poem "The Emperor of Ice-Cream." and hoped that Vendler might have something to say on the topic.As was to be expected, she did much more than offer a few clues. Her reading of the poem is extraordinary - spot on so far as I can tell - and a revelation. (I had thought perhaps we were in an Ice cream Emporium.) With her help,one can seeStevensas sane, human,passionate, very intelligent --- a real poetaddressing fundamental, and often distressing, issues.

Poetry as Question
I was reading yesterday a review in The New Yorker about the recent books on atheism: how good it is and how true, and it struck me how little room there is in our culture's collective mind for independent question. We know all about God, both his existence and his non-existence. We're big knowers of metaphysical things. But really we know next to nothing, and mostly we are not aware enough to even realize that. But if one begins to realize, one finds oneself with very little personal or cultural company, which is why I am so grateful to Helen Vendler for this group of lectures on Stevens.

Her discussions of Emperor of Ice Cream and A Plain Sense of Things in another book were my introduction to Stevens' work, prior to that I had thought he was not worth the trouble. It turns out that he is, to use a phrase he never would have used, an incredible poet - incredible in the sense of astoundingly good, not literally incredible. But incredible because often in his work one all at once recognizes a thought, an intellectual intuition one never expected to find expressed anywhere, let alone a 20th cenury poem. Like an unexpected sequence of chords that tears you apart.

Helen Vendler has a talent for getting to the essence of poems and poets, getting to the question at the core of the words. Poetry isn't really an end in itself, no art is. It is the artifice by which we understand better that of which we are merely moments. Which is to say that great poets and those who introduce them do truly help the angels as they try to save mankind.

Getting back to gratitude, I'm glad that Stevens wrote the way he did, that he was the way he was. I'm glad he insisted on his singular path, this shy, honest, loving being.

Helen Vendler is always magnificent; this is no exception
Vendler is clear, lucid, illuminating, and tough minded.An awfully tough combination to beat.On top of that she is concise and accessible to the educated but non-professional academic such as myself.

Beauty is momentary on the mind
Vendler is one of the great critics of the writing of Stevens. In this small work she focuses on shorter works, " Anecdote of the Jar" " The Emperor of Ice Cream" "Postcard from the Volcano" "The Rivers of Rivers in Connecticut" " Of Mere being ""The Dove in Spring" "Somnambulisma". She sees Stevens as tormented by thwarted desire , and gives a certain degree of detail regarding his difficult personal life, including his unhappy marriage.
She writes of his ' sexual loneliness in old age' as reflected in his poem 'The Dove of Spring' of the claims of 'sensual desire against the reasoning mind'(To an Old Philosopher in Rome)of his writing in a posthumous voiceabout the collected poems, (The Planet on the Table) where "he sees his life work contained in a single object, the potential book lying before him on a table'. She writes of his especially close relation to Keats, another one of the great musical poets.
Vendler's work is filled with profound and arresting insights, though often difficulty and awkwardly expressed.
This small book helped me read and understand Stevens poetry in ways I had not before.
And I suspect it will do so for other lovers of the poetry of Stevens.

Very helpful, very acute, close readings of some of Stevens' shorter poems
This is a collection of four lectures on Wallace Stevens, concentrating on shorter poems, and mostly (though by no means entirely) late poems. She argues for Stevens as a poet of passion, particularly the passion of one who desires but cannot have the object of desire -- or desires to desire but can no longer fulfill his desire, perhaps because of age.

I found this very helpful, very readable, very acute. And definitely a prompt to read some of the intense shorter poems more closely -- I had lately been concentrating on the remarkable long poems. My appreciation for Stevens only grows with each closer reading, and Helen Vendler's work is very helpful in pointing the way to more perceptive reading.
... Read more

Product Description
A beautiful new edition—the first in nearly twenty years—of the work of Wallace Stevens, a founding father of contemporary American poetry, with a dazzling range of work that is at once emotional and intellectual. As John N. Serio reminds us in his elegant introduction, Stevens has written more persuasively than any other poet about the significance of poetry itself in everyday life: “The imagination—frequently synonymous with the act of the mind, or poetry, for Stevens—is what gives life its savor, its sanction, its sacred quality.”

This rich and thorough selection—published in the 130th anniversary year of Stevens’s birth—carries us from the explosion of Harmonium in 1923 to the maturity of The Auroras of Autumn in 1950 and the magisterial Collected Poems published by Knopf in 1954. To be drawn in once more by “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” to name only a few, is to experience again the mystery of a poet who calls us to a higher music and to a deeper understanding of our vast and inarticulate interior world.

