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Wallace Stevens : Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America)

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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.

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.

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.

I find reading Wallace Stevens a wonderfully strange and rewarding experience. The words all seem familiar and yet when I ask myself what exactly has been said, specifics become elusive. Let us leave aside awful writers whose opaqueness is all they have to offer. Great writers are often difficult, but for various reasons. Some writers are difficult because their vision is so personal: William Blake for instance. Reading some authors is difficult because of cultural remove. To the extent that Shakespeare is difficult he can become readily understandable simply by reading him enough. The strangeness of the language falls away with familiarity and Shakespeare's endless depths become viewable if still unreachable.

Stevens is difficult for several other reasons. First, he uses language differently. The images he uses and creates are not the point of his work. Rather, they are a means of connotation and require some digging and wrestling. It is the accretion of direct and attached meaning that gives his poetry its full weight. Second, at times there is no direct meaning - it is about the sound and the sense of an image without actually being able to label it. For example, what exactly is a firecat or a buck clattering over Oklahoma? You think you know, but once you start asking yourself for a definition you can't find one. You can make it up, but what is the point? It is really the sound and sense of meaning that matters here. Also, he does have a cultural context that we assume is current enough that we share it with him. Actually, it is a time with certain assumptions and intellectual fads that have passed without a trace. Not being aware of them can add an unnecessary obscurity.

But it is all worth it. Great writers pay off rich dividends because of the way they expand your sense of the language. Stevens is powerfully unique and opens a whole new wing in the mansion of beautiful letters. This is poetry you can explore for a lifetime and still find new ways to appreciate and enjoy.

This is a fine edition that brings together all his collected poems, many that were never put in collections, essays, a couple of short plays, some letters, a chronology, and textual notes. I feel indebted to the Library of America for this wonderful book.

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.

Once thought of as something of a hot-house exotic (a notion confirmed for thousands of undergraduates through anthology pieces), Stevens is now considered by many to be America's greatest poet since Whitman. To me, he is the finest anglophone poet since Yeats. Here is a beautiful collection of his complete poetry and his (admittedly, less interesting) prose works. Formidably difficult and elusive, Stevens' poetry also provides one of the most intense engagements with language that I know of. This wonderful edition includes the early collection, "Harmonium," with all of its colorful exoticism, the great "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction," and the profound late works such as "Auroras of Autumn" and "The Rock." These late poems in particular explore the unnameable, elusive quality of human experience (of time, the world, language, and being itself) in so many ways and with such brilliant use of poetic language that it leaves me, literally, speechless. Granted, the poems are among the most challenging in English and are the very antithesis of the "spontaneous" writing of confessional and Beat poets. They are studied and intricate, but they are also deeply, deeply great and moving. As always, the Library of America edition is beautifully done and, unlike the paperback versions now available, will not yellow and decay in a matter of years. It will take years to digest this work, so that's an enormous plus.

Stevens is a national treasure. This is poetry of and about the imagination, but it is grounded in our real life experience of things. One should read his work as one would listen to great music, let it flow through you...but don't try too hard to comprehend it intellectually, at least, not on first reading it. If I had to choose one book to take to a desert island it would be this one.

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.

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.

There's something about Wallace Stevens poems. They remain in your head for days and their meanings change as you turn them over and over in your head. I love his poetry but I also enjoy the essays he wrote. And it is fascinating to read his articles on indemnity insurance.