Though Wallace Stevens' shorter poems are perhaps his best
known, his longer poems, Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests in this
book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens' central
theme--the worth of the imagination--remained with him all his
life, and Mrs. Vendler therefore proposes that his development as a
poet can best be seen, not in description--which must be
repetitive--of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view
of his changing styles.
The author presents here a chronological account of fourteen
longer poems that span a thirty-year period, showing, through
Stevens' experiments in genre, diction, syntax, voice, imagery, and
meter, the inventive variety of Stevens' work in long forms, and
providing at the same time a coherent reading of these difficult
poems. She concludes, "Stevens was engaged in constant
experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate
vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later
long poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work."
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