This essential volume for all readers of poetry reminds us of Stevens’s nearly unparalleled contribution to the art form and his unending ability to puzzle, fascinate, and delight us. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A New Selection of Stevens' Poetry
John Serio's new selection of the poetry of Wallace Stevens (1879 -1955) gave me the opportunity to revisit the works of this great American modernist poet. Stevens was able to combine his calling as a poet with a highly successful career as a lawyer and executive for the Hartford Insurance Company.This combination of poetry and practice was a source of my early fascination with Stevens many years ago. Stevens is also unusual because his first major collection of poetry, "Harmonium" appeared in 1923, when he was well into his 40s. The Library of America has published a volume of Stevens' complete poetry and prose. But this volume with poems selected by Serio, a noted Stevens scholar, includes poems from each of the poet's published volumes together with an introductory essay.It is an excellent introduction to Stevens for the new reader and will encourage those familiar with Stevens to read him again. The book is a pleasure to read and hold with large print and each poem beginning on its own page. Here are some of my thoughts on Stevens after reading this volume of Selected Poems.

Stevens writes with wit, gaiety, elegance and beauty. He is among the most philosophical of poets. He is a mixture of the realist and the romantic, and one of his major themes is combining the humdrum nature of daily reality, the quotidian, with romance and imagination through poetry. His thought is complex and shifting, but, on this reading, Stevens seemed to me as akin to an idealist who empahsizes the role of the individual mind in creating its reality.Some of the early poems such as "Sunday Morning" are highly meditative, and the abstract, philosophical character of Stevens poetry became more prevalent as he grew older. The last poems include reflections on the nature of being (I don't know if Stevens was familiar with the philosopher Martin Heidegger) including the final poem in this selection, "On Mere Being", which begins:

"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."

Stevens is both deeply introspective writer who describes his own moods and thought and a poet who portrays, paints, and responds to the world he sees around him. Part of Stevens' goal as a poet is to break down the dichotomy between the "objective" and the "subjective" and to combine them in a poem or other work of art. His poems are full of allusions to music and painting. For most of his life, and in his poetry, Stevens was a secularist who saw poetry as a way of bringing meaning to life that religions offered to their adherents.

For all the philosophical character of his work, Stevens resisted intellectualization in favor of a return to the world of feeling and innocence. He is essentially romantic. His poems, in their combination of the abstract, the concrete, the playful, and the allusive also tend to be difficult.In a poem called "Man Carrying Thing", Stevens wrote:

"The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully."

Some of the poems in this selection will likely be beautiful and relatively clear to the new reader.Others may remain opaque through many readings.Stevens is a writer who repays revisiting with time. The shorter poems tend to be easier while the many lengthy poems contain Stevens' extended reflections and discussions with himself on beauty, poetry, feeling, and reality.

Some readers like to pick and choose in an anthology of poetry. My suggestion would be to read the book through, in the chronological order in which Serio presents the poems.There will be much that will be difficult in this approach, but it will give the reader an understanding of Stevens' themes and of his growth. It is also valuable to look at the poems that Serio mentions or discusses in his introduction, particularly, at first, the shorter poems.

The poems that I like and that are relatively easy to read include "The Snow Man", "The Emperor of Ice Cream", and "Sunday Morning" from "Harmonium" and "The Idea of Order at Key West" from "Ideas of Order". "Poetry is a Destructive Force", "The Glass of Water", and "Angels Surrounded by Paysans" are short, accessible poems from later collections.The many beautifully reflective final poems include "To an Old Philosopher in Rome", "A Quiet Normal Life", and "A River of Rivers in Connecticut."

In concluding his introduction to the volume, Serio writes: "My wish is that this slimmer volume of selected poems will also become a prized possession, one that readers will keep close, hidden in them day and night, so that they might cherish, in the central of their being, the vivid transparence that [Stevens'] poetry brings." Serio has indeed given the reader a gift -- a selection of Stevens' poems to be treasured and reread with time.

Robin Friedman

Poet's eye
"At night, by the fire/The colors of the bushes/And of the fallen leaves/Repeating themselves..."

Simple yet lush, colorful yet elusive -- that's Wallace Stevens in a handful of words. "The Selected Poems by Wallace Stevens" brings together many of his poems from several of his published collections, giving a taste of his evolving work throughout the years -- the weird and the elusively lovely, dense with atmosphere and intense emotion.

Over his lifetime, Stevens wrote several books of poetry, but his exquisite poems are best taken by themselves: the lush grandeur of "Sunday Morning," the hymnlike "Le Monocle De Mon Oncle," the gritty weirdness of "Bantams in Pine-Woods," and the bittersweet farewells of "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour." He takes multiple looks at "Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird," and the lush "Six Significant Landscapes" ("A pool shines/Like a bracelet/Shaken in a dance").

In other poems, Stevens dips into outright surrealism, like in the fearful and powerful "Domination of Black" ("I saw how the night came,/Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks/I felt afraid/And I remembered the cry of the peacocks..."), and also adds a meditative bent into "The Snow Man" ("For the listener, who listens in the snow,/And, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is").

If nothing else, Stevens' poetry can be read just because it is exquisitely beautiful. He lavished details all over almost every poem he wrote, and gave many of them the quality of a dream. His descriptions are simply written, but brilliantly laid out: "When my dream was near the moon,/The white folds of its gown/Filled with yellow light."

