Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (Paperback)

~ (Author)

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

Product Description

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

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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.com Sales Rank: #154,453 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 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 (REAL NAME)

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!

29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Criticism at its best--illuminating and appreciative, June 1, 1998

By A Customer

Helen Vendler writes clearly and with great affection about Wallace Stevens, a difficult and rewarding poet. This short book will open many doors in Stevens, and inspire further appreciation of his work on the part of the reader.

11 of 11 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 50 REVIEWER)

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.