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

Wallace Stevens : Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America) | Wallace Stevens, Frank Kermode | Masterful Edition

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Wallace Stevens : ...

	Wallace Stevens : Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America) Wallace Stevens, Frank Kermode Library of America, 1997 - 1030 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Collected and worth reading through

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.

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Masterful Edition

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.

A lifetime of exploration will continue to reward

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.

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Indispensable volume of our greatest poet

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.

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An American classic - Beauty is Truth

For many of us Stevens is the supreme American poet of the twentieth- century. This invaluable volume contains treasures of poetry , whose richness and beauty are in some ways incomparable.
The prose , including the letters, I have always found much less interesting and convincing . Stevens strangely seems to me less persuasive in personal communication than in impersonally seeing and saying a universe.
The greatness of the poems is unquestionable. Part of it is their richness in perception, and the power in which perceptions and ideas combine in visionary lines of extended beauty. Another part is in the music of the poetry, a memorable music which plays in mind and heart and moves us into new feelings of things.
Art in Stevens , the poetry of Art is an incantation and a vision, a kind of replacement religion .What is remarkable is how much Beauty he created without , it seems to me, any complementary idea of Goodness.
With Stevens as with the poet I find him closest to, Keats,
" Beauty is Truth, and Truth is Beauty" This may not be all we need to know on earth, but in this case it may well be enough.

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reviews: 1, page 2, 3

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