Volume 33, Number 18 · November 20, 1986
The Hunting of Wallace Stevens
By Helen Vendler
Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self
by Milton J. Bates
University of California Press, 302 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Wallace Stevens: A Poet's Growth
by George Lensing
Louisiana State University Press, 313 pp., $35.00
Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879–1923
by Joan Richardson
William Morrow, 591 pp., $21.95
It is just over thirty years since Wallace Stevens died. Those of us who wrote on Stevens during his lifetime or within the first ten or fifteen years after his death were occupied in sorting out what his wonderful constructions—tempting, seductive, solacing, impertinent, resistant, teasing—were up to. We learned his language, and instructed others in its odd grammar and lexicon. It was a delightful period, in which his poems were still fresh and (especially the later ones) relatively unknown. It was also a time of preliminary evaluations: Was Stevens good? great? original? or reactionary? conservative? derivative? Was he the dandy and hedonist that Yvor Winters thought him? the elephant to which Randall Jarrell compared him?
Review, 6118 words
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