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Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens Paperback – February 8, 2011

by Wallace Stevens (Author), John N. Serio (Editor)

4.7 46 ratings

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The first new selection of this acclaimed poet’s work in nearly twenty years—now in paperback—is a rich reminder to poetry readers of his lasting contribution and his unending ability to puzzle, fascinate, and delight us.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Far more than Eliot or Pound, Stevens wished passionately to be above all a poet of twentieth-century America and its American English; and he had the luck, as they did not, to write with increasing genius to the end of his life.” —Helen Vendler, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, two National Book Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize.

John N. Serio has been the editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal for more than twenty-five years. He is a professor at Clarkson University in upstate New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

What can one say about a poet who writes, quite tenderly, “And for what, except for you, do I feel love?” and who does not mean his wife, or his daughter, or any other person, but rather an imaginary figure: the muse? But that is how Wallace Stevens begins the prologue to what many consider his greatest poem, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”—with a passionate, intimate address not to a beloved but to an intangible concept: inspiration. With something approaching erotic fervor, Stevens personifies an abstraction and speaks directly to poetry, as if it were his lover:

In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

No other poet I know of has written so elegantly and so persuasively about the beauty and significance of poetry in everyday life. We find these declarations not only in Stevens’s poems but also in his essays, most of which originated as invited lectures on the subject of poetry. In these essays, Stevens seduces us with his enchanting prose to believe in the spiritual importance of poetry. 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. In a passage from “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” he stresses the importance of poetic language by evoking our human craving for the sound of words:

“The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them.”

Noting that the imagination (poetry) must be based on reality, and furthermore that the interdependence of the imagination and reality is crucial, Stevens goes on to isolate poetry’s inherent distinctiveness: It bestows nobility, a quality he defines as “our spiritual height and depth.” Nobility emerges from the press of the imagination against a world that seems chaotic, crass, violent, and banal. The task of the poet is to transmit his imaginative power to others. Stevens sees the poet fulfilling himself “only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others.” Simply put, the poet’s role “is to help people to live their lives.”

One could cite other essays that make Stevens’s case for poetry, but the real question is: How well does his own poetry measure up to his ideal? After all, the telling phrase in the opening line of the invocation to “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” is “except for you.” Since the “you” refers to the creative faculty of the mind, it excludes everything else, including, of course, people. At the very least, such devotion to art rather than another person might strike a reader as odd. It has certainly struck many readers as cold and impersonal. With such observations as the following, Stevens has done little to alter that impression: “Life is not people and scene but thought and feeling;” “Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble;” “I have no life except in poetry.”

There is an abstract feature to much of Stevens’s poetry that distinguishes it from that of most other poets. Modern lyric poets, for example, usually write about more tangible topics, often using the first-person singular. One thinks of the speaker contrasting his neighbor’s view of walls with his own in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” or the persona’s sudden reversal of perspective toward a rather ugly, lice-infested fish in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” or even the paralyzing insecurity of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, dreading a social encounter (“In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo”). Each of these poems has a well-defined speaker and a clear setting. Each invites the reader to identify with or relate to the principal human figure in the poem.

By contrast, Stevens’s poems frequently seem bizarre, theoretical, and detached. What is one to make of lines such as “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream”; or “A. A violent order is disorder; and / B. A great disorder is an order”; or “There it was, word for word, / The poem that took the place of a mountain”? In addition, Stevens often employs strange characters, such as the mountain-minded Hoon, Professor Eucalyptus, and Canon Aspirin. He seldom uses the first-person form in his poetry, and when he does, it is likely to be in the plural form of “we.” Although he occasionally chooses the second-person “you,” he usually resorts to an anonymous third-person “he” or “she,” or to the even more remote “one.”

How then do we explain Stevens’s subject and elucidate his greatness as a poet? The answer is simple: His major achievement is the expression of the self in all its amplitude and, in fact, teasingly beyond it. In this respect, he writes in the grand tradition of romantic poetry.

Ironically, his strategies of distancing—his use of odd characters, his opening philosophical gambits, his impersonal voice—serve to objectify and make authentic deeply personal sources of feeling and thought. To borrow Eliot’s phrase, Stevens’s poems become objective correlatives of various states within the reader, not only of heart and mind but also of being.