And while he sometimes dips into sparer verse (even silly verse), his style tends to be a bit on the ornate side. Stevens freely uses the more exotic terms -- such as "opalescence," "pendentives" and "muleteers" -- wrapped up in complex verse, sometimes with a rhyme scheme and sometimes free-form. And lush detail is added to many of his poems, with descriptions of the moon, sun, plants and lighting, along with dazzling descriptions of the colors.

But his writing is more than beautiful. Stevens' work often poses questions about death, life, religion, and art, taking the conventional and turning it on its head. His belief in the importance of his art is reflected in poems like "Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself," which ends with the portentous lines: "Surrounded by its choral rings,/Still far away. It was like/A new knowledge of reality."

"The Selected Poems by Wallace Stevens" is obviously not quite the full experience of the great poet's collected works, but it's still a brilliant taste of one of the most unique artists of the 20th century.

A constant sacrament of praise
I am a reader of poetry whose ability to grasp great long poems is extremely limited. So much of the work of Wallace Stevens including 'Auroras of Autumn' and even 'Man with a Blue Guitar' do not hold and interest me. On the other hand there are certain shorter poems of Stevens which I find unequalled, incredibly beautiful. A seemingly simple poem like 'Snow Man' has a depth of thought and a music which makes me wish to possess it in mind completely , memorize it and be able to wherever I am, when I need it repeat it aloud to myself. There are passages of such great musical beauty in Stevens that he like Shakespeare and Keats provides aesthetic delight at the highest level.
This 'Selected Poems' contains much of the Stevens we know from the Anthologies. And it also contains much of the more challenging longer works which I suspect are primarily of interest to literary critics.
The preeminent Stevens critic Helen Vendler in a highly favorable review of this new 'Selected Poems' claims that its one lack is its failure to include non- published poems which show Stevens biographical personal connection to his poetry. But aside from praising highly the critical introduction of the work she finds it of great value in including the challenging, longer works.
Clearly this is a work for all lovers of Stevens poetry. I also recommend it for those who have not known the work of Stevens. They will have the great pleasure of discovering one of the greatest of the modern poets, one who even when his surface meaning escapes us provides a richness of music, a thrilling beauty in suggestiveness which is like no other.
... Read more

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Long unavailable, now in paperback for the first time, these are the brilliant, subtle, illuminating letters of one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Stevens's famous criterion for poetry"It should give pleasure"informed his epistolary aesthetic as well; these letters stimulate one's appetite for poetry as they valorize the imagination and the senses. They also offer fascinating glimpses of Stevens as family man, insurance executive, connoisseur, and friend.FROM THE BOOK:"Next to the passion flower I love fuchsias, and no kidding. . . . Down among the Pennsylvania Germans there was a race of young men . . . who carved willow fans. These men would take a bit of willow stick about a foot long, peel it and with nothing more than a jackknife carve it into something that looked like a souvenir of Queen Anne's lingerie. The trouble that someone took to invent fuchsias makes me think of these willow fans. However it is a dark and dreary day today and who am I to be frivolous under such circumstances."from a letter to Wilson Taylor, August 20, 1947 ... Read more

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Essential
For anyone interested in poetry, LETTERS OF WALLACE STEVENS should be essential reading. Along with Rilke's letters, it is the most fascinating book of correspondence by a twentieth-century writer: profound, witty, meticulous, at times funny, at times lyrical, and even in the duller letters written in a prose that is deliciously crisp and clear. It contains many explications of Stevens' own poems, important not only for understanding the poems but also as a way into the sometimes extremely strange imagination of one of our greatest poets.

These are also the letters of a man of integrity (a rare quality among poets, among human beings), and integrity always rejoices the heart. As a brief example, here are two statements Stevens made about his attitude toward poetry: "I write poetry because it is part of my piety: because, for me, it is the good of life, and I don't intend to lift a finger to advance my interest, because I don't want to think of poetry that way." "My state of mind about poetry makes me very susceptible and that is a danger in the sense that it would be so easy for me to pick up on something unconsciously. In order not to run that danger I don't read other people's poetry at all."

I have read this book at least ten times, and I now keep it at my bedside.

These are not the letters of Keats
If there is one poet who I think Stevens is most comparable to it is Keats. It has to do with their great musical quality, the richness of vocabulary and language, polyphonic beauty in their long lines. Keats' letters are among the greatest in the language and help definenot only his own poetic practice, but make a real contribution to literary theory in general. Stevens' letters do illuminate various aspects of his art but they seem to me to be on a wholly different level entirely from the poetry. The banker- businessman- husband is a much more pedestrian soul than the poet. The Letters are of great value to any student or scholar of Stevens, but they are not on the literary level of his great poetry.
He was however or so I have the impression of from these letters a devoted father to his daughter. This at least gives a sense that the value of his life was not only in the great poetry he created.

fascinating letters and a indispensible reference
Not only are these letters to Harriet Monroe, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Donald Hall, Robert Frost (and many others) fascinating and entertaining, but the comprehensive index makes it possible to findStevens' own comments about and explanations of individual poems--forinstance, his favorite poem was "The Emperor of Ice Cream"--anddetails about the circumstances in which they were composed. Not only doesStevens outline his evolving theory of poetry, he also expresses hisopinions about contemporary art, music and more.

