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The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens Hardcover – April 5, 2016

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Paul Mariani (Author)
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4.5 out of 5 stars 14 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 496 pages
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (April 5, 2016)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1451624379
  • ISBN-13: 978-1451624373
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #135,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsScholarly, Inspiring, Challenging, Informative Biography from Paul Mariani
By robert waldron on April 7, 2016
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Wallace Steven ranks with the greatest of the 20th century’s American poets: William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Hart Crane. Professor Mariani has written biographies of all these named poets, as well as one on the poet/priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. He is now has offering a new one on Wallace Stevens, the first in sixteen years: The Whole Harmonium, The Life of Wallace Stevens, published by Simon & Schuster. Not only is Mariani our premier biographer of poets, he is also one of our best critics and close reader of poetry, up there with such critics as Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler and Christian Wiman. He is also a fine poet himself, having published seven volumes of verse, as well as a spiritual memoir. He has also published two books of criticism, A Usable Past and God and the Imagination.
Mariani offers a real portrait of Stevens, by this I mean he deviates from the held portrait of Stevens the aesthete, the poet who was a vice-president of an insurance company, thus able to live an upper class life, with a big home, gardens, and inside on his walls French paintings, and a library of rare books. But there had been a time when Stevens was just one of the guys of Reading Boys High, in Reading, Berks County, Pennsylvania, his birthplace. Like his friends, Stevens played pool, smoked, played poker and was a left end on the school’s football team. A regular guy, not yet the effete poet he would become, and I do not use “effete” in a derogatory fashion: to me being somewhat over-refined isn’t a negative.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsA Portrait of the Artist as a Fat Insurance Executive!
By Jeff Bricker on April 19, 2016
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
This is a fine biography of a fine poet. Stevens was an intensely private man and an unapologetic homebody (he never visited Europe, although his job forced him to visit much of his own country) so the prospective reader should not expect much in the way of adventure or scandalous behavior or exotic locales. There is only one shocking sentence in the entire book (see page 182). The author manages to cover both the poet's life and comment intelligently (if briefly) on several remarkable poems, all in a mere 400 pages!

My only reservation is that Professor Mariani seems interested in playing down the influence of that fellow New Englander, Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Stevens. True, Mariani mentions Emerson six times in this book, but his tone is often dismissive. Also, he doesn't even mention that for Christmas in the year 1898 Wallace's mother gave her son a handsome twelve-volume set of Emerson's Collected Works, a gift which remained in poet's personal library for the next six decades.
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5.0 out of 5 starsKnowing More Deepens Appreciation
By Ardelle Cowie on May 26, 2016
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
Mariani makes a world for Wallace Stevens that creates a setting for his poetry. I was obsessed in graduate school by his poem The Idea of Order in Key West. Having more context and understanding of that poem now reinforces the power I feel in it, and gives, by understanding it's place in his life, more depth.
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5.0 out of 5 starsA poetic biography of a poet
By Bruce Watson on May 17, 2016
Format: Hardcover
Stevens always baffled me but there was something about a poet who worked all day as an insurance executive, so I have paid attention. Now, Paul Mariani's biography brings the two men together with eloquence, harmony, and a deep psychological understanding. A poet himself, Mariani explains Stevens' mystical poems with profound insight. He adds poetic narrative of his own, driving the story onward as we follow this lonely, brilliant, and quintessentially modern man through his lost marriage, his years of silence, and his ultimate triumphs. Truly a biography of a poet, by a poet, for everyone.
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4.0 out of 5 starsRevisting Wallace Stevens
By Robin Friedman HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on June 29, 2016
Format: Hardcover
I have returned to the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879 -- 1955) many times in my adult life and was glad to find this new biography, "The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens" (2016) by Paul Mariani. The University Professor of English at Boston University, Mariani has published several volumes of poetry together with biographies of the American poets Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Hart Crane, and now Stevens. I read and learned from Mariani's biography of Crane, "The Broken Tower" which I reviewed in 2002 on Amazon.

I have loved Stevens' difficult poetry for its own sake. He has inspired me over the years in his ability to combine artistic achievement with career success as a lawyer and executive for an insurance company. Other 20th century Americans who combined career with art include W.C. Williams and the composer Charles Ives. Williams and Stevens knew each other well, and their friendship is discussed in this biography. Ives and Stevens apparently did not know one another, and the parallels and differences in their lives may be a subject for exploration.

I also have loved Stevens for the strongly philosophical cast of his poetry. He is one of the rare poets who work in the realm of thought as well as in the concreteness of experience. The philosophical tenor of Stevens' poetry owes something to his student years at Harvard where he got to know George Santayana and, to a lesser extent, Josiah Royce. I have been studying the American idealist philosopher Josiah Royce in recent years. In reading Mariani's biography, I saw parallels between his absolute idealism and Stevens' absolute fiction that I hadn't thought about before.Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsExcellent account of the life and poetry of Wallace Stevens

A splendid account of the poet's life, with informative critique of Stevens poetry.

Published 12 days ago by Charlotte T. Whaley
5.0 out of 5 starsIf you know and love Stevens' poems, you will be interested to read...

As a lifelong Wallace Stevens aficianado, I looked forward to Paul Mariani's book and was happy to find it immensely interesting.

Published 25 days ago by Wolfcrow
2.0 out of 5 starsNot Mariani's Best

The Whole Harmonium: The life of Wallace Stevens is by far the least satisfying of the four biographies of poets by Paul Mariani I have read, and the problem is pretty much the... Read more

Published 1 month ago by David Curry
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

He met all of my expectations and beyond.

Published 1 month ago by Jon Racherbaumer
5.0 out of 5 starsStevens is a great poet. This biography illustrates that

Stevens is a great poet. This biography illustrates that.

Published 1 month ago by William C. Schutzius
3.0 out of 5 starsA Disappointment

The problem with this biography is that there is too much paraphrasing and overinterpretation of Stevens' poetry, letters and essays and not enough recounting and contemplation of... Read more

Published 2 months ago by Joseph Bianco
5.0 out of 5 starsAn excellent, much-needed biography by a writer with a deep ...

An excellent, much-needed biography by a writer with a deep understanding of poetry, and a talent for connecting the life with the work. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Bill Strunk
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

A wonderful presentation of the life and poetics of one of our major poets.

Published 2 months ago by Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 starsGood time to make up to him

I neglected stevens for way too long as i ventured in Eliot Cummings and Ginsberg land. Good time to make up to him.

Published 2 months ago by Amazon Customer

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