By analogy, consider what happens when one reads a poem such as Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Given the title, one naturally assumes that this is Whitman’s personal declaration, his own song. After all, he begins rather explicitly: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” But as one continues to read—as one absorbs the language, the sounds, the images, the rhythms—a revelation emerges: This is not Whitman’s song of self at all, but rather “mine.” Whitman’s song of self has subtly transformed itself into the reader’s. One realizes, sometimes with a jolt, that the title, “Song of Myself,” is a play on words: it has a double and much more personal meaning.

Similarly, when Stevens writes, “And for what, except for you, do I feel love?” we, as readers, respond to the language, to our “need for words to express our thoughts and feelings.” We search their sound “for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration” that expresses not Stevens’s self but ours. It is we who “press the extremest book of the wisest man / Close to [us], hidden in [us] day and night”; it is we who “sit at rest, / For a moment in the central of our being”; and it is we who discover that the “vivid transparence that [poetry brings] is peace.” We are like the invisible audience in Stevens’s “Of Modern Poetry” that listens “Not to the play, but to itself, expressed / In an emotion as of two people, as of two / Emotions becoming one.” The poet, the metaphysician in the dark,” has created the music that gives “Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses.” Stevens touches and moves our deepest and most private sense of self. In doing so, he fulfills his goal of making his imagination ours.

“Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

“Anecdote of the Jar”

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

“A Dish of Peaches in Russia”

With my whole body I taste these peaches,
I touch them and smell them. Who speaks?

I absorb them as the Angevine
Absorbs Anjou. I see them as a lover sees,

As a young lover sees the first buds of spring
And as the black Spaniard plays his guitar.

Who speaks? But it must be that I,
That animal, that Russian, that exile, for whom

The bells of the chapel pullulate sounds at
Heart. The peaches are large and round,

Ah! and red; and they have peach fuzz, ah!
They are full of juice and the skin is soft.

They are full of the colors of my village
And of fair weather, summer, dew, peace.

The room is quiet where they are.
The windows are open. The sunlight fills

The curtains. Even the drifting of the curtains,
Slight as it is, disturbs me. I did not know

That such ferocities could tear
One self from another, as these peaches do.

“The Plain Sense of Things”

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; Reprint edition (February 8, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375711732
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375711732
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.4 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.88 x 9.13 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #290,626 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #372 in American Fiction Anthologies
- #1,780 in Poetry Themes & Styles (Books)
- #3,205 in Short Stories Anthologies

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4.7 46 ratings

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robin friedman

A New Selection of Stevens' Poetry

Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2009

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John Serio's new selection of the poetry of Wallace Stevens (1879 -1955) gave me the opportunity to revisit the works of this great American modernist poet. Stevens was able to combine his calling as a poet with a highly successful career as a lawyer and executive for the Hartford Insurance Company. This combination of poetry and practice was a source of my early fascination with Stevens many years ago. Stevens is also unusual because his first major collection of poetry, "Harmonium" appeared in 1923, when he was well into his 40s. The Library of America has published a volume of Stevens' complete poetry and prose. But this volume with poems selected by Serio, a noted Stevens scholar, includes poems from each of the poet's published volumes together with an introductory essay. It is an excellent introduction to Stevens for the new reader and will encourage those familiar with Stevens to read him again. The book is a pleasure to read and hold with large print and each poem beginning on its own page. Here are some of my thoughts on Stevens after reading this volume of Selected Poems.

Stevens writes with wit, gaiety, elegance and beauty. He is among the most philosophical of poets. He is a mixture of the realist and the romantic, and one of his major themes is combining the humdrum nature of daily reality, the quotidian, with romance and imagination through poetry. His thought is complex and shifting, but, on this reading, Stevens seemed to me as akin to an idealist who empahsizes the role of the individual mind in creating its reality. Some of the early poems such as "Sunday Morning" are highly meditative, and the abstract, philosophical character of Stevens poetry became more prevalent as he grew older. The last poems include reflections on the nature of being (I don't know if Stevens was familiar with the philosopher Martin Heidegger) including the final poem in this selection, "On Mere Being", which begins:

"The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song."

Stevens is both deeply introspective writer who describes his own moods and thought and a poet who portrays, paints, and responds to the world he sees around him. Part of Stevens' goal as a poet is to break down the dichotomy between the "objective" and the "subjective" and to combine them in a poem or other work of art. His poems are full of allusions to music and painting. For most of his life, and in his poetry, Stevens was a secularist who saw poetry as a way of bringing meaning to life that religions offered to their adherents.

