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Summary: everyday life experiences
Review: everyday life experiences put into writing
mr stevens, i learned was a friend of robert frost's as well and their connection in writing is evident as well
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Summary: A lifetime of exploration will continue to reward
Review: 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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Summary: Shallow as a puddle?
Review: OK so I'm not a trained critic and this is just my opinion. Does anyone else see the obvious artifice in his poetry? Constructed to tried and trusted formulae. The other reviews speak of his broad spectrum of subject matter. Reading some of his material, he knows nothing first hand of what he is writing. Maybe I am a sentimentalist, but I prefer poetry to be written from real expereince, from the heart. I find Stevens' writing literally competent, but I can't ever imagine it moving me. I need something deeper, truer.
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Summary: Indispensable volume of our greatest poet
Review: 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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Summary: haunting me...
Review: Since the day the poem was first introduced to me, "The Emperor of Ice Cream" has haunted me and confused me; notwithstanding its very clear vision into a reality that I have trouble accepting, and may never accept. Thank you Mr. Stevens, for helping me cope with what human nature can do to us. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone that would like to see what brilliant, clarifying visions simple words can create in your mind...
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Summary: cosmological fireworks!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: cosmological fireworks!
Review: 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.
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Summary: magical poetry beautifully edited
Review: Stevens was on of America's most profound thinkers, and having a lovely edition of his work like this is great.
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Summary: Collected and worth reading through
Review: 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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Summary: Kermode gets at the "real" Stevens
Review: Who knew that the self-possessed and elegant verse of Wallace Stevens actually masked an insecure, nervous man of choleric temperament? Not me. Kermode, a Stevens scholar and biographer, has done a good job of not merely reprinting here the familiar but of finding some true surprises, too. For example, this verse, written in Stevens' 40th year to a college literary magazine that was sponsoring a competition:I Want to Win The Darned Contest Please let me win
your poetry contest
I'd like to be a lucky winner today.
I'm dreaming of the fame that will
ensue if you call me to utter
the words that make it worth while:
You're a winner, you're not a loser
any more
you totally have what it takes to
write a poem
that moves us
without making us puke.
Please god, that's what I need to
hear from you.
OK? OK.
Thanks again.
Very Truly Yours,
Wallace Stevens
Vice President. The book taught me a lot about this great American poet.
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