Volume 44, Number 19 · December 4, 1997
'Ice and Fire and Solitude'
By Helen Vendler
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose
by Frank Kermode elected and annotated by, by Joan Richardson
Library of America, 1032 pp., $35.00
The principal works of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) have been available for some years, but in maddeningly inadequate form. The Collected Poems, which appeared the year before Stevens's death, had been preceded in 1951 by a collection of his essays, The Necessary Angel. The Collected Poems did not include Stevens's juvenilia, his plays, and poems completed too late for inclusion (among them some of his very best). In 1957 Samuel French Morse gathered together poetry and prose not previously collected for a volume called Opus Posthumous, and in 1966 Stevens's daughter Holly, who devoted much of her adult life to editing her father's work, published the Letters (a selection, well-chosen) and a book of excerpts from her father's early journals and letters entitled Souvenirs and Prophecies.
Review, 4208 words
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