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This study of the poetry of poet-businessman Wallace Stevenson focuses on his works that reveal a constant search for religion. ... Read more

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A Comprehensive Tool for Stevens Scholarship
Although prohibitively priced, "Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens" provides an accessible starting point for Stevens scholarship for pleasure of for academic purposes.With essays by noted Stevens scholars, Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye in addition to many others, this collection of essays provides a useful survey of the range of views taken by contemporary scholars and usefully illuminates both Stevens' shorter and longer poems. ... Read more

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This study examines Wallace Stevens' ideas and practice of poetic language with a focus on the 1930s, an era in which Stevens persistently thematized a keenly felt pressure for the possible social involvement and political utility of poetic language. The argument suggests how mutually implicated elements of his poetry such as diction, prosody and metaphor are relied on to signify or enact aesthetic closure; both in the negative terms of expressive impotence and unethical isolation and the positive ones of imaginative and linguistic change. In this respect, the study deals closely with the epistemologically and ethically fraught issue of the ambiguous and volatile role of non-semantic elements and linguistic difficulty in Stevens' language. Assuming that these facets are not exclusive to this period but receive a very clear, and therefore instructive, formulation in it, the discussion outlines some of Stevens' most central tropes for poetic creativity at this stage of his career, suggesting ways in which they came to form part of his later discourse on poetic functionality, when polemical concepts for the imagination, such as evasion and escapism, became central. Stevens' prosody is discussed from within an eclectic analytical framework in which cumulative rhythmics is complemented by traditional metrics as a way of doing justice to his rich, varied and cognitively volatile use of verse language. The expressive potency of prosodic patterning is understood both as an effect of its resistance to semantic interpretation and by assuming a formal drive to interpret them in relation to the semantic and metaphoric staging of individual poems. A poem, in turn, is understood both as a strategic, stylistically deviant response to the challenges of a particular historical moment, and as an attempt to communicate through creating a sense of linguistic resistance and otherness.

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Very insightful.
Professor Berger is clearly an expert on his topic, and it comes through in his writing. His analysis of Stevens' work is very insightful. Reading Berger's criticism is like reading Stevens again for the first time. ... Read more

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Wallace Stevens established himself as a preeminent person in American letters. He is said to have elucidated the path toward the supreme fiction. Learn more about Stevens with this edition of Bloom's Major Poets.

This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. History’s greatest poets are covered in one series with expert analysis by Harold Bloom and other critics. These texts offer a wealth of information on the poets and their works that are most commonly read in high schools, colleges, and universities. ... Read more

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This study, first published in 1960, aims to show how to read Stevens. There have since been many critical accounts of Stevens, which are listed in the bibliography. Kermode also wrote an introduction for this new edition of his essay in which he recalls how insecure Stevens' reputation was in the 1950s. Frank Kermode edited the "Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot" and he is the author of "History and Value". He is a regular contributor to "Partisan Review", "New Statesman" and "The London Review of Books", as well as co-editor of "Encounter" magazine. ... Read more

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Wallace Stevens, who died in 1955, was one of the most original, prolific, serious, and rewarding of twentieth-century American poets. This is a detailed critical study of his poetry, identifying its concerns, from the point of view of a convinced admirer. Lucy Beckett presents Sevens as a contemplative poet, engaged on a long enquiry into the nature of the relationship between the creative imagination and the world it illuminates and recreates. Steven's achievement is seen as one of the great monuments in English of the endeavour to find and sustain a connection between poetry and belief. ... Read more

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Simply One of the Best Books on Wallace Stevens
I first read this book when it became available in the US in the 1970's. I found it a concise, no-nonsense approach to Stevens. In many ways, better than Bloom because it was jargon free but just as assured in its understanding and its discussion of the poet. It was one of the first books that intelligently related his prose and letters to a deeper explanation of the poems. Over the years when I returned to reading Stevens I looked for this book to unknot my inability grasp a line or poem--and while not a close reading in the style of Vendler--I always found clarification in the book. I finally found a used copy of my own several years ago. All of which is by way of saying that I am very pleased that the book is back in print and I cannot urge readers of Stevens enough to acquire and read this book. Many books on Stevens since this was written have appeared. Some probe deeply into one or another aspect of Stevens and some authors may even have looked as comprehensively at Stevens. But none, I think, are as well written as a result of Beckett's desire to clarify along with a comprehension that sends you back to the poems with your passion intact and your intellect burnished. ... Read more

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a very limited selection of Stevens' poetry
Two words pretty much sum up this collection: PUBLIC DOMAIN. It's only got what is available to reprint for free--Stevens' early poems. Some of these are nice, of course, but unless all you're looking for is Stevens' early poems you'd be better off with "Collected Poetry and Prose," or "Collected Poems," or "The Palm at the End of the Mind."

An introduction to an indispensable poet
After Whitman and Dickinson, Stevens is the American poet. The great beauty of his lines is musical and lyrical, colorful and rich with light.His lines have memorable( and re-memberable quality) that few poets can match. He has a Keatsian long- line aesthetic feeling, a sense of sensual reality, an experiential touch .This combined with a reflectiveness which makes and aches at a harmony of its own.
Who can match lines like, (" Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings of those white elders, but escaping, left only Death's ironic scraping" or " Deer walk our mountains / and in the isolation of the sky at evening/ Casual flocks of pigeons make ambiguous undulations/ as they go downward to darkness on extended wings.")

