On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems

Helen Vendler

ISBN 10: 0674634365 / ISBN 13: 9780674634367

Edité par Harvard University Press, United States, Cambridge, Mass, 1969

A propos de cet article

Vendler is a commentator almost clairvoyant.Her book ought to be read, with care and gratitude, by every reader of Stevens, for no critic before her has understood so well his major poems. Harold Bloom, New York Times Book Review A virtuosic reading of Stevenss most difficult poems brings their austere beauty and elaborately mannered movements to life. If poetry is the subject of the poem, as Wallace Stevens once declared, so too is the poet. A poets temperament, his attractions and repulsions, his sense of the world: all are integral to his style. And while Stevenss short poems are perhaps his most anthologized, it is only in his longer works that we find his unique sensibilities on full display. Tracing the great modernists development through fourteen poems, from Sunday Morning (1915) to An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (1949), Helen Vendler reveals the longer poems as the proving grounds where Stevens tested formal innovations and discovered his own formidable strengths. Chief among these, she argues, is a gift for equivocation. Neither ascetic nor hedonist, neither solipsist aesthete nor engaged poet of the social, Stevens trembles always at halfway points. He departs from his romantic forbears, deprecating the pure imagination by letting flights of poetic fancy degenerate into intentional decadence and triviality. But he finds desperate clutching at things as they are equally fruitless: endless struggle with fact is the poets inevitable lot. From this ambivalence springs a whole world of grammatical and syntactic innovation, from his ambiguous use of tense to the welter of qualifications that seem to thwart every affirmative declaration. An unsurpassed classic in the canon of Stevens criticism, On Extended Wings gives us the full sweep his of his oeuvrefrom the somber to the whimsical, from high stoic elegy to grotesque comedyas no one but the brilliant Helen Vendler can. A readable copy of the book which may include some defects such as highlighting and notes. Cover and pages may be creased and show discolouration.

N° de réf. du vendeur GOR014646863

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems
• Éditeur: Harvard University Press, United States, Cambridge, Mass
• Date de parution: 1969
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0674634365
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780674634367
• Reliure: Paperback
• État de l'article: Fair
• Poids: 485 grammes

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

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"

À propos de l?auteur

Helen Vendler (1933-2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, and the New Republic. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.