Rating: 
Summary: The great American poet of the twentieth century
Review: Stevens is for me the great American poet of the twentieth century.
His music is the supreme music of poetry . Not since Keats is there anyone as rich in the most elaborate kind of longworded poetry.
His metaphysical meanderings may confuse but somehow find themselves justified by the memorableness of the great lines- and again the music.
No one comes close to him in the kind of deep and complicated beauty he presents- and again the music.
The meanings he makes are musical meanings, and the sounds of his lines sing in us ever more strongly , the more we read and reread.
Stevens is the kind of poet we want to memorize and always have with us inside, so wherever we go , we can stop and to ourselves recite lines of beauty in joy.
I may be wrong but I simply hear his poetry as the greatest America has had in the twentieth century - though lesser than Whitman and Dickinson.
Rating:
Summary: Selah, tempestuous bird
Review: The poetry of Wallace Stevens as found in this most harmonious compendium is almost as inexhaustible as Shakespeare. There are times when he is as oblique within his traditional cadences as Emily Dickinson, but like that same poet, the words coruscate and are not cliches. What poet of sixteen, learning what poetry is, wouldn't benefit from a memorization of "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," or of parts of "Sunday Morning"?Wallace Stevens begins in the tropics and ends in the cold north; his two seasons as a poet are summer and winter; in both climates, he excels. Witness the formidable achievement of Crispin's voyages ("The Comedian as the Letter C") for Stevens in summer, and later poems in blank couplets such as "No Possum, No Sop, No Taters" for Stevens in winter. In between, there is the marvelous tapestry of controlled whimsy and exquisitely orchestrated anarchy of "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" where we have everything but the kitchen sink (caparisoned elephants, a flag whacking at the halyards, the President ordaining the bee to be immortal). We all know "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"; we might profit by reacquainting ourselves with "Academic Discourse at Havana," "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," "The Auroras of Autumn," "The Dove in the Belly," and (forgive us if we do not record the full title, with its wince-worthy epithet, of the truly splendid sequence of small but glittering poems) "Like Decorations in a Cemetery." These poems really should slay the thoughtless notion that the pentameter is an insurmountable restriction for the modern poet, because we see that a poet who is hampered by such an alleged "difficulty" is really no poet at all. (It was Mr Cummings who said that no poet should venture vers libre until he has mastered the old cadences, stanzas, & forms.) We really must ask ourselves if the more facile modes of composition are necessarily improvements over these (or any) lines by Wallace Stevens: "Panache upon panache, his tails deploy / Upward and outward, in green-vented forms, / His tip a drop of water full of storms." Or the pasage in "Of Modern Poetry" where we see the actor (poet) as "A metaphysician in the dark [...] twanging a wiry string that gives / Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses." Or yet again: The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies. An anthologist of poetry once called Wallace Stevens's universe "solipsistic"; but we demur at this term. It is evident that, in spite of the occasional impenetrability of meaning, the discursus without destination or the "description without place," the missing gist or multitude of gists, the ideas hiding almost successfully behind a glitter-glatter of joy in the sounds of the words themselves, Wallace Stevens had a lifelong conversation with reality that helped to compose these marvelous concertos of the supra-quotidian. His "pick of ebon, pick of halcyon" rarely failed him as he plucked his antique string in an accord of repetition. There is sometimes a surfeit of color, an impression that the poems (however elegant) are all "surface," and the tone can sometimes oppress; but this oppression, if possible, is salutary. Always in evidence, however, is a mind at work on the language, making an ineluctable music, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, consistently if not invariably enchanting: . . . words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Rating: 
Summary: Determined through period.
Review: This continues to disinterest, more out of differences in poetic palatability than in actual quality. As a supposed surrealist and modernist, harboring such structural rigidity ultimately defeats and contradicts Steven's full adoption of his moniker. Quite honestly, the majority of his work, while revolutionizing a style throughout his time, fail to stand to many other, more literately dense poets. Brenda Shaugnessy is a strong recommendation for a polished example of the craft.
Pet sounds to Kid A. The difference is immediately obvious.
Rating:
Summary: Determined through period.
Review: This continues to disinterest, more out of differences in poetic palatability than in actual quality. As a supposed surrealist and modernist, harboring such structural rigidity ultimately defeats and contradicts Steven's full adoption of his moniker. Quite honestly, the majority of his work, while revolutionizing a style throughout his time, fail to stand to many other, more literately dense poets. Brenda Shaugnessy is a strong recommendation for a polished example of the craft.
Pet sounds to Kid A. The difference is immediately obvious.
Rating:
Summary: Iffucan, read this book and then have some ice-cream!
Review: Wallace Stevens is a god! If you don't know him than there is definately something wrong with you. Have your head examined. Then, buy this book. It is an excellent compilation of Stevens's great work. If you don't like him than you are a caveman with a shallow brainpan, and I just don't like you. What a wonderful poet. He really really is just a wonderful poet.
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful mythic interpretation of consciuosness
Review: Wallace Stevens is one of the great poets of the last century - he is startlingly original and his delightful poems, sparkling and rich on first reading, gradually reveal a subtle and intelligent interpretation of modern consciousness - a vision which is as fresh and entrancing as it is sculptured around intricate traceries of thought. A rare jewel which deserves more attention from both academics and those who just love beautiful poems....
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Summary: "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself"
Review: Wallace Stevens' poetry both continues and extends the Western Humanistic tradition that places the human mind as the measure of all things. Stevens uses language not to depict the things of the world but to proclaim the mind's sense of being in the world. Stevens' language is often difficult, and his aesthetic defies simplistic explanation. Stevens is best understood by a mind that refuses to be taken into the conventional sense of things, but rather comes to sense the moments of the imagination and the life that is lived in them. What is known is not thing as idea, but knowledge in each moment as the life lived in the place. This seeking after a "Plain Sense of things" underlies most, if not all, of what Stevens writes. Anyone interested in difficult poetry that continually repays their efforts in full will want to have a copy of this book. Of course, there are more complete additions of Stevens poetry now available. You may want to check those out too.
Rating:
Summary: Imaginitive, Pleasurable Poetry, in the Extreme
Review: Wallace Stevens's poems are full of imagination, perception, humor, wonder, and awe. It is a sheer joy and a sheer pleasure to read this collection of glorious poems. I recommend this landmark work to everybody.
Rating:
Summary: Imaginitive, Pleasurable Poetry, in the Extreme
Review: Wallace Stevens's poems are full of imagination, perception, humor, wonder, and awe. It is a sheer joy and a sheer pleasure to read this collection of glorious poems. I recommend this landmark work to everybody.
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