" A poet makes a music of his own
and in his inner dissonance reflects
a star a sea a world forever home
in words whose Beauty
Lines of Light attest."

Good introduction
Wallace Stevens was one of the best poets of the twentieth century, with his richly atmospheric writing and multilayered themes about religion, nature and the imagination. "The Emperor of Ice Cream" is a good introduction to his work, collecting various poems into one volume.

"Let the lamp affix its beam/The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream," Wallace writes in the title poem. Other poems included are the eerie "Tattoo" ("The webs of your eyes/Are fastened/To the flesh and bones of you/As to rafters or grass"), the thirteen-part poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," the haunting "Domination of Black" ("I saw how the night came,/Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks"), and the languid, semi-spiritual "Sunday Morning."

The Dover Thrift collection does a good job of showing the various kinds of poetry that Stevens wrote -- some are infused with color, some with darkness, some with a rich overtone, some very brief like the tiny "Valley Candle." Many of Stevens' best poems are included in here.

One thing that Stevens' writing always has is beauty -- even in the weird ones. With only a few words he can evoke images that are exquisite, soothing, even eerie ("My candle burned alone in an immense valley"). He also infuses his poetry with intense colors and plenty of nature references, birds and trees, snow and rain and wind.

"The Emperor of Ice Cream" -- despite the somewhat silly title -- is an excellent showcase for some of Stevens' best works. Definitely worth checking out for fans of richly-conceived verse.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream
This is a resourceful book with a good assortment of Stevens' poetry. There is a decent amount of background on Stevens as well as many of his more influential poems. Overall, this is a good book to add to any poetry collection.

its okay
The poems are okay. The Emperor of Ice-cream stands out from the others. ... Read more

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Art from Art from Art
THE BLUE GUITAR is one of the most sensitive 'collaborations' or 'appropriations' or 'responsive inspirations' that has been published.Wallace Stevens wrote THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR in 1936 as a response to the famous painting by Pablo Picasso called 'The Old Guitarist 1903'.David Hockney discovered the poem and readdressed the Picasso in 1976 and the result of his encounter resulted in the 20 etchings he created. The work of all three artists is presented in this small book which feels more like a bibliophile edition than a standard text.No need for explantion or essay or evaluation, this sensitve little tome speaks volumes.A stunning publication. ... Read more

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PhD Dissertation, Jacksonville State University ... Read more

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Wallace Stevens, one of this century's foremost American poets, has been both praised and blamed for the "difficulty" of his poems and has bemused those seeking to reconcile the sobriety of his career as an insurance lawyer with the extravagance of his poetry. In this book, Tony Sharpe explores the symbiotic and antagonistic relations between Stevens' literary life and his working life as senior executive. He outlines the personal, historical, and publishing contexts which shaped his writing career, and suggests how awareness of these contexts sheds new light on the poems. Stevens was uncompromising in his insistence on the extraordinary importance of poetry to the ordinary world, and in this appreciative but not uncritical study, Sharpe tries to see the man behind the mandarin, while seeking not to simplify the sumptuous austerities of a major modernist writer.
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Citizen Stevens
Brazeau's 1977 reminiscence of Stevens through the comments of many of the people who had known, or just met him, either in his capacity as a man of business and a lawyer or a writer of poetry, is the essential introduction to the man, and, taken with the usual caveats, a fascinating point of entry into the poetry itself. Some of the entries are remarkably perspicacious - notably that of Jose Feo, the Cuban scholar, who underlines just how grounded in a sensual appreciation of the things of the world Stevens's language was. Stevens was many ways, and despite the ravings of that pompous windbag up there at Yale, our most "French" poet, in his grasp of quasi musical color notably, which is just what you'd expect from someone who not only was apt to recommend Ponge and Char as reading material but also contributed introductions to Valery's Dialogues, a poet whose temperament was not unlike his own - while others are written by blowhards tooting their own puny horns. None however are less than illuminating. Brazeau's method, and its effect, is akin to Welles's in Citizen Kane: the many refracted views may never offer a total grasp of the man - it was Welles's point of course that such a complete picture was ultimately impossible -but they come closer than any biography written and, I wager, to be written. Incidentally, if Stevens had a Rosebud, I didn't find it here. Why this book is not in permanent circulation escapes me. Essential. ... Read more

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Part biography and part literary history, this book is about the experience of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens in the 1930s. Stevens is generally thought to have antagonised, even engaged, the young literary radicals of the period. Using the archives of many little-known political poets, Alan Filreis offers a detailed description of these battles, in which the very texture of the various positions taken up in the movement between left and right becomes available to us in the language of the participants. Filreis demonstrates that the radicals knew and appreciated modernism more than has been generally recognised, and that Stevens's poetry - as well as that of other then-eminent modernists was significantly influenced by political poets and critics on the left. This book is a contribution to the cultural history of the American 1930s as well as a novel approach to an oft-studied figure. ... Read more

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Hardcover book. Dusty-rose colored boards. 196 pages plus another on history of the type used. 1950 edition. Arguably this may be the most important book of poetry written in the 20th century. ... Read more