Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
A beautiful new edition—the first in nearly twenty years—of the work of Wallace Stevens, a founding father of contemporary American poetry, with a dazzling range of work that is at once emotional and intellectual. As John N. Serio reminds us in his elegant introduction, Stevens has written more persuasively than any other poet about the significance of poetry itself in everyday life: “The imagination—frequently synonymous with the act of the mind, or poetry, for Stevens—is what gives life its savor, its sanction, its sacred quality.”
This rich and thorough selection—published in the 130th anniversary year of Stevens’s birth—carries us from the explosion of Harmonium in 1923 to the maturity of The Auroras of Autumn in 1950 and the magisterial Collected Poems published by Knopf in 1954. To be drawn in once more by “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” to name only a few, is to experience again the mystery of a poet who calls us to a higher music and to a deeper understanding of our vast and inarticulate interior world.
This essential volume for all readers of poetry reminds us of Stevens’s nearly unparalleled contribution to the art form and his unending ability to puzzle, fascinate, and delight us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The third in a series of handsomely designed publications of Selected volumes by major poets (following books by James Merrill and Frank O'Hara), this new selection from the whole of Stevens's career should bring this major poet's work to the attention of a new generation. Stevens is arguably the strangest of the High Modern poets, the most difficult to classify. While he partook of classical allusions and nods to American speech like his contemporaries, his poems take place in a world that is thoroughly his own, where a jar placed on the ground "made the slovenly wilderness/ Surround that hill" and Florida is a place where a woman sings by the sea such that it becomes "merely a place by which she walked to sing." Eminent Stevens scholar Serio presents Stevens's well-known favorites ("The Emperor of Ice-Cream") as well as lesser-known texts, such as "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together," hidden in the poet's only volume of prose. As this volume shows, we are still catching up to the force and individuality of Stevens's imagination, and perhaps we never will.
