Volume 24, Number 3 · March 3, 1977
The Snow Man
By Denis Donoghue
Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens
by Holly Stevens
Knopf, 288 pp., $12.50
Two years ago the Huntington Library acquired from Holly Stevens most of the papers, correspondence, journals, periodicals, and books that belonged to her father, the poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). Some manuscripts are already lodged elsewhere, notably in Yale, Buffalo, and the English Manchester, but most of the material is now in the Huntington. Many of the items are extremely interesting. Stevens's copy of Charles Mauron's Aesthetics and Psychology, for instance, is annotated so copiously that students of Stevens must now treat it as seriously as they already treat the sourcebooks by Santayana, Wahl, Valéry, Vaihinger, and other authorities deemed to bear upon Stevens's theory of literature. In Stevens's copy of Walter Pater's Appreciations the chapter on Style is heavily glossed, and the marginalia are as pointed as several of the items published as 'Adagia' in Stevens's Opus Posthumous (1957). Some of the notebooks are charming.
Review, 4089 words
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