Readers that enjoyliterary correspondence should also see One Art (the letters of ElizabethBishop). ... Read more

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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 Stevens: 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. ... Read more

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The "Other Works" of Stevens
Worth having just for the ADAGIA, a work I have sought long and in vain until now.

AD FEMINAM ATTACK!
It is extraordinarily wrong to attack people.It is extraordinarily wrong to make Ad Hominem or Ad Feminam attacks.I strongly dislike you.

Your attack on Joan Richardson was not an attack on the book itself.

Your attack on Wallace Stevens: The Early Years was unjust and an attack on Joan Richardson herself.

Your attack was reprehensible.



... Read more

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This book is an invitation to read poetry. Simon Critchley argues that poetry enlarges life with a range of observation, power of expression and attention to language that eclipses any other medium. In a rich engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Critchley reveals that poetry also contains deep and important philosophical insight. Above all, he agues for a 'poetic epistemology' that enables us to think afresh the philosophical problem of the relation between mind and world, and ultimately to cast the problem away.

Drawing astutely on Kant, the German and English Romantics and Heidegger, Critchley argues that through its descriptions of particular things and their stubborn plainness - whether water, guitars, trees, or cats - poetry evokes the 'mereness' of things. It is this experience, he shows, that provokes the mood of calm and releases the imaginative insight we need to press back against the pressure of reality. Critchley also argues that this calm defines the cinematic eye of Terrence Malick, whose work is discussed at the end of the book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

DREADFUL
I read this book when it first came out. It is dreadful. The writer is self-absorbed, pretentious, and seems remarkably remote from anything Wallace Stevens was about. Maybe Simon Critchley is a sign of how bad the academics in the humanities have become. I hope not.

Someone Grew An Epistemology/Pineapple Artichoke!
The rationale for this Amazon review stems from the fact that Amazon recommended "Things Merely Are" by Simon Critchley and I bit.But it turned out that this short volume is well-written, even lucid,[his choice of audience extends beyond the academy]and focuses on the inverse relationship of imagination and reality as found in "The Snowman":"Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." Critchley has a strong reading of Stevens and develops a theory of how poetry works which has a clarity unknown to H Bloom in "The Poems of Our Climate." "Things Merely Are" is a from my perspective a welcome addition to the conversation about Stevens and is of the quality produced by Helen Vendler. ... Read more

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A Masterwork of Philosophy
Perhaps the most significant work of philosophy in English in the 20th century.

Stevens works in the same field as Maurice Blanchot and the later Heidegger, with two caveats:

1.He writes exceptionally clear and elegant English, and

2.He is a real poet.

What he has to say about the relation of reality and the imagination provides the clearest sense of what Heidegger is getting at in speaking of absence and presence, and what Blanchot means by l'espace litteraire.

These essays also provide a way into some of Stevens' own crucial poems, like The Man with the Blue Guitar, and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.

Any critic who ignores this work (talking about you, Harold Bloom), or mangles it (Helen Vendler) cannot possibly understand what Stevens' poetry is about.

Postscript:After writing this review, I subsequently read through the unabridged version of Wallace Stevens' letters.I was quite pleased to note that in several letters written in the 1950s, he inquires of Peter Lee, a young poet and friend of his who lived for some time in Fribourg, whether he has encountered Heidegger there.In another letter, he asks his Parisian bookseller, Paule Vidal, to send him a copy of a recent book of Heidegger's on the German poet Holderlin.And in another letter, he states simply that he "loves" Maurice Blanchot.

For one thing, this shows that he was one of the first Americans to have read the work of Blanchot and the later Heidegger, possibly as early as the 1930s but certainly by the 1940s.Consider that even the most avant garde university intellectuals did not begin reading them in this country until the 1970s.But even more, this shows that Stevens felt a very strong affinity with Blanchot's writing on literature, and I believe he felt Blanchot's work expressing ideas similar to his own.And he may well have felt the same about Heidegger.

Trust the tale not the teller
Few are the great poets who construct a critical edifice worthyof bearing attention similar to that of their poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge do this in 'The Lyrical Ballads' and Keats does it in his Letters. Stevens a poet of extraordinary exuberance and richness constructs in these essays a kind of master -guide to own aesthetic and fundamental principles. His conception of a Reality- forming Imagination capable of transforming what it senses into supreme fictions, hints at what his own Art is all about.
But the line - by- line beauty of his poetry and its deep transforming often hypnotic music have no real parallel in his prose.Prose explains and poetryreveals more than anyexplanation can give.
The Essays can be a help to the reader of the Poetry, but it is the Poetry that it is the Essential Art. ... Read more

Product Description
The Contemplated Spouse gathers in a single volume the 272 extant letters written by Wallace Stevens to the woman with whom he shared his life, Elsie Viola Kachel. Written over the span of twenty-five years, the correspondence reflects Elsie's evolving relationship with Stevens, initially as his dear friend, then as his fiancée, and later as his wife. Taken collectively these personal letters from one of America's most important poets reveal aspects of Stevens's personality that his poetry discloses more obliquely. Most significant, they demonstrate Stevens's devotion to his wife through years of an uneven and often distant partnership.

