Synopses & Reviews
Review
"In these eloquent and witty lectures Helen Vendler attempts to locate the peculiar genius of Wallace Stevens in the 'life-moment' when interior reality presses against the object, 'the radiant moment when he had succeeded in calling the world by name. 'She concentrates on the shorter poems and examines them according to the strategies of concealment, revelation, and desire by which, as she argues, he projects his experiential, spatial world into a temporal structure of language. None of this often persuasive analysis is aimed at a fundamental reconception of Stevens.
Rather it seeks to find the way to his heart. That can be a frustrating and inconclusive business when dealing with the evasive and diffident Stevens, but in this case the game is well worth the candle." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
[This book] tells the reader a good deal more about Wallace Stevens's poetry and Stevens as a poet than many a weighty tome...The shining merit of these lectures is their capacity to elucidate single poems, some familiar anthology pieces, others much less familiar, so that they stand alone as comprehensible entities. The key to this success is the devotion that has accompanied her patience, a devotion that responds, in particular, to the warmth and sadness, the emotional depth, that Vendler finds in Stevens...Those readers who have sensed both the urgency of feeling and the forlornness in Stevens's poems, but have found the obliquities of his manner and diction often impenetrable, will be grateful for the tact and moderation of these fresh interpretations. Their special achievements are that they convince, movingly and with a simplicity not often found in Stevens commentary, and that they then leave the poem to reassemble in the mind as wholly itself. Lucy Beckett
Review
[Vendler] has found the right way to talk about [Stevens], and is quite right to say that he is a genuinely misunderstood poet. On the very late poems she is exceptionally good and provides some reasons for the belief (which I share) that they are great poems indeed...She writes throughout with admirable firmness...Altogether this little book seems to me a triumph. Times Literary Supplement
Synopsis
In this graceful book, Helen Vendler brings her remarkable skills to bear on a number of Stevens's short poems. She shows us that this most intellectual of poets is in fact the most personal of poets; that his words are not devoted to epistemological questions alone but are also "words chosen out of desire."
About the Author
Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.
Harvard University