Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose (Loa #96)

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 philo

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.

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 o

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.