Stevens wrote to Elsie for more than five years prior to their marriage, and for more than twenty years he wrote to her as his wife. During their early married life, the couple spent time apart each year while traveling for business and vacation. Even when living in the same house, the couple often operated in separate realms. Their camaraderie, however, rekindled in Stevens's final years, and Elsie remained an important source of inspiration.

Stevens's earlier, more intimate letters, though never free from his internal censor, foreshadow the poems he later published. Incidents he describes in his pre-1913 correspondence recur throughout his canon. His later letters, penned after his marriage, comment on the geography that would surface in his poetry—the Carolinas, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Key West.

The collection is augmented by editor J. Donald Blount's introduction—an overview of Stevens's life and his relationship with Elsie—and extensive footnotes to the letters that provide essential information about Stevens's references. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Philosophical Narcissism
Truly as awful as it is bombastic.This book provides an excellent introduction not to Stevens' poetry, but rather to Bloom's own philosophical narcissism, a disorder which prevents a professor from finding in writing anything other than what his own theory says can be found there.It is astonishing how far a famous critic's readings miss their mark, in poem after poem after poem.

Tellingly, Bloom cites only once to Stevens' "The Necessary Angel," which sets forth Stevens' view of poetry.Skip Bloom, read The Necessary Angel" instead (far shorter and written in English), and you will find a key to Stevens' poetry.

Bloom shows Stevens a fit member of the post-Whitman/Emerson tradition
Harold Bloom is probably my favorite critic, and Stevens one of the only 20th century poets in English I can bear to read without becoming hopelessly bored by the belatedness of the work.Bloom's book here is a close reading of the standard shorter and longer works of Stevens, and in so doing, Bloom shows how Steven's language and metaphor place him in the line of such Romantic poets as Keats, SHelly, and then of course, and most importantly, Whitman and Emerson. Emerson of course wrote rather weak poetry but his conception of the poet and his call for an American bard remain so strong today that very few poets/writers have the cognitive strength to deal with him.Most American writers fall back into the trope of nostalgia and flight (courtesy of Brockdon Brown); Stevens wrestled with this too, but his work ultimately stands in the orphic tradition of American poetry founded by Emerson, and whose strongest exemplars are of course Whitman and probably the Pan-American Pablo Neruda.

My only criticism of this book is that a) it does not address the great late poem "Sail of Ulysses," which is one of the most Emersonian poems in Steven's canon; further, b),Bloom's tone in this book, as compared with most of his others about the Romantic tradition, is not quite so strident.Some don't like Bloom at when he is strident, but I love his work the more he sounds like a high-toned Christian preacher in his Emersonian pulpit.However, it may be that Bloom is unable to rise to such heights in this book because, as great as Stevens is, he never truly defeated his agon with Emerson and Whitman; he never truly overcame his belatedness.Stevens came very near to doing so in his best work, but I am sorry to say that I think Stevens remains an ephebe to Emerson and Whitman.That is not to reduce his achievement; very few poets are able to defeat their precursors. Stevens is a canonical poet without a doubt; however, when I then open Whitman or Neruda, I see that his voice is indeed quite a bit weaker than theirs.The little old lady from Des Moines will then say, "yes sir of course, but whose voices could ever be as strong as theirs?!"And I would say to her then hallelujah madame!

The Bloom is Off the Prose
Those ofus who have bathed in the dazzling light of Bloom's exegeses of the Shakespeare plays will find on displayin this volume a moreobscure side of the greatcritic. The reader encounters here an earlier edition of Bloom, one who now expresses himselfin sometimes tortuous prose and unwieldy language, now bludgeons rather thandissects.This Bloom has not yetgained his sure footing in the sparse, pithyprose of his more recent works which revealhim to be a master interpreter.Still, there is much here to admire; for Bloom shows us Steven'spedigree with marvelous clarity.Beginning with Emerson and proceeding to Whitman, Dickinson, Harte and others,Bloom illuminates Steven's debt to the richprovender onwhich he drew.(My own acquaintance with Emerson had languished since high school , but I soon found myself reading Emerson's superb essay on Shakespeare and Whitman's Leaves of Grass with anew eye.) Bloom shows how 'the American religion', an atheistic blending of respectfor individualrights, power,will, and fate found their firm expression in Emersonandtravelled onward to inform the poetry whichfollowed, especiallyStevens'. Bloom showsus how the tropes of fate, death, mother, and the sea wind throughtheyears as each poet in turn struggles to express a uniquely American sense of meaning. True enough, Bloom fiddlestoo muchwith the technical bits, but he gives us a place from which to view Stevens' work so that we can now graspwhy,as Bloom says, he was the greatestAmericanpoet of the 20thcentury-andperhaps of anycentury.Such favorites as The Auroras of Autumn, The Man with the Blue Guitar, The Emperor of Ice Cream and a score of others shine for us in anew light. Best of all, the reader carries with him the secret knowledge that despite these earlyslips,Bloom's brilliance will onlygrow.