For all the philosophical character of his work, Stevens resisted intellectualization in favor of a return to the world of feeling and innocence. He is essentially romantic. His poems, in their combination of the abstract, the concrete, the playful, and the allusive also tend to be difficult. In a poem called "Man Carrying Thing", Stevens wrote:

"The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully."

Some of the poems in this selection will likely be beautiful and relatively clear to the new reader. Others may remain opaque through many readings. Stevens is a writer who repays revisiting with time. The shorter poems tend to be easier while the many lengthy poems contain Stevens' extended reflections and discussions with himself on beauty, poetry, feeling, and reality.

Some readers like to pick and choose in an anthology of poetry. My suggestion would be to read the book through, in the chronological order in which Serio presents the poems. There will be much that will be difficult in this approach, but it will give the reader an understanding of Stevens' themes and of his growth. It is also valuable to look at the poems that Serio mentions or discusses in his introduction, particularly, at first, the shorter poems.

The poems that I like and that are relatively easy to read include "The Snow Man", "The Emperor of Ice Cream", and "Sunday Morning" from "Harmonium" and "The Idea of Order at Key West" from "Ideas of Order". "Poetry is a Destructive Force", "The Glass of Water", and "Angels Surrounded by Paysans" are short, accessible poems from later collections. The many beautifully reflective final poems include "To an Old Philosopher in Rome", "A Quiet Normal Life", and "A River of Rivers in Connecticut."

In concluding his introduction to the volume, Serio writes: "My wish is that this slimmer volume of selected poems will also become a prized possession, one that readers will keep close, hidden in them day and night, so that they might cherish, in the central of their being, the vivid transparence that [Stevens'] poetry brings." Serio has indeed given the reader a gift -- a selection of Stevens' poems to be treasured and reread with time.

Robin Friedman

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robert maslansky

Stevens the Vice President

Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2011

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For a person who writes poetry often what is imagined is a cold garret overlooking a grim urban scene, the meager remains of a barely sustainable meal etc. etc. And, oh yes, the half empty bottle of 'vin ordinaire'.

With Stevens and a few others, TS Eliot, Philip Larkin, G M Hopkins, and, of course W C Williams, there was employment that alone would be prepossessing: TSE, a corporate publisher, PL, an academic head librarian, GMH, a parish priest, and WCW, a practicing pediatrician.

I imagine WS going up to his study after a silent dinner with his disenchanting spouse, closing the door and spending several more hours pruning, polishing, burnishing his extraordinary poems.

How (the hell) did they do it? Perhaps their poems themselves offer a clue. I am rereading all of the above with that thought in mind. This new collection and critique of Stevens is invaluable.

2 people found this helpful

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s. berger

Good but not Great

Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2016

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It's a nice collection, but didn't have The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws, which is an important poem in the Steven's oeuvre and one of his better ones. Not sure why this was missing. There are better collections of his poems out there, but if you want a good representative selection, this will do.

3 people found this helpful

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La Brouchie

wonderful

Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2015

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I am an admirer of WS, and this edition means I can carry his work with me

Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2016

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The master at work--a great selection of his most memorable and challenging poems.

Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2015

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Glad to have this book. Great shape and wonderful to read and enjoy time and time again.

Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2013

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The difficult poems of Wallace Stevens serve as a welcome form of terminal life insurance! This is a very manageable selection.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2015

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A nice selection all in all. Wish there were more from Harmonium.

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marcello

Amazing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2023

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Discovered this author through netflix series "love death robots". Absolute fine piece of poetry.

N Spencer

Excellent selection

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 27, 2013

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This is a wonderful selection. I was new to WS, but bought this for my husband. We have both enjoyed it very much. The poems in this selection are of course similar in voice, but there is a good variety of composition: some short, some very long, etc. Includes 13 ways to look at a blackbird (my favourite so far), a rabbit as king of the ghosts, as well as many others.

6 people found this helpful

Frank 9

The modern master of meditative poetry

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 16, 2018

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Stevens is a master of the meditative poem, circling often subtle philosophically sophisticated preoccupations with a vivid sensitivity to language which generates colourful imagery and a sensuous music that suggest a literary impressionist. The Kindle edition is nicely laid out.

the captain

The greatest 20th Century poet in English

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 14, 2015

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This is the master of 20th Century poetry in English. Difficult, but profound, complex -one struggles with his absolute claim for the primacy of language and the nature of poetic creation- but ultmately a dandy and a high romantic.

5 people found this helpful

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