Volume 56, Number 18 · November 19, 2009
The Invented World of Wallace Stevens
By Dan Chiasson
Selected Poems
by Wallace Stevens, edited by John N. Serio
Knopf, 327 pp., $30.00
This is the first selection to be made of Wallace Stevens's poems in nearly two decades. Stevens had contemplated making a selection of his own, in 1954, to mark his seventy-fifth birthday. Instead he allowed Knopf to publish his collected poems, appending a section of new poems, 'The Rock,' partly written with the collection in mind. The result was one of the most beautifully shaped and satisfying books of poetry ever printed. It was, in its way, a selection, since Stevens chose to omit 'Owl's Clover,' the long poem of the 1930s he came to find 'rather boring,' as well as several magnificent short lyrics, some finished too late to be included.
Review, 4166 words
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