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.
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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," "Sunday Morning," 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."
From Library Journal
This outstanding volume collects for the first time all of Stevens's published poetry, along with his writings about poetry plus reviews, criticism, speeches, short stories, and philosophical works. It also contains scholarly notes on the text plus an index to first lines and titles. Undoubtedly, the single finest collection of Stevens ever produced. Essential for all collections.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Collected and worth reading through,
This review is from: Wallace Stevens : Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America) (Hardcover)
Wallace Stevens is one of those rare writers who had a golden touch with words. "Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose" not only brings together several collections and uncompiled poems, but also selections from his journals, essays and letters. And in all of these, he showed himself to be a thoughtful, intelligent and very talented man.
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"). But Stevens was a man of many talents -- there is a trio of one-act plays, erudite and a bit whimsical, and which have his usual thoughts on art and poetry woven into some of their passages. It is followed by the essay collection "The Necessary Angel," which reflects on the nature of imagination, poetry, art, and the role of the poet in a society. His "uncollected" prose is not so tight -- there are literary experiments, snippets of atmospheric fiction, and sprawling essays on all sorts of subjects ("Cattle Kings of Florida"?). Even included are acceptance speeches and sound bites, like an enlightening little nugget on Walt Whitman. Finishing up the volume is a selection from Stevens' notebooks, ranging from puzzling ("Poetry is a metaphor") to revealing ("After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption"). And finally we get his letters and journals, which are friendly, relaxed, laid-back -- and still show that his mind was always thinking about his art. "Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry And Prose" is probably the best way to get a full view of Stevens' work. And his mind, too -- his poetry gives little glimpses of his attitude toward the world and his art, but his essays and journals add to that. By the time you hit the final page, it's hard not to feel like you know Stevens. If nothing else, Stevens' writing can be read just because it is exquisitely beautiful. He lavished details all over almost every poem he wrote; 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. His prose style isn't any less impressive -- Stevens could lavish as much on his essays as he did in his poetry, and showed that he was very good at arguing his points. The last parts of the book are sprinkled with anecdotes about his travels, bits of poetry, and plenty of beautiful imagery ("The streets are blue with mist this morning"). Wallace Stevens is known for his exquisite, lush poetry, but the full "Collected Poetry and Prose" shows just what an intelligent, cultured man he was. A must-have.
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The greatest poet of the 20th Century in a very complete collection,
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This review is from: Wallace Stevens : Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America) (Hardcover)
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.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Masterful Edition,
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This review is from: Wallace Stevens : Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America) (Hardcover)
I want to offer a quick word about the Library of America edition - it is fantastic! I hesitated to buy this work because of its length (1000+ pages), but Library of America has somehow fit all this material into a modestly-sized volume that is literally not much larger or heavier than my "Selected Works of Wallace Stevens" of 300 pages! They were able to achieve this without using onion paper - it seems to be a durable bond, and is very pleasing.
This is an edition of verse and prose that I will treasure for a long time.
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