The personality of "interpretive" poetics
Bloom has written this book after an obviously long devotion to reading Stevens and to developing his critical methods, in one of its modes, to a fine precision.The reader of this book benefits most by a slow absorbtionof the varied terminology that Bloom had accumulated previous to this workand the additions then newly made to it.The approach to Stevens' poetryis immediate in its variance from most previous criticism and especiallypassive reading, or "weak misreading" as B. would call it.Tofollow him closely is to slough the innocence of idealizing all poetry ascommitted to presenting its own meaning.Unwitting believers of the like,deterred by Bloom's criticism for appearing so staunchly definitive (thoughan immediate antidote to a belief in the floppiness of poetry), havn'trealized that beyond his belief (on particularly fine display) in thestrong potential of formalizing tropes and decoding of intertextualities,is the existance in poetry of its reader's 'becoming' the text that isread, and to do it inventively, eccentrically, and considerately isessentially to further poetry itself. ... Read more

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Wallace Stevens is a major American poet and a central figure in modernist studies and twentieth-century poetry. This Companion introduces students to his work. An international team of distinguished contributors presents a unified picture of Stevens' poetic achievement. The Introduction explains why Stevens is among the world's great poets and offers specific guidance on how to read and appreciate his poetry. A brief biographical sketch anchors Stevens in the real world and illuminates important personal and intellectual influences. The essays following chart Stevens' poetic career and his affinities with both earlier and contemporary writers, artists, and philosophers. Other essays introduce students to the peculiarity and distinctiveness of Stevens' voice and style. They explain prominent themes in his work and explore the nuances of his aesthetic theory. With a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading, this Companion provides all the information a student or scholar of Stevens will need. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Better than previously reviewed - Take it from an English PhD candidate
Contrary to the opinion of the previous review, this book offers an insightful overview of the nuances Stevens' work touches upon. Included in this work is information regarding his own life, his struggle with politics and poetry, a look at the multiple personae he used as his 'voices' when writing, his link to the Romantic poets, his use of the seasons, etc. While some of these essays could be a bit longer (As I would like to see), they are written by some of the top contemporary critics of Stevens and Modern Poetry. If you are at all interested in Stevens, this is not a bad place to begin reading criticism. These essays provide excellent introductions into some of the questions lurking around Stevens' rather opaque poetry. ... Read more

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Wallace Stevens the poet and Wallace Stevens the insurance executive: for more than one critical generation it has seemed as if these two men were unacquainted--that Stevens was a poet who existed only in the rarefied world of language. However, the idea that Stevens lived a double life, the author maintains, is misleading. This compelling book uncovers what Stevens liked to think of as his "ordinary" life, a life in which the demands of politics, economics, poetry, and everyday distractions coexisted, sometimes peacefully and sometimes not. Examining the full scope of Stevens's career (from the student-poet of the nineteenth century to the award-winning poet of the Cold War years), Longenbach reveals that Stevens was not only aware of events taking place around him, but often inspired by those events. The major achievements of Stevens's career are shown to coalesce around the major historical events of his lifetime (the Great Depression and two World Wars); but Longenbach also dwells on Stevens's two extended periods of poetic silence, exploring the crucial aspects of Steven's life that were not exclusively poetic. Longenbach demonstrates that through Stevens's work in surety law he was far more intimately acquainted with legal and economic concerns than most poets, and he consequently thought deeply about the strengths--and, equally important, the limitations--of poetry as a social product and force. ... Read more

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These Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover editions are popular for their compact size and reasonable price which do not compromise content. Poems: Stevens contains a selection, chosen by Helen Vendler, of over sixty of Stevens's poems, revealing with renewed force his status as our supreme acrobat of the imagination. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Beauty is momentary in the mind
The most well- known of Stevens' literary- critics Helen Vendler put this selection of his poetry together. It is outstanding. Stevens is the poet of musical questioning, of a great and vibrant sensuality , of a deep searching for and making of beauty in words. His aesthetic reflective mind plays over and over again with sounds he makes us hear in new ways.. And he leads us see things in different ways , seeing them and hearing them and feeling them in some mysterious blend his magical language reorders.
The most famous of the poems from 'Sunday Morning' to ' Thirteen ways of looking at a Blackbird' are included in this highly recommended collection.

Everyman's Stevens
One of the best poets of the twentieth century was Wallace Stevens, with his richly atmospheric writing and deep themes about religion, nature and the imagination. The "Everyman's Library" brings together many of his best poems,

Several of the poems included are well known ones that Stevens wrote, such as the atmospheric "Sunday Morning," the vivid "Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird," the whimsical and colorful "Emperor of Ice Cream" and a stretch of the epic "Man With the Blue Guitar."

However, lesser-known works by Stevens are also included, such as "Le Monacle De Mon Oncle" (""Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,/O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon"), "Asides on the Oboe" and "Postcard From the Volcano." These tend to be as good, if not even better, than Stevens' better-known works.

