- Paperback: 334 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Books; Revised edition edition (1 Jun 1991)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0679725342
- ISBN-13: 978-0679725343
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 14 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,327,247 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
This book has been edited to correct the previous editions errors and to incorporate material that has come to light since original publication. A third of the poems and essays in this edition are new to the volume.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is a must for all Stevens-addicts. Or, for that matter, anyone addicted to poetry, criticism or philosophy. Roughly half of the book is poems -- some earlier ones, including an earlier version of 'The Comedian as the Letter C', and many later than the last included in Stevens' Collected Poems. There are thirty pages of poem-plays -- including one peopled by Cat, Bowl and Broomstick. There are twenty pages of aphorisms, followed by a hundred pages of essays, speeches and questionnaire responses.
I don't know where to start in talking about this book. Some of the poems are less good than those in his Collected Poems -- they seem to be drafts for his more successful poems -- but some are as good. The late poems are especially good, clear and imagistic: "I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life / As a questioner about reality, / A countryman of all the bones in the world? / Now, here, the warmth I had forgotten becomes / Part of the major reality, part of / An appreciation of reality ..." ('First Warmth') There are many other poems here of equal beauty.
Stevens was an unusually intelligent poet. Perhaps more unusual than his intelligence was the analytic nature of his intelligence. A number of essays here approach the subject of philosophy -- always from a poet's point of view. They offer fascinating observations such as "The marvellous poetry of Nietzsche leaves us with -- the marvellous poetry of Nietzsche, and nothing else." Other essays connect Stevens to his time: there are two reviews of William Carlos Williams, one of which interestingly (and much to Williams' annoyance) characterised Williams as a romantic, whose attraction to the anti-poetic was an necessary corrective to this romanticism.
All the items in this book cover Stevens' major concerns: art, poetry, and its relation to "mere being" (to use the title of one of his last poems). Seen as a volume of poetry or as a volume of criticism, this is work that is far outside the usual order, both in the quality and passion of its thought. Stevens, unlike Pound or Eliot, was a poet who was, to a certain extent, outside the collective enterprise that was Modernism. He left struggles with movements to others, and instead pursued his own path with sure-footed tenacity. "Poetry," runs one of his aphorisms, "must resist the intelligence almost successfully." This book allows us to share in Stevens' high quest for reality, struggled towards through the practice of poetry.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Wallace Stevens deserves a lot higher profile in England than he currently enjoys as his early poetry and later work are as good as the English language can get. Try 'Sunday Morning', 'The Idea of Order at Key West', 'Anecdote of the Jar', 'The Poem That Took The Place of a Mountain' and 'To an Old Philosopher in Rome' as tasters. Despite the five stars I've given here, though, beware the turgid and laboured mid-period where WS lost his muse and spent a lot of time straining to produce what came so brilliantly before and after. American academics will tell you, for example, that 'Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction' is a great poem, which its ace title suggests. I, on the other hand, would warn you to steer clear of what is a boring, obscure and overlong concoction of pretentious twaddle. But as for the titles I've mentioned, and others early and late, even Shakespeare would have to flourish a quill in admiration at what is quite simply stunningly good poetry.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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24 reviews
51 of 52 people found the following review helpful
This is OK but there are better Stevens Collections
5 May 2006
Format:Paperback
This collection lacks 22 poems which appeared in "The Palm at the End of the Mind", Holly Stevens carefully edited selection highly approved of by Harold Bloom. Missing are "Of Mere Being", "A Child Asleep in Its Own Life" and "For an Old Woman in a Wig" to name but three. It leaves out the added lines of "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad". It lacks an index of first lines. If you're going to buy a book of Stevens' poems spend the extra $10 and get the magnificent Library of America "Collected Poetry and Prose" which contains EVERYTHING, is a huge bargain and will keep you occupied for the rest of your life. Or possibly get Holly Stevens "The Palm at the End of the Mind" which eliminates a lot of lesser poems which could confuse a newcomer to Stevens. The Vintage people have thrown this together without much thought. It's better than nothing, but the other two books I have named are the one's to get.
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful
A poet's eye
18 Nov 2004
Format:Paperback
"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.
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.
21 of 24 people found the following review helpful
The Intensest Rendez-vous...
21 Jan 2000
Format:Paperback
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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