Rating: 
Summary: A poet's eye
Review: "Her terrace was the sand/And the palms and the twilight" -- and those are only the first two lines. Dipping into surrealism and imbued with spirituality, his poetry is compiled into "The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens," which includes seven compilations of his work.
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").
If nothing else, Stevens' poetry can be read just because it is exquisitely beautiful. He lavished details all over almost every poem he wrote, and gave many of them the quality of a dream. His descriptions are simply written, but brilliantly laid out: "When my dream was near the moon,/The white folds of its gown/Filled with yellow light."
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. And lush detail is added to many of his poems, with descriptions of the moon, sun, plants and lighting, along with dazzling descriptions of the colors.
But his writing is more than beautiful. Stevens' work often poses questions about death, life, religion, and art, taking the conventional and turning it on its head. His belief in the importance of his art is reflected in poems like "Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself," which ends with the portentous lines: "Surrounded by its choral rings,/Still far away. It was like/A new knowledge of reality."
Wallace Stevens is one of the most unique poets of the 20th century, and the sprawling "Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens" is a wonderful read.
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Summary: Poetry as Religion, Poetry as Communion
Review: Can poetry replace religion as an object of personal "faith"? Wallace Stevens thought so, and in this collection of exquisitely crafted poems he attempted to show us how. This collection contains many of his most famous pieces including the much anthogized "The Snow Man", "Fabliau of Florida", Anecdote of the Jar" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Balckbird", as well as, his most famous (anthologized) poem "Sunday Morning".
In many ways the intensely focused vision and complex word play that Stevens employed, which aimed at breaking down the Western metaphysical binary between word and thing, in his poetry is representative of the deeply complect nature of his poetic vision. While not only breaking new ground in form and voice, Stevens, in these poems, sought to promulgate a view of poetry as deeply subjective and personal as our contact with the world and Nature itself. As Stevens himself later explained, his poetry was meant to represent "not Ideas, but the things themselves".
The Snow Man, for example, can be read as a mediatation on death and its place in the natural part of the unending cycles of being. Although, not a new idea, the way Stevens frames it, through his highly complex use of such simple language, brought to bear by the implied interrelationships of the individual words at play, introduces the idea of Gaia to the discourse of modernity. Thus, to understand and experience connection with the world itself requires the abandonment of irrational, socialized fears and a willingness to accept death as a natural outcome of life, without deference to hopeful dogma and superstition.
As "The Snow Man" illustrates, the message that Stevens tries to impart, through the transformation of language from mere linguistic signifiers into "real" referential elements grounded in reality--in brute being--is simply to force the reader to realize that the same action can be enacted in our individual interactions with each other and the world. Through metaphor and complex word play Stevens shows that the very metaphors that we all live by, simply shroud the apathetic reality that surrounds us all--something that some are just not willing to face. Thus, in a way Stevens poetry, through a redoubling of signification falls back upon itself and reveals that the world and the word are merely one and that neither takes precedence over the other, both mutually informs and defines the other, but only we, through our harmonium with the world, allow them to do so. Otherwise, we simply continue to delude ourselves and fail to see the actual things that lie in the ideas themselves.
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Summary: The American T.S. Eliot
Review: During a time in which our world was modernized in warfare, Stevens sought out the answers; indeed, in his collected poems, the reader sees a man struggling with man-made fictions: religion, government, science, and philosophy. It is through this struggle, ultimately expressed in "Sunday Morning," that Stevens comes to the final conclusion: Poetry is the supreme fiction.
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Summary: a shepherd of the language
Review: He will never be a popular poet in his nation. His beginnings did show more expertise than talent; the urge to spew message seemed irresistible: ÒLike a dull scholar, I behold, in love, / An ancient aspect touching a new mind;Ó ÒPoetry is the supreme fiction, madame;Ó ÒBeauty is momentary in the mind -Ó if this would have been all he could do; nobody would care to remember him. But once his first lines took notice of ÒThe exceeding brightness of this early sun ...Ó the poet had found his pace.
In his century, Wallace Stevens is one of the 5 leading poets native to America - I would rank him ahead of Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound as the breathless runner up. None of these people can hold the candle to W. H. Auden, but then, Auden was not a native. But how important is it anyway for a nation to have great poets to her credit? Judged by the reception of poetry in America, not very much. I know people who take courses in creative writing, because they come cheaper than a therapist.