The Everyman's Collection doesn't have everything Stevens did, but it does include bits here and there, from this book and that book, including posthumous publications. As a result, it's a good way to introduce oneself to Stevens' brand of lush, verbose poetry.

This book also does a good job of showing the various kinds of poetry that Stevens wrote -- most are infused with color, sounds and smells, some with darkness, some with a rich overtone, some very brief like the bare "Anecdote of the Jar."One thing that Stevens' writing always has is beauty -- even in the weird ones. With only a few words he can evoke images that are exquisite, soothing, even eerie ("My candle burned alone in an immense valley"). He also infuses his poetry with intense colors and plenty of nature references, birds and trees, snow and rain and wind.

Wallace Stevens' exquisite writing is some of the best the twentieth century had to offer, and the Everyman's Library collection is an excellent way to get into his work.

Great choice of Stevens poems!
Helen Vendler is the author of one terrific and one very good book on Stevens (the terrific one is _Words Chosen Out of Desire_, which ought to be the first piece of criticism any new reader of Stevens looks into--along with Milton Bate's _Wallace Stevens: the Mythology of the Self_, I think it's called). She's also one of the best critics of twentieth-century and current poetry....she's done an amazing job here. I love this edition--so compact, the typeface is beautiful, and most of my favorite Stevens is here. Vendler makes odd and fascinating choices of some neglected shorter lyrics and many of these have quickly become my favorites ("Mozart, 1935," and "Burghers of Petty Death," for example). You get all of the _Auroras of Autumn_ and the _Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction_, and substantial parts of _The Man with the Blue Guitar_ and _An Ordinary Evening in new Haven_. Of course I have a minor complaint or two--(where's The Owl in the Sarcophagus?) But they're quite minor. I'm assigning this to a class in the spring--it's a lot less intimidating than the Collected Poems. Buy this one first! And even if you own the collected, as I do, it's worth getting this one too...it makes the reading of these amazing poems quite irresistible! ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

A WONDERFUL VOLUME - FOR BOTH PARENT AND CHILD!
I cannot think of a better way to introduce the poetry of Wallace Stevens than this small volume.The selection is excellent and of interest you the young reader.The commentary is quite relevant as are the pictures which accompany it.I find that often now, our young people go all the way through the early grades in school and many of them have never heard of Stevens much less read their poetry.This was the sort of stuff my generation and the generation before it grew up on and cut our teeth on.I do not feel I am any worse for the wear.I am fearful that we are bringing up an entire generation (rightfully or wrong, although I feel it is the later) of young folks who will have no appreciation to this great art form and will miss a lot.This book helps.This entire series helps, as a matter of fact and I certainly recommend you add this one and the others to your library.Actually, it is rather fun reading these with the young folk and then talking about them.Not only do you get to enjoy the work your self and perhaps bring back some great memories, but you have the opportunity to interact with your child or student.It is actually rather surprising what some of the kids come up with.I read these to my grandchildren and to the kids in my classes at school.For the most part, when I really get to discussing the work with them, they enjoy it.Recommend this one highly.

Do children need adult poetry?
This series is lacking in several respects.The illustrations are beautiful but are geared more toward nostalgic adults than children.This particular book reflects what is wrong with several titles in the series: poems chosen because adults have an affinity for them rather than because they will appeal to children.One of the poems in this book is "The Emperor of Ice Cream" about the death of a poor woman, possibly a prostitute, surrounded by her poor neighbors trying to spiff up her house by bringing in flowers wrapped in month-old newspapers while the "roller of cigars" whips "concupiscent curds"in plain old cups in her kitchen.In which world do our children care to read about "concupiscent curds" and the death of a poor old woman?Let us hope they don't understand these words just yet.If you choose any of these titles, the least offensive is about Robert Louis Stevenson.

Brilliant book
Long a fan of Stevens' work, I was delighted to find that an illustrated book of his best-loved poems had be published for kids."Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is my favorite, but there is not a bad poem in the bunch.The soft, evocative pictures are just as terrific, and I will be giving this one as a gift to many young friends. ... Read more

Product Description
Edward Ragg's study is the first to examine the role of abstraction throughout the work of Wallace Stevens. By tracing the poet's interest in abstraction from Harmonium through to his later works, Ragg argues that Stevens only fully appreciated and refined this interest within his later career. Ragg's detailed close-readings highlight the poet's absorption of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century painting, as well as the examples of philosophers and other poets' work. Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction will appeal to those studying Stevens as well as anyone interested in the relations between poetry and painting. This valuable study embraces revealing philosophical and artistic perspectives, analyzing Stevens' place within and resistance to Modernist debates concerning literature, painting, representation and 'the imagination'. ... Read more

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Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The first volume of amajor American poet
This is one of those rare volumes, like the 'Lyrical Ballads' of Wordsworth and Coleridge which announces to the world the arrival of a new major Poet. Not all thought so at the time. And many found Stevens too dandified and precious to be a major voice. But among the poems of this collection are among the most beautifully colorful musical creations in Modern Poetry.

