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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Opus Posthumous is available in paperback!, 19 Sep 2001
By A Customer
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.
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