To be a poet in troubled times is never easy, and the 20th century was a watershed between the cultural paradigms. Poetry is a pagan instinct, a last line of defence of the old idols - maybe it has really run its course. But then language still needs its shepherds to protect it from the stench and spill of modern journalese and Òmessages from our sponsor,Ó and new poems, waiting to be discovered, are still floating in that haze of unborn dreams, that is shrouding our planet. Over the years, Stevens became a very conscientious shepherd:
A few things for themselves, / Convolvulus and coral, / Buzzards and live-moss, / Tiestas from the keys, / A few things for themselves, / Florida, venereal soil, / Disclose to the lover. // The dreadful sundry of this world, / The Cuban, Polodowsky, / The Mexican women, / The Negro undertaker / Killing the time between corpses / Fishing for crayfish... / Virgin of boorish births, // Swiftly in the nights, / In the porches of Key West, / Behind the bougainvilleas, / After the guitar is asleep, / Lasciviously as the wind, / You come tormenting, / Insatiable, // When you might sit, / A scholar of darkness, / Sequestered over the sea, / Wearing a clear tiara / Of red and blue and red, / Sparkling, solitary, still, / In the high sea-shadow. // Donna, donna, dark, / Stooping in indigo gown / And cloudy constellations, / Conceal yourself or disclose / Fewest things to the lover --- / A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit, / A pungent bloom against your shade.
Or:
I. Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, / And the green freedom of a cockatoo / Upon a rug mingle to dissipate / The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. / She dreams a little, and she feels the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe, / As a calm darkness among water-lights. / The pungent oranges and bright, green wings / Seem things in some procession of the dead, / Winding across wide water, without sound. / The day is like wide water, without sound, / Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet / Over the seas, to silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. .
II. Why should she give her bounty to the dead? / What is divinity if it can come / Only in silent shadows and in dreams? / Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, / In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else / In any balm or beauty of the earth, / Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? /Divinity must live within herself: / Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; / Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued / Elations when the forest blooms; gusty / Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; / All pleasures and all pains, remembering / The bough of summer and the winter branch. / These are the measures destined for her soul. ...Ó [...]
VI. ÒIs there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs / Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, / Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, / With rivers like our own that seek for seas / They never find, the same receding shores / That never touch with inarticulate pang? / Why set the pear upon those river-banks / Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? / Alas, that they should wear our colors there, / The silken weavings of our afternoons, / And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! / Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, / Within whose burning bosom we devise / Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. ...Ó [...]
It seems StevensÕ gift to America is a sanctuary for language and meditation ... so far!
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Summary: Not much to add
Review: I don't have much to add to what others have said, except this thought. I seem to remember reading a critic who said of James Joyce that his writing was (I am paraphrasing) not *about* anything, but was, instead, the thing itself. While I love Joyce, I think that this statement applies even more perfectly to Mr. Stevens. Let be be finale of seem!
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Summary: Ahhh.....
Review: It has been said many times that Wallace Stevens is one of the five best and most influential American poets. After reading this collection of poems it is impossible to disagree. It is a marvelous experience to pick up this book and read a few poems.
Rating:
Summary: Ahhh.....
Review: It has been said many times that Wallace Stevens is one of the five best and most influential American poets. After reading this collection of poems it is impossible to disagree. It is a marvelous experience to pick up this book and read a few poems.
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Summary: Iffucan, read this book and then have some ice-cream!
Review: Our Modernist Master. THE poet of the age, of any age, really. More soulful and jazz-happy than any Slam(e) Poete out stalking the cafes. A chirping metaphysical mind with all the right rhythms setting new tones. Unfortunately, you'll have to buy Opus Posthumous for some of the really great rare stuff. But here!: "The Snow Man", "To the One of Fictive Music", "Re-Statement of Romance", "Examination...", "The Revolutionists..." What a Figure of very capable imagination!
Rating:
Summary: The Man in Full
Review: Our Modernist Master. THE poet of the age, of any age, really. More soulful and jazz-happy than any Slam(e) Poete out stalking the cafes. A chirping metaphysical mind with all the right rhythms setting new tones. Unfortunately, you'll have to buy Opus Posthumous for some of the really great rare stuff. But here!: "The Snow Man", "To the One of Fictive Music", "Re-Statement of Romance", "Examination...", "The Revolutionists..." What a Figure of very capable imagination!
Rating:
Summary: The Intensest Rendez-vous...
Review: Stevens is a quirky and imaginative poet with a taste for unusual diction, a fluidity of ideas and an unerring instinct for the haunting and intriguing. The poems are meditational in their completeness and memorability and present a more delightful and pleasurable style of Modernism than the other 'greats' of the period such as T S Eliot or Ezra Pound. His attempts to create a 'Supreme Fiction' can at times be baffling, but there is a richness of pure self-indulgence in the poetry which means that it is immediately compulsive and a book which several of my friends agree is 'essential' to any poetry collection, whether its concern be with Poetry at its literary finest or with the langorous pleasure of 'the green freedom of a cockatoo...'and inspirational dream-like meditations. Treat yourself!
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