Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire [Paperback]

Helen Vendler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 18, 1986

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

Editorial Reviews

Review

[This book] tells the reader a good deal more about Wallace Stevens's poetry and Stevens as a poet than many a weighty tome...The shining merit of these lectures is their capacity to elucidate single poems, some familiar anthology pieces, others much less familiar, so that they stand alone as comprehensible entities. The key to this success is the devotion that has accompanied her patience, a devotion that responds, in particular, to the warmth and sadness, the emotional depth, that Vendler finds in Stevens...Those readers who have sensed both the urgency of feeling and the forlornness in Stevens's poems, but have found the obliquities of his manner and diction often impenetrable, will be grateful for the tact and moderation of these fresh interpretations. Their special achievements are that they convince, movingly and with a simplicity not often found in Stevens commentary, and that they then leave the poem to reassemble in the mind as wholly itself.
--Lucy Beckett (Times Literary Supplement )

[Vendler] has found the right way to talk about [Stevens], and is quite right to say that he is a genuinely misunderstood poet. On the very late poems she is exceptionally good and provides some reasons for the belief (which I share) that they are great poems indeed...She writes throughout with admirable firmness...Altogether this little book seems to me a triumph.
--Frank Kermode

About the Author

Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 86 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (November 18, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674945751
• ISBN-13: 978-0674945753
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #262,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beauty is momentary on the mind, September 2, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (Paperback)

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 voice about 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.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Helen Rocks, September 3, 2005

By 

Robert Hoeppner (Southwick, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (Paperback)

I recently finished reading this. It changed my perception of Stevens from an aloof obscurantist into a poet of melancholic desire. It's a short book which reveals his harshness, desire, secrecies and perfection of magnitude. He could be harsh with himself, he desired even as a septuagenarian, his secrecies were: using "he" or "she" instead of "I"; burying the emotional heart of a poem in the middle instead of stating it in the beginning or end; placing the context of the poem in his own work as well as his predecessors (particularly Keats); misleading titles; and his allusiveness. The final chapter covers Stevens' handling of the orders of magnitude between body, mind, garments, environment and nature. It illustrates how he reimagined the differences of magnitude between these elements in successive poems, culminating in The River of Rivers in Connecticut (which I happen to cross twice daily on my commute.) Included are some quotes from Stevens' Opus Posthumous, which prompted me to want to check that out, too.

My vote for favorite Vendler sentence in this book is on page 58: "If there is no medium of verbal solubility, perhaps one can only imagine two immiscible liquids with a metonymic impermeability." It seems that every book I've read of hers is usually very clearly written, but has one trademark sentence like that in it. I love it!

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very helpful, very acute, close readings of some of Stevens' shorter poems, August 5, 2006

By 

Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (Paperback)

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.