Wallace Stevens

[quasimodo1]

GUBBINAL That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

[stlukesguild]

Quasi... good to see you still here championing poetry. You may have noticed the thread on Neruda. Not much discussions of specific poems yet.

[Streber]

I am posting this because I am interested in Wallace Stevens and I want to see if there is anybody here to talk to. I am going through his Collected Poems one by one with Eleanor Cook's Reader's Guide.

[MorpheusSandman]

Streber, I read through Stevens' poetry twice within the past year, once in the (superior) Library of America edition and again via the Collected/Opus Posthumous editions on my Kindle. He instantly became one of my favorites and I've read a handful of studies. While I have Cook's Reader's Guide on my Kindle I've yet to read it; but I have read:

Lucy Beckett's Wallace Stevens
BJ Leggett's Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory: Conceiving the Supreme Fiction
Helen Vendler's two Stevens books: On Extended Wings and Words Chosen Out of Desire

All of them agree that the central concern of Stevens' poetry is the relationship between reality and the imagination, but they all take different routes in analyzing this concern. Of these, Beckett's is the best intro. I think she best explains the general way in which this theme plays out throughout Stevens' poetry. Her only flaw is a kind of superficiality compared to the others, but such superficiality makes for a perfect intro. Leggett's is an excellent reading of Stevens through the texts that most influenced Stevens' thought. Vendler's Words Chosen... instead of focusing on the theoretical aspect of Stevens' thought, focuses on the emotional desires that gave rise to his imagination. I think this book, above the others, digs into the emotional depth that so many readers feel in Stevens, but that gets glossed over in criticism that only focuses on his intellectual aspects. Her Extended Wings is an analysis of his long poetry, mostly concerned with how Stevens' techniques (such has his constant use of qualifiers and auxiliary verbs) illuminate what he's saying. Without this book, I don't know if I could've ever grasped both Creedences of Summer and The Auroras of Autumn.