In Wallace Stevens: A Poet's Growth, George S. Lensing examines Stevens' gradual emergence and development as a poet, tracing his life from his formative years in Pennsylvania to his careers as a lawyer for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. Lensing draws extensively upon previously unpublished material from the Stevens archive at the Huntington Library, which contains letters, early drafts of poems, and notebooks. Two notebooks, Schemata and From Pieces of Paper, are here reproduced in full.

The study is divided into three sections. In the first, Lensing examines the years before the publication of Sevens' first volume of poetry, paying special attention to the forces that hindered and enhanced his progress toward modernity. In the second, we see Stevens in the exercise of his craft. Lensing discusses the influence of the Romantics on the verse Stevens wrote as an undergraduate at Harvard; his interest in Oriental art, Cubism, and Fauvism; his anticipation of Imagism; and his imitation of certain French Symbolists. Sources of the epigraphs to Stevens' poems are identified fully for the first time, suggesting the role of Stevens' vast reading upon his poetry. Also considered is Stevens' voluminous correspondence with people from all over the world, some of whom he never met personally. These letters helped rescue Stevens from the insularity of his business life and aided in the making of his poems.

The final section treats the critical responses to Stevens' poetry by such people as Harriet Monroe, editor and founder of Poetry, who was the first important reader and publisher of his work. Attention is also given to Stevens' explications of his poems.

Wallace Stevens: A Poet's Growth is a comprehensive examination of Stevens' live and work. This study provides abundant new material, which will be of value to scholars and to those readers who are drawn to Stevens' poetry.

Over sixty years after his death, Wallace Stevens remains one of the major figures of American modernist poetry, celebrated for his masterful style, formal rigor, and aesthetic investigations of the natural, political, and metaphysical worlds. In Making the Poem, noted Stevens scholar George S. Lensing explores the poet's progress in the creation of his body of work, considering its development, composition, and reception. Drawing on little-known sources and nuanced readings of Stevens' texts, Lensing expands the customary view of the poet's creative approaches. This wide-ranging study extends from the origins and overlapping themes of well-known poems through the social and political backgrounds that marked Stevens' work to the prosodic and musical elements central to his style. Making the Poem features a dynamic new reading of the important early poem ""Sea Surface Full of Clouds""- viewing it alongside his wife Elsie's journal describing the sea voyage that inspired the poem- and an extensive, multiperspective treatment of the widely anthologized ""The Idea of Order at Key West,"" as well as a careful excavation of the poem ""Mozart, 1935"" in the context of the U.S. Great Depression. Lensing concludes with a discussion of the gradual (and sometimes reluctant) recognition Stevens' work received from poets and critics in Great Britain and Ireland. Stemming from decades of research and writing, Making the Poem: Stevens' Approaches presents a holistic view of his creative achievements and a wealth of new material for readers to draw upon in their future encounters with the poetry of Wallace Stevens.