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Often considered America's greatest twentieth-centurypoet, Wallace Stevens is without a doubt the Anglo-modernist poetwhose work has been most scrutinized from a philosophicalperspective. Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writingboth synthesizes and extends the critical understanding of Stevens'spoetry in this respect. Arguing that a concern with the establishmentand transgression of limits goes to the heart of Stevens's work, BartEeckhout traces both the limits of his poetry and the limits ofwriting as they are explored by that poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Please learn how to speak English
This was clearly written by a non-native speaker of English.Talk about wordy!Jeez and this got published.The age of intellectualism is dead, and this author will go down in history as a casualty.Wallace Stevens was NOT the greatest American poet of the 20th century.In fact, he wasn't even a poet.He was a man who wrote down vague notes an attempt to mimic the poet - much like the writer of this book attempts to mimic the intellectual. I am glad I didn't pay for this book.What a piece of .... ... Read more

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Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one of the leading poets ofthe twentieth century, continues to influence a wide range of poetswriting today. However, an image persists of Stevens as an aesthetewho was politically removed from his times and who also exhibitedsexist and racist tendencies. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan offers carefulreadings from across the Stevens canon to demonstrate that, contraryto such enduring earlier assessments, Stevens's work over the yearsshows poetic and political changes that merge with his growing ethicalconcerns.

Brogan traces Stevens's evolving poetic practices along three majorlines that often intersected. She situates the beginnings of Stevens'sdevelopment within his early resistance to the pressures of "reality"on the imagination, an artistic stand that pitted him against the"objective" poetry exemplified in the work of William CarlosWilliams. Then, in the midst of Stevens's career, World War II movedhim forward with new poetic responsibilities both to witness thecurrent world and to guide readers into their future. The emergence ofan almost feminist vision defines Stevens's third line ofdevelopment. Finally, in addition to identifying these developmentalstages, Brogan addresses the undercurrent of race throughout Stevens'swork.

According to Brogan, Stevens not only changed but matured over time. What began as an aesthetic "violence within," or a girding against such "violence without" as social unrest and war, rapidly evolved during Stevens's middle years into a set of perceptions and practices increasingly responsive to his times. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

informed uninformed review
Would love to see this book in paperbook so I could afford to order it for our library. Anything by this individual should be high on your list. Having personally been a student of Sexson's, I can vouch for the fact that he has an intriguing and often Dionysian take on whatever is set before him (read: fun). Not to mention that Wallace Stevens is amazing in his own right. If you don't own his collected works, well, start there, please. If you've never met a man who is fully awake, read Sexson.

A towering display of subtle textual analysis
Michael Sexson displays a tacticle familiarity with the throbbing heartbeat of the human psyche. ... Read more

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This revisionary study of Wallace Stevens queries the dominant interpretations of the poet's career. ... Read more

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Wallace Stevens is a fascinating and enigmatic poet; the vice-president of an insurance company, a corporate lawyer, an expert on the bond market, and, almost incidentally, one of America's greatest poets. Despite the many books written about him, Stevens remains a difficult poet, whose notorious injunction - 'Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully' - seems to haunt all his work, and especially the long poems. This study presents a close reading of Stevens' seven longest poems: 'The Comedian as the letter C', 'Owl's Clover', 'The Man with the Blue Guitar', 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction', 'Esthétique du Mal', 'The Auroras of Autumn' and 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven'. Dr Patke argues for the centrality of the long poem in Stevens' oeuvre, and of Stevens to the poetic and cultural heritage of modern times. Extensive reference is made to the shorter poems, prose and correspondence, and to the possible influences on the poetry. Critical jargon and theorising are kept at a minimum so that the pleasures of Stevens' poetic world can be made accessible to as wide a range of readers as possible. ... Read more

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Wallace Stevens was not only one of America's outstanding modernist poets but also a successful insurance lawyer--a fact that continues to intrigue many readers. Though Stevens tried hard to separate his poetry from his profession, legal theorist Thomas Grey shows that he did not ultimately succeed. After stressing how little connection appears on the surface between the two parts of Stevens's life, Grey argues that in its pragmatic account of human reasoning, the poetry distinctively illuminates the workings of the law.

In this important extension of the recent law-and-literature movement, Grey reveals Stevens as a philosophical poet and implicitly a pragmatist legal theorist, who illustrates how human thought proceeds through "assertion, qualification, and qualified reassertion," and how reason and passion fuse together in the act of interpretation. Above all, Stevens's poetry proves a liberating antidote to the binary logic that is characteristic of legal theory: one side of a case is right, the other wrong; conduct is either lawful or unlawful.

At the same time as he discovers in Stevens a pragmatist philosopher of law, Grey offers a strikingly new perspective on the poetry itself. In the poems that develop Stevens's "reality-imagination complex"--poems often criticized as remote, apolitical, and hermetic--Grey finds a body of work that not only captivates the reader but also provides a unique instrument for scrutinizing the thought processes of lawyers and judges in their exercise of social power.

Amazon.com Review
Poets James Merrill and Mark Strand, critics Harold Bloom andJoan Richardson, coworkers, and neighbors pay reverent homage to thepoet best known for selling his soul to the Hartford InsuranceCompany. Through remembrance, elucidation, and analysis, one of ourmost secretive writers ("I try to draw a definite line between poetryand business") is brought into clear focus. Merrill provides inspiredreadings of "Sunday Morning," "The Snowman," "Final Soliloquy of theInterior Paramour," and other favorites. An excerpt of Stevens'sresonant rendition of "The Idea of Order at Key West" is alsoincluded. Did the day job impinge on the poetry? Lush cadences andsurprising swings of diction provide the answer. Though he wore a graysuit, Stevens saved the full palette for his poems. (Running time: 1hour, 1 cassette) --Martha Silano ... Read more

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In this volume, seven renowned critics present different views of Wallace Stevens' place in the evolution of Modernist poetry. The essays offer a fresh scrutiny of the poet's work and influence, re-examining the critical consensus that has developed since Stevens first gained the attention of critics in the fifties. The collection traces both the development of Modernist poetics and Stevens' place in it, from the poet's relation to such contemporaries as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore to his influence on current writers such as John Ashbery and Robert Duncan. The contributions examine the cultural influences, or 'context', from which Stevens emerges: the Symbolist and Imagist traditions, the social and political context of the war years, and contemporary movements in the visual arts. Finally, two essays investigate the influence of Stevens on later poets. ... Read more