Customer Reviews

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

"Her terrace was the sand/And the palms and the twilight" -- and those are only the first two lines. Dipping into surrealism and imbued with spirituality, his poetry is compiled into "The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens," which includes seven compilations of his work.

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," and the humid grittiness of "O Florida, Venereal Soil." He takes multiple looks at "Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird," and the lush "Six Significant Landscapes."

In other poems, Stevens dips into outright surrealism, like in the delicate "Tattoo" ("There are filaments of your eyes/On the surface of the water/And in the edges of the snow"), 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."

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."

Wallace Stevens is one of the most unique poets of the 20th century, and the sprawling "Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens" is a wonderful read.

Stevens is a quirky and imaginative poet with a taste for unusual diction, a fluidity of ideas and an unerring instinct for the haunting and intriguing. The poems are meditational in their completeness and memorability and present a more delightful and pleasurable style of Modernism than the other 'greats' of the period such as T S Eliot or Ezra Pound. His attempts to create a 'Supreme Fiction' can at times be baffling, but there is a richness of pure self-indulgence in the poetry which means that it is immediately compulsive and a book which several of my friends agree is 'essential' to any poetry collection, whether its concern be with Poetry at its literary finest or with the langorous pleasure of 'the green freedom of a cockatoo...'and inspirational dream-like meditations. Treat yourself!

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.

Stevens is for me the great American poet of the twentieth century.
His music is the supreme music of poetry . Not since Keats is there anyone as rich in the most elaborate kind of longworded poetry.
His metaphysical meanderings may confuse but somehow find themselves justified by the memorableness of the great lines- and again the music.
No one comes close to him in the kind of deep and complicated beauty he presents- and again the music.
The meanings he makes are musical meanings, and the sounds of his lines sing in us ever more strongly , the more we read and reread.
Stevens is the kind of poet we want to memorize and always have with us inside, so wherever we go , we can stop and to ourselves recite lines of beauty in joy.
I may be wrong but I simply hear his poetry as the greatest America has had in the twentieth century - though lesser than Whitman and Dickinson.

Wallace Stevens is one of the great poets of the last century - he is startlingly original and his delightful poems, sparkling and rich on first reading, gradually reveal a subtle and intelligent interpretation of modern consciousness - a vision which is as fresh and entrancing as it is sculptured around intricate traceries of thought. A rare jewel which deserves more attention from both academics and those who just love beautiful poems....

It has been said many times that Wallace Stevens is one of the five best and most influential American poets. After reading this collection of poems it is impossible to disagree. It is a marvelous experience to pick up this book and read a few poems.

Can poetry replace religion as an object of personal "faith"? Wallace Stevens thought so, and in this collection of exquisitely crafted poems he attempted to show us how. This collection contains many of his most famous pieces including the much anthogized "The Snow Man", "Fabliau of Florida", Anecdote of the Jar" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Balckbird", as well as, his most famous (anthologized) poem "Sunday Morning".


In many ways the intensely focused vision and complex word play that Stevens employed, which aimed at breaking down the Western metaphysical binary between word and thing, in his poetry is representative of the deeply complect nature of his poetic vision. While not only breaking new ground in form and voice, Stevens, in these poems, sought to promulgate a view of poetry as deeply subjective and personal as our contact with the world and Nature itself. As Stevens himself later explained, his poetry was meant to represent "not Ideas, but the things themselves".


The Snow Man, for example, can be read as a mediatation on death and its place in the natural part of the unending cycles of being. Although, not a new idea, the way Stevens frames it, through his highly complex use of such simple language, brought to bear by the implied interrelationships of the individual words at play, introduces the idea of Gaia to the discourse of modernity. Thus, to understand and experience connection with the world itself requires the abandonment of irrational, socialized fears and a willingness to accept death as a natural outcome of life, without deference to hopeful dogma and superstition.


As "The Snow Man" illustrates, the message that Stevens tries to impart, through the transformation of language from mere linguistic signifiers into "real" referential elements grounded in reality--in brute being--is simply to force the reader to realize that the same action can be enacted in our individual interactions with each other and the world. Through metaphor and complex word play Stevens shows that the very metaphors that we all live by, simply shroud the apathetic reality that surrounds us all--something that some are just not willing to face. Thus, in a way Stevens poetry, through a redoubling of signification falls back upon itself and reveals that the world and the word are merely one and that neither takes precedence over the other, both mutually informs and defines the other, but only we, through our harmonium with the world, allow them to do so. Otherwise, we simply continue to delude ourselves and fail to see the actual things that lie in the ideas themselves.

Our Modernist Master. THE poet of the age, of any age, really. More soulful and jazz-happy than any Slam(e) Poete out stalking the cafes. A chirping metaphysical mind with all the right rhythms setting new tones.

Unfortunately, you'll have to buy Opus Posthumous for some of the really great rare stuff.

But here!: "The Snow Man", "To the One of Fictive Music", "Re-Statement of Romance", "Examination...", "The Revolutionists..."

What a Figure of very capable imagination!

I've had this collection for years, and it is fine. What I particularly like about it is that the selection emphasizes the religious dimension of Stevens' work. It is filled with beautiful heresies, about the about the unfathomable wonder we all live in. Just the sort of thing that annoys the truly unhappy.