This volume contains the following Poems:
Earthy Anecdote
Invective Against Swans
In the Carolinas
The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage
The Plot Against the Giant
Infanta Marina
Domination of Black
The Snow Man
The Ordinary Women
The Load of Suger-Cane
Le Monocle de Mon Oncle
Nuances of a Theme by Williams
Metaphors of a Magnifico
Ploughing on Sunday
Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges
Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores
Fabliau of Florida
The Doctor of Geneva
Another Weeping Woman
Homunculus et La Belle Etoile
The Comedian as the Letter C
From the Misery of Don Joost
O Florida, Venereal Soil
Last Look at the Lilacs
The Worms at Heaven's Gate
The Jack-Rabbit
Anecdote of Men by the Thousand
The Silver Plough Boy
The Apostrophe to Vincentine
Foral Decorations for Bananas
Anecdote of Canna
Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds
Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb
Of the Surface of Things
Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
The Place of the Solitaires
The Weeping Burgher
The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician
Banal Sojourn
Depression Before Spring
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
The Cuban Doctor
Tea at he Palaz of Hoon
Exposition of the Contents of a Cab
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
Sunday Morning
The Virgin Carrying a Lantern
Stars at Tallapoosa
Explanation
Six Significant Landscapes
Bantams in Pine-Woods
Anecdote of the Jar
Palace of the Babies
Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.
Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow
Cortège for Rosenbloom
Tattoo
The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws
Life is Motion
Architecture
The Wind Shifts
Colloquy with a Polish Aunt
Gubbinal
Two Figures in Dense Violet Night
Theory
To the One of Fictive Music
Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion
Peter Quince at the Clavier
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Nomad Exquisite
Tea
To the Roaring Wind
Poems Added to Harmonium (1931)
The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad
The Death of a Soldier
Negation
The Surprises of the Superhuman
Sea Surface Full of Clouds
The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade
New England Verses
Lunar Paraphrase
Anatomy of Monotony
The Public Square
Sonatina to Hans Christian
In the Clear Season of Grapes
Two at Norfolk
Indian River

Among these are a number of the signature- poems of Stevens: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, The Emperor of Ice- Cream, Peter Quince at the Clavier, To the One of Fictive Music,Anecdote of the Jar, Bantams in Pine- Wood, The Snow Man, Sunday Morning.
My own personal favorite is : Peter Quince at the Clavier . The poetry of its music is among the most deeply felt and colorful in all Stevens work. Its concluding Stanza rings in my mind at this moment.
"Beauty is momentary in the mind-
The fitful tracing of a portal
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; The body's beauty lives,
So evenings die, in their green going,.
A wave interminably flowing
So gardens die their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter
done repenting .
So maidens die to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.


Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Off those white elders: but escaping
Left only death's ironic scraping.
Now in its immortality it plays upon the clear viol of her memory
And makes a constant sacrament of praise."

Stevens intense musicality, his love of color, the delicate intricacy of his long lines, his precise intellectual playing in searching for the Ideal in the Real, his seeming to make even Beauty a necessary fiction- all these and more- make him one of the most interesting and greatest of twentieth- century American poets.

In "Harmonium"
Wallace Stevens first revealed his genius in 1923, when his first collection of poetry "Harmonium" was released. While it was only the first part of his career as a poet, Stevens' first book is in some ways his best -- despite being a little uneven, "Harmonium" has a rough, passionate quality.

"At night, by the fire,/The colors of the bushes/And of the fallen leaves,/Repeating themselves,/Turned in the room,/Like the leaves themselves/Turning in the wind," writes Stevens in "Domination of Black," a display of the beauty and eerieness of his work. And Stevens sticks to that in poems like "Infanta Marina" ("Her terrace was the sand/And the palms and the twilight"), the steamy beauty of "O Florida, Venereal Soil," or the eerie surreality of "Tattoo."

While lush, rich poetry was what suited Stevens the best, "Harmonium" also has some more minimalist poetry, such as the sparse "Gubbinal" ("The world is ugly,/And the people are sad"). And one of his rare strikeouts is the confusing "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad." Even these are not bad, just not as good as they could be.

Virtually anyone can write poetry -- the trick is writing something that stirs the reader, or at least makes them think. Stevens had a rare gift for poetry, and that gift propelled him into fame during his own lifetime. It isn't much of an exaggeration to say that he was one of the great poets of the twentieth century.

Stevens dips into both free verse and rhyming poetry, without sticking solidly to anything for any period of time. At times his poetry is just an intellectual pleasure, without any rhyme or rhythm. But in "Le Monocle De Mon Oncle," he creates a poem with an almost hymnlike quality -- solemn, ornate and thoroughly beautiful.

It's the descriptions that really make his poetry shine. He paints almost everything with color -- sapphire seas, gilt umbrellas, electric fireflies, rotted skulls, and how a "red bird flies across the golden floor." And with lines like "the light is like a spider./It crawls over the water," Stevens also gave his poetry a note of the dreamlike.

Richly surreal and beautiful, "Harmonium" is a remarkably polished first collection. Wallace Stevens wasn't yet at his peak in the years before 1923, but with "Harmonium" he became a must-read. ... Read more